Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864,
by
CHARLES SCRIBNER,
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States
for the Southern District of New York.
STEREOTYPED BY R. H. HOBBS,
Hartford, Conn.
MY DEAR FRIEND:
WHEN resigning my pastorship, five years ago, you will remember that you put it before me to consider myself engaged now in a “Ministry at Large;” serving in it, by the pen, or by whatever method, according to the ability left me, the cause we both have made our own. In this modified ministry, I have had the sense of a worthy and sacred charge upon me still as before, and in it, as I have occupied, I seem also to have prolonged, my life. This, with another volume, on The Vicarious Sacrifice, which is ready in due time to follow, are the principal fruit of my broken industry. Without consent obtained, I venture to connect them with your name, as the spontaneous tribute of my true respect and strong personal friendship.
HORACE BUSHNELL.
Hartford, June 10, 1864.
“And she brought forth her first-born son, and
wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no
room for them in the inn.”—
In the birth and birthplace of Jesus, there is something beautifully correspondent with his personal fortunes afterward, and also of the fortunes of his gospel, even down to our own age and time. He comes into the world, as it were to the taxing, and there is scant room for him even at that.
A Roman decree having been issued, requiring the people to repair to their
native place to be registered for taxation, Joseph and Mary set off for Bethlehem.
The khan or inn of the village is full, when they arrive, and, being humble persons,
they are obliged to find a place in the stall or stable, where the holy child is
born. It so happens, not by any slight of the guests, in which they mock the advent
of the child, for he makes his advent only as the child of two very common people.
But there is a great concourse and crowd—senators, it may be, landowners, merchants,
money-changers, tradesmen, publicans, peddlers, men of all sorts—and the most forward,
showiest, best
So
it was, and perhaps it was more fitting to be so; for the great Messiah’s errand
allows no expectation of patronage, even for his infancy. He comes into the world
and finds it preoccupied. A marvelous great world it is, and there is room in it
for many things; room for wealth, ambition, pride, show, pleasure; room for trade,
society, dissipation; room for powers, kingdoms, armies and their wars; but for
him there is the smallest room possible; room in the stable but not in the inn.
There he begins to breathe, and at that point introduces himself into his human
life as a resident of our world-the greatest and most blessed event, humble as the
guise of it may be, that has ever transpired among mortals. If it be a wonder to
men’s eyes and ears, a wonder even to science itself, when the flaming air-stone
pitches into our world, as a stranger newly arrived out of parts unknown in the
sky, what shall we think of the more transcendent fact, that the Eternal Son of
God is born into the world; that proceeding forth from the Father, not being of
our system or sphere, not of the world, he has come as a Holy Thing into it—God
manifest in the flesh, the Word made flesh, a new divine man, closeted in humanity,
there to abide and work until he has restored the race
But I am anticipating my subject, viz., the very impressive fact that Jesus could not find room in the world, and has never yet been able to find it.
I do not understand, you will observe, that this particular subject is formally stated or asserted in my text. I only conceive that the birth of Jesus most aptly introduces the whole subsequent history of his life, and that both his birth and life as aptly represent the spiritual fortunes of his gospel as a great salvation for the world. And the reason why Jesus can not find room for his gospel is closely analogous to that which he encountered in his birth; viz., that men’s hearts are preoccupied. They do not care, in general, to put any indignity on Christ; they would prefer not to do it; but they are filled to the full with their own objects already. It is now as then and then as now; the selfishness and self-accommodation, the coarseness, the want of right sensibility, the crowding, eager state of men, in a world too small for their ambition—all these preoccupy the inn of their affections, leaving only the stable, or some by-place, in their hearts, as little worthy of his occupancy and the glorious errand on which he comes.
See how it was with him in. his life. Herod heard
At the descent of the Spirit there was certainly a great opening in the minds of his disciples concerning him, and there has been a slow, irregular, and difficult progress in the faith and perception of mankind since that day, but we shall greatly mistake, if we suppose that Christ has ever found room to spread himself at all in the world, as he had it in his heart to do, when he came into it, and will not fail to do, before his work is done.
Were a man to enter some great cathedral of the old continent,
of which there are many hundreds, survey the vaulted arches and the golden tracery
above, wander among the forests of pillars on which they rest, listen to the music
of choirs and catch the softened light that streams through sainted forms and histories
on the windows, observe the company of priests,
So if we
speak of what is called Christendom, comprising, as it does, all the most civilized
and powerful nations of mankind, those most forward in learning, and science, and
art, and commerce, it may well enough seem to us, when we fix. the. name Christendom—Christ-dominion—on these great powers of the earth, that Christ has certainly gotten
room, so far, to enter and be glorified in human society. And it is a very great
thing, doubtless, for Christ to be so far admitted to his
But we must take a closer inspection, if we are to see how very little room Christ
has yet been able to obtain, and how many things conspire to cramp the
So it should be, as you will easily perceive beforehand; for
Christianity comes into the world by supposition, just because the world is not
ready to receive it.
What shall Constantine, the first convert king do, for example, when
he enters the fold, but bring in with him all his regal powers and prerogatives,
and wield them for the furtherance of the new religion; never once imagining the
fact that, in doing it, he was bringing church and gospel and every thing belonging
to Christ, directly into the human keeping and the very nearly insulting patronage
of the state. And so the gospel is to be kept in state pupilage, in all the old-world
kingdoms, down to the present day—officered, endowed, regulated, by the state supremacy.
Spiritual gifts have no place under the political regimen of course. Lay ministries
are a disorder. No man comes to minister because he is called of God, or goes because
he is sent of God, but he buys a living, or he has it given him, as he might in
the army or the post-office. And so the grand, heaven-wide, gospel goes into quarantine,
Church-craft meantime has been quite as narrow, quite as sore a limitation as state-craft. Thus instead of that grand, massive, practically educated, character, that Christ proposes to create in the open fields of duty, by sturdy encounter with wrong, by sacrifices of beneficence and the bloodier sacrifices of heroic testimony for the truth, it contrives a finer, saintlier, more superlative, virtue, to be trained in cells and nightly vigils!—poor, unchristly, mean imposture, it turns out to be of course. To give the church the prestige of a monarchy, under one universal head, a primacy is finally created in the bishop of Rome, and now, behold the august father, occupied, as in Christ’s name, in blessing rosaries, preparing holy water, receiving the sacred puffs of censers, and submitting his feet to the devout kisses of his people! O how wretched and barren a thing, how very like to a poor mummery of imposture, have these ecclesiastics, contriving thus to add new ornaments and powers, reduced the gospel of heaven’s love to men!
And the attempted work of science,
calling itself theology, is scarcely more equal to its theme. The subject matter
outreaches, how visibly, and dwarfs all the. little pomps of the supposed scientific
endeavor. What can it do, when trying, in fact, to measure the sea with a spoon!
A great question it soon becomes, whether Christian forgiveness covers any but sins
committed before baptism; as if the flow of God’s great
But the most remarkable thing of all is that, when the old, niggard dogmas of a
bigot age and habit give way, and emancipated souls begin to look for a new Christianity
and a broader, worthier faith, just there every thing great in the gospel vanishes
even more strangely than before. Faith becomes mere opinion,
Now the blessed Lord wants room, we all agree; we even profess that we ourselves want mightily to be enlarged. Why then is it always turning out, hitherto, that when we try to go deepest, we drag every thing down with us? What, in fact, do we prove but that, when we undertake to shape theologically the glorious mystery of salvation by Christ, we just as much reduce it, or whittle it down, as human thought is narrower and tinier than the grand subject matter attempted.
But saddest of all
is the practical depreciation of Christ, or of what he will do as a Saviour, experimentally,
from sin. The possibilities of liberty, assurance, a good conscience, a mind entered
into rest, are, by one means or another, let down, obscured, or quite taken away.
To believe much is enthusiasm, to attempt much, fanaticism. The assumption is, that
Christ will,
True there
is no grace of Christ that will suddenly make us perfect; but there is a grace that
will take away all conscious sinning, as long as we sufficiently believe, raising
us above the dominating power of sin into a state of divine consciousness, where
we are new-charactered, as it were, continually, by the righteousness of God, spreading
itself into and over and through the faith, by which we are trusted to his mercy.
All this Christ will do. In this state of power and holy endowment, superior to
sin, he can, he will establish every soul that makes room wide enough for him to
enter and bestow his fullness. He will be a Saviour, in short, just as mighty and
complete as we want him to be, just as meager and partial and doubtfully real as
we require him to be. O what meaning is there, in this view, in the apostle’s invocation—“That he would
And this same sigh
has been how fit a prayer for all ages. Probably nothing comparatively of the power
of Christ, as a gift to the world, has ever yet been seen or realized in it. And
a main part of the difficulty is, that Christ is a grace too big for men’s thoughts,
and of course too big for their faith,—the Eternal Word of God robed in flesh,
the humanly manifested love and feeling of God, a free justification for the greatest
of sinners and for all sin, a power of victory in the soul that raises it above
temptation, supports it in peace, and makes obedience itself its liberty. Such a
Christ of salvation fully received, embraced in the plenitude of his gifts—what
fires would he kindle, what tongues -of eloquence loosen, what heroic witnessings
inspire! But, as yeti the disciples are commonly men of only a little faith, and
it is with them according to their faith. They too often almost make a merit of
having no merit, and think it even a part of Christian modesty to
And so it comes to pass, my brethren, that our gospel fails, hitherto, of all its due honors, because we so poorly represent the worth and largeness of it. What multitudes are there, under the name of disciples, who maintain a Christian figure scarcely up to the line of common respect—penurious, little, mean, sordid, foul in their imaginations, low-minded, coarse-minded every way. Until Christ gets room in the higher spaces of their feeling, and their consciousness gets ennobled by a worthier and fuller reception, it must be so. Others are inconstant, falling away so feebly as to put a weak look on the gospel itself; as if it were only able to kindle a flare in the passions, not to establish a durable character. This too must be so, till Christ is fully enough received to be the head of their new capacity and growth. Multitudes, again, are not made happy as they should be, wear a long-faced, weary, dissatisfied, legally constrained look, any thing but a look of courage and joy and blessed contentation. Yes, and for the simple reason that there is nothing so wretched, so very close to starvation, as a little, doubtfully received grace. True joy comes by hearts’-full and when there is room enough given for Christ to flood the feeling, the peace becomes a river—never till then.
Discordant
opinions and strifes of doctrines endlessly propagated are another scandal. And
since heads are
Why,
again, since Christianity undertakes to convert the world, does it seem to almost
or quite fail in the slow progress it makes? Because, I answer, Christ gets no room;
as yet, to work, and be the fire in men’s hearts he is able to be. We undertake
for him as by statecraft and churchcraft and priestcraft. We raise monasteries
for him in one age, military crusades in another. Raymond Lull, representing a
large class of teachers, undertook to make the gospel so logical that he could
bring down all men of all nations, without a peradventure, before it. Some in
our day are going to carry every thing by steam-ships and commerce; some by
science and the schooling of heathen children; some by preaching agents
adequately backed by missionary boards; some by tracts and books. But the work,
however fitly ordered as respects the machinery, lingers, and will and must
linger, till Christ gets room to be a more complete inspiration in his
followers. They give him the stable when they ought to be giving him the inn,
put him in the lot of weakness, keep him back from his victories, shut him down
under the world, making his gospel, thus, such a secondary, doubtfully real,
affair, that it has to be always debating in the
But what most of all grieves me, in such a review, is, that Christ himself has so great wrong to endure, in the slowness and low faith of so many ages. Why, if I had a friend, who was always making me to appear weaker and meaner than I am, putting the flattest construction possible on my words and sayings, professing still, in his own low conduct, to represent my ideas and principles, protesting the great advantage he gets, from being much with me, in just those things where he is most utterly unlike me—I could not bear him even for one week, I should denounce him utterly, blowing all terms of connection with him. And yet Christ has a patience large enough to bear us still; for he came to bear even our sin, and he will not start from his burden, even if he should not be soon through with it.
All the sooner, brethren, ought we to come to the heart so long and patiently grieving
for us. Is it not time, dear friends, that Christ our Master should begin to be
fitly represented by his people—received in his true grandeur and fullness as the
Lord of Life and Saviour of all mankind; able to save to, the uttermost; a grace
all victorious; light, peace, liberty, and power; wisdom, righteousness, sanctification,
and redemption. Be it yours then so to make room for him, even according to the
greatness of his power-length, breadth, depth, height. Be no more straitened in
your own bowels, stretch yourselves to the measure of the stature of the fullness
of Christ. Expect to be all that he will
“Thy gentleness hath made me great.”—
Gentleness in a deity—what other religion ever took up such a thought? When the coarse mind of sin makes up gods and a religion by its own natural light, the gods, it will be seen, reveal both the coarseness and the sin together, as they properly should. They are made great as being great in force, and terrible in their resentments. They are mounted on tigers, hung about with snakes, cleave the sea with tridents, pound the sky with thunders, blow tempests out of their cheeks, send murrain upon the cattle, and pestilence on the cities and kingdoms of other gods—always raging in some lust or jealousy, or scaring the world by some vengeful portent.
Just opposite
to all these, the great God and creator of the world, the God of revelation, the
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, contrives to be a gentle being; even hiding
his power, and withholding the stress of his will, that he may put confidence and
courage in the feeling of his children. Let us not shrink then from this epithet
of scripture, as if it must imply some derogation from God’s real greatness and majesty;
What then, first of all, do we mean by gentleness? To call it sweetness of temper,
kindness, patience, flexibility, indecisiveness, does not really distinguish it.
We shall best come at the true idea, if we ask what it means when applied to a course
of treatment? When you speak, for example, of dealing gently with an enemy, you
mean that, instead of trying to force a point straight through with him, you will
give him time, and ply him indirectly with such measures and modes of forbearance
as will put him on different thoughts, and finally turn him to a better mind. Here
then is the true conception of God’s gentleness. It lies in his consenting to the
use of indirection, as a way of gaining his adversaries. It means that he does not
set himself, as a ruler, to drive his purpose straight through, but that, consciously
wise and right, abiding in his purposes with majestic confidence, and expecting
to reign with a finally established supremacy, he is only too great to fly at his
adversary, and force him to the wall, if he does not instantly surrender; that,
instead of coming down upon him thus, in a manner of direct onset, to carry his
immediate submission by storm, he lays gentle seige to him, waiting for his
willing assent and choice. He allows dissent for the present, defers to
prejudice, watches for the cooling of passion, gives room and space for the
weaknesses of our unreasonable and perverse habit to play themselves out, and so
by leading
It is scarcely necessary to add that there are many kinds of indirection, which are wide, as possible, of any character of gentleness. All policy, in the bad sense of the term, is indirection. A simply wise expedient has often this character. But the indirections of God are those of a ruler, perfectly secure and sovereign, and their object is, not to turn a point of interest for himself, but simply to advance and make great the unworthy and disobedient subjects of his goodness.
This character of gentleness in God’s treatment, you will thus perceive, is one of the greatest spiritual beauty and majesty, and one that ought to affect us most tenderly in all our sentiments and choices. And that we may have it in its true estimation, observe, first of all, how far off it is from the practice and even capacity generally of mankind. We can do almost any thing more easily than consent to use any sort of indirection, when we are resisted in the exercise of authority, or encounter another at some point of violated right.
There is a more frequent approach to gentleness,
in the parental relation, than any where else among men.
It will also be observed,
almost universally, among men, that where one conies to an issue of any kind with
another, matters are pressed to a direct pointblank Yes or No. If it is a case of
personal wrong, or a quarrel of any kind, the parties face each other, pride against
pride, passion against passion, and the hot endeavor
True gentleness, we thus perceive, is, a character too great for any but the greatest and most divinely tempered souls. And yet how ready are many to infer that, since God is omnipotent, he must needs have it as a way of majesty, to carry all his points through to their issue by force, just as they would do themselves. What, in their view, is it for God to be omnipotent, but to drive his chariot where he will. Even Christian theologians, knowing that he has force enough to carry his points at will, make out pictures of his sovereignty, not seldom, that stamp it as a remorseless absolutism. They do not remember that it is man, he that has no force, who wants to carry every thing by force, and that God is a being too great for this kind of infirmity; that, having all power, he glories in the hiding of his power; that holding the worlds in the hollow of his hand, and causing heaven’s pillars to shake at his reproof, He still counts it the only true gentleness for Him to bend, and wait, and reason with his adversary, and turn him round by His strong Providence, till. he is gained to repentance and a volunteer obedience.
But God maintains a government of law, it will be remembered, and enforces his law by just penalties, and what room is there for gentleness in a government of law? All room, I answer; for how shall he gain us to his law as good and right, if he does not give us time to make the discovery of what it is? To receive law because we are crammed with it, is not to receive it as law, but only to receive it as force, and God would spurn that kind of obedience, even from the meanest of his subjects. He wants our intelligent, free choice, of duty—that we should have it in love, nay have it even in liberty. Doubtless it is true that he will finally punish the incorrigible; but He need not therefore, like some weak, mortal despot, hurry up his force, and drive straight in upon his mark. If he were consciously a little faint-hearted he would, but he is great enough in his firmness to be gentle and wait.
But some evidence will be demanded that God pursues any such method of indirection, or of rectoral gentleness with us. See then, first of all, how openly he takes this altitude in the scriptures.
When our first father breaks
through law, by his act of sin, he does not strike him down by his thunders, but
he holds them back, comes to him even with a word of promise, and sends him forth
into the rough trials of a world unparadised by guilt, to work, and suffer, and
learn, and, when he will, to turn and live. The ten brothers of Joseph are managed
in the same way. When they could not speak peaceably to him,
But I need not multiply
these minor examples, when it is the very genius of Christianity itself to prevail
with man, or bring him back to obedience and life by a course of loving indirection.
What we call the gospel is only a translation, so to speak, of the gentleness of
God—a matter in the world of fact, answering to a higher matter, antecedent, in
the magnanimity of God. I do not say that this gospel is a mere effusion of divine
sentiment apart from all counsel and government. It
Nor does it vary at all our account of
this gospel, that the Holy Spirit works concurrently in it, with
Holding this view of God’s gentleness in the treatment of souls, and finding even the Christian gospel in it, we ought also to find that his whole management of us and the world corresponds. Is it so—is there such a correspondence?
See, some will
say, what terrible forces we have ravening and pouring inevitably on about us day
and night—roaring seas, wild hurricanes, thunder-shocks that split the heavens,
earthquakes splitting the very world’s body itself, heat and cold, drought and
deluge, pestilences and deaths in all forms. What is there to be seen but a terrible,
inexorable going on, still on, everywhere. The fixed laws everywhere refuse to bend,
hearing no prayers, the great worlds fly through heaven as if slung by the Almighty
like the smooth stone of David, and the atoms rush together in their indivertible
affinities, like the simples of gunpowder touched by fire, refusing to consider
any body. Where then is the gentleness of such a God as we have signaled to us,
in these unpitying, inexorable, fated, powers of the world? Is it such a God that
moves by indirection? Yes, and that all the more properly, just because these signs
of earth and heaven, these undiverted, undivertible, all-demolishing and terrible
forces permit him to do it. He now can hide his omnipotence, for a time, just at
the point where it touches us; he can set his will behind his love, for to-day
and possibly to-morrow;
See then how it goes with us in God’s management of our experience.
Doing every thing to work on our feeling, temperament, thought, will, and so on
our eternal character, He still does nothing by direct impulsion. It is with us
here, in every thing, as it was with Jonah when the Lord sent him to Nineveh. It
was a good long journey inland, but Jonah steers for Joppa, straight the other way,
and there puts to sea, sailing off upon it, and then under it, and through the belly
of hell, and comes to land nobody knows where. After much perambulation, he gets
to Nineveh and gives his message doggedly, finally to be tamed by a turn of hot
weather and the wilting of a gourd. Just so goes the course of a soul whom God is
training for obedience
The change is great, nay almost total in his life, and yet it has been carried by a process of indirection so delicate, that he is scarcely sensible by what steps and curiously turned methods of skill it has been brought to pass. And so God is managing every man, by a process and history of his own; for he handles him as he does no other, adapting every turn to his want and to the points already gained, till finally he is caught by the gentle guile of God’s mercies and drawn to the rock of salvation; even as some heavy and strong fish, that has been played by the skillful angler, is drawn, at last, to land, by a delicate line, that would not even hold his weight.
In a similar way God manages, not seldom, to gain back infidels and doubters. First he commonly makes them doubt their doubts. Their conceit he moderates, meantime, by the sobering effect of years and sorrow. By and by he sharpens their spiritual hunger, by the consciously felt emptiness of their life, and the large blank spaces of their creed. Then he opens some new vista into the bright field of truth, down which they never looked before, and the mole eyes of their skepticism are even dazed by the new discovered glory of God’s light.
Disciples who are lapsed into sin, and even into looseness of life, are recovered
in the same way of indirection. God does not pelt them with storms, nor jerk them
back into their place by any violent seizure. He only leads them round by his strong-handed
yet gentle tractions, till he has got them by, or out of, their fascinations,
Indeed I may go farther. Even if you desire it, God will not thrust you on to higher attainments in religion, by any forcible and direct method. He will only bring you out into the rest you seek, just as soon as you are sufficiently untwisted, and cleared, and rectified, under his indirect methods, to be there. Commonly your light will spring up in quarters where you look not for it, and even the very hidings and obscurations you suffer, will give you out some spark of light, as they leave you. The obstacles you conquer will turn out to be, in some sense, aids, the discouragements that tried you will open, when they part, as windows of hope.
Having traced the manner and fact of God’s condescension
to these gentle methods, let us now pass on to another point where the subject properly
culminates; viz., to the end he has in view; which is, to make us great. He may
have a different opinion of greatness from that which is commonly held by men—he
certainly has. And what is more, he has it because he has a much higher respect
for the capabilities of our human nature, and much higher designs concerning it,
than we have ourselves. We fall into a mistake here also, under what we suppose
to be the Christian gospel itself; as if it were a plan to bring down, not the
loftiness
Take, for example, the first point named, the will;
for this, it will be agreed, is the spinal column even of our personality. Here
it is that we assert ourselves with such frightful audacity in our sin. Here is
the tap-root of our obstinacy. Hence come all the woes and disorders of our fallen
state. Is it then His point to crush our will, or reduce it in quantity? If that
So of the intellect. Blinded by sin, wedded to all misbelief and false seeing, he never requires us to put violence upon it, never to force an opinion or a faith, lest we break its integrity; he only bids us set it for seeing, by a wholly right intent and a willingness even to die for the truth; assured that, in this manner, Time, and Providence, and Cross, and Spirit, will bring it into the light, clearing, as in a glorious sun-rising, all the clouds that obscure it, and opening a full, broad heaven of day on its vision. Recovered thus without being forced or violated, it feels itself to be a complete integer in power, as never before; and having conquered such obstacles under God, by the simple honesty of its search, it has a mighty appetite sharpened for the truth, and a glorious confidence raised, that time and a patient beholding will pierce all other clouds, and open a way for the light.
And so it is that God manages to save all the attributes of
force and magnanimity in us, while reducing us to love and obedience. Take such
an example as Paul. Do we speak of will? why he has the will-force of an empire
in him. Of intelligence? let it be enough
Such now are God’s mighty ones—humble it may be and poor, or if not such
by social position, most effectually humbled, some will think, by their faith, yet
how gloriously exalted. God renounces all the point-blank methods of dealing, that
he may give scope and verge to our liberty, and win us to some good and great feeling,
in glorious affinity with his own. He wants us to be great enough in the stature
of our opinions, principles, courage and character, that he may enjoy us and be
Himself enjoyable by us. Hence also it is that, when we are born of God, and the
divine affinities of our great nature come into play unbroken, unimpaired, and even
wondrously raised in volume, we, for the first
And now at
the crowning of this great subject, what shall more impress us than the sublime
and captivating figure God maintains for Himself and his government in it. Easy
enough were it for him to lay his force upon us, and dash our obstinacy to the ground.
He might not thrust us into love, he could not into courage and confidence, but
he might instantly crush out all willfulness in us forever. But he could not willingly
reduce us, in this manner, to a weak and cringing submission. He wants no slaves
about his throne. If he could not raise us into liberty and make us great in duty,
he would less respect both duty and Himself. He refuses therefore to subdue us
unless by some such method that we may seem, in a certain other sense, to subdue
ourselves. Most true it is that he carries a strong hand with us. He covers up no
principle, tempers the exactness of no law. There is no connivance in his methods,
no concealment of truths disagreeble and piercing, no proposition of compromise
or halving, in a way of settlement. His Providence moves strong. His terrors flame
out on the background of a wrathful sky. He thunders marvelously with his voice.
And
Holding such a view too
of God’s ends and the careful indirections by which he pursues them, we can not
fail to note the softened aspect given to what are often called the unaccountable
severities of human experience. The woes of broken health and grim depression; the
pains, the unspeakable agonies by which human bodies are wrenched for whole years;
the wrongs of orphanage;
Again, to vary the strain of our thought, how strangely
weak and low, is the perversity of many, when they require it of God to convert
them by force, or drive them heavenward by storm. You demand, it may be, that God
shall raise the dead before you, or that He shall speak to you in an audible voice from the sky, or that he shall regenerate your life by some stroke of omnipotence
in your sleep—something you demand that shall astound your senses, or supersede
your freedom. You require it of God, in fact, that He shall
Last of all let us not omit, in such a subject as this, the due
adjustment of our conceptions to that which is the true pitch and scale of our magnanimity
and worth as Christian men. It is easy, at this point, to flaunt our notions of
dignity, and go off, as it were, in a gas of naturalism, prating of manliness, or
manly character. And yet there is such a thing to be thought of, revelation being
judge, as being even great—great in some true scale of Christian greatness. A little,
mean-minded, shuffling, cringing, timorous, selfish soul—would that many of our
time could see how base the figure it makes under any Christian name. I will not
undertake to say how little a man may be and be a Christian; for there are some
natures that are constitutionally mean, and it may be too much to expect that grace
will ennoble them all through in a day. Judging
Conscious there of powers not broken down or crushed into servility, but of wills invigorated rather by submission, with what sense of inborn dignity and strength shall we sing—Thy gentleness hath made us great. All the littleness of our sin is now quite gone. We are now complete men, such as God meant us to be;—great in the stature of our opinions, great in our feelings, principles, energies of will and joy; greatest of all in our conscious affinity with God and the Lamb. Be it ours to live, then; with a sense of our high calling upon us, abiding in all the holy magnanimities of love, honor, sacrifice and truth; sincere, exact, faithful, bountiful and free; showing thus to others and knowing always in ourselves, that we do steadily aspire to just that height of good, into which our God himself has undertaken to exalt us.
“She hath done what she could; she is come aforehand to anoint
my body to the burying.”—
It takes a woman disciple after all to do any most beautiful thing;
in certain respects too, or as far as love is wisdom, any wisest thing. Thus we
have before us, here, a simple-hearted loving woman, who has had no subtle questions
of criticism about matters of duty and right, but only loves her Lord’s person with
a love that is probably a kind of mystery to herself, which love she wants somehow
to express.; She comes therefore with her box of ointment, having sold we know not
what article, or portion of her property, to buy it, for it was very costly, and
pours it on the Saviour’s head—just here to encounter, for the first time, scruples,
questions, and rebuffs of argument. For though she is no casuist herself, no debater
of cases of conscience, there are abundance of such among the Lord’s male disciples
present, Judas among them, and they have more reasons, a great many, to offer than
she, poor child of love, has ever thought of. “Hold woman,” they say, and particularly
Judas in the representation of John, “Why this extravagance and foolish waste?
Is not the Lord
But Christ answers for her. “No, children, no,” he says, “do not trouble the woman, she has an oracle in her love wiser than yours that you have in your heads; she has done a good work on me, fitting, altogether, to be done by her, if not by you. [Nay, she has even prophesied here, taken hold practically of my future—just that which I have never been able to make you conceive, or guess. The poor you have always with you, be it yours to bless them, but me ye have not always. She is come aforehand—dear prophetic tribute!—to anoint my body for the burying. Is it nothing that I die in the fragrant odors of this dear woman’s love? Verily I say unto you, wheresoever this gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, this also that this woman hath done, shall be told for a memorial of her.”
No such commendation was ever before or after conferred by the
Saviour on any mortal of the race. He testified for the Gentile centurion, that
he had found no such faith as his even in Israel. He tacitly commended his three
favorite disciples, Peter, James and John, by the peculiar confidence into which
he took them. But the little gospel, so to speak, of this loving woman’s
And what is the lesson or true import of this so much commended example? What but this?—do for Christ just what is closest at hand, and be sure that you will so meet all his remotest, or most unknown times and occasions. Or, better still, follow without question the impulse of love to Christ’s own person; for this when really full and sovereign, will put you along easily in a kind of infallible way, and make your conduct chime, as it were, naturally with all God’s future, even when that future is unknown; untying the most difficult questions of casuistry without so much as a question raised.
And precisely here,
not elsewhere, is the great contribution Christ has made to morality, or the department
of duty. He inaugurates, in fact, a new Christian morality, quite superior to the
natural ethics of the world. Not a new morality as respects the body of rules, or
code of preceptive obligations, though even here he instituted laws of conduct so
important as to create a new era of advancement, but new in the sense that. he
raised his followers to a new point of insight, where the solutions of duty are
easy, and the otherwise perplexed questions of casuistry are forever suspended;
even as this woman friend of Jesus saw more through her love, and struck into a
finer coincidence with his sublime future, than all the male disciples around her
But we shall not understand either her, or the subject we are proposing to illustrate, if we do not—
I. Bring into view the inherent difficulty that besets all questions of casuistry that rise under the laws, or precepts of natural morality. By casuistry we mean, as the word is commonly used by ethical writers, the settlement of cases, sometimes called cases of conscience. The rules or precepts of morality are easy for the most part, it is only their applications to particular cases that are difficult. And they are often so difficult as to cause the greatest perplexity in the most conscientious and thoroughly Christian minds; as many of you will know perhaps from the struggles of your own moral experience. Ready to do any thing which duty requires, ready to fulfill any precept, or law, which is obligatory, you have yet been tormented often with doubts, it may be, regarding what this or that rule of duty required of you, in the particular case which had then arrived. For the rules, or precepts of obligation, are all general or generic in their nature, while the cases are particular, and appear to even run into each other, by subtle gradations of color, so as to be separable by no distinct lines. Every case is peculiar, it is more, it is less, it is different—does the rule of duty apply?
