AT CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, SEPTUAGESIMA SUNDAY, 1915.
“Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord: and in his law doth he meditate day and night.”—Ps. i. 12.
“Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord: and in his law doth he meditate day and night.”—Ps. i. 12.
It is with the utmost appropriateness that this psalm is placed first in the Psalter, for it expresses the spirit which underlies all other psalms, and, in fact, the whole of the Scriptures. Its message lies, indeed, at the root of the religion of the Old Testament, and of the New Testament also. Let us notice, in the first place, that its opening word—the word “blessed”—is the keynote of the Scriptures from first to last. In the first chapter of Genesis, which we have read this morning, we read, not only that God saw everything that He had made, and behold it was very good; but more particularly, that when God made man He blessed them, and gave them a special commission. He placedthem in the Garden of Eden, in which He made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the Tree of Life also in the midst of the Garden. He blessed them, and intended them to be blessed; and He gave them a command which they had only to obey in order to enjoy that blessing. Man forfeited the blessing by disobeying the command; but the last chapter of the Bible, which we have read this evening, describes the recovery of it by those who have faithfully served Him. It describes a day when there shall be no more curse, but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in the new Garden of the Tree of Life. “The throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and His servants shall serve Him; and they shall see His face; and His name shall be in their foreheads. And there shall be no night there; and they need no light of lamp, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever.” Thus the Bible holds out, from beginning to end, the prospect of blessedness, or perfect happiness, as that which God designs for men, and which will be ultimatelybestowed upon His faithful servants. Between the beginning and the end, in the midst of this great dispensation, when our Lord appeared with His new covenant, His message is described as a Gospel, as “good tidings of great joy,” and the first word He utters in that great Sermon on the Mount, which contains his special teaching, is this characteristic word “blessed.” He repeats it again and again, “Blessed be ye poor.... Blessed are ye that hunger now.... Blessed are ye that weep.” The promise of blessing is thus the keynote of our Saviour’s message.
Now this characteristic of the Bible and of our Saviour’s teaching explains, and in great degree justifies, the universal craving of men and women for happiness. The pursuit of happiness in one form or another is the most universal motive of human conduct. It inspires some of our best exertions, and it prompts most of our sins. The motive of our first mother, as described in the third chapter of Genesis, is still that of nearly all of us, in one way or another. “When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it waspleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and did eat.” The world, the flesh, and the devil are perpetually offering men fruits of this kind, and the craving for the happiness they promise is so great that men and women seize them, in spite of the knowledge they have in their consciences that to do so is wrong and against the will of God. In daily life we find that different fruits—forbidden fruits—appeal to different classes of men and women, but they are all liable to be attracted by some fruit or other and to be possessed by some “ruling passion.” It is striking, moreover, to look at the course of history, and observe how different fruits, different ideals, have attracted the various nations of the world. To the Greek the attraction was that of beauty and art, and their temptation was to give themselves up to the pleasures which those ideals could afford them, with but little moral restraint. The fruit which most attracted the Roman mind was that of rule and power. The passion, indeed, for creating great empires has been one of the strongest in mankind. We see it in full strength in the greatAssyrian and Babylonian empires, and, unhappily, we see it in full force in a great nation of the present day. These pleasures and glories have accordingly been the subject of a vast amount of human literature—poetry, and history, and song.