Take for example, the statute “thou shalt not kill,” either as a statute of the decalogue, or of natural morality. Under this, as an accepted law, there will come up, in the application, questions like these—Whether one can rightly be a soldier for the defense of his country? Whether he can rightly execute a criminal under the sentence of death? Whether it is murder to shoot a robber at one’s bed-side in the night? Whether one can rightly defend a poor fugitive, hunted by his master, by assailing the master’s life? Whether as a christian he may rightly pursue the murderer of his child, and bring him to trial, under a charge that subjects him to capital punishment? Whether he may order a surgical operation done upon a child, which there is much reason to fear will only shorten life? Whether he can run this or that considerable risk of his own life for purposes of gain, without incurring the guilt of suicide?
The same is true of any other main precept of morality or statute of the decalogue. Accepting the law general, endless questions arise regarding its particular applications, which it seems impossible to solve.
Or we may take the great principle which requires doing good, the utmost good possible.
And then the question will arise continually, in new forms endlessly varied, what
is best to be done? And here we find ourselves thrown at every turn, upon a search
that requires an immense fore-reaching, or impossible, knowledge of the future.
What are God’s plans in regard to the future? shall we meet them and chime with
them, by this course or by that? Or, if we only try to find
These difficulties, it is true
may be exaggerated. Some men never have a trouble about duty in their
II. To show is contributed by Christ and his gospel. By him is added to the code of duty, what could, by no possibility be located in it, a power to settle right applications to all particular cases, without casuistry, or any such debate of reasons, as allows even a chance of perplexity.
Thus, begetting in the soul a new personal love to himself, practically supreme,
Christ establishes in it all law, and makes it gravitate, by its own sacred motion,
toward all that is right and good in all particular cases. This love will find all
good by its own pure affinity,
Again it is a further
consideration, drawing toward
At the risk now of a little repetition, let us recur a moment
to the singularly beautiful example of the woman, whose conduct gives us our subject,
and see how completely these suggestions are verified. The wise male brethren who
stood critics round her, had till the casuistic, humanly assignable, reasons plainly
enough with them. And yet the wisdom is hers without ally reasons. She reaches further,
touches the proprieties more fitly, chimes with God’s future more exactly, than
they do, reasoning the question as they best can. It is as if she were somehow polarized
in her love by a new divine force, and she settles into coincidence with Christ
and his future, just as the needle settles to its point without knowing why. She
does not love him on debate, or serve him by contrived reasons, but she is so drunk
up in his person, so totally captivated by the wondrous something felt in him, that
she has and can have no thought other than to love him, and do every thing out of
her love. To bathe his blessed head with what most precious ointment she can get,
and bending low to put her fragrant homage on his feet, and wind them about in the
honors of her hair, is all that she thinks of, and be it wise or unwise, it is done.
Whereupon it turns out that she has met her Lord’s future, as no other one of his
disciples had been able; anointed his brow for the thorns, his feet for the nails,
that both thorns and nails may draw blood in the perfume of at least one human creature’s
love. And this she has done, you perceive, because her life is wholly in Christ’s
element; tempered to him more fitly and
Now in just this manner it is, that Christianity comes to our help,
in all the most difficult, most insoluble questions of duty, those I mean which
turn upon a computation of consequences. To compute such consequences, we need to
know, in fact, a thousand things that belong to the future, and we know scarcely
one of them—on what particular ends God is moving, by what means he will reach them,
what effects will follow, or not follow, a supposed act of usefulness, what trains
of causes will be put agoing, what trains checked and baffled. Here it is that our
casuistry breaks down continually. At this point, all merely preceptive codes are
inherently weak and well nigh impracticable. They command us to good, or beneficence,
and leave us to utter perplexity in all computations of consequences that reach
far enough to settle the real import or effect of any thing. Nothing plainly but
some inspiration, or some new impulsion of love, such as puts the soul at one
with all God’s character and future, as when it embraces Christ and a completely
incarnated morality in his person, can possibly settle our applications of duty
and give us confidence in them. Just what
And this I will now add, as a last consideration, is what every Christian has found many times, if not always, in his own experience. Thus, in some trying condition, where he has not been able, by the understanding, to settle any wise course of proceeding, how very clear has everything been made to. him, step by step, by the simple and consciously single-eyed impulse of love to his Master. And when all is over, when his crisis is past, his course fought out, his adversaries confounded, his cause completely justified, his sacrifice crowned, how plain is it to him that he has been guided by a wisdom in his loving affinities, which he had not in the reasons of his understanding; all in a way so easy as even to be an astonishment to himself. Not to say this, my brethren, out of my own experience would be to withhold a good confession that is due. And I can not persuade myself that any thoroughly Christian person is ignorant of the experience I describe. All our best determinations of duty are those which come upon us in the immediate light of our immediate union to Christ.
I ought, perhaps,
to add that the doctrine I am wishing to unfold, does not exclude the use of the
understanding. It is one thing to use the understanding under love, as being liquified
and molded by it, and quite another to make it the oracle or sole arbiter of duty.
Christ himself gives precepts to the understanding,
Let me add now, a few distinct suggestions that crowd upon us, naturally in the closing of such a subject. And—
1. The great debate which has been going on for some time past, with our modern
infidelity, is seen to be joined upon a superficial and false issue. The superior
preceptive morality of the Gospel of Christ, which used to be conceded, is now denied,
and the learned champions of denial undertake to refute our claim, by citing from
the explored literature of the ancient Pagan writers, every particular maxim, or
precept
2. All conscientious Christian persons
who get confused and fall into painful debates of duty in particular
3. It is no good sign for
a Christian person, that he is always trying to settle his duty by calculations,
and wise presagings of the future; and it is all the worse, if he pleases himself
in the confidence that he succeeds. Doing nothing by faith, making no room for impulse
or the inspiration of christian love, he takes the easy method of sagacity—easy
to the fool as to the wise. man—determining his questions of course mostly in the
negative; for, if there is any doubt, it is always a brave thing, and always looks
sagacious to say, No; and then, since he undertakes no duty which he can not see
to the end of, even by his eyes, which is about the same as to undertake no duty
at all, he conceives that he has a more solid way of judging than others. He will
do nothing out of a great sentiment of course, he will break no box of ointment
on the head of anybody; he will educate no son for the ministry, for example, lest
possibly he should be only a martyr for the truth, and all that has been spent upon
him, should only be anointing him for his burial. Meantime, what is the
4. We have a striking, and at the same time, most inviting conception
here given us, of the perfect state of society and character in the future life.
Calculation, criticism, moral codes and precepts, none of these are wanted longer
to regulate the conduct, all the legalities are gone by. There is no debate of reasons,
no casuistry. The reign of simple love has come. The impulse that moves has its
law in itself, and every man does what is good, just because only good is in him.
There is no scruple, no friction, no subtlety of evil to be restrained. The conduct
of all is pure water flowing from a pure spring. And as springs are unconscious
of their sweetness, thunders of their sublimity, flowers of their beauty, so the
perfection of character and conduct is consummated in a spontaneous movement that
excludes all self-regulation, and requires no dressing of the life by rules and
statutes. All best and noblest things are done, as it were naturally; for Christ,
who is formed within, must needs appear without in acts that represent himself.
All acts of beauty and good are like that of the woman, coming to anoint her Lord—inspirations
of the beauty she loved, wise without
After having sunned ourselves, my
friends; in this bright picture above, some of you, it may be, will now return to
the earth with a feeling more wearied and worn by duty than ever. This everlasting
and compunctious study of duty, duty to children, husband or wife, duty to poor
neighbors, and bad neighbors, and impenitent neighbors, duty to Sunday Schools,
duty to home missions and missionaries, duty to heathens and savages, duty to contrabands
and wounded soldiers, and wooden legs in the streets, and limping beggers at the
door, duty to every body, everywhere, every day; it keeps you questioning all the
while, rasping in a torment of debates and compunctions, till you almost groan aloud
for weariness. It is as if your life itself were slavery. And then you say, with
a sigh, “O, if I had nothing to do but just to be with Christ personally, and have
my duty solely as with him, how sweet and blessed and secret and free would it be.”
Well, you may have it so; exactly this you may do and nothing more! Sad mistake
that you should ever have thought otherwise! what a loss of privilege has it been!
come back then to Christ, retire into the secret place of his love, and have your
whole duty personally as with him. Only then you will make this very welcome discovery,
that as you are personally given up to Christ’s person, you are going where he goes,
helping what he
“For the Son of Man is come to save that
which was lost.”—
Every kind of work supposes something to be done, some ground or condition of fact to be affected by it; education the fact of ignorance, punishment the fact of crime, charity the fact of want. The work of Christ, commonly called a work of salvation, supposes in like manner the fact of a lost condition, such as makes salvation necessary. So it is that Christ himself conceives it, “For the Son of Man is come to save that which was lost.” He does not say, you observe, “that which is about to be, or in danger of being, lost,” but he uses the past tense, “was lost,” as if it were a fact already consummated, or, at least, practically determined. This work, therefore, is to be a salvation, not as being a preventive, but as being a remedy after the fact; a supernatural provision by which seeds of life are to be ingenerated in a lapsed condition where there are none. At this point then Christianity begins, this is the grand substructural truth on which it rests, that man who is to be saved by it, is a lost being—already lost.
And yet there will
be many who recoil from this
Probably some of you before me are in just this position of mind regarding the great point stated. You feel obliged to make issue with the Lord Jesus in respect to it—doing it, as you believe, not from any disposition to have a conflict with him, but simply because you can not assent to his words, and seem even to know that the fact he assumes can not be true. The disagreement you will admit is very unequal, but how can you assent to a position that so far violates your honest convictions.
What
I propose then at the present time, not in the way of controversy, but for your
sake and Christ’s sake, is to go over this matter in a careful revision, offering,
if I can, such a statement of it that, going out as it were from your own center
and sentiment, you will meet the mind of Christ approvingly. Perhaps you will so
take
I. Clear away some obstructions, or points of misconception, that may put your feeling at unnecessary variance with Christ’s doctrine, or give you a sense of revulsion from it that is not really occasioned by any thing in it.
Thus, when he says “was lost,” using the past tense, as if the lost condition
were a fact accomplished, you do not see that either you, or the world is in a state
of undoing so completely reprobate. But he does not mean, when he says “was
lost,” that the lost condition is literally accomplished in the full
significance of it, but only that it is begun, with a fixed certainty of being
fully accomplished; that, as being begun, the causes that are loosed in it
contain the certainty of the fact, as truly as if the fact were fully executed.
Thus if you see a man topple off the brink of a precipice a thousand feet high,
you say inwardly, the moment he passes his center of gravity, “he is gone;” you
know it as well as when you see him dashed in pieces on the rocks below; for the
causes that have gotten hold of him, contain the fact of his destruction, and he
is just as truly lost before the fact accomplished as after. So if a man has
taken some deadly poison and the stupor has begun to settle upon him already,
you say that he is a lost man; for
Again, you have heard of such a thing as “total depravity,” and the declaration of Christ may be somehow associated with such a conception; a conception which you instinctively repel as unjust and extravagant, and contrary plainly to what you know of the many graces and virtues that adorn our human life. But this notion of total depravity is no declaration of Christ, and he is not responsible for it. It is only a speculated dogma of man, which can be so stated as to be true, and very often is so stated as to be false. You have nothing to do with it here.
It has much to do, again with your impressions on this subject, that you are so
completely wide of all sensibility to, or consciousness of, the lost condition Christ
assumes. Have you considered the possibility that you may be rather proving the
truth of it in that manner? “If our gospel be hid,” says an apostle, “it is hid
to them that are lost.” If you have no sense of being in the lost condition Christ
speaks of, if the salvation he proposes seems, in that view, to be an exaggeration,
a fiction, it may be true and is very likely to be, that the want of proportion
is in you and not in it. I say not that it is, I only suggest that it may be. If
it is, then
Again, your mind is an active principle, and it keeps suggesting, or putting in
your way, thoughts that run, as it were, to a contrary conviction; as that God is
good, and will not put a race in being, to be lost regarding all good ends of being,
or that he is a great being, competent every way to keep his foster children safe.
The argument is short and easy, it seems even to invent itself. But there is another
counter suggestion that is quite as likely to be true, and has weight enough certainly to balance it; viz., that God wanted possibly, in the creation of men, free
beings like himself, and capable of common virtues with himself—not stones, or trees,
or animals—and that, being free and therefore not to be controlled by force, they
must of necessity be free to evil; consequently never to be set fast in common virtues
with himself, except as he goes down after them into evil and a lost condition,
to restore them by a salvation. This being true, creatures may be made, that perish,
or fall into lost conditions., Besides the world is full of analogies. The blossoms
of the spring cover the trees and the fields, all alike beautiful and fragrant;
but they shortly strew the ground as dead failures, even the greater part of them,
having set no beginning of fruit. And then of the fruits that are set how many die
as abortive growths, strewing the ground again. How many harvests also are blasted,
yielding only straw. In the immense propagations of the sea, what myriads die in
the first week of life.
Once more the amiable virtues,
high aspirations, and other shining qualities, you see in mankind, make the assumed
fact of our lost condition seem harsh and extravagant—you could not believe it
if you would. But considering how high and beautiful a nature the soul is, it should
not surprise you that it shows many traces of dignity even after it has fallen prostrate,
and lies a broken statue on the ground. Besides, Christ himself had even a more
appreciative feeling, in respect to what may be called our natural character than
you. When a certain young man, rich, but conscientiously upright and nobly ingenuous,
came to him asking what he should do “to inherit eternal life?” though he was obliged
in faithfulness to answer, “one thing thou lackest,”—requiring him to suffer a total
change of life, in the sacrifice of all he had, and the assumption of his cross—his
manner and look were so visibly and affectingly tender, nevertheless, as to attract
the special attention of his disciples, and from them it passed into the narrative,
as a distinctly noted element of description—“Then Jesus beholding him, loved him.”
You might not yourself have put any such terms of requirement upon him; I fear that
you would not, but would you, with all you sensibilities to natural excellence,
have
Having noted, in this manner, so many points of unnecessary revulsion from the fact of a lost condition, assumed by Christ in his work of salvation, I think I may take it for granted that you are ready—
II. To look at the evidence of the fact and accept the conclusion it brings you.
And the first thing here to be considered is, that
our blessed Master, in assuming your lost condition, is not doing it harshly, or
in any manner of severity. He is no dogmatist, making out his article of depravity.
He is not a teacher of that light quality that permits him to be pleased with appalling
severities of rhetoric, and over-drawn allegations of fact, without any due sense
of their meaning. His feeling is tender, never censorious. Sometimes, by a kind
of divine politeness so to speak, he puts a face on human character and relations
that avoids a look of impeachment where impeachment would be true; as when he speaks
of “laying down his life for his friends.” He could have said “enemies” quite as
truly, or even more so, but did not like to put that now upon his disciples. In
the same kind way of consideration, but with a deeper feeling, he apologizes to
God for his murderers, even in the article of death, and apparently comforts himself
in the allowance—“Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Is it
such a being that will thresh you in random
Furthermore, it must be evident to you, as it has been to all most unrestrained critics and deniers, that his moral sentiments and standards are high and sharp beyond comparison—higher and sharper certainly than yours. He has also a most piercing insight of all that is deepest in character and its wants; as, by force of his most singular purity alone, he must of necessity have; what then will you sooner think of, when he calls you a lost man, than that, possibly, he knows you more adequately than you know yourself? Having then some better right than you to know, what does he in fact say?
I might go to
the other scriptures, citing declarations from them; and especially from the writings
of Paul, who discusses this very point many times over, showing by the most cogently
close and formal arguments, the fallen state of disability and subjection to evil,
out of which Christ has undertaken to raise you; but I prefer to keep the question
still and altogether between you and him, and therefore I shall not cite any words
but his. Notice then his parables of the lost sheep, and the lost piece of money,
not omitting to observe that he is here sharpening no point of allegation against
men, but only setting forth the joy that will accrue to the angels of God, and all
good beings, when they are restored. Is it in this attitude of feeling that he is
launching hard or unjust judgments upon them? He also speaks of a
These now are Christ’s convictions, most tenderly, faithfully, and variously expressed, concerning man, or the lost condition of man—your lost condition. He does not come to some very bad men, saying these things, but he speaks comprehensively to the race, and grounds his work of salvation fixedly upon the lost condition affirmed.
You will not hear them disrespectfully. Still it will not be strange if your feeling is unsatisfied. “If it be so with me,” you will ask, “why may it not somehow be made to appear?” Let me take you then a step further, into another field, where I think it will appear.
As the matter lies between you and Christ, and he has spoken already, I will take you now to yourself. Think it not strange, if your heart answers, after all, to the heart of Jesus, and re-affirms exactly what he has testified.
You live in a world where there is certainly some wrong—you have seen it, suffered
from it, and consciously done it. But all wrong, it will be agreed, is something
done against the perfect and right will of God, and a shock must of necessity follow
it. Suppose a machinist to produce a machine, some one wheel of which will somehow
run directly the other way from what was intended—does run the other way for some
But I refer you to society thus only in a way of transition, and return immediately
to the main question as it stands in the revelations of your own personal consciousness.
It has always seemed to me that whoever will accurately note his own inward working,
for but one half hour, must even be appalled by the discoveries he will make. You
distinguish first of all a certain shyness, or feeling of recoil from God—why should
you withdraw instinctively thus from a being wholly good and pure? It was just this
feeling that
You discover also a certain look of disproportion, that is painfully significant. Your ambition is too high for your possibilities and your place. Your passions are too strong for your prudence. Your prudence too close for your affections. Your irritabilities too fiery at times for both. Your resentments are too impetuous for your occasions. Your appetites too large for your possibilities of safe indulgence. Your will over-rules your conscience. Your inclinations master the dictates of your reason. And what is more sadly humiliating than any thing else, your great aspirations have some weight upon them which they can not lift, falling back baffled and spent, with no power left but to notify you of their constant failure. Your great ideals too, revealing, as it were, the summits of a magnificent nature, and lifting their flags of inspiration there, are yet draggled somehow and drugged by low impulses, that make you a mockery to yourself in your attainments. A kind of inversion appears in every thing—sure indication of disorder.
There is disagreement also, as well as disproportion. Your
practical judgments of things disagree with your
Take another and simpler view of your disorder, do just what
so few men ever did, sit down for an hour, and watch the run of your thoughts. Nothing
flows in regular causation, no law of suggestion can be more than faintly traced.
As a man who is lost in a deep forest, turns confusedly one way and the other, unable
to set his mind in a train of deliberative order,
Glance now a moment,
at the disabilities that have somehow come upon you, in what the Saviour calls
III. Of the salvation—what it is, and by what means or methods it is wrought. Too short a space is left me, you will see, to allow any thing but a very condensed statement. Excluding then all that may be held, or contended for, as regards the matter of expiation for sin, or the final satisfaction of God’s justice, in the death of Christ—which can, at the most, be no proper salvation from the inward disorder and disability we have discovered—we come directly to the question, how the death is quickened, bow the lost condition of the old man is, or is to be, renewed by Christ, in his work considered as a salvation?
Manifestly this can be done only by some means, or operation, that respects the soul’s free nature, working in, upon, or through consent in us, and so new ordering the soul.
Not then, by some divine act in the force principle of omnipotence, some new creating stroke from behind, that restores our disorder; the change thus accomplished is a mending by repair, and not a recovery; omnipotence, not Christ, is the Saviour.
As little is it by some help given to your
development, or self-culture, or even self-reformation. When Lord Chesterfield gives
disquisitions on the elegant
We must look, in fact, for some such being as can be a World’s Regenerator;
making good the fact that God has not created us for a lost condition, but for salvation.
Doubtless it may be true that God could not bring us on as free, by any straight
line progress of development, into the character he meant for us, and the relation
to Himself, that was to be our joy and his. As the ancient poets tell us of this
or that hero of their’s, who went down to hell, fought away the three-headed dog
at the gate, and passed the Stygian river, and when the
He works by no fiat of absolute will, as when God said “let there
be light.” He respects your moral nature, doing it no violence. He moves on your
consent, by moving on your convictions, wants, sensibilities, and sympathies. He
is the love of God, the beauty of God, the mercy of God—God’s whole character, brought
nigh through a proper and true Son of Man, a nature fellow to your own, thus to
renovate and raise your own. Meeting you at the point of your fall and disorder,
as being himself incarnated into the corporate evil of your state, he brings you
God’s great feeling to work on yours. He is deeply enough entered into your case,
to let the retributive causes loosened by your sin roll over him in his innocence,
doing honor
And this is salvation, the entering of the soul into God’s divine order; for nothing is in order that is not in God, having God flow through it by his perfect will, even as he sways to unsinning obedience the tides of the sea, and the rounds of the stars. As we are lost men when lost to God, so we find ourselves when we find God. And then, how consciously do the soul’s broken members coalesce and meet in Christ’s order, when Christ liveth in them. In this new relationship, the spirit of love and of a sound mind, all strength, free beauty, solid vigor, get their spring—we are no more lost. All that is in God or Christ his Son, flows in upon us—wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, redemption. We are new men created in righteousness after God. Even so, “in righteousness;” for we are new-charactered in God, closeted so to speak in God’s perfections—in that mariner justified, as if we had never sinned, justified by faith. We have put on righteousness, and in it we are clothed; even the righteousness of God, which is by faith of Jesus Christ, unto all and upon all them that believe.
This is the salvation that our God is working
in his Son, but as the great apostle here intimates, it is, and is to be, by faith;
for the result can never be issued save as we, on our part believe. The very plan,
or mode of his working supposes a necessity of faith in us. For as God comes nigh
us in his son, he can be a salvation, only as we come nigh responsively to Him,
yielding our feeling to the cogent working of his. And this we do in faith. Faith
is the act by which one being
“Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into
the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. And when he had fasted forty days and
forty nights, he was afterward an hungered.”—
I think I do not mistake, when I assume that this particular chapter of the gospel history, commonly called the temptation, is just the one that a good many theologians, and a much larger number of Christian disciples, do really, if not consciously, wish had not been written; that which most stumbles their speculation, and least fructifies their spiritual impressions; that which wears the most suspiciously mythic look, that which they skip most frequently in the reading, or, if they read, only gather up their minds to go on with due attention, after they are through with it.
Jesus Immanuel,
the eternal Word incarnate, innocence itself and purity, the only perfect being
that ever trod the earth, fasting! opening his great ministry of life in a fast
of forty days, and a conflict with the devil for so long a time! Coming down, as
he himself declares from heaven, to set up the kingdom of God among men, he goes
to his work as if it were a deed of repentance—out of a desert, out of a fast—inaugurating
his sublime
What I propose then at the present time, is a careful inquiry into the matter.—The fasting of Jesus in the wilderness. My hope is, that I shall be able to clear this remarkable scene of what many regard as its forbidding, or unwelcome aspect. I even hope to open up a conception of it that will place it along side of the agony and the cross, and will make it correspondently dear to all most thoughtful, practically earnest souls.
In the descent of the Spirit upon him at his baptism, he passes his
great inward crisis of call and endowment, the effect of which the gospels report,
in terms that require to be distinctly noted; saying, one that he is “led up,” [transported,]
another, that he is “led,” [taken away,] another, that he is “driven” by the Spirit
into the wilderness. Under all these rather violent forms of expression, the fact
is signified, that the Spirit, coming here upon him in the full revelation of his
call, raises such a ferment, in his bosom, of great thoughts and strangely contesting
emotions, that he is hurried away to the wilderness, and the state of privacy before
God, for relief and settlement. He was not wholly unapprised of his Messiahship
before, but had come to no adequate impression of what, as Messiah, he was to do
and to be. He began at twelve years of
As he was human, so there was to be a humanly progressive opening of his mind, and a growing presentiment of his great future. All which makes the revelation, when it comes, only the greater and more astounding, because he is just so much more capable of taking the fit impression of it. Nor does it make any difference what particular account we frame of his person. If there is a divine-nature soul, and a human-nature soul, existing together in him as one person, that one person must be in the human type, unfolding by a human process, toward the consciously great Messiahship he is going to fulfill. If he is pure divinity incarnate, he is not simply housed or templed in the flesh, but inhumanized, categorized in humanity, there to grow, to learn, to be unfolded under human conditions of progress.
And then it is only a part of the same general view, that when his endowment settles
upon him, as it does in
An amazing transformation
is suddenly wrought in his consciousness. As heaven opens above to let forth the
voice, and let down the power, and the gate is set open before him to let him forward
into his great future as a world’s Redeemer; as every thing opens every way to prepare
his mighty kingship, and he feels the Messianic forces heaving in his breast, he
reels so to speak, under the new sense he has of himself and his charge, moved all
through in a movement so tremendous that every faculty groans in the pressure, like
a forest swaying in a storm. And the result is that he does what he must—tears himself
utterly away from the incontinent folly of human voices, and the sorry conceit of
human faces, and plunges into the deep silence and solitude of the wilderness; there
to settle his great inward commotions and compose himself to his call. He is “driven
of the Spirit,” only in the sense that the crisis brought
As to the fast itself, it is not likely that he had any thought of fasting, when he betook himself to the retirement of the wilderness; he only found, when there, that a fast was upon him, and since it might help him to subdue his partly intractable humanity more completely to his uses, he took it for his opportunity, refusing to come out into the sight of the world’s works and faces, to obtain his customary food. The great inward tumult he was in held him thus to his fasting for a whole forty days, and so deep was the stress of his feeling, that he does not appear to have been particularly conscious of hunger, till the very last of it; when as we are told “he began to be an hungered”—all which, as many are forward to say, is a myth, or, if not, a perfectly incredible story; no mortal organization being able to subsist for so long a time without food. And yet we hear every few months, of cases well attested that correspond. There appears in fact, to be a possible state of mental and nervous tension, that allows the subject to maintain life without food, for a much longer time than he could in the quiet equilibrium of a more natural state.
But what is Christ doing in this long solitude and
Who has not wished many times, that he could have the record of these forty days? And yet they may be worth even the more to us, that the record is not given—left with a veil hung over it, left to the imagination; by that only, as the purveyor to faith and sympathy, to be explored and pictured as it may be in its scenes, for there is nothing so fructifying as the supplying fondly of what is not given us in our Master’s history, but is left, in this manner, to our creative liberty. In this view, certain blank spaces were even necessary, it may be to our complete benefit in the record of his life. Had he kept a complete diary for us of the forty days experience, it might have been a far less fruitful chapter, than the almost total blank he has left us to range in, loosing our love in tender explorations and reconnoisances, and constructing a history for our faith, out of the scantiest helps given to our understanding.
Among the few things given, or which we sufficiently know, are such as these; that he is not bewailing his sins; that he is not afflicting himself purposely in penances of hunger and starvation; that he is not wrestling with the question whether he will undertake the work to which he is called. The first he can not be doing, because he has no sins to bewail; nor the second, because he is no believer in the doctrine of penance; nor the third, because his choices are concluded always, by the simple fact that any thing right or good is given him to do. If by reason of his human weakness he suffers, for a time, great revulsions of body and mind, that do not pertain to his voluntary nature, that is quite another matter. We shall find reason to think it may be true.
But these, are negations only, and I think we shall be able to fix on several very important points, where we know sufficient in the positive, to justify a large deduction, concerning the probable nature of the struggle through which Jesus is here passing.
1. He has a nature,
that in part, is humanly derived, so far an infected, broken nature. He has never
sinned, he has lived in purity, under this humanly impure investment; growing more
and more distinctly conscious of those higher affinities by which he thus dominates
over the human, unable to be soiled by its contact. But now it is opened to him
in his call, that he is here not as here belonging, that he is sent, let down into
the world, incarnated into human evil, into the curse. There must have been some
time at which the sense of
2. It is not to be doubted that he had internal struggles of a
different nature, growing out of his hereditary connection with our humanly disordered
and retributively broken state. I refer, more especially, to what must have come
upon him under the law of bad suggestion.
3. It is not to be doubted that his human weakness made a fearful recoil from the lot of suffering, and the horrible death now before him. Human nature is keenly sensitive to suffering; but we manage often to bear a great deal of it, because we do not know of it beforehand, but have it coming upon us by surprises, or turns of Providence not expected. Hence there is nothing so common as the remark, from one or another, that he could not have borne such trials as have come successively upon him, if he had been advised, of them and had them in full view beforehand.
But the call of Christ, as it now opened, was a call to suffering; a call to be
fulfilled by sorrow and pain, and consummated by the ignominy of a cross. The great
Messiahship in which he was inaugurated, was to be a power of salvation for the
world, as being a sublime tragedy of goodness. In this respect, his career of suffering
was different, widely, from that of any mortal of the race, in the fact that he
came into it with a full knowledge flashed upon him, of all that he was
Let us not be misled, at this point, by the fact that be is a
superior nature incarnate, imagining that he must also be superior, in that
manner, to suffering. He has taken the human nature, and taken it as it is, by
inheritance, and though it is good for symbol, as being the express image of
God—better than
all nature up to the stars beside—still it is weak for the matter of suffering,
and is, in fact, only the more perfect for his uses on that account. Good, therefore,
as symbol, it has to be conquered as organ. It wants staunching, for so dreadful
a service, by some strong mastery, be it that of a fast, or of any other kind of
discipline. Otherwise, being all weakness, it would even be treason if. it could.
Nothing could be farther off from the heroic in sacrifice, more susceptible to fear,
more instinctively averse to the hatred of men, more unwilling to die, and die
hard, and die low. And what shall he do more naturally, in the confused struggles
of his feeling, than withdraw till the terrible revulsion is quelled
4. There comes upon
him also, at the point of his call or endowment, still another and vaster kind of
commotion, that belongs even to his divine nature, holding fit proportion with the
greatness and perfection of it. The love he had before to mankind, was probably
more like that of a simply perfect man. Having now the fallen world itself put upon
his love, and the endowment of a Saviour entered consciously into his heart, his
whole divinity is heaved into such commotion as is fitly called an agony; answering,
in all respects, to the agony of the garden. How differently do we feel for any
subject of benevolence the moment we have undertaken for him. He lies upon our heart-strings
night and day, as a burden. We watch for him with a painful concern, we agonize
for him. So when Jesus takes the world upon his love, it plunges him at once, into
what may be called the suffering state of God; for it belongs to the goodness of
God, just because it is good, to suffer, as being burdened in feeling for all wrong-doers
and enemies. Every sort of love, the maternal, the patriotic, the christian, has
for its inseparable incident, a moral suffering in behalf of its subjects. God has
the same, in a degree of intensity equal to the intensity and compass of his love.
And it is this moral suffering that now comes upon Christ, and is to be revealed
by his incarnate ministry. The stress upon his feeling is too heavy to be supported
by the frail
Once more, the
mind of Jesus, in his forty days retirement and fasting, must have been profoundly
engaged and powerfully tasked in the unfolding of the necessary plan. He can not
bolt into such a work, embracing such an immense reach of territory, and time, and
kingly rule, without considering, beforehand,
How great and rapid the movement of his counsel has been, we may see, when coming out, after the forty days, into his ministry, he opens his mouth in his beatitudes and goes on with his wonderful first sermon, speaking, how decisively and calmly and with what evident repose; then beginning straightway his miracles, calling his apostles, and organizing his cause; evidently master of his plan even as a practiced general of his campaign-ready in all ripe counsel, to spread himself out on the great world-future of his kingdom.
Beginning
thus at the call of Jesus, and making this large induction from what we know concerning
him, I think you will agree, my friends, that these forty days of his in the wilderness
must have been the most eventful days of his Messiahship, including beyond question,
a vast, unknown, scarcely imaginable, but necessary
I have alluded once or twice to the agony of Jesus. I might also refer you to hours when the same deep conflict more than once, rolls back on him for a space, and his mighty “soul is troubled,” venting itself in words. I can not resist the impression that the real agony of Jesus took him at the very first. How he bore himself in it for so many days in those desert wilds, his attitudes, his sleep or want of sleep, his prostrations and prayers, his groanings in spirit, his spaces of brightness and victorious courage and peace, his deep ponderings by day or night, sitting under the grim rocks—none of these are given us, but our heart will indulge itself in them and rightly may.
Some few incidents are given us which, taken together, signify much. Thus, he is not hungry, he is too powerfully wrought in by his thoughts and emotions to have the sense of hunger.
He is also alone. In the agony of the garden
he has his friends with him, and looks to their sympathy for support. Here he has
no friend with him, because he has not yet any friend enlisted, who can at all understand
him, or yield him even a word of comfort. I said he was alone—no he is not alone,
but as Mark very casually intimates, “he is with the wild beasts.” And this word
with indicates a strange concomitancy, by which they are somehow drawn to come about
him
Still another and very different class of beings come to him—I mean the angels. These we are told ministered unto him. Great joy was that to the angels! and it must have been as great to him! In such a state of long, long conflict and trial, how blessed were these visitors from the great world of peace above, their communications how sweet, how rich in assurance! So between the beasts and the angels, men being wholly away, Jesus gets tokens of sympathy that minister comfort, and help him to compose himself to the opening tragedy of his life.
We come, at last, to the final
crisis of the trial, which many, by what appears to me a very great mistake, call
the temptation; as if it covered the whole ground of the forty days. Exactly contrary
to this the history says expressly—“And when he had fasted forty days and forty
nights he was afterward an hungered.” Or according to another
gospel,—“when they were ended, he began to be an hungered.” The three
temptations follow. So powerfully had his mighty soul been
That this, or something like it, is the true account
to be taken of the story, is hardly to be questioned. It must have been derived
from his own report; for no one else was privy to the matter of it. And he simply
meant, I have no doubt, in the three temptations recited, to report what appeared
to him, visionally speaking; or how they stood before his fevered brain. To believe
that he was actually taken up by the devil, and set on the pinnacle of the temple,
when fifty miles away; or that he was taken up into a mountain so exceedingly high,
that he could see all the kingdoms of the round world from the top, is fairly impossible.
He only reported the seemings of his hunger-fevered state. All temptations
are but seemings. The devils bait their hook, never with truths, always with illusions.
Nor were the temptations any the less real, or satanic, as being phantoms of exhaustion.
This, in fact, was to be his victory, that not even his unsettled, weakened, faculty
could
Scarcely necessary is it,
my brethren, to say that it will be such a ministry as the great first chapter of
the fast prepares—such and no other. I know not any point beside, in the history
of his life, where you may take your stand and see the whole course of it open,
with such intelligible unity and clearness. As the dawn prepares the day, so the
forty days prepare the three wonderful years. Taking the fast for your initial point,
and carefully distinguishing what goes on there, and is done or made ready, every
thing appears to come out naturally, in a sense, from it. Here, in fact, as you
may figure, Christ officially young, levels himself to his aim; and then, as age
is not the count of years but of works, puts himself into his great ministry with
such momentum and constancy, giving so much counsel, expending so much sympathy,
suffering so great waste of sorrow, that he dies, at the end of three years, like
one ripened by full age. The unsteadiness, the overdoing, the romance, of unpracticed
energies, nowhere appears, but the regular gait of sagacity, patience, sound equilibrium,
as of one who has his counsel ready, brings him on to his close. Whether this maturity
is unfolded by the very rapid development of his crowded, heavy-pressing,
I do not mean, of course, in hanging so much upon the temptation of the forty days, to say that Jesus was never tempted before, or after that time. All such temptations were casual, matters by the way, having a certain consequence, but no principal consequence in fixing the tenor of his life. But the forty days temptation had this distinction, that it took him at the point of crisis, so that every thing was turned by the settlement, and went with it. There could be only one such crisis, and the turning of it rightly was the grand inaugural of all that came after, in his wonderful and gloriously consecrated ministry.
In just the same manner, there is, I conceive, in the life of
almost every Christian disciple, a crisis, where every thing most eventful, as
regards the Christian value of his life to himself, and of his consecration to
God, especially hinges, and where, as we may figure, his grand temptation meets
him. Other temptations have gone before, others will come after, here is the
temptation of his personal call, and opportunity. What it will be, or
Having this high work upon you, brethren, silence and solitude will be congenial, and the fasting of Jesus will be remembered by you with a strange sympathy—all in the endeavor to come out on your future, thoroughly consecrated to it, even as he was to his. Drawn to him in such profoundest sympathy with his temptation, O how tenderly and approvingly will he be drawn to you, pouring, as he best may, all the riches of his forty days struggle and consecration to sacrifice upon you. “For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted.” Any life is great and blessed, into which you are entered, upon this high footing with Christ your Master. You can not be worse handled by men, or by what is called fortune, than he was; can not be more faithful to God’s high purpose in you, or more consciously great, and happy, and true; and that, if I am right, is the only kind of life at all worthy of you. And then, at the end, it will be yours to say, in the sublime confidence also of your Master—“I have glorified thee on the earth, I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.”
“Of sin, because they believe not on me. Of
righteousness, because I go to the Father, and ye see me no more. Of judgment, because
the prince of this world is judged.”—
In the convincement of sin,
the Holy Spirit is to be the agent, and Christ rejected the argument—so Christ himself
conceives the promise of the Spirit which he is here giving. The convincing work
is to be wrought by no absolute method of force, but by truths and reasons drawn
from Christ’s person, and the treatment he received from the world. “Of sin,” he
says, “because they believe not on me.” The two other points that he adds—“Of righteousness
because I go to the Father and ye see me no more; Of judgment, because the prince
of this world is judged;”—appear to be only amplifications of the first, or points
in which the guilty convictions of his rejectors will be raised to a higher pitch.
Thus when he is gone out of the world to be seen here no more, gone up to the Father
in visible divine majesty, they will begin to conceive who he was—the Son of God,
the righteousness itself of God. He will be no more the man or the prophet, poorly
apprehended, doubtfully conceived; all their. opinions
It is then a fixed expectation of Christ himself, and that is the truth to which I am now going to call your attention—that his mission to the world will have a considerable part of its value, in raising a higher moral sense in mankind, and producing a more appalling conviction of their guilt or guiltiness, before God.
A widely different, or even contrary, impression appears to be generally derived
from certain things said in the scripture, concerning the law; taken as they are,
in a less qualified manner than they should be, or the facts of the gospel require
them to be. Thus it is declared that, “by the law is the knowledge of sin.” It is
also described in its relation to the gospel, as the letter that killeth,” “the
ministration of death,” “the
Now this impression is so far true, that conviction of sin doubtless supposes the fact of some. rule or law, broken by sin; and that, when such law is broken, it can, as law, do nothing more than condemn—can not help, or save. God only can do that, and that he does in Christ.
But, in a certain other view, there is more law in Christ, more, that is, in his
character and life and doctrine, then there is in all statutes beside. The law of
Eden is to the law of the sermon on the mount, as a jewsharp to an organ. The ten
commandments, mostly negative, or laws of not doing, are not, all together, as weighty
and broad upon the conscience, as Christ’s one positive law, “Do ye unto others
as ye would that
Besides, it is not so much the question, where most law is given, as by what means the sense of law may be most effectually quickened, where before it slept. And here it is that Christ’s great expectation hinges, when he says, “of sin,” “of righteousness,” “of judgment.” For in him, the law is more than a rule, or than all rules—a person, clothed in God’s righteousness, bearing God’s authority, filling and permeating all human relations with an exact well doing, and with all most loving ministries, such as never before had been even conceived in these relations. How much then will it signify, when guilty minds are so painfully dazed by the glories of right in his person, that they. can not endure the sight; conspiring even his death, and falling upon him in their implacable malice, to thrust him out of the world! Why, simply to have had such a being living in the world, doing his work, suffering his pains at the hands of his enemies and breathing out his pure untainted breath upon the poisoned air, changes it to a place of holy conviction, where sin must be ever knowing itself, and scorching itself in its own guilty fires!
Thus much it was necessary to say, in a way of general statement,
or adjustment, as respects the relative agency of Christ and the law in the convincement
of guilty minds. That Christianity was to have, and has had, a considerable part
of its value, in this convincing, as well as in a forgiving and restoring agency,
1. Make due account of the fact, that conviction of sin is a profoundly
intelligent matter, and worthy, in that view, to engage the counsel of God in the
gift of his Son. If we have any such thought as that what is called conviction of
sin is only a blind torment, or crisis of excited fear, technically prescribed as
a matter to be suffered in the way of conversion, we can not too soon rid ourselves
of the mistake. It is neither more nor less than a due self-knowledge—not a knowledge
of the mere understanding, or such as may be gotten by philosophic reflection, but
a more certain, more immediate sensing of ourselves by consciousness; just the same
which the criminal has, when he hies himself away from justice; fleeing, it may
be, when no man pursueth. He has a most invincible, most real, knowledge of himself;
not by any cognitive process of reflection, but by his immediate consciousness—he
is consciously a guilty man. All men are consciously guilty before God, and the
standards of God, in the same manner. They do not approve, but invariably condemn
themselves; only they become so used to the fact that they make nothing of it, but
take it even as the normal condition of their life. Their sin gets to be themselves,
and they only think as thinking of themselves. Living always in the bad element,
they think it is only their nature to be as they are. Their consciousness is frozen
over, so to speak, and they see no river underneath, but only the ice
2. It is quite evident that such a being as Christ could not
come into the world and pass through it, and out of it, in such a manner,
without stirring the profoundest possible convictions of character. If the
divine glory and spotless love of God are by him incarnated into the world, the
revelation must be one that
3. Christ was a being who perfectly
knew the pure standards of character and duty, knowing, as well, just what sin
is in the breach of them, and what man is in the sin. He also knows of course, exactly
what is necessary to stir up the guilty consciousness of men; sometimes doing it
by instruction, sometimes by acts of unwonted patience and beneficence, sometimes
by terrible rebukes and lifted rods of chastisement, and more than once by a divine
skill of silence—as when stooping down, once and again, he drew mystic figures on
the ground; sending out thus one by one, condemned and guilt-stricken, the pretentious
accusers of the woman; or when, scarcely speaking and urging no defense, he so visibly
shook with concern, the guilty mind of Pilate, by the dumb innocence only of his
manner. He knew exactly what to do on all occasions, and with all different classes
of men, to put the sense of guilt upon them, and
4. To the scriptures and gather up some few of the tokens that Christ, before his coming, was expected to come in this character; and also of the declarations, by himself and his followers afterward, that he had, especially in his death, accomplished such a result.
“They shall look on me whom they have pierced,” says the prophet, “and they shall mourn.” Other expressions of the prophets correspond. Accordingly when the infant Jesus was brought to Simeon, by his mother, he said to her, “Behold this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be spoken against, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” His rejection was to reveal the heart of his rejectors. John the Baptist conceives, in the same manner, that he is coining with “the axe” of conviction, to be laid to the root of all sin, and “the fan” of separation, to winnow out the chaffiness of all pretense, so to unmask the secrecy of guilt and place it in the open light of conviction.
Christ himself also testifies that he has done it, saying to Nicodemus,
“He that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the
name of the only begotten Son of God. And this the condemnation (how deeply shall
the sting of it some time pierce
Take the trial scene of Jesus next, noting first, the bad spirit out of
which it comes, and then the guilty conviction that follows it. What injury had
Christ done to Caiphas and the managers of his party, that they should be so bitterly
exasperated against him? There was never a more inoffensive being, save as goodness
is itself an offense to sin. Hence the violence of their animosity; for no man is
so violent and brutish in his animosities, as he that is storming against goodness,
to drown the disturbance, and redress the guilty pangs it
Mark the result. The very moment after Jesus has commended his
spirit to the Father and ceased to breathe, the conviction of crime begins to
break through the enmity of his crucifiers. Their malignity is discovered, they
could hate a living enemy, but the helpless
Next we see the great principle of conviction—“of sin because they believe not on me,”—beginning to be wielded with overwhelming energy, by the apostles. This very truth charged home—you have rejected and crucified Christ—is the arrow of the day of Pentecost. “Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly,” says Peter in his sermon on that occasion, “that God hath made that same Jesus whom ye crucified both Lord and Christ—he hath shed forth this which you now see and hear. Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and cried—‘Men and brethren, what shall we do?’”
And the very next sermon of Peter hangs upon the same bitter truth of conviction. “Ye denied the Holy One and the Just, and desired a murderer to be granted unto you, and killed the Prince of Life, whom God hath raised from the dead, whereof we are witnesses.”
And again, in the third sermon of the same apostle, he hurls
the same arrow. For of a truth against thy holy child Jesus, whom thou hast anointed,
both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and thy people
So it was that Peter, in his preaching, charged home upon his hearers everywhere the rejecting and denying of Jesus the Saviour.
Paul too was traveling over all seas, and through all lands, telling the story of his remarkable conversion—how at first he disbelieved and hated the very name of Jesus, how he was exceedingly mad against his followers, and went about dragging them to prison, till, at last, on his way to Damascus, he was met by that word of irresistible conviction, which had been so powerful many times before—“I am Jesus whom thou persecutest.” O what depths were opened now in the persecutor’s heart! All his bitter wrongs and fiery inflictions flame back in that word—“I am Jesus whom thou persecutest!” showing him the madness that reigns within. Thus begins the life in Christ of this great apostle—itself an illustration how sublime of the Saviour’s thought! “Of sin because they believe not in me.” But there is a reason—
5. Back of this great fact, in the scheme of the gospel, in which it is grounded; viz., that a very bad act often brings out the show of a bad spirit within and becomes, in that manner, a most appalling argument of conviction. Hence the immense convincing power to be exerted on mankind through the crucifixion of Christ by his enemies. Even as a profligate, unfilial son, discovers himself as he is, and receives the true impression, for the first time, of his own dire wickedness and passion, when he looks upon the murdered form of his father, and washes the stains of parricide from his hands. In like manner Joseph’s brethren, when he stood revealed before them, as the brother whom they cruelly sold, were struck dumb with guilt, and could not so much as speak to ask his forgiveness. So also Herod, haunted by the sense of his crime in the murder of John, imagined, in the wild tumult of his guilty brain, that Christ must be the prophet’s ghost, returning to be avenged of his wrong.
The death, or public execution of Socrates affords,
in some respects, a more striking illustration. His pure morality of life, his sublime
doctrine of virtue, the discredit reflected on the gods of his country, by his belief
in a supreme, all-perfect God and governor of the world, worthy of a better worship,
raised up enemies and accusers, who indicted him as a corrupter of the youth, and
a denier of the gods of his country. The people, artfully wrought upon, voted his
death. Shortly after, the dead teacher rose upon them mightier even than the living,
and a wave of conviction rolling back
I have spoken of this act, as the act of the human race, and
such, in some true sense, it was; and as such has been ringing ever sense in the
guilty conscience of the race; for it is, in fact, a proof by experiment, of what
is in all human hearts. Thus, if there should come down from the upper sky some
pure dove that has his home in that pure element, and the birds of the lower air
should be heard screaming at all points, and seen pitching upon the unwelcome visitant
and striking their beaks into his body, we should have no doubt of some radical
unlikeness, or repugnance, between the creatures of the two elements. And this exactly
is the feeling that has been forced upon the world’s guilty mind, ever since, by
the crucifixion of Jesus. It rolls back on our thought in a kind of silent horror,
that will not always be repelled, that the manifested love of God, impartial and
broad as the world, a grace for every human creature, is yet gnashed upon by the
world and crucified. If we say that this act of crucifixion was not ours, it certainly
was not in the particular sense intended, and yet in another and much deeper sense,
it was; viz., in the sense that what it signifies was ours. It was done by mankind,
as Christ was a Saviour for mankind, and we are men. It proves for one age all that
it proves for another; proves for the lookers on all which it proves for the doers.
In this manner it is yours, it is mine. I think it quite certain, sometimes, that
I should have had no part it, and it may be that I should not. But again I sometimes
shudder privately over the question, whether if such a being were to come
Lastly there is another and more direct
kind of argument, that I mean which we get from our own consciousness. I think
I may assert, with confidence, that there is no man living, who is not made conscious,
at times, of sin, as in no other manner, by the simple fact of his own rejection of
Christ. Nor does it make any great difference,. if his belief appears to be hindered
by speculative difficulties. He may imagine, or distinctly maintain, that he rejects,
or does not believe, on the ground of sufficient evidence. Still Christ is Christ,
and the cross is the cross, and he can not so much as think of himself, before the
merely conceived image of
But the most of you are
troubled by no such speculative doubts; you are only selfish and earthly, want your
pleasures, want other objects more, that must be renounced to receive him—meaning
still, at some time, to do it, and become his disciples. Living in this feeble and
consciously false key, your courage wavers, and self-rebuking thoughts are, ever
and anon, making their troublesome irruptions upon you. When the Saviour says—“Of sin because they believe not on
But I must not close
my argument on this great subject, without noting a common objection; viz., that
all such phases of mental disturbance called conviction of sin, in the New Testament,
are too weak for respect, and should not be indulged, even if they are felt. But
if they are according to truth, if they are so far intelligent as to be modes of
sensibility accurately squared by the fact of character within, then they are only
a kind of weakness that is stronger to be allowed than stifled. They are however,
in some sense, moods of weakness I must still admit; for they belong to sin and
sin itself is weak. Nothing in fact is weaker. Courage,
In what manner
Christ was to convince of sin we have now seen, and no farther argument appears
to be needed. But the subject can not be fitly concluded without noting a remarkable
effect that has followed the cross as a convincing power on the world; viz., the
fact that, in what is called Christendom, there has been a manifest uplifting of
the moral standards, and a correspondent quickening of the moral sensibilities,
both of individual men, and of whole races and people. In the people of the old
dispensation and of the great Pagan empires long ago converted to the cross, moral
ideas have now taken the place, to a great extent, of force; the coarse blank apathy
of sin is broken up; the sense of duty is more piercing; and it is even as if a
new conscience had been given respecting the soul in its relations to God. It is
as if men had seen their state of sin glassed before them, and made visible in the
rejection of Christ and his cross. Jews and Pagans had before been made conscious
at times of particular sins; we are made conscious, in a deeper and more appalling
way, of the state of sin itself, the damning evil that infects our humanity at the
root—that which
“And behold there arose a great tempest in the sea, insomuch
that the ship was covered with the waves: but he was asleep.”—
Christ asleep—the eternal Word of the Father, incarnate, lapped in the soft oblivion of unconsciousness—a very strange fact, when deeply enough pondered to reveal its significant and even singular implications.
Where then do we go to look upon so
great a sight, the sleep of God’s Messiah? Is he royally bestowed in some retired
hall, or chamber of his palace? Is he curtained about and canopied over on his
bed of down, as one retiring into the deepest folds of luxury, there to woo the
delicate approach of sleep? Must no doors be swinging, no feet of attendants stirring
in the halls? Are the windows carefully shaded, lest some ray of moonlight streaming
in may break the tender spell of the sleeper? No, it is not so that Jesus sleeps,
or with any such delicate provisions of luxury to smooth his rest; but he is out
upon the Gennessaret, in some little craft that his disciples have picked up for
the crossing, and upon the short space of flooring, or deck, in the hinder part,
he sinks, overcome with exhaustion, and is
By and by a change appears. A dark and ominous cloud,
sailing up, shuts in the sky. The lightnings begin to fall, crashing on the head
of Gerizim and Tabor, and very soon the tempest that was booming heavily in the
distance, strikes the little skiff, dashing the waves across, and filling
instantly the forward part with water. The little company are thrown, as it
would seem, into the greatest panic and confusion, unable to manage the sinking
vessel, and only mixing their cries of distress with the general tumult of the
storm. Still Jesus sleeps, folded in that deep self-oblivion which no rage of
the elements can disturb. “And behold there arose a great tempest in the sea,
insomuch that the ship was covered with the waves: but he was asleep.” Even so, no wildest tumult without can reach
the inward composure of his rest. The rain beating on his face, and the spray driving
across it, and the sharp gleams of the lightning, and the crash of the thunder,
and the roar of
The sleeping of Jesus I believe is mentioned nowhere else in the gospels, and I do not recollect ever to have heard the subject presented as a topic of discourse, or even distinctly noticed—an omission the more remarkable that the theologic implications of the fact appear to be so important.
Sleep is
a shadow that falls on the soul, as well as on the body. It is such a kind of state,
or affection, as makes even the mind, or intelligent principle, unconscious. What
could be more in point, then, for the speculative humanitarian, than to call this
fact to his aid, by raising the question, what can be made of the sleep of Jesus,
on the supposition that he is divine? Does sleep attack divinity? How can it be
conceived that deity, or a nature essentially deific, sleeps, falling
It would carry me too far, to go into these
questions here, taking me, in fact, quite away from my subject. I most readily admit
that Jesus, being essentially a divine person, can not, in good logic, sleep; and
just as certain it is that, if we proceed logically, he can not, as having a deific
nature, be a man. And yet he both slept and was a man. As being God incarnate, the
Word made flesh, the infinite in the finite, he is logically impossible. But God
has a way of doing the impossible. In the communication of himself to men, he tears
away the logical carpentry, refusing to put his glory into it. The truth is that
our laws of thinking are totally at fault, in regard to subjects of this nature,
speculatively handled. All that we can say of the personality of Jesus is that he
is a being in our plane, and yet not in it—in it as a practical approach of God,
not in it as being logically resolvable by our scientific, or speculative deductions.
The very thing proposed in the person of Jesus is to make an approach transcending
any possible explication by us; viz., to humanize divinity; that by means of a nature,
fellow to our own, he may bring himself within our range, and meet our feeling by
a feeling formally humanized
There is then a very great spiritual importance, in the fact
that Jesus sleeps. In it we behold the divine humanity sealed or set in complete
evidence. Divine he must be, for his character is deifically spotless and perfect;
human he must be for he sleeps like a man.
And yet more nigh, by a sympathy more tender, when we go
over the count of what he had been doing yesterday, and see how it was that he fell
into a sleep so profound. The warrior sleeps returning spattered and spent from
the bloody horrors of the field; the devotee of pleasure sleeps, because he has
drunk the cup dry and would fain forget himself; one hasting to be rich, exhausted
and spent by his overmastering cares, and the strain of his mighty passion, sleeps
a hurried sleep, fevered by his price-current dreams; the hireling sleeps on his
wages, gathering strength for the wages of tomorrow; Jesus sleeps, because he has
emptied the fund of his compassions and poured himself completely out in works of
mercy to the sick and the poor. His giving way to sleep is well accounted for, when
we find him engaged the whole day previous, in works of teaching, advice, counsel,
sympathy, consolation, healing, and rebuke, such as kept him in a constant expenditure
of feeling and strain of attention, that no mortal strength could support. According
to Matthew he
In this sleep of Jesus
therefore, as related to the works of the day, a very great mistake, into which
we are apt to fall, is corrected or prevented; the mistake, I mean, of silently
assuming that Christ, being divine, takes nothing as we do, and is really not under
our human conditions far enough to suffer exhaustions of nature by work or by feeling,
by hunger, the want of sleep, dejections, or recoils of wounded sensibility. Able
to do even miracles—to heal the sick, or cure the blind, or raise the dead, or still
the sea—we fall into the impression that his works really cost him nothing, and
that while his lot appears to be outwardly dejected, he has, in fact, an easy time
of it. Exactly contrary to this, he feels it, even when virtue goes out only from
the hem of his garment. And when he gives the word of healing, it is a draft, we
know not how great, upon his powers. In the same way every sympathy requires an
expenditure of strength proportioned to the measure of that sympathy. Every sort
of tension, or attention, every argument, teaching, restraint of patience, concern
of charity, is a putting forth with cost to him, as it is to
Now all such miscolorings of his
human experience take him, so far, out of our tier of life, and slacken proportionally
our sympathy with him. And they are beautifully corrected in the night of the boat.
Jesus had become so exhausted that he could not, in fact, support himself an hour
longer, and dropped immediately down, mind and body together, into the profoundest
Blessed be thy rough sleep, O thou great benefactor! thou that art wearied and spent by thy particular works and the virtues that have gone out of thee! What is it now to thee, that the waters drench thee, and the fierce tempest howls in tumult round thee! Sleep on exhausted goodness, take thy rest in the bosom of the storm! for it is thy Father’s bosom, where they that are weary for works of love, may safely trust, and sink so deeply down into the abysses of sleep, that no thunder even may rouse them.
Notice more particularly also the conditions, or bestowments of the
sleep of Jesus, and especially their correspondence with his redemptive undertaking.
Saying nothing of infants, which in a certain proper sense are called innocent,
there have been two examples of full grown innocent sleep in our world; that of
Adam in the garden, and that of Christ the second Adam, whose nights overtook him,
with no place where to bestow himself. And the sleep of both, different as possible
in the manner, is yet most exactly appropriate, in each, to his particular work
and office. One is laid to sleep in a paradise of beauty, breathed upon by the flowers,
lulled by the music of birds and running brooks, shaded and sheltered by the overhanging
trees, shortly to wake and look upon a kindred nature standing
How fitting was it also, both that sleep should be one of the
appointments of our nature, and that Christ should be joined to us in it. These
rounds of sleep are rounds, in fact, of bodily regeneration,
But as I have
spoken of the sleep, I must also speak of the waking; or at least I must so far
note the manner of it, as to draw from it some deeper and more fit conception of
the internal state of the sleep. It is a matter of common remark that one who goes
to his night’s rest charged with a purpose to rise at some given signal, or at some
fixed hour, will catch the faintest
But observe
specially his manner when he wakes. It is as if the great commotion round him had
been only a hymn lulling his slumber. He is not flurried or startled by the tumult,
shows no sign of confusion, or alarm. If he sleeps, a man, he wakes, a God. You
can almost see by his waking, that his dreams have been thoughts pure and mighty,
coasting round the horrors of a guilty wrath-stricken world on errands of love and
peace. Indeed if it has ever occurred to you to wish that you could once look in
upon the sleep of Jesus, and distinguish accurately the dream-state of his thought,
even this you may sufficiently guess from the
I am fully conscious, my friends, that I have been discoursing on this matter of the sleep of Christ, in a somewhat random way; for it is a specially intangible, unexplorable subject. Not an unimportant subject either in its theological implications, or its practical relations to our Christian life, but one whose value does not so much depend on our definite interior knowledge of it, as in the external and evident fact. It does not definitely, or conclusively teach, but it suggests many things, and things only suggested are often of as great consequence to us as things proved. Let us note a few of the points suggested. And
1. The possible, or rather actual redemption of sleep. Sleep is just
as truly fallen as humanity itself. And who that knows the sleeping thoughts of
man, as they are, can have any doubt of it? Nay, who that knows the waking thoughts
of man, as they are, can be at all ignorant how they will run when he sleeps? Gnawed
2. It is another point suggested here, that there is a right and wrong sleep, as well as a right and wrong waking state. Sleep is the subsiding of soul and body into nature’s lap, or the lap of Providence, to recruit exhaustion, and to be refitted for life’s works. But what right has any one to be refitted for wrong; and above all refitted, by the help of Providence? Such sleep is a fraud, and the fund of new exertion obtained by it is actually stolen. Sleep was never appointed by God, to refit wrong-doers and disobedient children, and enable them to be more efficient against Him. Their very sleep they go to, therefore, as a crime, and the dark shadow of guilt curtains in their rest. O ye days-men, that a few hours hence, when your fund is spent, will go to your sleep to be refitted for to-morrow, is it to be a lying down upon wrong, upon sin, or will it be upon right—there is a very serious meaning in the question. Will you suffer it to rise and be distinctly met, when your head meets your pillow? How very hard a pillow would it be to many, if they took it understandingly!
Observe, meantime, how free a guarantee Christ gives to sleep,
when it is right sleep. There have been multitudes of devotees under the Christian
name, that made a great merit of withholding sleep, in the rigid observance of long
vigils; as if the reduction of the soul’s quantity, and the obfuscation of its functions,
were the same thing to God as advancing in holiness. These vigils are about the
most irrational, most barren kind of fast, that was ever invented; for the reason
that, instead of clearing, or girding up the mind, they even propose to make a penance
of stupor and lethargy. It is a great mistake also of some that they are jealous
of sleep, and have it as a point of merit to shorten the hours, by a regularly enforced
anticipation of the dawn. Any such rule for the reduction of quantity is doubtful.