But the characteristic of the people of Israel, and of Jewish literature, is that none of these ideals of happiness, whether of beauty or glory or power, have animated their best representatives. The one ideal which was always before the minds of their great prophets, and poets, and teachers was the ideal of righteousness, the ideal of the law of God, which is the subject of this first Psalm. The truth, with which the Book of Genesis opens, that God has given a law to men, that He has declared His will to them, and given them statutes and commandments in which that will is expressed—this is the supreme thought in the mind of the Jewish Psalmist or prophet, and, in spite of all their faults, of the Jewish nation as a whole. Psalm cxix. is, perhaps, the fullest expression of this conviction and passion. That psalm is one long variation of its opening verse, “Blessed are they that are undefiled inthe way, and walk in the law of the Lord. Blessed are they that keep His testimonies, and seek Him with their whole heart.” “O how love I Thy law! it is my meditation all the day.” “How sweet are Thy words unto my taste! yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth! Through Thy precepts I get understanding, therefore I hate every false way.” You will see that these phrases express a positive passion in the mind of the Psalmist for the law of God—as strong a passion at least, or even stronger, than the passions of some men for the pleasures of sense, and of others for the pleasures of ambition and worldly success. “I opened my mouth,” says the Psalmist, “and drew in my breath, for my delight was in Thy commandments.” The whole frame of the man, his body as well as his mind, is absorbed in this passion for the law of God. The Jew craves for blessing, or for happiness, as much as the Greek or the Roman, but he seeks that blessing in the knowledge and obedience of the law of God. He knows it is to be found in the way of righteousness and nowhere else. Thus the first Psalm is a fitting introduction to all the rest. “His delight,” it says, “is in the law of the Lord; and in His law doth he meditate day and night. And he shall be like a tree planted by the waterside, that will bring forth his fruit in due season. His leaf also shall not wither; and look, whatsoever he doeth, it shall prosper.” This psalm, in short, embodies the very essence of the belief of the true Jew, which is that the law of God and the righteousness of God are the one source of all happiness and blessedness, and that the highest privilege of men and women is to give themselves up, body and soul, to the pursuit of the happiness which is there to be found.
I think we shall all recognize that the tendency of men and women is, for the most part, too different from this. They may wish to do right and to avoid wrong, but it is comparatively rare for the supreme passion of their lives to be the pursuit of righteousness, and for the supreme love of their lives to be for the law of God. Is it not our general tendency to pursue our own objects, to seek enjoyment, and happiness, and success in our own ways, and to regard the law of God, and the principles of righteousness, as a controllingpower, an external authority, which checks us when we are in danger of going wrong and so far guides us? but the love of it, and the longing for obedience to it, is too rarely the main motive of our lives. That is the characteristic of those whom we regard as Saints, but it is not, I fear, the characteristic of the mass of men and women. This, however, is the ideal put before us, throughout the Scriptures, as that which ought to be predominant in our hearts and lives. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God,” says Moses, “with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.” “This,” said our Lord, “is the great commandment.” “Blessed,” according to this Psalm, “is the man whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law doth he meditate day and night.” It is not enough for such a man not to do wrong; his whole soul is absorbed in the passion for doing what is right. He believes that the law of God has set before him a great ideal, a vision of the perfection of human nature; and his great craving is to realize that ideal and to be what God intended him to be. He knows that all blessing is to be found in that law and inthose visions of perfection, and he pursues them with his whole heart.
This spirit of the godly man is associated with another aspect of the same truth which is ever present in the Bible, and which is very imperfectly realized among men in general. We are apt to be satisfied with recognizing right and wrong as one of the many elements with which we are concerned in life. Life is a vast scene of innumerable passions, and interests, and pleasures, and schemes—personal, social, political, and imperial; and nearly all of us recognize, no doubt, that right and wrong, righteousness and justice, have a momentous place among these various energies and interests; but in the light of the Bible, and in the teaching of our Lord, that is a very imperfect view to take of their position. There, right and wrong, righteousness and justice, are supreme over all other interests; they are the foundation on which the whole edifice of life is built up; or they are, as it were, the very cement by which the whole is held together. As the history of the Jewish people is told in the Bible, every event in their career is shown to turn onthe question of their righteousness or wickedness. God’s one object is to educate them to be a righteous nation, to keep His commandments, and statutes, and judgments, so that they may realize His great design for them. They suffer punishment, such as invasion by enemies, or captivity by Assyria or Rome, not merely because of the ambition of those nations, and of their own comparative weakness, but because they were becoming faithless to the law of God, and not living for His honour and glory. All that the world, and the worldly historian, might see of them was that they had provoked the Assyrian or Roman monarch by some act of self-assertion and pride, and that he avenged himself by invading and desolating their country. But the prophetical men who wrote the Books of Kings, and other historical Books of the Old Testament, went behind this immediate cause, and saw that it was by the providence of God that the people were thus punished, because they had forgotten the God of their fathers, and were ceasing to serve Him. They were inspired to see this element of righteousness, and of the law of the Lord,as the most essential in the whole history, and asserting itself continually under the control of God’s providence.