A much better rule respects the quality. Make it your duty to prepare a Christian
sleep; that kind which the exhaustion of a righteous, or right minded industry requires,
and then you may know that Christ your master is with you. It is remarkable that
he actually tore himself away from even his healings, and from vast multitudes of
people crying piteously for help. He did not reason as some very good men often
do, that he must go on, pressed by such calls of mercy, till he could stand no longer.
He was famished with hunger, his strength was gone, and enough, to him, was enough.
What merit could it be, if he should continue into the night, and falling at last
on the ground for faintness, be carried off in that weak plight, to be himself commiserated
in turn? He plucked himself away, therefore, fled
3. The associations connected with the sleep of Jesus induce a
very peculiar sense of his nearness to us in it. Only to have slept in some
fisherman’s hut, or about some hunter’s fire, in company with a noted or
publicly known person, gives a certain familiar kind of pleasure to our
remembrance of him. In the same way, when the Son of God is joined to us here in
a common sleep, subsiding nightly into unconsciousness with us, under the same
heaven, a most strange association of nearness is awakened by the conjunction.
In our very proper endeavor to exalt God, and give him the due honors of
majesty, we commonly push him away, just so far, into distance; we seat him on
the circle of the firmament, we lift him, not above the clouds only, but even
above the stars; scarcely content, till we have found some altitude for Him,
higher than all points visible, and even outside of the creation itself. When,
therefore he comes down, as the incarnate One, to be a man with us, tired and
spent as we by life’s toils, when he lies so
Once more the analogies of
the sleep of Jesus suggest the Christian right, and even duty, of those relaxations,
which are necessary, at times, to loosen the strain of life and restore the freshness
of its powers. Christ, as we have seen, actually tore himself away from multitudes
waiting to be healed, that he might refit himself by sleep. He had a way too of
retiring often to
But if you go to kill time, or to cheat the ennui of an idle life, or to drown your self-remembrance in giddy excesses, or to coax into composure nervous energies eaten out by the passion or flustered by the ventures of gain, there goes an enemy with you that will bitterly mock you, giving you the type, in what you seek but nowhere find, of that more awful disappointment that awaits the rest of eternity. What, in fact, are you dying of now, but of rest that is no rest—the inanity of ease and idleness, the insipid bliss of cloyed, overworn pleasures, nights that add weariness to the weariness of the days, sabbaths of God that are bores and not restings under the fourth commandment. O I would rather sleep in a fisherman’s boat, in thunder and tempest and rain, exhausted by a day of useful, Christly work, only dreaming there of the good rest to come, than to never know the exhaustions of true industry, and spend life, lolling in equipages, and courting pleasures that will not come! For what too are such ready, dying in their pampered bodies and worn out splendors, but to turn away heart-sick, as here, from the golden sands of the river, and chill with nervous ague for the shades of the trees of life. Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord; for they rest from their labors. Blessed only they; for where there is no labor, spending life’s capacity for God, there is, of course, no rest.
“Behold also the ships, which though they be so great,
and are driven of fierce winds, yet are they turned about with a very small helm,
whithersoever the governor listeth.”
The ships that were “so great” in former days, were, in fact, scarcely more than cock-boats, or small coasters, scraping round the shores of the inland seas; whereas, now, what we call the great ships are big enough to store in their hold, a whole armed fleet of the ancient time, vessels and men together; and these huge bulks strike out on the broad oceans defying their storms, yet still turned about, as before, with a very small helm, whithersoever the helmsman will. There he stands at his post, a single man, scarcely more than a fly that has lighted on the immense bulk of the vessel, having a small city of people and their goods in the world of timber under him, and perhaps with only one hand, turning gently his lever of wood, or nicely guaging the motion of his wheel, steers along its steady track the mountain mass of the ship, turning it always to its course, even as he would an arrow to its mark.
Dropping now the particular reference had by our
In this mode of statement the very supposition is,
you perceive, that we have no ability in ourselves, more than simply to turn ourselves
into the track of another, more sufficient power, and so to have it upon us. Helms
do not impel ships, and if there were no other kind of power moving on the sea,
they would only swing dead-logged upon the waters, making never a voyage. So the
power we have as persons, in religion, is not a power of self-impulsion, but only
a steering power; though it is a very great power at that. For when we so use it
as to hold ourselves fairly to God’s operation, as we hold a ship to the winds,
that is sufficient, that will do every thing, turning even our impossibles
Glance a moment here at the analogies of our physical experience. Great,
overwhelmingly great, as the forces and weights of nature are, what do we accomplish
more easily than to turn about their whole body and bring them into manageable service?—doing
it always by some adjustment, or mode of address, which acknowledges their superior
force. We do not manage a horse by the collar, but by the bit. We do not raise the
winds that serve us by blowing on the mill ourselves, but we let them blow as they
list, only setting the fans of the wheel to get advantage of them. The cliffs of
rocks we do not tear open with our hands, but we drill them and, by merely touching
a little gunpowder with a spark of fire, as we know how, let that blow them into
the air by a force of its own, repeating the operation till we have literally removed
mountains. Our many thousand wheels of manufacture we do not turn by our arms, but
we take the rivers, flowing as they will, and let them flow, only cutting sluices
for them and setting wheels before them, or under them; whereupon they turn producers
for us and even builders of cities. We have a way too of taking that most fierce
and dreadful power called steam into service and management—doing it never by gathering
it up into our arms and holding it in compression, but by raising it in
Prepared by such analogies, our dependence, in the matter of religion, ought to create no speculative difficulty, and I really do not believe that it does, unless it be in some few exceptional cases. There used to be much debate over the question of ability and dependence, but as far as my knowledge extends, such difficulties are not felt any longer as they once were. And yet we seem to have as much difficulty as ever in making that practical adjustment of ourselves to God, which is necessary in any and every true act of dependence.
Thus a great many, admitting quietly the
fact of some such ability as makes them responsible, take it really upon themselves
to do, out and out and by their own force, all which they are responsible for. It
is as if they were setting themselves to steady and move on the general bulk of
the ship, seizing it by its body. What tremendous weights and fearfully complex
forces the soul contains, and how many and fierce the storms may be that have broken
loose in it, under the retributive damage of sin, they do not sufficiently consider,
daring even to hope that they can gather it back into the sweet unity of order and
health, by their own self-governing
Besides we have no capacity, under the natural laws of the soul, as a self-governing creature, to govern successfully any thing, except indirectly, that is by a process of steering. We can not govern a bad passion or grudge by choking it down, or master a wild ambition by willing it away, or stop the trains of bad thoughts by a direct fight with them—which fight would only keep them still in mind as before—all that we can do in such matters, in a way of self-regulation, is to simply steer the mind off from its grudges, ambitions, bad thoughts, by getting it occupied with good and pure objects that work a diversion; and then the danger is—only working thus upon ourselves—that we shortly forget ourselves; when the sky is filled, again, of course, with the old tumult. We ourselves, acting on ourselves, institute harmony in the soul and establish heaven’s order in its working?—why if all its many thousand parts and forces were put in a perfect military subjection to the will, we could not even then conceive the state of internal order and harmony accurately enough to command them into their fit places and functions.
Furthermore, if we could, our self-government would
What is wanted therefore
in us, and nothing more is
Hence also that
very positive matter called faith, or the fixed demand of it as a condition of salvation.
The conception of it is, not that we are to do or attempt doing something great
upon ourselves—regenerating ourselves, sanctifying ourselves. All that we can do
is to simply trust ourselves over to God, and so to bring ourselves into the range
of His divine operation. In one view, or considered as including what God does for
it and by it, faith it is very true is every thing—the whole substance and bulk
and body of holiness; but considered in a manner most analytical and closest to
us, it is our act alone and a very small one at that, to be the determining helm
of a new life. Doubtless faith, again, is some how wrought by God, but it is none
the less acted by us, being the sublimest and completest mortal act of dependence
possible; in which the soul, ceasing from itself, turns away to God—comes unto
God. Whereupon as God meets it, accepts it, and pours himself into its open
gates, it is filled with God’s inspirations
All human doings therefore, as regards the souls’ regeneration, or the beginning of a new-life, amount to nothing more than the right use of a power that steers it into the sphere of God’s operation. And the reason why so many fail here is, that they undertake to do the work themselves, heaving away spasmodically to lift themselves over the unknown crisis by main strength—as if seizing the ship by its mast, or the main bulk of its body, they were going to push it on through the voyage themselves! Whereas it is the work of God, and not in any other sense their own, than that coming in, to God, by a total trust in Him, they are to have it in God’s working. Let the wind blow where it listeth—God will take care of that—they have only to put themselves to it, and the impossible is done.
In just this way also it is that so many miscarriages occur, after conversion.
Nothing was necessary to prevent them, but simply to carry a steady helm in life’s
duties. Thus there will be some who get tired of the helm; to be always at their
post, praying always, guaging their motions carefully to meet their new conditions,
keeping their courses set exactly by their conscience, and allowing no slack times
of indulgence, becomes wearisome as certainly as they lose out the Spirit that makes
exactness liberty, and then they take away their
At the same time it must not be forgotten, that multitudes of disciples
fall out of course, for no less positive reason than that they actually steer themselves
out of God’s operation. One goes into an employment the right of which he is not
sufficiently sure of to have a good conscience in it. Another galls himself in a
right employment, by the consciously wrong manner in which he carries it on. A third
goes into company that consciously does him injury, yet still continues to go. A
male disciple turns himself to the pursuit of honor, a female disciple to the worship
of fashion; one to the shows of condition, the other to the more personal vanities
of dress. Thousands again will let their lusts and appetites get above their affections,
their bodies above their minds. Some are nursing their pride and some their envy,
driven of fierce winds by the gustiness of one, eaten out and barnacled by the water
vermin of the other. These now and such like are the small
Now it is very true that a man who is tending the small helm of duty with
great exactness may become painfully legal in it—a precisionist, a Pharisee. But
it
Now in all that I have said, thus far, in the unfolding of this very practical subject, I have been preparing a more distinctly Christian view of it, that could not otherwise be given—this I will now present, and with this I close.
I have been showing what power accrues, or will accrue, as we keep ourselves in,
or bring ourselves into, the range of God’s operation; and this word operation has
been taken probably as referring only to the omnipotent working of his will, or
spiritual force. But there is a power of God which is not his omnipotence, and has
a wholly different mode of working; I mean his moral power—that of his beauty, goodness,
gentleness,
The infinite perfection, or unseen beauty
of God—how could we so much as frame a notion of it, when even the being of God,
as an unseen spirit, has so little reality to our coarse and fearfully demoralized
apprehensions? Therefore understanding well our utter inability to so much as conceive
the perfect good in which we require to be fashioned, or the moral excellence of
God whose image is to stamp itself upon us, He has undertaken to put even this
before our eyes. To this end he becomes incarnate in the person of His Son. As the
incarnate Son, He is God in the small, God in humanity, the Son of Man, bringing
all God’s beauty and perfection to us in a personal being and life akin to our own—powerful
on our own, by the tragic tenderness
Christ then as the Son of Man, is that small helm put in the hand, so to speak, of our affections, to bring us in, to God’s most interior beauty and perfection, and puts us in the power of His infinite, unseen character; thus to be molded by it and fashioned to conformity with it. And so we have nothing to do but to keep his company, and watch for him in faithful adhesion to his person, in order to be kept in the very element of God’s character, and have the consciousness of God, as a state of continually progressive and immovably steadfast experience. The moral power of God and God’s glory is mirrored directly into us, to become a divine glory in us. Beholding, as in a glass, the glory of the Lord, we are changed into the same image from glory to glory. This it is, working in our sin, that clears it all away—the power of God unto salvation.
What now brethren and friends, is our
conclusion? What have we seen but that all condolings with ourselves, all regrets
of failure, turning upon the fact of our weakness, all protestations of inability,
all sighs and suspirations ending in the word “impossible,” are without a shadow
of reason—utterly groundless. We can do and become just all that we ought, and without
so much as one strain of self-endeavor. It is very true that God has not made us
omnipotent—we can not manipulate ourselves into holy character by our will, we
He will be the door, so that your heart will pass in, where your understanding can
not. reach. No matter how weak you may seem to be, or how many impassable mountains
to be before you, or how many fierce storms to be raging round you, still you will
go over mountains beaten small as chaff, on through tempests that have heard the
word “be still.” You will never fail or fall. Stay by your love to Jesus and the
power of God’s infinite will is with you, and the still mightier, more inconceivable,
power of his greatness upon you. O this glorious fact of our dependence—if we speak
of ability, we have all utmost ability in it. We come to no bar in it, brethren,
as many are wont to speak. If only we can rightly depend, we come into all power
rather, and are able to do all things! Here it is that so many of God’s. mighty
ones became mighty—Moses, Elijah, Paul, Luther, Cromwell—all those efficient and
successful ones that we ourselves have met, wondering
“Judge me O Lord according to my righteousness, and according
to mine integrity that is in me.”—
A truly noble confidence!—and yet many of our time would call the language very dangerous, or scarcely Christian, language, if it were spoken by any but one of the scripture saints. What can be a slipperier footing, they would say, for any sinner of mankind, than to be appealing to God in the confidence of his own righteousness; or, what is even worse, in the confidence of his mere integrity? What does it show but a state of egregious, fearfully overgrown, spiritual conceit, coupled with a prodigious self-ignorance? And what could evince a lower sense of God and religion? We shall see whether it is so, or must needs be so in all cases or not.
It may not be amiss to note that some Unitarian
teachers, on the other hand, charge it as a fault in our doctrine of salvation by
grace, or justification by faith, that it lets down even the standards of our morality
itself; making grace a cover for all defections from honor, truth, honesty, and
whatever belongs to the
Let us pursue this subject, and see if we can find the true place for integrity under the Christian salvation. And we shall best open the inquiry, I think, by noting—
1. How the scriptures speak
of integrity; how manifold and bold the forms in which they commend it, and how
freely the good men of the scripture times testify their consciousness of it, in
their appeals to God. The text I have cited does not stand alone. In the twenty-sixth
Psalm, David says again—“Judge me O Lord; for I have walked in mine integrity.”
And again—“But as for me, I will walk in mine integrity.” The Proverbs testify in
language still more unqualified,—“that the integrity of the upright shall preserve
them,” “The just man walketh in his integrity.” In the same view it is,
that good men are so often called “the upright” and “the just”—“Mark the perfect
man and behold the upright,” “The way of the just is uprightness, thou most
upright dost weigh the path of the just.” They are called “righteous” too and
“right” in the same manner, and it is even declared that they “shall deliver
their own souls by their righteousness.” And lest we should imagine that the
integrity, honored by so many commendations and examples, is only a crude and
partial conception, belonging to the piety of the Old Testament, the Christian
disciples of the New
2. What integrity means, or what is
the state intended by it. As an integer is a whole, in distinction from a fraction,
which is only a part, so a man of integrity
But we must not
pass over the distinction between what is called commercial, or social integrity,
and the higher integrity of religion. This commercial integrity which is greatly
affected and much praised among men, relates, only to matters of truth and personal
justice in the outward affairs of life, and becomes integrity only because it is
measured by a partial and merely human standard, viz., the standard of the market,
and of social opinion. Such a character is always held in high respect among men,
and, what is more, it should be. It is really refreshing in this selfish, scheming,
sharp-dealing world, to meet an honest man. Whether he be a Christian or not, we
love to honor such a man. It will also be seen that he is a man who means, at least
so far, to honor himself. But it does not follow that such a man’s integrity is
complete enough even to give him a
You perceive, in this manner, how easy it is for a man to be in great
repute for this virtue, and yet be wholly uncommitted to principle in it. Nay, he
may even be a very bad man. Examples of the kind will occur to almost any one. I
knew in college, and afterward in a remote part of the country, a man of such repute
now in the law, that he was said to have made the greatest argument ever presented
before the Supreme Court at Washington, whose reputation, as a kind of Cato in this
matter of market integrity, was scarcely less remarkable. He had more than once
kicked a man out of his office, who had come to engage him in a case plainly tainted
with fraud, and would never allow himself to gain a point, by the least deviation
from truth. And yet he was a man of many vices, and a man, withal, of such infernal
temper, that his wife and children knew him only as a tyrant scarcely endurable.
Getting exasperated almost to the pitch of insanity, by what he conceived to be
a base attempt of his law partner to jew him, for he was a Jew, in a matter of
business, he drew off in disgust and anger from his practice, determined to add
nothing more to the profits of the concern, where before he had, in fact,
brought all. As the contract still existed in law, the right of his proceeding
might be questioned, but his almost overgrown sensibilities to points of honor
would no longer suffer him even to look upon the face of such a man. Still he
Now this man, so keenly sensitive to the matter of
honor in business, as to be well nigh demonized by it, was not even a virtuous man.
He was, in fact, the most magnificently abominable man I ever knew. And he died
as he lived. The steamer on which he was a passenger sprung aleak at sea, and when
they called
Was he then a man of integrity? In one view he certainly was, and that was his reputation. Still he was a man false to every right principle, both of God and man, but just one; an example in which any one may see how little the boasted integrity of commercial honor and truth may signify, when taken alone.
I could easily have given you a thousand nobler and more beautiful examples of integrity, in the spheres of business, and before the human standards of commercial obligation. I give you this, just because it is so nearly repulsive; showing, in that manner, how little true merit of character belongs to this kind of virtue, when it stands by itself. How far off is it then from being any true equivalent for that Broad, universal, radically principled, integrity that includes religion. Whoever is in the principle of right-doing, as a principle, will be ready to do all right, always, and everywhere—to God as to men, to men as to God. This it is and this only that makes a genuinely whole-intent man, thus a man of integrity.
There is, then, a kind of integrity which goes vastly
beyond the mere integrity of trade, and which is the only real integrity. The other
is merely a name in which men of the market compliment themselves, when they observe
their own standards; though consciously neglecting the higher standards of right
as before God.
3. In what manner? Christ, we say, does not undertake to save men by their merit, or on terms of justice and reward, but to save them out of great ill desert rather, and by purely gratuitous favor. What place have we then under such a scheme of religion, for insisting on the need of integrity at all. Does it not even appear to be superseded, or dispensed with?
I wish I could deny that some pretendedly orthodox Christians do not seem, in fact, to think so. It is the comfort of what they call their piety, that God is going to dispense with all merit in them, and this they take to mean about the same thing as dispensing with all the sound realities of character—all exactness of principle and conduct. They are sometimes quite sanctimonious in this kind of faith. Cunning, sharp, untruthful, extortious, they look up piously still, at the top of what they call their faith, and bless God that he is able to hide a multitude of sins—able to save great sinners of whom they are chief! Submitting themselves habitually to evil, they compliment themselves in abundant confessions of sin; counting it apparently a kind of merit that they live loosely enough to make salvation by merit impossible. Ten times a day they declare that they will know nothing but Christ and him crucified, and lest they should miss of such a faith, they do not spare to crucify him abundantly themselves!
It can not be that such persons are not in a great
Yes doubtless, it will be said, there must be such a thing as integrity—that is, commercial integrity—in Christian men, else they would bring very great scandal on the cause. Is it then permitted that, if they will be just and true in trade and in society, they may safely consent to be out of integrity with God? Looking at the principle of things, for there is nothing else to look at here, it would seem that the Great God and Father of us all is certainly as much entitled to consideration from us as we are from each other, and how can there be any genuine principle at all in a disciple, who is not in that higher integrity which includes doing justice to God—being right with God?
There must then be some place for the claim of integrity in our gospel,
even though it be a scheme of salvation by grace. Nor does the solution of the matter
appear to be difficult. Integrity, we have seen, is wholeness of aim, or intent;
but mere intent of soul does not make and never could complete a character. It is
even conceivable that a soul steeped in the disorders of sin, might take up such
a kind of intent, on its own part, and, acting by itself, be only baffled in continual
defeats and failures to the end of life, There is no redeeming efficacy in right
intent, taken by itself—it would never vanquish the inward state of evil at all.
And yet it is just that by which all evil will be vanquished, under
Here then is the place of integrity. It is even
presupposed in all true faith, and enters, in that manner, into all true gospel
character. It does not exclude the grace of Christ, or supersede salvation by grace,
but on the human side moves toward grace, and is inwardly conjoined with it, in
all the characters it forms. The sinning man, who comes into integrity of aim, is
put thereby at the very gate of faith, where all God’s helps are waiting for him.
Now that he is so tenderly and nobly honest, there is no grace of God, or help of
his merciful spirit, that will not flow into him as naturally as light into a window.
By this grace, in which he
His integrity, therefore, his new and better aim, is not any ground of merit, or title of desert, which dispenses with faith, but his way of coming into faith—thus into the helps, inspirations, joys and triumphs that Christ will inwardly minister—in one word, into the righteousness of God. And accordingly the scriptures formally condition all such helps, on the integrity of the soul that wants them. “Ye shall seek me and find me, if ye search for me with all your heart—that is with a whole and single aim.” “If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.” “If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” The scriptures, we may thus perceive, have no difficulty in finding how integrity is needed in a way of salvation by grace, and there is, in fact, no such difficulty, save as we make it ourselves.
Having discovered, in this manner, what, and how great a thing integrity is, and the necessity of it on strictly Christian grounds, let us note in conclusion, some of the practical relations of the subject. And
1. Consider what it is that gives such peace and loftiness of bearing to the
life of a truly righteous man. What an atmosphere of serenity does it create for
him, that he is living in a conscience void of offense. And when great storms of
trouble drive their clouds about him, when he is assailed by enemies and detractors,
persecuted
2. Is the ground
of all failures, and all highest successes in religion, or the Christian life. Only
to be an honest man, in this highest and genuinely Christian sense, signifies a
great deal more than most of us ever conceive. We make room for laxity here that
we may let in grace, and do not hold ourselves to that real integrity that is wanted,
to receive, or obtain, or be in, that grace. O how loosely, irresponsibly, carnally,
do many Christians live—covetous, sensual, without self-government, eager to be
on high terms with the world, praying, as it were in the smoke of their vanities
and passions, making their sacrifices in a way of compounding
Perhaps he has conceived a higher standing in religion, a state of attainment where
his soul shall be in liberty, and has tried for whole months, possibly for years,
to reach it, and yet he finds it not. He begins to imagine, not unlikely, that no
such thing is for him—God’s sovereignty is against him, and he must be content
to stay in that lower plane that God has appointed him. “God never means,” he will
say, “that
3. To another very important
deduction, viz., that every man who comes into a state of right intent, or is set
to be a real integer in the right, will forthwith also be a Christian. There is
apt to be much pride in men not religious, on the score of their commercial integrity.
They will find, if they search more narrowly, that they still have no right conscience
in it. They feel themselves to be inwardly wrong. They live in a state of conscious
disturbance. They are often consciously disingenuous, as regards the truths and
claims of religion. They have consciously a certain dread of God which harrows their
peace. What I mean to say, at present, is that whoever gets a clear perception of
the state of wrong in which he lives, and comes back into a genuinely right intent,
to be carried just where it will carry him, sacrifice what it will cost him—any
thing to be right—in that man the spirit of all sin is broken, and his mind is in
a state to lay hold of Christ, and be laid hold of by him, almost ere he is aware
of it. Nor, when I say this, do I throw discredit on the common modes of expression;
for this exactly is the point to
Let me give you a case, in which this particular point, in the
matter of conversion to God, will be clearly distinguished. There died, in the
city of New York, about ten years ago, a distinguished merchant, and: much more
distinguished saint of God, whose conversion was on this wise. He was born and
brought up in the island of Santa Cruz, belonging to a wealthy and gay family,
in which he received no religious instruction at all. He had a naturally gay,
light, forceful character, and scarcely a religious idea. One Sunday, when the
family and their guests went out for a ride, he remained at home. Going to the
library for something to read, his eye fell on a book labeled “The Truth of
At what point now did this remarkable servant of God pass his conversion? Not when he was reading the book, but when he was looking on the back of it; for there it was, in that little deliberation on the label, and the nobly honest conclusion he accepted concerning it, that his soul took hold of integrity, and sin was all reversed! The mere resolve to accept it, if true, decided all. And therefore it was that Christ met him in the book, with a revelation so blessed. Doubtless it was the Spirit of God, working unseen, that drew him out in the previous parley on the label; and every step of the change, nay, of his whole life, was in some sense, worked by a power superior to his own mere will. And yet he had a will, by that consented to believe what is true, and live it in his life.
Now there is
no man in this audience, however remote he may have been from the thought of being
a
And now in conclusion of my subject, I will only lay down God’s indorsement
upon it and upon all that I have said, in a single, but remarkable sentence of scripture.
I wish it might be remembered, and stay by you always, even from this hour till
your last—“For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro, through the whole earth, to
show himself strong in behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward Him.” This “perfect heart” means a right conscience, a clean, simple intent. And the substance
of the declaration is, that God is on the lookout always for an honest man—him
to help, and with him, and for him, to be strong. And if there be one, that God
will not miss of him; for his desiring, all-searching eyes are running the world
through always to find him. And when he finds him, he will show himself to him in
the discovery even of his strength.
“As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they can not
fast. But the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them,
and then shall they fast in those days.”—
It is one of the honorable
distinctions of Christ’s doctrine that he is never one-sided; never taken, as men
are, with a half-view of a subject, or a half-truth concerning it. If there is,
for example, a free side, or free element, in Christian life and experience, and
also a restrictive side; conditions and times of not fasting, and conditions and
times of fasting; he does not fall to setting one against the other, but he comprehends
both, and holds them in a true adjustment of their offices and relations. John’s
disciples come to him in the question, why he does not put his disciples to fasting,
as their own great prophet and the Pharisees do theirs? But instead of making light
of fasting, and calling it an old, ascetic practice, now gone by, as many human
teachers would have done, seeing only half the truth, and rallying a party for the
part they see, he simply replies—“every thing in its time; the attendants of the
bridegroom
His answer, taken more spiritually, amounts to this: that when the love is full, and the soul is consciously gladdened by the present witness and felt impulse of God, any kind of restrictive, or severely self-compelling discipline is inappropriate or uncalled for, and is really out of place; but that when there is a failure of such divine impulse, when the soul is losing ground, brought under by temptation, groping in dryness and obscurity of light, then some sharp revision of the life, some new girding up of the will in sacrifice and self-discipline, is urgently demanded, and must not be declined. In other words, let there be liberty in God while there may, girding up in ourselves, by forced exercise and discipline, when there must; let the soul go by inspiration when the gale of the Spirit is in it, and when it has any way stifled or lost the Spirit, let it put itself down upon duty by the will; when the divine movement is upon it, let it have its festal day with the bridegroom, and when the better presence fades or vanishes, let it set itself to ways of self-compulsion, moving from its own human center.
Much the same general truth though differently conceived, is taught
by Paul when he represents the Christian
Liberty and discipline, movement from God’s center and movement from our own, sanctified inclination and self-compelling will, are the two great factors thus of Christian life and experience. We may figure, in a certain coarse analogy, that we live in a city having two supplies of water for its aqueduct; one upon high ground back of it, whence the water runs down freely along the inclinations of the surfaces; and the other in some lake or river on its front; whence, in case that fails, or the ducts give way, a supply is to be received by forcing, or the dead lift of the pump. The water, however, is not created in this latter case, you will observe, by the enforcement, but is taken, as in the former, from the general supply of nature’s store. So there are ways of Christian living, where every thing goes by impulse, and a gracious inspiration, flowing in, as it were, by its own free motion; and other ways and times, where a self-compelling discipline of sacrifice and painstaking are wanted to regain the irrigating grace that was practically lost or shut away, by moods of inconstancy and mixtures of subjection to evil.
It is very obvious that both these conceptions
may be abused, or pushed to excess, as in fact they always
On the other side, where every thing takes the shape of will-work
and discipline, the result will commonly be quite as bad. Sometimes the word will
be activity, and a general campaign of doing will set every thing in a way of tumult,
and aggressive motion. Responsible only for action, action will come to be just
the thing most irresponsibly done. Hard, graceless, censorious, denunciatory, sometimes
wild, and always unchastened
I ought also, perhaps, to name two counterfeits that cover the ground of both these particular excesses. Thus, on one side,: the argument will be, “why should I do, or attempt to do in religion, what I can not do in liberty, or from inclination? When I am not inclined to prayer why should I pray? Why cross myself in duties which I only dislike? Why put myself under service by rules that only annoy me, and do not bless me? How can I imagine that God is pleased with me, when: he finds me doing by compulsion, what he knows I distaste, and have really no heart to?”
The assumption is, in this way of. speaking, that when there is real inclination
to the thing done, there is even something a little remarkable in it; a kind of
superlative, or superfine, merit, such as discharges all thought of obligation respecting
duties where such inclination
The counterfeit upon the other side, is that self-reliant morality,
which counts it a sufficient, or even a rather. superlative religion, to live in
correct practice under rules, and makes nothing of receiving from God, or being
in any consciously restored relationship with him. Christ is engaged as a Saviour,
I conceive, to connect human nature with God, according to its normal idea, and
have it regenerated, as by God’s restored movement in it—born of God. He wants to
raise again the very plane of our existence, lifting us up out of mere self-hood
into a state of divine consciousness and beatitude. This to him and this only is
religion. The beaver is not more certainly below humanity, than the footing it along
by mere rules, is a kind of life below the grade of religion, or concourse with
God. That high world of blessing too, for which Christ has undertaken
We have then two conceptions of Christian life and experience, which Christ holds comprehensively together, but which his disciples are often trying to hold separately, making a whole religion of either one or the other; and then we have a counterfeit of each, contriving how to make a religion of each, without the reality of either one or the other. Let us see now if we can bring ourselves back into the conception of Christ, and find how to hold with him both the two sides at once; setting both in that genuine mutual relationship that belongs to them. There is then
I. A ruling conception of the Christian life,
which is called having the bridegroom present; a state of right inclination established,
in which the soul has an immediate knowledge, or consciousness of God, and is swayed
in liberty, by His all-moving, supernatural, inspirations. This kind of state, if
it were complete, as it never is in this world, would, of itself, be the all of
perfection and of blessedness. The whole aim of Christianity is fulfilled in this
alone. No other kind of service, taken by itself, at all meets the Christian idea.
Self-compelling ways of discipline, resolve, self-regulation, body-government, soul-government,
carried on by the will may be wanted—I shall presently show in what manner—but no
possible amount of such doings can make up a Christian virtue, and, if such virtue
II. Is the place, or office, or value of that whole side of will and self-discipline; which Christ himself assumes the need of, when the bridegroom is to be taken away? Here is the main stress of our subject, and upon the right solution of this point, its uses will principally depend.
There
is then, I undertake to say, one general purpose, or office, in all doings of will,
on the human side of Christian experience, viz., the ordering of the soul in fit
position for God, that he may occupy it, have it in his power, sway it by his inspirations.
No matter what the kind of doing to which we are called, or commanded; whether it
be self-government, or self-renunciation, or holy resolve, or fasting, or steadfast
waiting, the end is one and the
And here is our particular human part in religion—all that we can do is summed
up in self-presentation to God, or the putting of ourselves in position for his
operation. Hence the call to salvation is “come,” and the
So
it is in the matter always of conversion, or the beginning of a new life—it is always
begun, just as soon as the subject comes into position far enough to let it be.
And then the same holds true of all proper Christian doings afterward—they are
all summed up, either in keeping position toward God, or in regaining it after it
is lost. Thus, if by reason of a still partially remaining subjection to evil, the
soul should be stolen away from its fidelity and the nuptial day of its liberty
should somehow be succeeded by a void, dry state, without any proper light or evidence
left, then the disciple has it given him to recover himself, by getting himself
in position again before God. He will take
In this
kind of struggle the disciple will get on most effectively, when for the time, he
is much by himself, and much apart from the world, and even its pleasurable scenes
and gifts. In one view, there will be a certain violence, or desperation sometimes
in the fight of his repentances. “For behold what carefulness it wrought in you;
yea what clearing of yourselves; yea what indignation; yea what fear; yea what vehement
desire; yea what zeal; yea what revenge.” By these stern rigors of will, these mighty
throes of battle, the disciple out of liberty will in fact be only putting himself
in position to recover it. He takes himself in hand in fiery self-chastening, and
rigidly enforced subjection, that he may prepare himself to God’s help. He gets
confidence in this manner, by his thoroughness, to believe that God accepts him,
and has the testimony given him that he pleases God. Restored in this manner to
his liberty, the enemy that came in at the
Neither let any one object that all such stresses and strains of endeavor must be without merit) because they are forced and are, in one sense, without inclination. Such kind of endeavor God honors because it is practical, and not for the merit of it. What should he more certainly honor than the true endeavor of souls to present themselves to him, and get position for the complete admission of his will. If these struggles of enforcement do not belong to the perfect state of good, it must be enough that they are struggles after that state. God is practical; and without prudishness; if nothing is really good: to him that is not from the heart’s inclination, he will yet be drawn to such struggles against inclination, as he is to the cries of the ravens, and will put his benediction upon them, under that same fatherly impulse, if no other.
Holy scripture has no such dainty way of
reasoning in this matter, as they give us, who, by affected reverence, excuse themselves
from all rough discipline, because they have no inclination for it. It even commands
us to serve, when we are not in a key to reign. “Mortify therefore, your members
which are upon the earth”—do men mortify themselves by inclination? “Ye have crucified
the flesh with its affections and lusts”—do we this self-crucifying by inclination?
“Deny thyself, take up thy cross”—do we deny ourselves by inclination, or take
up the cross for inclination’s sake? When Christ again, to get a certain rich
How feeble, superficial,
sophistical, and withal, how very like to a practical mockery of all deep movement
in religion is that word so often ventured, and of which I have already spoken—“Why should I pray when I do not feel inclined to it? Why should I go to church,
why should I read the scriptures, why should I give alms, why should I hold myself
to observances, all which I am weary of, and in fact really dislike? If I can not
offer God from the heart, what better is my offering given than withheld? Just
contrary to all such feeble platitudes Christ, we have seen, appoints a grandly
rugged, thoroughly real, massive, discipline, by which souls, at best only half
inserted into good are to hold on their way: and press themselves down upon the
constancy their fickle hearts would fly. Filling them to the full, if he possibly
may with holy inspirations and loving impulses, he counts even this a gospel
But I should not produce any just impression of the immense reach of this very practical matter—the so ordering of our life, on the side of self-discipline, as to be always squaring ourselves to God, and holding true position before Him—if I did not specify some of the humbler and more common matters in which it is to be, or may be, done.
Order,
for example—how great a thing is it for a Christian, or indeed, for any one, to
keep his life and practice and business in the terms of order? Holding himself steady,
and squaring his habit thus carefully by system in God’s will, his very order is
itself position—the orbit he traverses having God to traverse it with him; and the
worlds of the sky will not be more surely and steadily moved in their rounds, than
he by God’s impelling liberty. Fallen out of this order into all disorder and confusion,
how can he ever
A responsible way has the same kind of value. An irresponsible man has no place for God or God’s liberty. But a soul that stays fast in concern for all good things—responsible for the church, for the brethren, for the welfare and salvation of perishing men, for the vices and woes of society, for the good of the country—is just so far in position with God, and ready for his best inspirations. God loves responsible men, and delights to keep them in the full endowment of strength and liberty.
Openness and boldness for God, the readiness to be found on God’s side in the full acknowledgment of his name and people, is an absolute requisite, as regards the effective revelation of God in the soul. Whoever will not thus acknowledge God, in a bold commitment of himself before the world to his cause, wants the firm courage and manly truth of feeling which puts him in position. Real and bold devotement is magnanimity, and where there is nothing of one, there is nothing of the other—as little receptivity therefore for God. God loves to be trusted, and loves the men that can boldly take their part with him. When they stand openly for his name, he stands by them, and puts his. might upon them.
Descending to what is in a still humbler key, let me speak of honesty—how
a large and faithfully complete honesty puts every soul in true position before
God. A single eye—that is honesty; and “if thine eye be single,
I could
speak of things yet humbler and more common; such, for example, as dress and society.
These are matters which we commonly put even outside of the pale of religious concern,
or responsibility. And yet there is how much in them to fix the soul’s position
toward God. How perfectly evident is it that one may dress for the Holy Spirit
and the modest opening of the soul to God’s manifestation; or so as to quite shut
away any possible visitation from the divine. In the same way, society may be observed
in such a way of sobriety and grandly true hospitality, that angels, much more Christ
and God, will gather to it unawares; or in such
Not pursuing these illustrations further, it must be enough that we have found, and practically verified two elements in Christian life and experience, liberty and discipline, God’s free movement and our own self-constraining will. That is the heavenly state of blessing and perfection; this our human concern to get, as in conversion, recover, as in dryness and decay; or keep, as in all most ordinary goings on of life, the position toward God that commands his bestowment of the other.
But what, of fasting? the very thing about which my text is itself concerned, and about which I have said as nearly nothing as possible. In one view it is even so; in another I have been speaking of nothing else; for the whole course of argument pursued has been tracing its fit place and relationship, as an integral part, or factor, of the true Christian discipline.
Are we then to allow, some will ask, that fasting belongs to
Christianity? I certainly think so. Did not Christ himself declare that his
disciples should fast after he was gone? Did he not also begin his great
ministry, by a protracted fast, which duly considered, and rightly conceived,
constitutes one of the grandest
It is a great mistake of many, in our time, that they are so easily carried by a certain half-illuminated declamation against asceticism. Let us have nerve enough to withstand the odium of a word, and be less superficial, and just as much stronger in our practical life. For there is—I put the issue boldly that it may not be missed—a good asceticism that belongs to Christianity, as a worthy and even rationally integral function; the same which an apostle describes when he says, “I exercise myself (ασκω) to have a conscience void of offense.” By which he means that he puts himself to it by the direct training of his will, even as a rider trains a horse by the rein.
In this good asceticism, we take ourselves
away purposely, when it seems to be needed, from society, from gain, and from animal
indulgence, that we may assert, with more emphasis, the principle of
Over against this good asceticism, there is also a false and a bad, as already intimated. It makes a virtue of self-torment, contrives artificial distresses to move on God’s pity, or pacify his resentments, or purchase his favor. It macerates the body to make the soul weak and tender. It dispenses, in fact, with faith itself, and even thinks to square its account with God, by a due contribution of bodily pains and privations.
This bad asceticism we exclude, the good we accept. And in this, we
shall train ourselves, sometimes even naturally, by a fast. If we are mortified
by the discovery that the body is getting uppermost, if our Sundays are choked,
our great sentiments stifled, by indulgences of the body we meant not to allow,
we
Observed on occasions like these, a fast will sometimes wonderfully clear
the atmosphere of the mind. The sentiments will be quickened in their play. The
imagination, which is a great organ for religion, will
No such good results of fasting will follow, or will be expected, where it is improperly observed. No one should ever go into a fast, when he has the bridegroom consciously with him. Such fasting is untimely. Turning sunshine into night, and making misery gratis, when we are not miserable, is any thing but Christian, though alas! some very good people do sometimes make a merit of it.
Some persons, who are not practiced in the art, so to speak, of fasting, complain that they are only troubled and mentally confused by their hunger, and get no advantage from it. But when they have learned the way to set their mind facing Godward, instead of facing the body, and moving in the low range of the gastric energy, it will not be so—they will even forget to be hungry. It might be well for such to begin with a prolonged half-fast, or Lenten reduction, instead of abstinence. Feeding the body circumspectly thus, as between cage bars, they may still the growling of nature, and learn, at last how to get a spring of reaction for the mind. A prolonged bridle check upon the body is good both for it and for the rider; for what both most especially need is to get accustomed to the rein!
At the same time, fasting should always be a reality, never a
semblance. To pretend a fast, when all the
Instead of recoiling now, my
brethren from this more rugged kind of discipline, there ought even to be a fascination
in the severities of it. As it is profoundly real and earnest, it will also make
us strong. How often are we oppressed with the feeling that our modern piety wants
depth and spiritual richness. It is as if it were in the skin and not in the heart—thin,
flashy, flavorless, destitute of the heroic and sturdy qualities. It never can be
otherwise, till we consent to endure some hardness, or at least to find some way
of painstaking. The gymnastic we are in must be strong enough to make muscle, else
we shall not have it. Hence the profound necessity, as I conceive, that there
should be an ascetic side or element in this free salvation, where the disciple
“exercises himself,” as the apostle has it, putting himself
“And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly, and his
sweat was, as it were, great drops of blood falling down to the ground.”—
What Christian has not many times wished that he could lay hold of the precise condition and feeling of Jesus, in this very remarkable scene or chapter, commonly called his agony? And yet a suspicion may well be indulged that we not seldom push it quite away from us, and make it unrealizable, by dogmatic solutions that rather confound than solve it. Mystery, in some sense, it certainly is, and must be; for the person itself of Christ is, internally viewed, a mystery, and the What and how, of his personal pains, in what part they affect him, under what laws of intensity, and by what internal force he is able to support them, we can never know, till we understand his psychology itself—as we certainly shall not here on earth.
Still the agony is given us, because it can somehow be seen to be
for us; yielding impressions of Christ and of God, manifested in him, which it is
important for us to receive. And to receive these impressions from
A much less artificial, tenderer, and, I think I shall be able to show, truer and more affecting conception of the agony is, that it rises naturally out of the perfect feeling, and the personal relations and exigences of the sufferer. Such. a being, on such a mission, meeting such objects of feeling, at such a crisis, will have just this agony, without any infliction to produce it.
The facts of the scene briefly and freely related are
these. The Saviour, attended by his disciples, goes up into a dell on the slope
of Olivet, and enters a certain garden or olive yard, where he had often before
communed with them apart. He requires them to sit down. But there is something peculiar
in his manner. A feeling of depression makes him droop in his action, and gives
a drooping accent to his voice. He signifies to three of their number that he wants
their company
Thus far, as relates to the agony, or crisis of pain itself, reported in the narrative. Other points relating to his conduct in the scene, will come into view as we inquire into the causes of the agony, and need not be recited. Whence and why, this very strange crisis of mental anguish? According to a very common impression, as already intimated, the suffering has a judicial character, and is to be taken as a theologic factor, in a scheme of retributive justice. The conception is that Christ has somehow come into the place of transgressors, to receive upon his person what is due to them, and that God, accepting him in that office, launches upon him the abhorrence or displeasure, that is clue to them; inflicting upon him, as it were, deserved pains by withdrawing from him and letting fall upon him the horror of darkness under which he groans. The facts of the narrative have been so frequently, or even habitually, submitted to this construction, that our first concern will be to make a revision of the facts, ascertaining how far they give it their support.
Thus it is alleged,
as a striking peculiarity of the scene, that the suffering appears, on a merely
human footing, to be out of place. Before the arrest, in a quiet place out of the
city, at a still hour of the night,
Again his language,
in the figure of the “cup”—“if this cup may not pass away from me except I drink
it”—is taken as favoring the idea of some suffering, in the nature of infliction.
But do we not use the same kind, of language ourselves, having still no such thought
as that the cup of anguish we speak of, or pray to have taken away, is a judicial
infliction? This figure too of the cup is used, in scripture, for all kinds of experience,
whether joyful, or painful. Thus we have the “cup of salvation,” “the cup of consolation,”
“the cup of trembling,” “of fury,” “of astonishment,” “of
desolation.” Whatever God sends upon a man to be deeply felt, and by whatever
kind of Providence, whether benignant, or disciplinary, or retributive, is
called his cup. How then does it follow, when Christ speaks of
Again the agony is accounted
for as having been caused by the judicial withdrawment of the Father; leaving him
to feel the weight, in his human person, of that displeasure which is due to the
sins of the world, now upon him. There is no intimation whatever, to this effect
in the narrative, but his exclamation afterward, in the scene of the cross—“My
God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me,”—is carried back to the agony to fix this
construction upon it. But there is not the least reason to suppose that Christ means
literally to say, in the exclamation referred to, that God has forsaken him. Did
he not comfort himself but a short time previous, in the assurance—“therefore doth
my Father love me, because I lay down my life for the sheep?” how then can he imagine
that God is forsaking him, in just the sacrifice for which he loved him? Nay it
was only an hour ago that he was saying, in the dearest confidence, and in tender
appeal even to the Father—“I have glorified thee on the earth, and now I come to
thee.” Besides it is represented by Luke, in his account of the agony itself, that
an angel is sent
But he does it nevertheless,
some one will say; for if we take his words interjectionally, why should he vent
his sufferings by the outcry of what is not true? Because, I answer, the not true
is often the most vehemently, best uttered truth. Thus when Jonathan and his armor
bearer broke into the camp of the Philistines, the wild commotion, or panic, they
two raised in the army, and the garrison, and all the people, is described by saying,
“and the earth quaked; so there
I will further add what ought, by a short method, to finish the argument, apart from all criticism on the terms of the narrative, that the absolute morality of God makes any such withdrawment of the Father impossible. That eternal goodness should forsake goodness in suffering, and even to make it suffer, in a way of gaining ulterior ends or advantages however merciful, is to pawn the eternal chastities of character for ends of beneficence; which, as certainly as God is God, will never be done.
Dismissing now this artificial, over-theological, way
Secondly to find the spring of it, in a way that looks to the simple character and conditions of the sufferer himself. I greatly mistake, if it does not so become, at once, more intelligible, and as much more effective on our feeling, as it is closer to the range of our human sympathies.
That it is not resolvable into fear is, I think, sufficiently evident. It is quite incredible that a character of such transcendent worth and majesty should be thus appalled, thus miserably shaken, or dissolved, by fear of any kind. Besides, in fear the blood flies the skin, rushing back upon the heart, and leaving a deadly pallor over the whole exterior aspect; while here we have a kind of agony that racks the soul, in some way, at the very center of life, forcing the blood outward and driving it even through the skin. In which we may see as conclusively as possible, that fear, the common human weakness, had nothing to do with his suffering. It must also be noticed that the account given of his agony does not call it fear. It simply declares that he was sorrowful, “exceeding sorrowful,” a state which has nothing to do with fear.
And yet he is shaken, somehow, in a degree that would not be
considered honorable in a man of ordinary spirit, when about to die. Not only
does the very great and wise man Socrates surpass him in the noble composure of
his last hours, but thousands of malefactors
We have a great matter then to account for, viz., that Jesus Christi the incarnate Word of God, a being who has never had to acknowledge a sin, or had the feeling of it, a perfect character who has confronted every sort of peril in his works of mercy, one who shows the most perfect confidence in God and the final success of his cause, is yet somehow shaken by the most dreadful agony—rent as it were asunder, by his agitated sensibility—when he meets the prospect of death.
The first thing that occurs to us is that this agony can not be simply human. It visibly exceeds, in its degree, all that we know of human sensibility. Calling it then divine, if only we could think it possible for the divine sensibility to be a suffering sensibility, the question would begin to open. That this suffering sensibility should not fearfully wrench, and burden even to crushing, the human vehicle it occupies, is scarcely credible. A suffering that exceeds the proportions of the vehicle must needs appear by violent symptoms—even as a powerful engine in a frail, light-timbered vessel, must needs make it groan heavily, or shake it even to wreck.
What then is the fact? Is there any sensibility
in God that can suffer? is He ever wrenched by suffering? Nothing is more certain.
He could not be good, having evil in his dominions, without suffering even according
to his goodness. For what is goodness but a perfect feeling? and what is a perfect
feeling but that which feels toward every wrong and misery according
There is then, we conclude, some true sense, in
which even God’s perfection requires him to be a suffering God—not a God unhappy,
or less than perfectly, infinitely, blessed; for, though there be many subtractions
from his blessedness, there is never a diminution; because the consciousness of
suffering well brings with it, in every case and everlastingly, a compensation which,
by a great law of equilibrium in his and all spiritual
Now it is this suffering sensibility of God that most of all needed to be revealed, and brought nigh to human feeling, in the incarnate mission of Jesus; not being revealed in any sufficient measure through nature and the providential history of men. It was necessary for us to feel God in his feeling, to know him in his passive virtues—his patience, forbearance of enemies, compassion, pity, sympathy, and above all, his deep throes of love, agonizing for the salvation of transgressors and wanderers from his fold. This, accordingly, is just what we are to look for in the agony so called, viz., a true discovery to our hearts of God’s intensity and depth, in those suffering virtues by which his transcendently sovereign nature is exercised.
Christ then, we shall expect to find, suffers in his agony, not because
it is put upon him judicially from without, but only as his better nature should
and must in the crisis that has overtaken him. Not to particularize further, two
great sources, or causes of anguish open upon him at once; firstly the chastity
of his pure feeling recoils, with horror, from the hell-gulf of wrong and wild judicial
madness into which he is now descending; and secondly the love he has for his enemies
brings a burden of concern upon his heart, that oppresses and, for the time, well
nigh crushes him. Of
Christ, is a being of unsullied innocence, or even of divine purity, though
incarnated into the corporate evil and retributive disorder of the world, to bear
its liabilities and be himself a part of it. This retributive disorder of the race
is what is called in scripture “the curse;” and, being himself a man, he is just
so far in it as he is human. In all his previous ministry—in his temptation, in
his healings, in the arts of hypocrisy and the cruelties of wrong he has encountered,
he has been struggling often with the sense of recoil, or even with pungent visitations
of horror difficult to be suppressed. But now, as he nears the great crisis of his
life, he beholds the corporate evil, or curse, gathering itself up to a deed upon
his sacred person, that will display just all that is most horrible in it. He is
not afraid, but his pure feeling shudders at the madness which is ready to burst
upon him—shudders even the worse that it is to be judicial madness. For, though
God is not going to deal judicially with him, he does perceive that the rage of
sin, ordinarily restrained and graciously softened by God’s Spirit, is now to be
let forth in his betrayers and crucifiers, in just the madness that judicially belongs
to it—so to glass itself before conviction, in a deed of murder upon the only perfect
being that ever trod the world, nay a deed of murder upon divine love itself! This
it is that, in sad note of warning, he testifies, when his enemies come shortly
after, to arrest him—“For this is your hour, and the power of darkness.”
Now this suffering of the agony is the suffering,
in one sense, of justice, answering doubtless many of the uses conceived by those
who contrive to make it a suffering divinely inflicted. It is a suffering that he
undergoes in God’s retributive order. In one view it is the curse that murders him,
being that power of darkness and corporate evil that has come upon the world, as
disordered and shaken out of God’s harmony, by the recoil of transgression. His
very incarnation had put him into or under it, and he would not even by the power
of miracle push the liability away; for it was one of his purposes to offer such
a tribute of respect to God’s retributive order, as would sanctify it in the feeling,
and fix it in the convictions of mankind. Thus, by his power of miracle, he could
have made to himself a testudo, so to speak, of inviolable protection
After such a tribute paid to the instituted
justice of God, who will imagine that the forgiveness of penitent souls will loosen
the joints of governmental order? By this submission of Christ to man’s curse or
lot of penalty—penalty in no other sense to him—an impression will be made for God’s
justice, and a sting of conviction sharpened against sin, that will even start a
new sense of his law, and the penal order of his rule in the hearts
It remains
to speak of yet another and very distinct kind of suffering included in the agony,
viz., the suffering Christ bore on account of his love. As he recoiled in horror
from the spirit and deed of his enemies, so he was oppressed by his anguish of concern
for the men. He had come into the world, in the fullness even of God’s love, to unbosom that love to the sight and feeling of mankind. As respects all enemies and
rejectors, it had been a suffering love even from eternity, and it will be none
the less a suffering love that it has taken humanity for its vehicle. Every sort
of love connects some kind of suffering greater or less—desire, concern, affliction,
anguish. A bliss in itself, it is even a bliss intensified, by the burden it so
willingly or even painfully bears. Thus it is that friendship, charity,
motherhood, patriotism, carries each its burden, light or heavy, according to
the nature and degree of its love
And yet how little will our dull-hearted
world bronzed in evil, habitually unloving, unvisited or seldom visited, by a consciously
tender compassion; how little, indeed, will the most unselfish, or even beneficently
Christian of us, conceive this agony of the divine love for men! Our hearts make
feeble answer to it at the best; so feeble that there even seems to be a kind of
overdoing, or overfeeling in it. Indeed we are even wont ourselves, for dignity’s
sake, to halve our own little emotion and we do the same unconsciously for the emotion
of God; halving it also again, by the consideration
When I consider thus who Christ was, what the love he bore, what the crime his enemies were going to perpetrate, invoking, in horrible delusion, his blood upon themselves and their children; I seem to get some little, dim, conception of his anguish for them, in this dreadful hour. I can not go to the depth of it, I can not ascend to the height of it, but I can perceive why it should transcend my feeling and even the possible reach of my conceptions. It is even the more credible too that its tokens do so plainly exceed all human demonstrations. The most adequate and complete thing we can say of it is, that it reveals the Suffering Holiness of God.
The reason of the agony then—this is our conclusion—lies in the
facts themselves; in the sensibilities of the sufferer and the causes acting on
those sensibilities. No theologic reason, such as makes him suffer by infliction,
or by the judicial forsaking of God, has even a tolerable pretext, aside from the
theory that makes up such a construction for its own sake. Even the justice
Can there now my friends, be any thing more strange than that multitudes of you,
having had full time to ponder this scene, and take its meaning after the fact,
should still adhere to your sin, nay should even be quite insensible to it and the
feeling of God concerning it. Beholding this immense sensibility of God, you still
have none! O it is even appalling! Rightly conceiving such a fact, you would even
start from yourself! Were you called by some angel, in the brightness of the sun,
or by voices of thunder in the clouds, it would signify much less; but that you
should not feel the silent call of God’s feeling ought to make you think even with
dread of yourself. When the Christ of Gethsemane meets you bathed in the sad drops
of his divine sorrow, there certainly ought, if there be any feeling left, to be
some answering sorrow in you. Is there still none? What a relation this between
your sensibility and goodness—functional death, lying as a rock in
The lessons derivable to us, my brethren, from this subject are
many; I can only call attention specially to this one, that as Christ suffers in
his agony, not by the forsaking of God, not by any kind of infliction making compensation
to eternal justice; but naturally, because of his character, and the crisis into
which he has come, so there will be times and conditions where we shall suffer in
like manner, according to our measures, and the degree of our likeness to him. Purity
in us will shudder, love in us will bear its burden of sorrow. It is no presumption
or profanation for us to think of being with him in his passion, we shall even require
it of ourselves, as a necessary Christian evidence. Even as he himself declares—“ye shall indeed drink of my cup.” Not that we are to be as deep in the pains of
holy sensibility as he—that is impossible. Not that we are to make a point of suffering
much, and be always talking of some dreadful burden that is on us, and having it
as a point of merit to be always in a groaning testimony. Christ did not make a
three-years’ funeral of his ministry. Once he had a heavy struggle of temptation,
telling never a word about it but the close. Once, and again, he wept. Once he declared
that his soul was troubled. Once he fell into an agony, and was very soon through
with it. It was never his way to suffer more than he must, or to call for sympathy
by a show of his sorrows. On the other hand, no disciple is to make
For it became
him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in
bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their
salvation perfect through sufferings.—
It is a fact worthy of distinct notice, that our apostle is here making answer to the very same question that Anselm propounded for settlement, a thousand years afterward, in his very famous treatise, the Cur Deus Homo? And despite of the very great admiration won by this treatise, I feel obliged to suffer an impression, that the apostle has greatly the advantage; writing out his answer with a freer hand, and a far more piercing insight, and presenting, in fact, the whole subject more adequately, in a single sentence, than the much venerated father was able to do in the high theological endeavor of his volume.
In the verse previous to this sentence, which is my text,
finding Jesus made a little lower than the angels, and, for the
suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor, it is as if his
mind began to ask, even as
The words bringing and captain, here occurring, have a relationship in the original, which would not be suspected, and which disappears in the English; as if we should read—“in the bringing on of many sons unto glory, to make the bringer on” &c. There is no importance however in this reading, such as might be supposed, for a captain is a leader and bringer on of course; only we conceive the passage more fitly, if the family relationship of the two words is understood. The declaration is, and that is the matter of chief importance, that God, the Almighty, must needs work morally in such a case, and not by force: and that Christ, the leader, is made perfect, or perfectly competent, as regards the moral new creation, or bringing up unto glory, by his cross and the tragic eloquence of his death.
That we may fully develop the
apostle’s meaning in
I confine the question here, it will be observed, to his physical suffering. He encountered two distinct kinds of suffering, as we commonly use the term, viz., mental suffering, and bodily suffering; that which belongs to burdened feeling and wounded sensibility, and that which is caused by outward privation, or violence done against the physical nature; that which appears more especially in the agony, and that which appears in the death of the cross. The former kind of suffering I believe is never called suffering in the New Testament, but a being grieved; a bearing, or a burden, as in sympathy and loving concern; a being troubled in spirit, or very heavy; sorrow; agony. The word suffering is applied, meantime, I think, only to physical suffering; and was doubtless used by the apostle, in the present instance, as relating to Christ’s physical suffering only.
It is obvious enough then, at the outset, and as the first thing to
be noted, that physical suffering, taken by itself, or as being
simply what it is in itself, is never a thing of value. On the
contrary it is; so far, a thing on the losing side of existence, a
subtraction from the
And the same exactly is true of
Christ’s suffering. Taken as physical pain simply, nothing is to be
made of it. All the worse and more deplorable is the loss or
negation of it, that it is a suffering which has no relation to
personal desert; and still more deplorable in the fact that,
regarding the divine order of the sufferer, it is even a shocking
anomaly, which reason can not comprehend and faith only can accept.
God certainly did not want it as wanting to get so much suffering
out of somebody. He does not exact a retributive suffering, even in
what is called his justice, because he wants so much in quantity to
even the account of wrong, but only that he may vindicate the right
and testify his honor to it by a fit expression. Nothing could be
more horrible, or closer akin to blasphemy, than to say that God
wants pain for his own feeling’s sake; or because he is hungry for
that particular kind of satisfaction. We have it as a proverb, that “revenge is sweet;” but I recollect no proverb which avers that
justice is sweet; because the mind of justice is a right mind, as
the mind of revenge is not; and, being right, no pain is sweet to
it, not
But some one will object in the question—are
not the physical sufferings of Christ what are called, in the
scripture, his sacrifice for sin? and what is the use of sacrifice
but to atone God’s justice? I do not understand the scripture to
speak of suffering and sacrifice in that manner. Thus we hear an
apostle say—“made perfect through sufferings”—for what made perfect?
for the satisfying of God’s justice? No, but “to bring many souls
unto glory?” “Lamb of God that taketh away”—what? the pains of
justice? No, but “the sins of the world.” “Who his own self bare our
sins in his own body on the tree”—for what end? that God might be
satisfied with his pains? No, but “that we being dead unto sin,
should live unto righteousness;” “By whose stripes”—what of the
stripes? do they pay off the release of ours?—“by whose stripes ye
were healed.” “For Christ also Lath once suffered for sins, the just
for the unjust”—in what view? to satisfy the justice of God? no,
but “to bring us unto God.” All the lustral figures—those of
washing, purging, sprinkling,
Regarding Christ’s
sufferings then as having no value in themselves, on the ground of
which they may be accepted as compensations to justice, we must not
leap to the conclusion that Christ could do nothing in a way of
bringing men to God, without such sufferings. He could even have
been incarnated into the world, in such a way as to involve no
physical liability at all. He might even have been incarnated, I
suppose, into the family of Cæsar, and strid into his mission, as a
prince iron-clad, in all the dignities and immunities of the Empire.