I venture to think we might illustrate the matter by an example from modern science. We know now that the most important and universal force in nature is that of which one of the most familiar forms is electricity. We know that its influence in the form of light and magnetism pervades the whole of nature; we know that the very movements of our limbs, of our hands and fingers, are dependent upon it, that this is the force which animates our nerves and through them controls our whole bodies. We know that the element in which it works—the ether—pervades the whole universe, and that the light which flashes from stars hundreds of millions of miles away is due to this subtle force. And yet until less than a hundred years ago men hardly realized its existence. It was an unseen force, which worked behind all other forces, and even men of science had but a dim appreciation of it. So it was with this supreme force of righteousness, until it was brought into full light by the revelation of the prophetsand of our Lord and His Apostles. What they revealed to us, what the Bible is teaching in every page, what our Lord, above all, impresses on us with supreme force, is that God’s righteousness is like the ethereal fluid, which is at once the illuminating agent and the motive force of all human life. It is quiet for the most part, and men hardly observe it; but on a sudden it bursts out into some great storm, like that which startled the author of Psalm xxix. “The voice of the Lord is upon the waters: the God of glory thundereth: the Lord is upon many waters.” We see the flash of the lightning of righteousness, and hear the crash of its thunder. “The voice of the Lord divideth the flames of fire. The voice of the Lord shaketh the wilderness.” That is the meaning, no doubt, of a great war like the present. Some evil had been accumulating, some passions of ambition and greed, some failures in duty, some defections from truth, faults of one kind in one nation, and sad failures of duty in another, and, on a sudden, some spark lights an explosion, and the whole world is ablaze with flames of fire. So it is also in ourprivate lives. We may go on for a long time yielding to weaknesses, or even sins, and righteousness may seem to be silent, the voice of conscience may seem to be a mere voice and not to be asserting its supremacy; but, on a sudden, or after a long and gradual accumulation of wrong-doing, God asserts His law, our neglect of righteousness finds us out, and God’s justice is vindicated upon us.
These considerations ought to lead to a deeper devotion to those principles of right and wrong, and to that supreme vision of righteousness which the Bible and our Lord and His Apostles impress upon us; but I would add that it is the great message we should take home to ourselves, not merely in our individual lives, but in our national life. We see before us a great nation, endowed with some of the highest capacities of human nature, allowing itself to be absorbed more and more, year by year, by a great passion for power and dominion and supremacy in the world. This passion has taken such hold on it that it thinks itself justified in over-riding and defying the laws of truth and justice and mercy, even in the imperfectform in which they have been formally recognized in the law of nations. Everything, we are told, must yield to the demands of a nation which believes that a certain supremacy in the world is necessary for it. The consequence is that the air has to be cleared by this awful outburst of national thunder and lightning. But let us apply the danger and the lesson to ourselves. What is our own ideal as a nation and as an empire? Perhaps we too have been in danger of being fascinated too much by that vision of empire. It is a legitimate ideal when applied to right purposes, and subject to the right control; but those purposes must be those of Divine righteousness, and the control is the control of the law of God. If we make it the main object of every power with which God has entrusted us to promote His laws, to support and to spread further the Kingdom of His Christ, to do righteousness and justice in the world, so far as our power and influence reaches; if for that purpose we strive to ensure that all our legislation, and all our imperial and national action, is deliberately and constantly directed to the support and extension ofthe law of God and of Christ, then we may hope for God’s blessing on our achievements, and may trust to be preserved from those perversions of national spirit, and from that military and arbitrary passion, against which we have at this moment to maintain so desperate a struggle. Let us strive after this great object, alike in ourselves, in our country, and throughout our Empire, and then we may hope that as a nation we may be, in the Psalmist’s words, “like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season,” and that whatsoever we do may prosper. In a word, as a nation no less than as individuals, let our delight be in the law of the Lord, and in His law let us meditate day and night.