He might have taught the same doctrine, omitting only his call to
take up the cross, which he taught as the son of Mary. He might have
healed as great multitudes, with as kind a sympathy. He might even
have been followed, if he chose, by trains of great people, as he
was by the humble and the poor, dining at their tables, lodging in their
palaces, receiving all the while the highest honors of genius. Or if it should
be imagined that, teaching faithfully the same principles, and rebuking the same
sins, and offering himself to men as the incarnate Word and Lord, he must of
necessity provoke the hatred of enemies, and stir up powerful conspiracies of
violence and bigot zeal, what suffering could they bring upon him, armed as he
was
If then Christ’s
physical sufferings, taken as such, had no value, and if he could
have been incarnated in the human state without suffering—doing and
teaching, to a great extent, the same things—why did he come under
conditions of suffering, what uses did he expect to serve by it,
such as would compensate the loss? It was done I answer, that he
might be made perfect by
Does he then, it may be asked, undertake the suffering as having that for his object or as consenting to it for effect’s sake? He of course knows that he will suffer, and how, and when, and by whom, arid with what result, but he does not fall into the weakness of those partly fanatical martyrs who undertook the particular merit of being somehow murdered. Coming down to do a work of love, he simply took the liabilities of a human person doing such a work. He was not ignorant of the immense value or power of a right and great suffering, as regards the possible effect of it, and as sin would certainly be exasperated by his goodness, and drag him down to suffering, he meant beforehand to make it a right and great suffering, and so to win dominion by it. He suffered understandingly, therefore, as the Lamb that was slain from the foundation of the world, though not as aiming to get himself afflicted, or to make an ostentation of being wronged.
What, then, we have now to look after, is the manner and degree of that power over men’s convictions and feelings, which Christ obtained by his physical suffering. And the points to which I call your attention are such as these.
1. The manner in which, by his physical
suffering, he
See then how he does it in
the matter of Christ’s physical suffering. He came into the world
with a perfect right to be exempted from such suffering. There is
nothing in his character to require this kind of discipline, or even
to make it just. He also had power to put all suffering by, and sail
over the world as the stars do, in a region of calm and comfort
above it. He could have exorcised the wild hate of his enemies, as
he did the poor lunatics of the Gergesenes. By his power of miracle,
if not without, he could have driven Pilate and his accusers out of
the judgment-hall into the
He suffers nothing as from justice to himself, and therefore makes no satisfaction to the justice of God. But he powerfully honors that justice in its dealings with the world, by refusing to let even his innocence take him out of the murderous and bloody element it mixes. Hence the marvelous, unheard of power his life and gospel, and especially his suffering death, have exerted in men’s consciences. His suffering has this wonderful divine art in it, that it sanctifies both forgiveness and justice, and makes them common factors of good, in the conscience of all transgression.
2. The physical suffering of Christ has
an immediate values under that great law of human nature, that
ordains the disarming of all wrong, and the prostration of all
violence, by a right suffering of the evils they inflict. Nothing
breaks the bad will of evil so completely, as to have had its way,
and done its injury, and looked upon its victim. And if the victim,
suffering even the worst it could do, still lives unvanquished, the
defeat is only a more absolute and stunning paralysis. Thus in the bitting of horses, the animal champs the bit as if he would crush
it, and throws himself on the rein as if he would snap it, till
finding that he only worries and galls himself, he at last gives way
to what has not given way to him, and so is tamed, or, as we say,
broken to the rein. So when the wrath of transgression hurls itself
upon the Lord’s person, sparing not his life, nor even letting him
die easily or in respect, the bad will is only the more fatally
broken that, accomplishing so much in a way so dreadful, it has yet
accomplished nothing. It has mocked him, tortured him, thrust him
out of life, only to find him still alive and see him go up to
reign! In one view it has succeeded against him, and he has been
seemingly crushed under the heel of its malignity. It has pierced
the noblest heart and seen it bleed. It has finished the worst, most
shocking, deed of murder ever conceived, And yet that murdered one
still lives and loves! How dreadfully crest-fallen now and weak is
that bad will, how nearly slain itself by what it has done! Nay, to
have only spent so great malignity, and come to the
3. The sublime morality, or moral worth of Jesus, could never
have been sharply impressed, except for the sensibilities appealed
to by his physical suffering. If he had come as one born of a good
family, if he had been a considerable owner of real estate, if he
had made his journeys in a chariot, lodging, at night, with
distinguished senators and persons of consideration, if he had been
a great scholar among the Rabbis, or had been familiar to the people
in the livery of a judge, or a priest, winning great popularity by
the profuseness
4. It is only by his suffering in the flesh that he reveals or fitly expresses the suffering sensibility of God. As certainly as God has any sensibility, such as belongs to a perfect mind and heart, that sensibility must be profoundly moved by all misery, impurity and wrong. Impassible, physically speaking, he is not impassive to evils that offend, or grieve, his moral perfections. Indeed his vast and glorious nature is, in this view, nothing but an immense sensibility, whose dislikes, disgusts, indignations, revulsions of pity, wounded compassions, afflicted sympathies, pains of violated tenderness, wrongs of ingratitude, are mingling and commingling, as cups of gall, for the pure good feeling of his breast. So far he suffers because he is a perfect being, and according to the measure of his perfection. Why if he could not hate what is hateful, pity what is pitiful, mourn for the hopeless, burn against the cruel, scent the disgusts of the impure—if all bad things and all good were just alike to him, what is he better than granite or ice? No, the glorious, all-moving fact is, that there is a great sensibility at the head of the worlds, and a mental suffering as great, when the worlds go wrong!
This accordingly it is, that we, as sinners, need
most of all to know and to feel, and this that Christ, for our
salvation’s sake, has taken the flesh and suffered even death, to
impress. Nature, in her scenes and objects, had no power to express
this moral pain of God’s heart.
And every thing turns here, you will perceive, on the matter of physical suffering; for, to our coarse human habit, nothing else appears, at first, to have much reality. In the agony, for example, the real suffering is mental, and the great struggle, a struggle purely of feeling. But if it were not for the physical symptoms attendant, the prostrations, the audible groans, and above all, the body dripping, in blood-like drops, forced through the skin by the pains of the mind—were it not for these physical tokens we should get no impression of a suffering sensibility, that would be of much account. We should only look on drowsily, doubting probably. how much, or what kind of, reality there may be in this rather dull scenic of the gospels!
And here is the precise relation of the agony
and the cross. One is the reality, the other is the outward sign or
symbol. Having all the mental sensibility Christ has regarding our
sin, and shame, and wrong, and fearfully lost state, he still needs
to be made perfect through physical sufferings, or by these to have
his higher sensibility
In one view it is even a scandal that we make so much more of the cross than we do of the agony. And yet the cross was appointed for the culminating point of the gospel, partly in a way of condescension to our lowness and the want of our coarseness, and is really the greater for that reason. The grand thing to be revealed is that which stands in the agony; and the superior value of the cross, or physical suffering, lies in the fact that it comes to us, at our low point, speaking to us of the other, in a way that we can feel. When we look on Jesus suspended by nails through his hands and feet, and set up to die a slow death, in delirium and thirst and fever, we do have raised in our bosoms a little natural sensibility. And, taken hold of by that, our apprehensions will perhaps be sufficiently fixed, at last, to let us in where that deeper, and warmer, and more agonizing, sensibility heaves unseen in the mental compassions of God!
Let us not be too much taken, my
friends, by the typology in which our gospel is here and there so
feebly and pretensively dressed—the low perceptions, and the short
culture, always putting their cheap honors and ornaments upon it. I
speak not here of the cross set up as a symbol on our peaks of
architecture,
5. It was necessary that Christ should suffer in the body, and get power over men by that kind of suffering, because the world itself is put in a tragic economy, requiring its salvation to be an essentially tragic salvation. God has made the world, we all agree, for the great sentiments it will organize and bring into play, and souls themselves to be lifted by that play, in those great sentiments. Hence the wonderful affinity of our human nature for the tragic exaltations.
There may have been a prior necessity that a
free moral kingdom should include peril, disorder, suffering, great
struggles to escape great woes, sacrifices in the good, wrongs
suffered by the good, to regain and restore the evil; in other
words, there may have been a prior necessity that the plan of God’s
moral universe should be essentially tragic in the cast of it. But,
whatever may be true in this respect, we can see, every man for
himself, that so it is. No merely fine sentiment, or morally high,
is quite sufficient for us. The festive, the gay, the triumphal, the melo-dramatic
tenderness, the pastoral sweetness, the flutes of domestic arbors, the
The great crimes are tragic, and the great virtues scarcely less so. The tribunals sprinkle their gate-posts with blood. The stormy passions, honor, jealousy, and revenge, are letting blood in all ages; and the little ones of trust, and truth, and worth, do the bleeding. And then all the epics and romances, and a great part of the world’s poetry go on to add imaginary pangs and troubles, and torture us still more with bloody felicities that are fictitious. Practically the world has a general fashion of suffering. Right is trampled everywhere,, goodness fights with wrong, nations fall, heroes bleed, and all great works are championed by suffering. Some Prometheus, torn by his eagle, bleeds painfully on every rock waiting to be loosed from his chain. So if Christ will pluck away eternal judgment for the world, he must bleed for it. So great a salvation must tear a passage into the world by some tragic woe—without shedding of blood there is no remission.
This blood—O, it is this that has a
purifying touch, working lustrally, as the divine word conceives, on
all the stains of our sin, washing us, making us clean, sprinkling
even our evil conscience. This tragic power of the cross takes hold,
in other words, of all that is dullest, and hardest, and most
intractable, in our sin, and
And this is Christianity; meeting us just where we most require to be met. Christ is a great bringer on for us, because he suffers for us. Christianity is al mighty salvation, because it is a tragic salvation. Why my friends, if it were not for this generally tragic way in things about us, and especially in religion, I fear that we should have a more dull time of it than we think. Indeed I suspect that even the same is true of the general universe—it probably is and is forever to be an essentially tragic universe. With, a fall and an overspreading curse at the beginning, and a cross in the middle, and a glory and shame at the end, where souls struggle out, through perils, and pains, and broken chains, or bear their chains away unbroken still and still to be—how moving, and mighty, and high, must be the sentiment of it! O how grandly harrowing is that joy, how tremulous in tragic excitement is that song of ascription, roaring as a sea-surge round the throne—“unto him that loved us, and washed us, from our sins in his blood!”
Concluding at this point, my brethren, the exposition I have
undertaken, you will not fail to note how it gathers in its force
upon this table and rite of communion before us. These symbols,
bread and wine, body and blood, represent exactly what is most
physical in Christ’s suffering. But they do not stop in that, as if
there were a value in the pains. They are even
Back of the wood and the nails, back of the suffering body, there was another cross, another suffering, even that of God’s deep love, struggling out through the blood and the pain, to make its revelation felt in us. And this for what? To bring many sons, that is to bring us all, unto glory.
Suffering and glory! even so; in that tragic copula, the gospel stands, and it is remarkable how many times it recurs. “Ought not Christ to suffer these things, and to enter into his glory?” “For the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor”—“The sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow”—“A witness of the suffering of Christ, and a partaker of the glory that should be revealed”—“Who hath called us unto eternal glory, by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered awhile”—responses all, as it were, to the word “made perfect through sufferings in bringing many sons unto glory.”
Here, too, as you have noted, Christ’s
sufferings for us, and ours for him, and his glory, and our glory,
are blended all together, heaving in a common passion, shining in a
common glory. And thus it is, my brethren, that our ascended Master,
by these communion tokens, pledges us to-day our right to suffer
with him,
For since by man came death, by man came also the
resurrection from the dead.—
It can not, of course,
be the apostle’s meaning, that mankind are going literally to raise
themselves from the dead. When he says “by man,” he mentally refers
to Christ; only taking advantage of the fact that, since Christ the
Son of God incarnate, is become a proper man, a member of the race,
it is therefore permitted us to regard the whole remedy of sin, or
power of salvation, as being included in humanity itself.
Redemption, life, resurrection—all are, in a sense, being and to be,
by man. When we say humanity, there is inclosed and, as it were,
closeted in it, all the inspiration, all the light, all the
life-impulse of the divine man, and so all the supernatural,
resurgent powers of a complete salvation, even up to the
resurrection force itself. It is not as if God had called us here
from a distance, or had sent his Son to sit upon the circle of the
heavens and lecture us from those supernal heights, but he has
What I propose then at the present time, is the practically important fact that Christ is not so much to be thought of as a being external, or as dispensing salvation from above, as a second Adam in the race itself; a regenerative and redemptive power, so inserted into humanity as to be in a sense of it. Just as the apostle’s language intimates—“For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection from the dead.” For this word “since” is a word of rational connection, supposing an impression felt of some inherent fitness, requiring the corporate disadvantage of the fall, to be made good by a corporate remedy. Consider then—
1. The
antecedent probability of such a remedy, indicated by familiar
analogies. It is not God’s manner to work all remedies in things
from without, but to make them largely self-remedial, when attacked
by damage, or disorder. Thus all creatures of life, all substances
above the range of mineral substance, are endowed by him with
recuperative functions for the repair of their own injuries. The
bush that is bent to the ground does not require some other bush or
even tree, to come and lift it up, but, no sooner is it let go, than
it springs up suddenly by an elastic force within. Cut it down, as
it begins to be a tree, and it will set new growths to pricking
through the hard bark even of its stump, and so, by a newly begun
architecture it will go on to build
We see, in this manner, on how large a scale God
contrives to incorporate powers of self-recovery in things. What
then shall we expect, when humanity is broken by the irruption, or
precipitation of sin, but that if he organizes redemption, he will
do it in a way
I do not mean, of course, when I speak in this manner of “self-recovery,” and “salvation my man,” that the recovery and salvation are not by God. There is exactly the same propriety in this kind of language that there is in speaking of a harvest, or a voyage, as being by man—it is never such in the sense of excluding God and his natural agencies. Indeed the recovery and salvation of souls are more properly by man, because the agency of God is here incarnated and works in the race by a man thus inserted into it.
2. It is another point to be observed, that we not only
want a supernatural salvation (for nothing less than that can
possibly regenerate the fall of nature,) but in order to any steady
faith in it, we must have it wrought into nature and made to be as
it were, one of its own stock powers. It does not meet our
intellectual conditions, till it satisfies, in a degree, the
scientific instinct in us, and becomes rational and solid, by
appearing to work inherently, or from within, as by a certain force
of law. Moving on the soul and society, as from a point above and
without, it would be here, and there, and nowhere, flitting as it
were apparitionally, breaking out now as from behind the moon, and
vanishing next, as our faith reels away, in we know not what spaces
of the air, or abysses of the sea. What we want can be seen, at a
glance, from the eagerness that hurries such multitudes of our time
after the doctrine of progress. We love to look on education,
political liberty, personal culture,
And yet we want a salvation that is to us all which this
doctrine of progress pretends to be, and God defers to our want, by
contriving a gospel for man that is to be, in form, by man; giving
us to see the general humanity so penetrated and charged with the
supernatural, by Christ living in it, as to be, in a sense, working
out redemption naturally from within itself. We call it the progress
of society, and such it really is, and yet, solid and scientific as
we think it, all the reality it has comes of the incorporated,
incarnated grace, in Jesus Christ, which is countervailing always
the penal disorders of nature, and setting continually on, as by a
destiny itself, the rising fortunes of the race. Our gospel is a
cause, in this manner, among causes; a real calculable force, the
Confidence of which can be held with a steady assurance. Is
any thing more rational than to believe that goodness and truth are
bound to master all
3. We shall see that, if it were possible to restore the fall of our race, by any kind of agency, or operation, wholly external, supposing no recuperative forces and concurrent struggles operating from within, it would reduce our character and grade of significance to a virtual nullity. Dismiss the grand world-honoring fact of the incarnation, conceive that the Jehovah angel, or some angelic messenger comes to us, not humanized in sympathy or in order, but having a plastic power to work on us from without and sway us to good, by his own methods of divine magic, apart from our consent; this would settle us, at once, into a state of cliency both dangerous and humiliating. We should probably begin, at once, to pay him the honors of idolatry; for the manly consciousness in us will be taken away, and we shall be to ourselves a kind of second rate interest in God’s kingdom; just that which the incarnation, begetting a new divine power in the race itself contrives to avoid with a skill so beautiful.
Or we may suppose that God was able to put the
So, if the race were to be recovered in any way that includes
no struggle of self-recovery, no power within striving toward recovery, it would
almost take away the sense of our personality. We should be ciphers to
ourselves, not men. Exactly contrary to this, it is the very great merit of the
incarnation, that it brings help in a way to make it valuable. God could easily
help us in a way to crush us, just as many human helpers will really make
nothing of their beneficiaries, by allowing them to make nothing of themselves,
and be nothing for themselves. The very thing wanted here is to get power into
the fallen race, and put it striving upward; to raise a ferment of recuperative
energy, feeling, aspiration, choice, and whole right working in humanity;
exactly what the nearness and high sympathy of God in the incarnation must
inevitably do. The Saviour being, or becoming man, the salvation dignifies and
raises man even before he receives it; giving him the right to feel, that,
coming verily as
4. Since it is continually assumed by the scripture that we fall by race, or as a corporate whole, we naturally look for some recuperative grace to be entered into the race, by which so great disadvantage may be repaid or overcome. Thus, if we say “as in Adam all die,” we want also to say, “so in Christ shall all be made alive.” Or if we say that “through the offense of one many be dead,” we want also to say, “much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many.” In this manner it is that Christ is conceived to be a “second Adam,” a kind of new progenitor, such that we get in him, as it were, a new descent from good.
But we are born of Adam physiologically, it will be remembered, and so we go down with him as a race by physiological consequence, while we are not thus born of Christ the second Adam. He only comes into the race at a given point, just as we do, and communicates nothing by descent to persons collateral, any more than we do to persons collateral to us. How then, being no progenitor, does he become any proper Adam at all? how get himself into the race, in any such general way, as to become a new headship of life?
To this I answer, that we must not press the correspondence too
closely; it is not understood to be literal, or to hold in any but a
general and qualified way. Let it be enough that as the sin
abounded, so the grace
Observe too this very
striking distinction, that good souls have a power to get into the
race by collateral propagations of their goodness, when bad souls
have almost no such power at all. The bad impregnate human feeling
through falsities, and lies, and oppressions, and combinations of
interest, or at best through the dazzling exploits of ambition. But
there is a short run to such kind of power. Deep in evil, the world
is yet naturally shy of evil, and begins very soon to get away from
it. No bad character propagates long, as by character. Even bad
writings drop out soon and die, as it were, of their own poison. On
the other hand it will be seen that good and great souls have a
destiny of headship, propagating side-ways, and every way, till they
become Adams in the sublime fatherhood of their power, and that so
completely as to finally reach, and take headship of the race. Thus
we think of Socrates, for example, as a kind of progenitor in good
for his people; a man whose ideas, principles, sacrifices, entered
him into the whole Greek race, and more and more
And so it is, illustrating the great by the small, the divine by the human, that Jesus, the incarnate word of God’s eternity, coming into birth and living and dying as a man, fills the whole race with new possibilities and powers, starts resurgent activities, overtops the sin abounding with a grace that much more abounds, and becomes the Adam, so to speak, of a new humanity. Consider now—
5. Some of the scripture evidences of the
subject. And here we meet, first of all, as it were at the head of
all scripture, the remarkable and rather strangely worded promise,
which declares that the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent’s
head. The representation
Here and there, it is true, this interior hidden method is
departed from, and he appears to be operating from without, doing something for,
or upon, our humanity, and not through it; working some astounding miracle,
sending some angel, or appearing by some angelic theophany. In one case he even
ordains a supernatural sign that is to be a kind of institution, recurring, like
the sun itself, with astronomic regularity; the cloud, I mean, by day and the
pillar of fire by night. And yet none of these extraordinary, external things,
appear to get much hold of the race, just because they do not get into it.
Nothing works like a power that does not work by man. The sacrifice of Abraham
and the wrestling of Jacob bring more victory and might into the race, as far as
we can see, than the brazen serpent, or the waters drawn out of the rock. When,
too, Christ comes, what is he but a man? and though, as such, he has a divine
power and plenitude, how careful is he to
We shall find, accordingly, that the scriptures are full of
images, that conceive the great contest with evil to be a struggle in the bosom
of the race itself, and give us the expectation that it will go on, as such,
till it has won a complete triumph for the truth. Thus it is that Isaiah uses
the word “increase,” which does not mean to enlarge by additions, but by
internal growth;—“And of the increase of his government and peace
there shall be no end.” Thus it is that Daniel represents the
kingdom of the Messiah as “a stone cut out without hands,” but a
most remarkable kind of stone in the fact that it grows from within
itself, and becomes a great mountain filling the whole earth. In the
same way it is compared, by Christ himself, to a grain of mustard
seed, which does not grow by something added
Here Christ is giving, you will see, his deliberate opinion of the manner in which his kingdom will be extended. The process will be forwarded, he conceives, within the race itself, and will so far be human, that we may rightly say of it—for since by man came the fall of the world, by man came also its restored glory and peace.
Observe, again, how
even holy scripture is the scripture also of man, written by man,
given to the world by man, bearing, in every book, the particular
stamp and style of the particular mind, in whose personal
conceptions it was shaped. The subject matter too of the historic
and biographic parts is human, showing how men have acted, thought,
felt, suffered for the truth, fallen before temptation, triumphed
over it. Indeed the value itself of these records consists, to a
great extent, in the fact that they give us divine lessons under
human incidents, in the molds of human character and life. They show
us too, on a larger scale, what is the meaning and way of God’s
Providence, by the disasters
When we come to the writings of devotion, the Psalms, for example, and other chorals of scripture, these are human sentiments, lifted indeed by holy inspirations, but none the less properly human for that reason—rolling in as such upon us, from the word, even as the tides roll in from the sea.
The proverbs are specially human, being maxims of human wisdom, such as have even gained a proverbial currency, in the judgments of philosophy, and statesmanship, and common life.
The prophets, again—these are all men speaking by men s words and voices. True their voices are voices also of God, but they are none the less human, that God wants to use them as such, or that he sometimes puts them to speaking in the first person for him, saying “I the Lord;” for when he crowds himself thus into men, or men’s voices, he only proves how much he may prefer to do as man.
The same is true of the Epistles. They are written by men, to men, in the words of men, under the relationships of teacher and taught, and shepherd and flock. They deal with actual human conduct, in actual human conditions. They speak to human difficulties and human dangers. They show how good men suffer in times of persecution, how they bruise Satan under their feet, how fidelity triumphs; in a word how the great life-struggle of the church goes on.
A corresponding
reason doubtless required the gospel
He also constructs a corporate state, called the church, in which, as being corporate, and not subject to death, he deposits the gospel and the sacraments, and all the institutional appointments of religion, thus to be conserved and perpetuated by man.
In the same way too, he makes the church even to be the pillar
and ground of the truth itself; for the disciples in it are to be
Christ’s living epistles, gospels of the life, new incarnations of
the word, showing always what is in the text, by what is expressed
in their life and walk and character. Were it not for this light
continually supplied to the written gospel, from the lives of those
who live it, the word of the skies would shortly become an utterly
dead language, a kind of Sanscrit
As the disciples are to be new incarnations, in this manner, of Christ, so, in a sense, they are to be vehicles also of the Spirit, demonstrations, revelations, of his otherwise unseen or unobserved agency; and so, many of his most effective operations will be through their gifts, works, prayers, sufferings, personal testimonies, and the pentecostal glow of their assemblies.
Again, last of all, and as it were to include all, it is given to men even to convert the world. Not that they, as being simply men, are able to do any such thing, but that Christ, the Son of Man, being entered into the race, and working as a leaven in the mass of it, will make them a leaven also to one another, and set the ferment on till all is leavened. And so the great world itself, all the empires, known or unknown, all the continents, and islands undiscovered, all most distant ages and times are given as a trust to men, originally to a very few, very humble men. “Ye,” said Christ, “are the light of the world.” “Go ye into all the world and disciple every creature.”
I will not detain you with farther illustrations of the subject in hand, but will simply suggest in conclusion, a few points variously related, in the practical drift of its applications.
We have then a very significant
presumption raised, that when any breakage, or damage, occurs in any
legitimate
So if there be a great nation rent by faction, a good government broken down and trampled by rebellion, God has no miraculous fire to flash upon the conspirators and scorch them down. It must be enough that he has given a sword for the punishment of evil doers, that the remedy may come by man, making due use of it. If the people too will know that God is with them, let a spirit be kindled in their manly breast that shall take them to the field, forbidding any word of peace to be spoken, till the laws are vindicated and the foes of order crushed. If God will make a broken world restore itself by man, much more a broken people, and it will as certainly be done as there is quantity enough of manhood in them—enough great sentiment and patriotic fire—to do it.
Again, the immense responsibility thrown upon
Christ’s followers, in the fact that the salvation of the world is
to be in so many ways, by man, ought to be distinctly admitted and
practically assumed. If they are to preach the gospel, and light up
the gospel by their lives, so to be the gospel, and finally to
regain the world to God; if Christ himself lays it on them to be gospelers with him, putting the world in their hands to be lived
for, died for, won and saved, then how clear it is that their faith
will be no relaxation of responsibility, but the begun fulfillment
and seal of it rather. How nearly appalling too is the fact that if
God has any good thing to be done, it is to be done somehow by man,
and that he has the man, or men, or women, somewhere on whom so
great a charge is laid. As he has undertaken to make man good, he
will let the good that wants to be done, wait till their goodness
gets purpose, and fire, and sacrifice, in a word, reality, enough to
do it. And if they make slow progress, if the conversion of the
world drags heavily, then so it must; for God will not so far
dishonor the great salvation as to push on the propagation of it
faster than it has reality enough to propagate itself. If it takes a
million of years to recover the world to God, then a million it must
have; for it never can be accomplished, either in one, or in a
hundred millions, unless it is accomplished by man. O, how
preposterous, in this view, is the soft opinion many hold of faith;
as if it were the faith of a soldier to expect that his captain will
do all the fighting himself, and that he is never to fight under
him, or win
There is, furthermore, a
great mine of comfort opened here, for such as have settled into
heart-sickness over human affairs, and the want of all high movement
in them. Some are sick because they hear no thunders, and see no
mighty stir in the heavens. If they could see God converting the
world by signs, and wonders, and mighty portents, there would seem
to be something going on! Nothing could be weaker than such a kind
of gospeling. Laying no hold of us by rational evidence, it would only drum us
to sleep in the tumults of the senses. And yet they are almost pining to have
the world’s dull tedium broken, by some such outward stir; never once
recollecting that, while commotion is a profitless noise, real motion is silent.
Another class are pining, in the same manner, for some new dispensation to
break, that shall displace the rotten hopelessness of the old; some second
coming of Christ, some
Let us also observe the beautiful delicacy of God in
his plan of salvation. He is not willing to make it a salvation for
man only, as I have said already, but contrives to make it also, as
far as possible, a salvation by man. As the seed of the woman goes
down, so he contrives to get a force into it that will finally
bruise and trample its adversary. If he should do every thing simply
as acting upon us, it would make us only underlings to eternity,
waste timber of creation, that he has only gathered and stored for
the dry-rot of a state of impotence, miscalled felicity. No, he
wants to raise a character in us, and, to do this, requires a great
hiding of power. He must contrive to put us a doing, in all that is
to be done, striving to enter the straight gate, working out our
salvation with fear and trembling, as only knowing by faith that he
is working at all. And then his word of promise at the end will
be—“to him that overcometh.” The beauty, the delicacy, of his work
is that he gets the force of it into our own bosom, and lets it work
as if it were a part of ourselves. True it is all by Christ, and yet
it is by the Christ within—the law of the Spirit of life in Christ
Jesus. And so, instead of making his mercy a mere pity that kills
respect, he makes it a power that lifts into character and
everlasting manhood. He becomes a second Adam, a
“Because that the worshipers, once purged, should have
had no more conscience of sins.”—
The reading is not, you observe, “conscience of
no more sins,”—as if the sins were stopped, but “no more
conscience of sins,”—as if the conscience of sins already past were
somehow extirpated, or else the sins taken quite away from it and
forever extirpated themselves, as facts, or factors of the life. And
the allegation is, that while the old sacrifices of the law had
power to accomplish no such thing, it is accomplished by the
wonderful, seemingly impossible, efficacy of the gospel sacrifice. Those older sacrifices could not make the comers thereunto
perfect—perfect, that is, as pertaining Ito the conscience—and therefore they
must needs be renewed as remembrances of sin every year; but the offering of the
body of Jesus, once for all, was sufficient; allowing us forever after to have
no more conscience of sins. Now it is this practical wonder, this: seeming
impossibility accomplished by the cross, to which I invite your attention on the
present occasion.
I fell in company, some years ago, with a college acquaintance—not a minister of religion, but a remarkably subtle, closely scientific thinker, and withal a devout Christian—who said to me, in a manner and tone of sensibility I can never forget—My great trial in religion is, to find how a clean bosom, in regard to sin, is ever possible. I can, not see how my sin can ever be really gotten away; indeed I fall into such darkness on this point, when I undertake to solve it, that I quite lose my faith in the possibility of a real deliverance, and feel obliged to say with David—“my Sin is ever before me.” He went on to state his difficulty more fully, but as I have it on hand to make an exposition of the whole subject, the ground of his difficulty will be covered with much other ground beside. How then is it, or how is it to be imagined, that Christ, by his sacrifice, takes away the condemning conscience, or the felt dishonor of transgression? This is the question we are to consider, and, if possible, answer; in doing which I will—
I. Go over, as briefly as may be, certain supposed answers, that do not appear to reach the real point of the question; and—
II. Will endeavor to exhibit and support by sufficient illustrations what appears to be the true scriptural answer.
I. The supposed answers that are not sufficient.
Thus, when it is conceived that Christ has borne our punishment, that, if it were true, might take away our fear of punishment, but fear is one thing, and mortified honor, self-condemning guilt, self-chastising remorse, another and Very different thing; and that will be only the more exasperated, that divine innocence itself has been put to suffering on its account.
Neither will it bring any relief to show that the justice of God is satisfied. Be it so; the transgressor is none the better satisfied with himself—his own self-damning justice is as far from being satisfied as before.
Is it then conceived that what has satisfied the justice of God, has also atoned the guilty conscience? Will it then make the guilty conscience less guilty, or say sweeter things of itself, that it sees innocence, purity, goodness divine, put to suffering for it? If any thing could exasperate, even insupportably, the sense of guilt, it should be that.
Is it then
brought forward to quell the guilt of the conscience that Christ has
evened our account legally by
Forgiveness taken as a mere release of claim, or a negative letting go of right against transgression, brings, if possible, even less help to the conscience. Christ had forgiven his crucifiers in his dying prayer, but it was the very crime of the cross, nevertheless, that pricked so many hundreds of hearts on the day of pentecost. Christ bad forgiven them, but their consciences had not!
But Christ renews the soul itself, it will be said, and makes it just within; when, of course, it will be justified. That does not follow. If Judas at the very point where he confessed—“I have betrayed the innocent blood,” could have been instantly transformed into an angel of beauty, his purified sensibility would have been shaken, I think, with a greater horror even of his crime than before.
But the fatherhood of God—the disciple of another and
different school will take refuge under that, and say, that here, at
least, there is truly no more conscience of sins. Would it not be
strange, if a tolerably good father can forgive and forget, and God
can not? But who is God, and what most fitly represents him? a
mortal father who is able, just because of his weakness, to forgive
and forget, or to forgive without forgetting,
You perceive in this
recital, my friends, how great a matter we have undertaken, and how
very obstinate, or intractable, our difficulty is. Doubtless a foul
vessel may be washed, a fracture mended, a personal injury
redressed, a sick body restored to health and soundness, and dressed
in a new covering of flesh; nay, there is a clear possibility of
raising the dead to life, but to conceive a sinner so wrought in as
to obliterate the fact of his sin, leaving no more conscience of it,
is a very different matter, and if the possibility were not really:
shown by the gospel itself, we must certainly give up
II. To the question as it is, and the answer given it by the scriptures of God.
The great question meeting us at this point is, whether it is possible, or how far possible; to change the consciousness of a soul, without any breach of its identity? In this manner, we shall find, the gospel undertakes to remove, and assumes the fact of a removal of, the dishonor and self-condemnation of sin. But we shall conceive the matter more easily and naturally, if we notice, before going into the scripture inquiry, certain analogies discoverable in our human state, which may serve as approaches to the proper truth of the question.
Thus a thoroughly venal, low-principled man, elected President of the United States, will undergo, not unlikely, an inward lifting of sentiment and impulse, corresponding with the immense lift of his position. The great honor put upon him makes him willing to honor himself. He wants to deserve his place and begins to act in character in it. He is the same man, regarding his personal identity, but he is raised, even to himself, in the grade he occupies. His old natural consciousness has a kind of Presidential consciousness superinduced, which holds a higher range of quality. He lives, in fact, Presidentially, and is dignified inwardly by the dignities of his position.
How many thousand
soldiers, who before were living in the low, mean vices, lost to
character and self-respect,
The same, again, is true in a different way, of all the gifted ones in art and speech and poetry, when they are taken by the inspirations of genius. When such a soul, that was down upon the level of uses, torturing itself into production for applause, or even for bread, begins to behold God’s signatures upon his works, and worlds, and the magnificent discipline he gives us; discovering in objects ideas, in facts the faces of truth; catching also the fires of a Promethean heat from all subtlest moods and hardest flints of experience;—then it is become, to itself, quite another creature. It is as if the grub-state were gone by, and the winged life had broken loose, to try the freedom of the air. In that finer element he ranges at will, lifted by his etherial seership, to move in altitudes hitherto invisited; consciously another and different being—another, yet still the same.
In these and other like examples, afforded
us in the field of our natural life, we are made familiar with the
possibility of remarkable liftings in the consciousness of men, such
as make them really other to themselves, and set them in a higher
range of being; and, by these examples, we are prepared, as it were
beforehand, to that more wonderful ascent above ourselves which is
accomplished in Christ, when he takes us away from the conscience of
sins. He does it—this is the general, or inclusive truth that covers
the whole ground of the subject—by so communicating God, or himself
as the express image of God, that he changes, in fact, the plane of
our existence. Without due note of this, we do not understand
Christianity; the very thing it proposes is to bring us up into
another level, where the consciousness shall take in other matter,
and have a higher range. Thus, when the apostle says—“And hath
raised us up together and made us sit together in heavenly places in
Christ Jesus,” he is speaking of a change purely internal, a
conscious lifting to another grade of life, and a higher range of
joy. The word places, here occurring, belongs to the English only,
and it is put in to fill out the plural of the neuter adjective heavenlies, used here as a noun. But sitting in the heavenlies, does
not mean, of necessity, sitting in other localities. It means
sitting in heavenly things, as well; above the world, that is, and
the flesh and sin, in the serene, pure element of God’s eternal love
and glory, there to be folded in harmony, raised in- consciousness,
filled to the full with all God’s heavenlies, even as his
Now it must not be imagined that this one passage of scripture stands by itself in asserting such a sentiment. The whole New Testament is full of it. “If ye then be risen with Christ seek those things which are above where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God,”—“Hath made us kings and priests unto God,”—“A chosen generation—a royal priesthood,”—“Partakers of the divine nature,”—“Sons of God,”—In all such modes of expression, and a hundred others that might be cited, we have the same thought breaking out on our discovery; that Christ is lifting us out of shame and condemnation, into a higher plane and a footing of conscious affiliation with God.
But you will not conceive how very essential this idea of a
raising of the consciousness may be, if you do not bring up distinctly the
immense fall of our mortal consciousness, in the precipitation of our sin. In
their true normal condition, as originally created, human souls are inherently
related to God, made permeable and inspirable by him, intended to move in his
divine impulse forever. A sponge in the sea is not more truly made to be filled
and permeated by the water in which it grows, than a soul to be permeated and
possessed by the Infinite Life. It is so made that, over and above the little,
tiny consciousness it has of itself, it may have
But this higher
consciousness, the consciousness of God, is exactly what was lost in transgression, and nothing was left of course but the little, defiled
consciousness of ourselves, in which we are all contriving how to
get some particles of good, or pleasure, or pride, or passion, that
will comfort us. The great, inspirable, and divinely permeable
faculty, is closed up. We do not know God any more, we only know
ourselves. We have the eyes, and the ears, that were given us, but
we are too blind to see, too deaf to hear—“Having the understanding
darkened, being alienated from the life of God, through the
ignorance that is in us because of the blindness of our heart.” The
true normal footing or plane of our humanity was thus let down, and
it is exactly this which Christ undertakes to restore. And until
that restoration is accomplished, the soul occupies a plane of mere
self-knowing, and self-loving, and is, in fact, a lower order of
being. It lives in the conscience of sins, a guilty,
self-denouncing, and miserably shamed life. But as soon as it is
opened to God, by the faith of Jesus Christ, and is truly born of
God, it begins to be the higher creature God meant it to be—the same
yet another. It is no more like the sponge stuck fast on some dry
rock, but like the same, filled and vitalized
It is of course to be admitted that the disciple, raised thus in his plane, has the same conscience, and remembers the same sins, and is the very same person that he was before; but the consciousness of God, now restored, makes him so nearly another being to himself, that the old torment of his sin will scarcely so much as ripple the flow of his peace. It takes, in fact, a considerable rock, a little way out from the shore, to do more than dimple or curl the tide-swell coming in; and the sea, at the full, will simply bury it. and hide it from the sight, in the depths of its own stillness. Or we may imagine, without much danger of extravagance, that when a soul is really filled with the higher consciousness, moving wholly in the divine movement, so great a lifting of character, and quality, and action, will carry it above the old range so completely, as to let the wrong and shame quite drop away; even as the insect creatures hovering on wings about us, flitting in swift motion, and playing with the air and the light, remember probably no more the cold, slow worms they were, when crawling, but a week ago, in the ground.
You will
understand, of course, that if Christ is purging thus men’s
consciences, by lifting them above themselves, into a higher range
of life, the conception will appear and reappear, in many distinct
forms, and weave itself, in so many varieties, into the whole
texture of Christianity. Notice then three distinct forms, not to
speak of others, in which this change of grade or
As the first of these, I name justification,
or justification by faith. The grand last point or final. effect of
Christian justification is, “no more conscience of sins;” for,
having that accomplished, it is inconceivable that God should
condemn us. when we do not condemn ourselves, and having it not
accomplished, but condemning still ourselves, no justification by
God will do us any good. But in this matter of justification, the
less we make of the old standing alternative the better; what if it
should happen that, while we are debating which of two conceptions
is the true one, they are neither of them true? And so I think it
will sometime be found. According to the scripture, which is very
plain, gospel justification turns on no such mere objective matter
as the squaring of an account; nor on any such subjective matter as
our being made inherently righteous; but it turns on the fact of our
being so invested with God, and closeted in his righteous impulse,
that he becomes a felt righteousness upon us. Our consciousness is
so far changed, in this manner, by the river-flood of God’s
character upon us, that, as long as our faith keeps the connection
good, and permits the river to flow, we are raised above all
condemnation and have no more conscience of sins. Inherently
speaking we are not righteous; our store is in God not in ourselves;
but we have the supply traductively from him, just as we do the
supply of light from the sun. But the new divine consciousness in
which we live is continually conforming
See how beautifully and simply Paul sets forth this true Christian idea of justification—“But now the righteousness of God, without the law, is manifested, even the righteousness of God, which is by faith of Jesus Christ, unto all and upon all them that believe.” It is not righteousness for us in a book, nor in us by inherent character, but righteousness unto us and upon us, in its own living flow, as long as we believe. It is a higher consciousness which God generates and feeds, and as long as he does it there is no more conscience of sins.
This same truth of a
raising of our plane appears in another form, in what is called the
witness of the Spirit. “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our
spirit that we are the children of God; and if children then heirs,
heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” Here the conception is
that, as being spirit, we are permeable by the divine Spirit, and
that he has a way of working in our working, so as to be consciously
known as a better presence in our hearts. And so we have the
confidence of children or sons, raised in our before low-bred
nature, and dare to count ourselves God’s heirs—fellow heirs with Christ our
brother. Nothing is said of sins in this connection, but we can see for
ourselves that, being thus ennobled by the inflowing Spirit, we shall be too
much raised in the confidence of our dignity, to be troubled,
Once more this grand
fact of the gospel, the raising of our plane of being, is presented
in a still different manner in what is said of the conscious
inhabitation of Christ. “Christ in you the hope of glory,”—“But ye
see me,”—“bide in me,”—“Until Christ be formed in you.” But the
great apostle to the Gentiles, himself a Christian man, all through,
having that for his sublime distinction, declares himself, on this
point, out of his very consciousness—“I am crucified with Christ,
nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” It is, you
perceive, as if his being itself were taken well nigh out of its
identity by Christ revealed in it. The old sin—he does not think of
it. The old I—why it is gone—“yet not I.” He was going to say
that he Paul was alive, but he did not like to say so much as that,
and so he puts down his negative on it, and says he does not live.
But
Here then, my friends, you have opened to view one of the
greatest triumphs of Christianity, perhaps the very greatest of all.
To bring a clean thing out of: an unclean is a much easier matter
than to make a good conscience out of an evil or accusing
conscience. Here the difficulty appears to be a. kind of
metaphysical impossibility. Indeed there is no philosopher, who
would not say, beforehand, that such a thing is even demonstrably
impossible. For if the accusing conscience accuses rightly, then it
must either be extirpated, which decomposes the man, or else it must
be suborned to give a lying testimony, when of course it will even
condemn itself. But our gospel is able to look so great
Only the more strange is it that, when this way of
remedy is, and no other can be, sufficient, we so easily fall out
of our faith, and begin to put ourselves on methods of purgation
that only mock our endeavor. Having the grand possibilities of a
good conscience opened to us in Christ, and nothing given us to do
but just to receive by faith the manifested righteousness of God, we
begin to work, in the lower level of our shame, upon the shameful
unclean matter, as if going to purge it ourselves. One will mend
himself up in a way of self-correction; which, if he could do,
would, alas, not even touch the conscience of his old sins. Another
goes to the work of self-cultivation, where he may possibly start
some plausible amenities on the top of his bad conscience, even as
flowers will sometimes be induced to grow upon a glacier. Another
will pacify his bad conscience by his alms and philanthropic
sacrifices, when an avalanche on its way could as well be pacified
by the same. Others will make up a purgation by their repressive
penances and voluntary humiliations, when
Worthier of sympathy but scarcely more
worthy of the gospel name, are those hapless souls, who have fallen
under their bad conscience to be forever harrowed and tormented by
it. They have no faith to believe in a concrete, personal grace, and
are only haunted by the nightmare of their moral convictions. They
mope along their pathway therefore, looking always shamefully down;
as if the sky above were paved with condemnations. If they bear the
Christian name, they have yet no real peace, no sweet element of
rest and confidence. They seem ever to be saying, “mine iniquities
have taken hold upon me so that I am not able to look up.” Or
sometimes there is a trouble more specific—some one sin, the shame,
the inward mortification, or damnation of which, follows them, day
and night, and even year by year; a crime unknown to the world, but
for which they inwardly blush, or choke with guilty
And here, just here,
in fact, we strike the culminating point of wonder and glory in what Christ, by
his more perfect offering, has been able and was even required to accomplish, to
put us on a footing of complete salvation; viz., a restoration, forever, of the
soul’s lost honor. We could not take our place among the pure angels of God, and
be really united to their blessedness, when we are inwardly self-disgusted,
shamed, and even to be eternally stigmatized, by our condemning consciences.
Nothing sufficiently restores us, which does not restore the mind’s honor. And
this, exactly, is our confidence; “that we are to be found unto praise, and
honor, and glory, at the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” We are even called to
“seek
for honor, and glory, and immortality.” What dishonor, what possible
shame, can be our torment, when our very consciousness is robed in
the righteousness of God? There is to be no more condemnation, no
more conscience of sins; simply because we are so
Are there none of us, my friends, that have many times sighed after just this hope, nay, that are sighing for it now? You have lost forever, you say, the chastity of your nature, you are and must forever be a guilty man; how then can you ever think of yourself without mortification? Getting into heaven itself, what can you ever do with so many bad facts upon you, and a bad conscience in you testifying eternally against them? No! no! There is even to be given back the sense of honor that was lost. You shall go in, not to hang your head, but to hold it up in praise and confidence. Now that mighty word is fulfilled according to its utmost meaning—“raised up together to sit in the heavenlies.” We are there “together” in the common fold, we “sit” there in a titled security, the “heavenlies” are all ours—the honor, the confidence, the peace, the praise. O my God, what reverence shall every creature have for every other, when thou puttest honor upon all! gathering in before thee, nothing which defileth, or abideth in shame, but only such as Christ hath raised to eternal honor, before both thee and—themselves!
“Then answered the Jews and
said unto him—say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast
a devil?”—
It is often remarked as a curious, half ludicrous distinction of insane persons, that they look on others round them as being out of their head. And yet this kind of phenomenon is more or less observable, in all cases of diseased action, whether mental or spiritual; the subject sees his disorder, not in himself, but in the objects and conditions round him.
Under
the disease or disaffection called sin, the same is true; as we may
see by the answer of these carping hypocrites, when Christ reproves
their high pretenses, and sanctimonious lies. “You call yourselves
children of Abraham,” he says, “when you do none of his works, when
your fatherhood is more truly discovered in the father of lies. And
as he abode not in the truth, and has no truth in him, so because I
tell you the truth ye believe me not.” They feel the sharpness of
the words, but do not perceive the solemn justice of the
argument—throwing it captiously back upon him as in the text; “say
we not well, that thou art a Samaritan
That a bad mind sees bad things, and makes to itself a bad element. In other words, a bad mind projects its own evils into persons and conditions round it; charging the pains of its own inward disorder to the objects that refuse to bless it, and counting, it may be, Christ himself a sting only of annoyance.
It would be far more agreeable to me to assert this truth universally, or so as to include the good; showing how they convert all things to good by their bright and loving spirit, and how the stones even of the field are in league with them to bless them; but this would take me over too large a ground, and therefore I must be content to occupy you, for the time, with a subject not grateful in itself, hoping that you may even find the greater benefit in it. If the errand we are after is not pleasant, if it compels us to go burrowing into the dark, underground, abysses and pains of evil in the soul, let us not recoil from the task, because we find a great deal of our conceit inverted and a great many of our complaints of God and the world turned back upon ourselves.
I do not mean, of course, to say, that we can have nothing to
complain of, or that other men can not do
We shall best open the gate of our argument on this subject, if we notice two great facts, or laws of our nature, which are the ground of this tendency in us to refer our own evils to things about us, and in the same way to keep us from a discovery of them as being in ourselves.
First, by a fixed necessity of language, we are obliged,
apart from all the blinding effects of our sin, to represent. a
great part of what transpires in our experience, in a way of
objective description. For example, it is the natural way of
language to call things “hot,” “sweet,” “bitter,” and the like,
when in fact the words really describe nothing but our own inward
sensations. So we say that a “subject is dark,” not because there
is any thing dark in the subject, but that we are dark to it. So
again we say. that a thing bears a “suspicious look,” when we are
suspicious of it; or of some spectacle
But there is another great condition, or law
of experience in bad minds, that is operating always and more
powerfully in the same direction. A bad mind lives in things and for
things, or we might rather say, under things. Condition, pleasure,
show, are its god. And then it follows that the worship is only
another name
Besides it is a fact, under
this great law of retributive disorder, that even good things are
really bad to our feeling, because there is a bad mind in us. They
are not given to be our torment, but the subjective badness of the
soul makes them so; just as the weakness of the diseased eye makes
the light a cause of injury and pain. The light is not bad in
itself, but the receiving organ is bad, and so the pure light, image
itself of God, shoots in arrows of pain that sting the body. In the
same way selfishness and sin make the whole soul a diseased
receiving organ; when, of course, every thing received
We come now to the matter of fact itself. Is it only theory of which we have been speaking, or is it fact?
Here we make our appeal first of all to the scripture,
where the illustrations are manifold and striking. There was never
among men a more inoffensive, winning, and beautiful character than
Joseph. But his brethren hated him and could not speak peaceably to him—hated him so intensely that they were willing to put him out of
the way, by almost any method, however cruel. They talked with one
another about him, painted him as a selfish, proud brother, and set
him off in the most odious colors. Having a bad mind towards him,
they saw only bad and hateful things in him. But the bad things were
all in themselves, not in him. His only crime was his worth, and the
beauty of his spirit, and that God, on this account, had advanced
him, giving him the precedence his character deserved. So with Saul;
the devil of jealousy creeps into his morbid, selfish heart, and he
sees in David, the faith-.ful servant of his throne, a scheming usurper only and
traitor, waiting to vault into his place. He is wrought up thus to such a pitch
of fear and malice, that, in one of his paroxysms, he hurls a javelin at his
head. The
Equally mad, exceedingly mad, almost conscientiously mad; as he himself relates, was Saul, the young rabbi of Tarsus, though in a different vein. The fiery young zealot was hot against Jesus, hot against Stephen, hot also against all the disciples of the new religion; but the heat of his passion he afterwards discovered was in the bad fire of his own bad mind, and the miserable bigotry that possessed him.
It is also a fact most remarkable, evincing the same
thing, that Jesus Christ, the only spotless and perfect character
that ever breathed the air of our planet, was more accused and
hated, and charged with worse crimes, than it ever fell to the lot
of any mortal to perpetrate. He was not only a Samaritan and had a
devil, but he cast out devils by a devil, he broke the Sabbath, he
was a mover of sedition, he made himself equal with God, he spoke
blasphemy, he was a conspirator against Cæsar, his silence was
called obstinacy, his eating and drinking gluttony and drunkenness,
his cross the proof of his weakness and a fit mark for jeering, his
death his defeat as an impostor and his final expulsion from the
world. And yet there was nothing in him to irritate, or anger good
men. His life was beauty itself, his spirit breathed the pure
benignity even of God. Yes, and for just this reason, he disturbed
the bad mind of men only the more bitterly. Troubled, heated, moved
with jealousy, convinced of evil, they all rushed upon him
The same truth is continually thrust upon our observation, in the intercourse of life. The passionate, ill-natured man is an example, living always in stormy weather, even though it be the quiet of dew-fall round him—always wronged, always hurt, always complaining of some enemy. He has no conception that this enemy is in his own bosom—in the sourness, the ungoverned irritability, the habitual ill-nature of his own bad spirit and character. I speak not here of some single burst of passion, into which a man of amiable temper may, for once, be betrayed; but I speak, more especially, of the angry characters—always brewing in some tempest of violated feeling. They have a great many enemies, they are unaccountably ill-treated, and can not understand why it is. They have no suspicion that they see and suffer bad things because they are bad, that being ill-natured is about the same thing as having ill-treatment, and that all the enemies they suffer from are snugly closeted in their own devilish temper.
The same is true of fretful persons—men and women that wear
away fast and die, because they have worried life completely out.
Nothing goes right; husband, or
The animosities of the world are commonly to be solved in the
same way—“Hateful and hating one another.” A purely good mind would
not hate even the worst of enemies and wrong-doers, but would. have
a sublime joy in loving him still. Thus we have one kind of enmity
that hates differences of thought and sentiment, and is continually
rasped by the fact that other men are so generally wrong-headed.
Commonly the difficulty is prejudice, or bigotry in ourselves,
reigning as a narrow, self-willed principle in the heart. Another
misery we suffer, in the pride, and the high airs, and the ambition,
and the undeserved successes of others. We wish there was some
justice in the world, and that such people had their due! This now
is envy in the soul, green-eyed, sick, self-tormenting envy. Then,
again, we have it as another form of misery, that, having injured
some one, we for that reason hate him; and there is no hatred so
implacable, so bitter, and so like the pain of hell, as that which a
man has to one
So again in regard to things of condition. The poor hypochondriac is just ready to be stranded in utter poverty and distress, though he holds, it may be, millions of property. We laugh at the strange fatuity he suffers. But every selfish mind is in it, only in some different way, or in some less exaggerated and palpably absurd form. Thus, what care, fear, anxiety, hunger, eagerness, is there in the world; and the secret of it is, that we are all imagining some fault in our condition. We want condition. Our thirsty, weary, discontented soul finds all it wants of blessedness denied, and wonders why it is that God has given us such a miserable desert to live in; as if the desert were in the world and not in ourselves—an immense Sahara wider than Africa knows! Why, if we were in the midst of God’s own paradise, carrying our bad mind with us, we should see the desert there. The inward dearth and desolation of a mind separated from God and the all-sufficing rest and fullness of his peace, would raise mutinous questions and harsh accusations of dryness, against the finest, most superlative felicity God has ever been able to invent for his angels themselves.
Let us not omit to
notice that the immoralities and crimes of the world are commonly
conceived, by those who are in them, to be not of themselves, but to
be
Such is human nature in its bad estate everywhere. No sin sees its own evil; but the world is evil, everything is evil to it. Even truth is evil. Why should the preacher come to us with so many unwelcome messages? as if it were not enough to be dragged through such a world as this, without being disturbed all the way by hard accusations! It may be that we all sin; but the circumstances we live in are all bad, and what do we do, but what the circumstances make us. Let the preacher charge upon the circumstances! When they are not really angry at the truth, how many hearers dislike it. Little conception have they that the badness of the sermon is in themselves—“Say we not well, thou art a Samaritan and hast a devil?”
The subject I have now endeavored to illustrate is itself a purely practical subject, and yet a great many practical things beside are opened by it, that do not seem, at first, to be included. And—
1. It puts in a sad light of evidence
what may well enough be called the weak point of Christianity; viz.,
the fact that the souls to be saved will be always seeing themselves
in it, and not seeing it as it is—turning it thus into an element as
dry as their dryness, as bitter as their bitterness, as distasteful
and oppressive as their own weak thraldom under sin. And so it turns
out that Christ is dry, bitter, a hard yoke, any thing but what he
is. O, what power would there be in his love, and beauty, and divine
greatness, if it were not for this. The grand difficulty in the way
of a general conversion
It used to be frequently taught that men have
no susceptibility that can be acted on by the gospel, save in a way
of revulsion; that they must be only more exasperated by it, the
more powerfully they are made
2. We here perceive what is the true
value of condition. I do not blame, of course, a proper attention to condition—it is even a duty. But the notion that we are really to
make our state as bad or good by the surroundings of life, and not
by what is within us, not only violates the scripture counsel, but;
quite as palpably, the dictates of good sense—it is in fact the
great folly of man. For a bad mind is of necessity its own bad
state, and that state will be just as bad as the man is to himself,
neither more nor less, come what may. A bad temper, a wrong love, an
ungoverned pride, a restive ambition, a fretful, irritable,
discontented habit within—why if a man had a den of vipers within,
they would not make a state for him more absolutely than these. The
surroundings of condition are to the man what the cloak is to the
body, and the man who hid the fox under his cloak and hugged him
close, till he gnawed into his vitals, might as well have been
thinking to be happy because of his cloak, as any bad soul to be
happy in sin because of condition. O, that men could be so far
disenchanted of this devil that possesses their understanding, as to
see how certain it is that their condition, after all, is what they
are themselves; that it can be only bad as long as
3. We discover in this subject, what opinion to hold of the
meaning and dignity of the state sometimes called misanthropy.
Misanthropy is the state of mind that distastes men, the world, and
life, and withdraws itself, more or less completely, into a feeling
of self-justifying and self-isolating enmity. It is the sentimental
state of wickedness, or wicked feeling, and is more common to youth
than to persons of a later age. For some reason they are not happy;
they begin to sympathize with themselves; they imagine how bad men
are, and dislike them because they are selfish, or
4. It is
clear, in this subject, that we have little reason for troubling
ourselves in questions that relate to a place of future misery.
Enough to know that the mind is its own place, and will make a place
of woe to itself, whithersoever it goes, in a life of sin and
separation from God. If the sceptic bolts upon us with the question,
where is hell? or the question, whether we suppose that a God of
infinite goodness has occupied himself in excavating and fashioning
a local state for the torment of bad men? it is enough to answer
that a bad mind carries a hell with it, excavates its own place of
torment, makes it deep and hot as with fire, and will assuredly be
in that place, whatever else may be true. A good mind sits in
heavenly places, because it is good. Go where it will it is with
God, and God is templed eternally in it; God in his own everlasting
beatitude and peace. Exactly what is true of place beyond this, or
of place as related to the condition of happy spirits, we do not
know, but shall know hereafter. Enough that the bad mind will at
least be its
Finally, it is evident in these illustrations,
that the salvation of man is possible, only on the ground of a great
and radical change in his inmost temper and spirit. What is wanted
for the felicity of man is clearly not a change of place, or
condition, but a change in that which makes both place and condition
what they are. The bad spirit—this is the woe; and nothing cures
the woe, but that which changes the spirit of the mind. Marvel not
at this; you have only to take one glance at the world, turn one
thought upon yourselves, to see it. Hence it is that Christ has come
into the world as the physician of souls—it is that he may impart to
them a new life and spirit from himself, and heal the disorders of
their bad state, by uniting them to his own person. Think it not
strange that he proposes thoughts to you so different from your own. O, ye weary ones, all ye desolate, all ye tossed with tempest and
not comforted, all ye world-sick and heavy hearted, hear ye his
call—“come unto me and I will give you rest.” Why, my friends, what does
it mean that we are such a malcontent, miserable race of beings? Did not a good
God make us and the world we live in? Why then are we so continually plagued and
tormented in it? Why so hungry, so dry, so empty, so bitter, so like the
troubled
“Ye have heard
how I said unto you, I go away and come again unto you.”—
To go away and come again, or to go away in order to come again, would seem, taking the words -at their face, to be a rather idle or unmeaning operation; but if we can get far enough into the mind of Christ to apprehend his real meaning, we shall find that he is proposing, in these words, a change of the greatest consequence—a change that is necessary to the working plan of his gospel and even to the complete value of his incarnation itself. In what sense then he is going, and in what sense he will come again, what change of relationship he will inaugurate between himself and his followers, and so what kind of personal relation he undertakes to hold with them now, is the subject to which I call your attention this morning, as one of intense practical interest, and even of the tenderest personal concern.
Whoever has reflected much upon the
subject of the incarnation has discovered that its value depends on
brevity of time, and that no such condition could be permanent,
without becoming a limitation upon itself
Therefore he says—“it is expedient for
you that I go away,” adding the promise—“I will come to you.” He
means, by this, that the time has now arrived, when there must be a
change of administration; when he must needs be taken away from the
eyes, and begin to be set in a new spiritual relation, which permits
a universal access of men to him, and a universal presence of him
with them—so a grand, world-wide kingdom. Saying nothing of the
particular objects to be gained by his death, he could not stay here
and carry on his work; he had as many friends now as 6he could speak
with, or allow to speak with him; and if he should remain, holding
fixed locality, as of a body in space, he could be the head only of
a coterie, never of a kingdom. What is wanted now is an unlocalized,
invisible, spiritually
And this will be his coming again, or his second
coming—such a kind of coming as shows him bearing rule in
Providence, and riding in the clouds of heaven—rolling on the
changes, unfolding the destinies of time, and preparing his
universal kingdom. The world, he says, seeth me no more, but ye see
me; and having your spiritual eye open for this, it will be as if
you saw me coming triumphantly in the clouds. This image is a
well-known Eastern figure of princely pomp and majesty; they say of
every great monarch, taking ascendancy, that he rides on the clouds
of heaven. So, as Christ comes on, bearing sway and ruling
invisible, it will be as if he were seen coming on overhead, in the
clouds. And especially will this be felt when Jerusalem the Holy
City is blotted out, as it were by God’s hand of judgment upon it,
in the conquest by Titus. By that sign goes out the old, exclusive,
Jew-state; and there comes in after it, now to have its place, the
Christian, catholic, free state, that is to be gathered under the
universal, spiritual headship of Christ. That gathering in, as in
power, is to be his coming, or coming again—no bodily appearing, no
visible pomp, no manifestation locally as in space; for the very
thing that made it expedient for him to go away from the senses,
forbids any such outward manifestation. And therefore be adds a
caution, telling his disciples expressly, that his coming thus again
is not to be a coming with
In all which Christ,
you will perceive, is proposing to do exactly nothing which many of
his disciples, specially taken by the faith of his second coming, so
fervently preach and so earnestly magnify. They believe that he is
to come in a body, and be visible as in body. He will of course be
here or there in space, a locally present being, at some particular
geographic point—Jerusalem, or London, or Rome, or going about in
all places by turns. Hearing now that he is here, or there, we shall
think no more of seeing him by faith, and begin to think of seeing
him with our eyes. Every ship that sails will be crowded with eager
multitudes pressing on to see the visible Christ. Thronging in thus,
month by month, a vast seething crowd of pilgrims, curious and
devout, poor and rich, houseless all and hungry, trampling each
other, many of them sick, not one of them in the enjoyment truly of
God’s peace, not one of a thousand getting near enough to see him,
still fewer to hear him speak—how long will it take under such kind
of experience to learn what Christ intended and the solid truth of
it, when he said—“it is expedient for you that I go away.” Nothing
could be more inexpedient, or a profounder affliction, than a
I am well aware that our brethren, who look for Christ’s visible coming, will not allow the inconveniences, or almost absurdities, I have here sketched, to be any proper results of their doctrine. “We believe,” they will say, “that he will come in a spiritual body, such as he had after his resurrection, not in a coarse, material body. It will be such a body that he can be here, or there, at any given moment, hampered by no conditions of space; even as he came into the room where his disciples were gathered, when the doors were shut.” But they only impose upon themselves by such a conception. If their spiritual body is to be visible, it must be as in space and outward appearing; for that is the condition of all visibility. And then we have a flitting Saviour, breaking out here or there, at what time, or on what occasion, no mortal can guess. And the result will be that they are in a worse torment than they would be, if he were established in some known locality. Going after their eyes, they are taken off from all faith, and where their eyes shall find him they know not.
Pardon me then if I suggest the
suspicion that they
We have no want then
of a locally related, that is of a bodily resident Saviour; we
perceive, without difficulty, the expediency of which Christ speaks,
that he should go away and not continue the incarnate, or visible
state, longer than to serve the particular objects for which he
assumed that state. But he gives us to understand, that he is not
going to be taken utterly away
Obviously what we want ourselves, is to be somehow with him, and to
know that he is with us. We want a social, consciously open state
with him, as real as if he were with us bodily, and as diffusive as
if he were everywhere; thus to have a personal enjoyment of him, and
rest in the felt sympathies of his personal companionship. This,
too, exactly is what he means to allow us; not in the external way,
but in a way more immediate, and blessed, and evident, and as much
more beneficial. If we had him with us in the external way, as his
own disciples had, when they journeyed, and talked, and eat, and slept, in his
company, we should be living altogether in our eyes, and not in any way of
mental realization. And, as a result, we should not be raised and exalted in
spiritual force, or character, as we specially need to be. What we want,
therefore, is to have a knowledge of him, and presence and society with him,
that we can carry with us, and have as the secret joy,
Now it is
just this relation that he undertakes to fill, when he goes away.
Being himself a Comforter, [Paraclete,] for this is the word
translated Advocate, he promises “another Comforter;” that is, in
some proper sense, another self. Indeed, he really calls the
Comforter promised, another self; for he says expressly, in this
very connection—“Even the Spirit of truth, whom the world can not
receive because it seeth him not; neither knoweth him, but ye know
him; for he dwelleth with you and shall be in you;” striking
directly into the first person, to say the same thing over again, as
relating to himself—“Yet a little while and the world seeth me no
more, but ye see me; because I live, ye shall live also. At that day
ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.”
And then, to be still more explicit, he gives the promise, that
whosoever of his followers follows faithfully, keeping his
commandments, shall have the immediate manifestation always of his
presence—“I will manifest myself unto him,”—“If a man love me he
will keep my words, and
The great change of administration thus to be introduced, by the going away and coming again, includes several points that require to be distinctly noted.
1. That Christ now institutes such a relationship between him and his followers, that they can know him when the world can not. Before this, the world had known him just as his disciples had, seeing him with their eyes, hearing his doctrine, observing his miracles, but now he is to be withdrawn, so that only they shall see him—“the world seeth him not.” As being rational persons, they may recollect him, they may read other men’s recollections of him, but his presence they will not discern, he is not manifest unto them, but only to his followers. He that loveth knoweth God, and he only.
2.
It is a point included that the new presence, or social
relationship, is to be effected and maintained by the Holy Spirit,
the Comforter. And he it is that Christ, in the promise, calls so
freely himself. The. New Testament writings are not delicate in
maintaining any particular formula, or scheme of personality, as
regards the distributions of Trinity. They call the Spirit “the
Spirit of Christ.” They say, “God hath sent the Spirit of his Son
into your hearts.” They speak of “the supply of the Spirit of Jesus
Christ.” They speak also of “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ
Jesus.” They say, “the Lord [Christ] is that Spirit.” Christ also is
3. In this coming again of Christ by the Spirit,
there is included also the fact that he will be known by the
disciple, not only socially, but as the Christ, in such a way as to
put us in a personal relationship with him, even as his own
disciples were in their outward society with him. “Ye shall know
that I am in the Father, and ye in me, and I in you.” “But ye know
him.” “But ye see me.” Many persons appear to suppose that the Holy
Spirit works in a manner back of all consciousness, and that there
is even a kind of extravagance in the disciple who presumes to know
him. And so it really is, if the conception is that he knows him by
sensation, or by inward phantasy. But what means the apostle when he says—“the
Spirit itself beareth witness with our Spirit that we are the children of God”?
That bearing witness with imports some kind of inward society, or interchange,
in which a divine testimony flows into human impression, or conviction, else it
imports nothing. The real Christian fact in regard to this very important
subject appears to be, that the Holy Spirit, or Spirit of Christ, though not
felt by sensation, or beheld by mental vision, is yet revealed, back of all
perception, in the consciousness. We are made originally to be conscious
Here then is the
relationship we seek—Christ is so related now, to the soul of them
that receive him, that he is present with them in all places, at all
times, bearing witness with their spirit, in guidance and holy
society; a friend, a consoler, a glorious illuminator, all that he
would or could be, if we had him each to himself in outward company.
Yes, and he is more than this; for if we simply had him in such
outward company, the contrast perceived would be even mortifying
But there is a different conception
of this whole matter, which I must briefly notice. Many persons
appear to assume, that we have, and can have, no relations to
Christ, more immediate than those which we have through language and
the understanding, The Spirit, they say, works by truth, and only as
the truth gets power in our thoughts and choices. Their conception
is that we have nothing to do with God, except as we get hold of
notions, or notional truths, concerning him—reported facts, for
example, and teachings, and doctrinal deductions. Undoubtedly we are
to have this notional furniture in the understanding, but it is
never to be a fence between us and God, requiring us to know him
only at second hand, as we know China by the report
But is
not this a kind of mysticism, some will ask, better therefore to be
avoided than received? I hardly know what is definitely meant by the
question; unless perhaps it be that a word is wanted that will serve the uses of a stigma. A great many will begin to suspect some
kind of mysticism, just because they are mystified, or misted, and
see things only in a fog of obscurity. But if this be mysticism,
nothing is plainer than that Christ is the original teacher of it,
and his two disciples, John and Paul, specially abundant teachers of
it after him. Every man is a mystic in the same way, who believes
that Christ is the Life—in such a sense the life that he truly
liveth in his followers, and giveth them to live by him. God as the
Life, the all-quickener, the all-mover and sustainer, the inward
glory and bliss of souls—this may be set down as a thing too high to
be any but a mystical notion. And yet all highest things are apt to
be most rational, and, at bottom, most credible. What can be more
rational, in fact, than to think that
Our answer then to the question what are Christ’s present relations to his followers? is that he is present to them as he is not, and can not be to the world; present as an all-permeating Spirit; present as the all-quickening Life; consciously, socially present; so that no explorations of science, or debates of reason are wanted to find him, no going over the sea to bring him back, or up into heaven to bring him down; because he is already present, always present, in the mouth and in the heart. In this manner he will be revealed in all men, waits to be revealed in all, if only they will suffer it. The word for every loving, trusting heart is, I will come unto it, I will be manifest in it. Lo, I will be with it always.
But the answer at which we thus arrive is a purely spiritual
answer, you perceive, one that is real and true only as it is opened
to faith, and experimentally proved. But all such spiritualities
waver and flicker; we are too much in the senses to hold them
constantly and evenly enough to rest in them. Therefore to keep us
in the
“Behold the kingdom of God is within you,” says the
Saviour, meaning that he will be there, and there will have his
reign. But he also lays the foundations of a great, perpetual,
visible institute, that he names the church, calling it to be the
light of the world, even as he, in the body, was the light of the
world himself, and because he is now, in the Spirit, to be entered
into and fill the body of the church with light. His apostle calls
it too “the pillar and ground of the truth,” because it is to be
that corporate body that never dies, receiving the written word as a
deposit and trust for all ages to come, and becoming itself a living
epistle, answering faithfully to it, and shedding, from its own
luminous property, a perpetual light of interpretation upon it. Of
this body, called the church, he is to be the Head himself, and all
the members joined together in him, are to be so related to Him as
to make a virtually real, and perpetually diffusive, incarnation of
him in the world. While, therefore, it was expedient for him to go
away as the Son of Man, or of Mary, it was yet to be found, as he
comes again by revelation to the consciousness of his disciples,
that he is again taking body, in fact, for all time, in them; so to
be manifested organically, and, as it were, instituted in their
undying and corporate membership—“Head over all things to the
But the spiritualities of the relation Christ
maintains with his disciples were to be settled and fortified by
still another institute; I mean the sacraments, and especially the
sacrament of the Holy Supper. The very object of the supper appears
to be the settlement, and practical, or experimental, certification
of that revelation to consciousness, of which we have been speaking. “This is my body, take and eat.”
“This is my blood, drink ye all of
it.” And this, to establish, as by institute, the fact that Christ
here present, is to be communicated and received, as by nutrition,
or as life. And this is what is meant by discerning his body, and
the
And this exactly is the great
institute of the supper. Christ engages to be present in it, by a
most real presence, without a miracle of transubstantiation; so that
when we come to offer him up ourselves, and open our inmost receptivities to the
appropriation of his presence, it is no vague, volunteer, possibly presumptuous,
thing that we do, as if venturing on some almost aerial flight, in the way of
coming unto God, but we have the grace by institution, firmly pledged, and
given, as it were, by routine. Here is Christ to be communicated. Here are we to
commune. There is no miracle, but what is
O, that we might receive this supper to-day, my brethren, according to its true meaning, and eat and drink worthily. Take it as no mere commemorative ceremony over Christ dead, but as the appointed vehicle of Christ living, and in you to live. Come not here to be sad and sit mourning for your Master’s body, like the women weeping for Tammuz. Consider, above all, this, that Christ, once dead, is here alive, that he may here dispense himself to you. Blessed is the heart that shall be fully opened to him. Be that true, as it may be, of you all; that you may go forth loving one another as you love your Master, and shining without, by the light he gives you within. Neither forget how that open, dear, relation of spirit with him, of which we have been speaking, is here sanctioned publicly for you, and sanctified before you, even as by an institute of God. As he has gone away, so believe, henceforth and always, that he has come again. Count this coming in the Spirit to be with you, dearer than even outward society with him would be, such as his disciples had at the first; and expect to be always with him in this manner, in the closest, most immediate, knowledge; even as he said himself—BUT YE SEE ME.
“And said to the mountains and rocks,
Fall on us and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the
throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb. For the great day of his
wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?”—
The lamb is the most simply innocent of all animals. Historically also it had become a name for sacrifice. For this twofold reason, Christ is set forth as the Lamb. Under this name, as fulfilling the conception of gentleness and sacrifice in God, we give him ready welcome. We magnify him as the Lamb, and expect to magnify him even eternally, in ascriptions offered to that dear name. Even such as are most remote from the life of religion are commonly satisfied with conceptions of God under this gentle, patient figure; making up, not seldom, schemes of divine character and order, that have only the innocuous way of the lamb—just as thousands of the devotees of liberty will magnify liberty, as being the whole substance of government; counting it really the same thing as a release from being governed. Yet liberty is but justice secured; and, in just the same manner, the Lamb is but the complemental gentleness of God’s judicial vigor.
All which appears to be represented by a most paradoxical, jarring, combination of words, that predicates wrath of the very lambhood of Christ. To speak simply of the wrath of God is bad enough to some; it is even a real offense. They recoil from such expressions as unworthy, and as indicating, either a degree of irreverence in those who use them, or else low ideas of God, such as may not be revolted by the ascription of a temper so unregulated and so essentially coarse. It is commonly no sufficient answer to such, that the scriptures of God speak of his wrath in this way without compunction; for the scriptures, they will suspect, are not as far refined themselves, in the moral tastes and proprieties, as they might be. But here we have “the wrath of the Lamb;”—which not only violates a first principle of rhetoric, forbidding the conjunction of symbols that have no agreement of kind or quality, but also shocks our cherished conceptions of Christ, as the suffering victim, or the all-merciful and beneficent friend, in either way, tile Saviour of sinners. Who will ever speak of a lamb’s wrath? Who, much more, of the wrath of the Lamb of God? And yet the scripture does it without any sense of impropriety, or moral incongruity—what shall we make of such a fact?
Simply this, I
answer, that while our particular age is at the point of apogee from
all the more robust and vigorous conceptions of God in his relation
to evil; while it makes nothing of God as a person or governing
will; less, if possible, of sin as a wrong-doing by subject wills;
we are still to believe in christianity, and
We take the principle, in brief, without scruple, that if we can settle what is to be understood by the wrath of God, we shall not only find the wrath in God, but as much more intensely revealed, in the incarnate life and ministry of Christ, as the love is, or the patience, or any other character of God. Since he is the Lamb, in other words, the most emphatic and appalling of all epithets will have its place, viz.,—the wrath of the Lamb.
We want very much, in English, a word
that we have not, to express more definitely the true force of the
original scripture word [οργη] occurring in this relation. We have a
considerable family of words that we can employ for this purpose;
such as wrath, anger, indignation, fury, vengeance, judgment,
justice, and the like, but they are all more or less defective.
Indignation is the most unexceptionable, but it is too prosy and
We understand then by wrath, as applied to God and to Christ, a certain principled heat of resentment towards evil doing and evil doers, such as arms the good to inflictions of pain, or just retribution, upon them. It is not the heat of revenge, girding up itself in fiery passion, to repay the personal injuries it has suffered; but it is that holy heat which kindles about order, and law, and truth, and right; going in, as it were, spontaneously, to redress their wrongs and chastise the injuries they have suffered. It is that, in every moral nature, which prepares it to be an essentially beneficent avenger, a holy knight-errant champion for the right, and true, and good. It can be let in to nerve a resentment, or to bitter a grudge, and commonly is, in souls given up to resentments and grudges; but it was ordained specially to be such an equipment of moral natures, that goodness would be an armed state, capable not only of beneficence, but of inflicting pain where pain is wanted, in the fit vindication of order and right.
How it works, we may see, almost every hour, in
In all these and similar examples that could be cited without number, there is, you perceive, a function of wrath, or an instinctively vindicatory function, that pertains to all moral natures, and arms them to be the supporters of justice and the avengers of wrong. They have this high moral instinct, or function, not as a vice to be extirpated or stifled, but as an integral part of their inmost original nature. It is constituent, consubstantial, and is to be eternal.
Having distinguished, in this manner, what is to be understood by wrath, as predicated, whether of God or of the Lamb, we are ready to proceed with the main subject of inquiry. Is it then a fact that Christ, as the incarnate Word of God, embodies and reveals the wrath-principle of God, even as he does the patience or love-principle, and as much more intensely? On this point we have many distinct evidences. And—
1. It is very obvious, at the outset, that Christ can not be a true manifestation of God, when he comes in half the character of God, to act upon, or qualify, or pacify, the other half. He must be God manifest in the flesh, and not one side of God. If only God’s affectional nature is represented in him, then he is but a half manifestation. And if we assign him, in that character, a special value, then we say, by implication, what amounts to the worst irreverence, that God is a being to be most desired when he is only half presented, and when his other half is either kept back, or somehow smoothed to a condition of silence. I take issue with all such conceptions of Christ. He is God manifested truly, God as he is, God in all his attributes combined, else he is nothing, or at least no fair exhibition. If the purposes of God, the justice of God, the indignations of God, are not in Him; if any thing is shut away, or let down, or covered over, then he is not in God’s proportions, and does not incarnate his character.
2. It will
be noted that Christ can be the manifested wrath of God, without
being any the less tender in his feeling, or gentle in his patience.
If God may fitly comprehend these opposite poles of character, so
also may Christ; and if the fires of God’s retributive indignations
are no contradiction to the fact that he is love, no more is there
any such contradiction to be apprehended, when these indignations
are displayed in Christ. Indeed we have occasions in the history of
Jesus, when he actually displays the judicial and the tender, most
affectingly, together and in the very same scene. “And
Indeed these two poles of sensibility, wrath and tender love,
are not only compatible; I must go farther and say, that the
tenderest, purest souls will, for just that reason, be hottest in
the wrath-principle, where any bitter wrong, or shameful crime, is
committed. They take fire and burn, because they feel. Furthermore
you will observe that the man whose dull-hearted phlegm keeps
prudent silence, utters no condemnation, burns with no indignant
fire, when some wicked cruelty
3. It is another and distinct consideration that
God, without the wrath-principle; never was, and Christ never can
be, a complete character. This element belongs inherently to every
moral nature. God is no God without it, man is no man without it.
Take it away from God and he is simply Brama, a mere Fate, or
Infinite Thing—no Governor of the world, but an ideal, in the neuter
gender, of the True and the Good; a Beauty that lies in sweet
lassitude on the world, for literary souls to make a religion of,
for themselves. Take it away from man, and he is only paste, or, at
best, an animal; for though animals have the capacity of brute passion, or infuriated excitement, yet that moral passion or
vindicatory instinct, of which we are now speaking, they as little
share as they do the instinct of language, or that of scientific
inquiry. They have no moral ideas, and of course have no moral
armature of wrath to set them on the side of moral ideas, and steel
them, as in principled resentment, to be avengers of the same. Now
it is this principled wrath, in one view, that gives staminal force
and majesty to character. It is in this principle of the moral
nature that it becomes a regal nature. In these indignations against
wrong, it champions the right and judges the world. Without this, or
apart from this, submission to wrong is pusillanimity, forgiveness
4. It is a conceded principle of justice,
that wrongdoers are to suffer just according to what they deserve.
It was unavoidable, therefore, that if Christ brought in new mercies
and gifts of grace, the liabilities of justice must be
correspondently increased—not diminished, as many try to imagine. As
the score of justice, too, is augmented, the judicial wrath must be,
and be also as much more forcibly manifested—just as we shall find
it to be, in fact, in the new assertion made of God, by Christ’s
personal life and doctrine. First he asserts the principle—“For
unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required.” Next
he asserts the new liability that has actually accrued under it—“If
I had not done among them the works that none other man did, they
had not had sin, but now they have both seen and hated both me and
my Father.” Then again he makes specific denouncement both of the principle and
the liability, declaring to the cities that reject his ministry, that they are
bringing a doom of judgment on them, worse than God ever put upon the worst and
wickedest of the past ages—“Woe unto thee, Chorazin, woe unto thee, Bethsaida; it shall be more
tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the day of judgment than for you.” “And thou, Capernaum, it shall be more tolerable for the land of
Sodom, in the day of judgment, than for thee.” His apostles, too,
only represent him fitly, when they say—“treasurest up unto thyself wrath,
against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God;” or
again—“Of how much sorer punishment suppose ye shall he be thought worthy, who
hath trodden
5. One
of the things most needed in the recovery of men to God, is this
very thing; a more decisive manifestation of the wrath-principle and
justice of God. Intimidation is the first means of grace. No bad
mind is arrested by love and beauty, till such time as it is balked
in evil and put on ways of thoughtfulness. And nothing will be so
effectual for this, as a distinct apprehension of the wrath to come.
Then, when it is brought to a condition of thoughtfulness by the
apprehension of damage and loss, the vehemence of God and his
judgments starts a correspondent moral vehemence in its own
self-condemnations; when of course it is ready to be melted by the
compassions and won by the beauty of the cross—that is born of God.
Now it is no longer swayed by interest and fear, but having come
into God’s occupancy and become spirit, as being permeated by God’s
impulse, it ranges in liberty with God himself. The precise thing
not wanted, in this view, is to get justice out of the way. To know
that the avenging wrath-principle of God’s moral nature is forever
hushed, would be fatal. The weak point of sin is that
6. We can see for ourselves that the more
impressive revelation of wrath, which appears to be wanted, is
actually made in the person of Christ. I will not stop here to speak
of the driving out of the money-changers from the temple, which has
been the scandal of so many, just because of the imagined over
vehemence of the wrath, and which his disciples took as being the
zeal that was to eat him up; I will not stay upon the fiery
denunciations and imprecations of woe by which he scorched the
oppressions and the sanctimonious hypocrisies of the priests and the
Pharisees; I will not recur again to the terrible judgments he
denounced upon so many guilty cities, and among them even upon
Jerusalem itself; but pass directly to the fact that no other
preacher ever had appealed as strenuously as he to the sense of
fear, or employed with as little restraint the artillery of God’s
penalties. The terrible and abundantly unwelcome, or unpopular,
doctrine of future punishment is specially his. Previously, the
sanctions of religion had been temporal, and the future state itself
had been only dimly revealed; save that in two or three single
passages of the prophets it had finally
Once more Christ is appointed, and
publicly undertakes, to maintain the wrath-principle officially, as
the judge of the world—even as he maintains the love-
But it will be objected, I suppose, by some, that in the view
now presented, the hope of a possible salvation is quite taken away. You can
not, any more, deserve God’s favor, how then can you be saved, unless God’s
justice be somehow satisfied in your behalf? You could not, I answer, if God
were obliged to execute justice, having no option concerning it. But exactly
contrary to this, the wrath-principle in him is only that
Put it down, then, first of all, at the close of this great subject, that the New Testament gives us no new God, or better God, or less just God, than we had before. He is the I Am of all ages; the I Am that was, and is, and is to come; the same that was declared from the beginning—“The Lord God, gracious and merciful, forgiving iniquity, transgressions, and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty.”
At the same time, let. no one be concerned to find how God’s
justice has been satisfied, or please himself in the discovery how Christ has
made up the needed satisfaction, by the pains and penalties of his cross. For if
Christ has satisfied God’s justice, then who is going to satisfy the justice of
Christ? If the offered Lamb has propitiated, or appeased, the wrath of God
against transgressors, then a question of some point remains, viz., who is going
to propitiate the wrath of the Lamb? Furthermore, if the lighter penalty of
justice has been taken off, on the original score of retribution, who is going
to lift the more tremendous liabilities of justice incurred by those who have
trodden under foot the blood of the Son of God, and cast away forever all the
glorious mercies and helps of the cross? O, it grieves me to think of the poor,
speculated inventions we have wearied ourselves to set up. on this summit, and
most central point, of gospel truth! Wood, hay, stubble—
How plain is it, also, in such
a view of God and the inevitable wrath-principle of his nature, that
the charity, so called, of our modern philanthropism, is an
effeminate and false charity. It reprobates all condemning judgments
and all inflictions of penalty. It does not really believe in
government, or sin as an act of responsible liberty. Sin is only
misdirection, and the misdirecting power is circumstance. Are we not
all what our conditions make us to be? Why, then; do we lay severe
judgments; or even torments of penalty, on the head of
transgression? Just contrary to this, we have seen that no man even
is a proper man, whose moral nature is not put in armor by the
wrath-principle. Much less is God true God, when no such central
fire burns in his bosom, to make him the moral avenger of the world.
Neither let any one argue. that God, as he is good, must desire the
happiness of all, and that, being omnipotent also, what he desires
he will certainly bring to pass. What if it should also be true,
that there is a wrath-impulse in his nature, burning to have every
wrong chastised by the pain it deserves; is not the argument as good
to show that the chastisement will certainly be inflicted? The
argument, in fact, holds neither way, least of all in showing that
God will make every creature happy; for we know, as a plain matter
of fact, that he does not. There may seem to be a considerable show
of reason in the vaunted liberality of this new philanthropism;
still it is only that weak light
We are brought out
thus, at the close, just where John began, when he came to make
prophetic announcement of the new dispensation. He looks, you may
see, for no merely soft salvation, but for a great and appalling
salvation rather. “Now the axe will be laid,” he says, “unto the
root of the trees. He that cometh after me is mightier than I, his
fan is in his hand, he will thoroughly purge his floor, the chaff he
will burn with unquenchable fire.” The doctrines of religion will
now be more spiritual and the tests more severe. God will not be
changed, but will only be more perfectly shown. Responsibilities
will not be diminished, but increased with the increase of light. If
Christ bends low at his cross, no such fearful words of warning and
severity as his were ever before spoken. The Old Testament is a
dew-fall in comparison with the simply judicial, spiritual,
unbending, and impartial wrath of the New. And this exactly is the
impression,
“Forgiving one another, even as God
for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.”—
Under these words, “even as,” and the relation or comparison they introduce, a
very serious and high truth is presented; viz., that our human or
Christian forgivenesses are to correspond with the forgiveness of
sins by Christ himself; to be cast in the same molds of quality and
bestowed under similar conditions. And that we may not fail of
receiving such an impression, the principle or idea is made to recur
many times over, and in such ways that we can not miss of it, or
throw a doubt upon it. Thus we read again—“forgiving one another,
if any man have a quarrel against any; even as Christ forgave you so
also do ye.” Again, in the gospels, it is given us in Christ’s own
words—“forgive, and ye shall be forgiven”—“for if ye forgive men
their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if
ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your heavenly
Father forgive your trespasses.” He will not even allow us to pray
for forgiveness, save as we ourselves forgive—“Forgive us our
trespasses, even as we forgive those who trespass against us.” All
this on
I
state the point thus distinctly, because, in the matter of
forgiveness among men, a kind of lapse, or sinking of grade, appears
to have somehow occurred; so that, holding still the duty of
forgiveness, we have it in a form so cheap and low, as to signify
little when it is practiced. “O, yes,” says the brother, finally
worn out by much expostulation, on account of the grudge he is
holding against another who has greatly injured him, “I will
forgive him, but I hope never to see him again.” Christ does not say
that to the man whom he forgives, and I suppose it would commonly be
regarded among brethren, as a rather scant mode of forgiveness—such
a mode of it as scarcely fulfills the idea. Another degree of it,
which would probably pass, says—“Yes, let him come to me and ask to
be forgiven, and it will be time for me to answer him.” Probably a
quotation is made, in this connection, of the scripture text which says—“If thy
brother repent forgive him.” And most certainly he should be thus forgiven, when
the repentance appears to be an actual and present fact; but suppose that no
such repentance has yet appeared. Is it then enough to say, “let him come and
ask to be forgiven?” Many
Well then, suppose that Christ had stopped just there. Nobody is asking to be forgiven, all are in their sins and mean to be there. They love their sins. They have asked no release or forgiveness. They are not repentant in the least degree? What then is there for him to do? Is he not absolved from any such matter as the preparing and publishing of forgiveness, by the simple fact that nobody wants it, or asks for it?” “If they were penitent,” he might say, “it would lay a heavy charge upon me. But they are not, and what is forgiveness thrust upon souls that do not even so much as care for it?”
Why, my friends, it is just here that Christ and his gospel begin—just here, in fact, that his forgiveness begins; viz., in for-giving, giving himself for, and to, the blinded and dead heart of unrepentant men, to make them penitent, and regain them to God. The real gist of his forgiveness antedates their. penitence; it is what he does, shows, suffers, in a way of gaining his enemy—bringing him off and away, that is, from his wrongs, to seek, and, in a true sorrow, find, the forgiveness that has been searching beforehand so tenderly after him.
If we are to
understand this matter accurately, as it
Now both of these words are names, we have said, of
Do not understand me to say that the higher Greek word is made up of the verb to give, with the preposition for, like our English word. It is not; it signifies literally and simply “dealing grace,” or “doing grace upon;” which is represented by the genius of our tongue, in the word “for-giving;” and, what is remarkable, the Latin and all the principal modern tongues, [as in con-dono, par-don, ver-geben,] make up their word signifying remission in the same way, by compounding their verb to give with a preposition answering to for; giving it, as it were by vote, and declaring it as their inward sense or conviction, that the true forgiving of wrong and evil is that which has its beauty and greatness and the spring of its operative power, in a giving-for the sinners and the sins to be forgiven.
And lest this might seem to be scarcely better than a
suggestion of the fancy, or a curiosity of speech, let us glance a moment at the
practical, or practically Christian, import of forgiveness when it is received.
What is it practically to us, or in us? What does it do for us? What internal
changes of position, or experience, does it bring? Answering these questions, we
shall find that forgiveness, when ascribed to Christ, has suffered a lapse or
fall in our understanding, much like that which it has suffered when applied to
men. For the word is taken by multitudes, including even teachers of theology,
as if it had no reach of meaning
We go back now from this excursion, to the subject-matter at which we began; viz., the duty of forgiveness between brethren, or. fellow-men. And we carry back this very important principle or discovery; that the reality of forgiveness, or the grace of a forgiving spirit in us, lies not so much in our ability to let go, or to be persuaded to let go, the remembrance of injuries, as in what we are able to do, what volunteer sacrifices to make, what painstaking to undergo, that we may get our adversary softened, to want, or gently accept, our forgiveness. If it is in us to forgive, in any real and properly Christian sense of the term, it will not be that we can somehow be gotten down to it, by the expostulations of brethren, nor that we only do not expressly claim a right to stay in our grudge, or the hurt feeling raised by the wrongs of our adversary, till he comes to us in a better mind. Perhaps he ought to come, or to have come long ago, but that is nothing as regards our justification. If we know how to forgive, we shall be like Christ our Master, we shall be giving ourselves for our adversary, circumventing him by our prayers, contriving ways to reach his tenderness and turn the bad will he is in, taking pains, even to the extent of great loss and suffering, that we may get him into the right again; thus to accept our remission, and be joined to us openly for Christ our Master’s sake.
But this, it may be objected, carries the
obligation too high—Christ was a peculiar being, in a very peculiar
office, and it can not be expected of us to follow him and be like
him, in what belonged rather to his official work, than to the
merely inherent principle of personal excellence in his character.
Now it may be very true that we are not called to work out the same
problems of divine government, but we are required to have, in our
degree, exactly the same modes of character, and all that he did was
the simple coming out of his character. He had no good ways, or
qualities, that were more than good, no merits of character that
were superlative and above all the known standards of merit. On the
contrary one of the great and blessed objects of his mission was to
consist, in the true unfolding of God’s feelings, graces,
perfections, so as to draw us into the same, or impregnate our
fallen life with the same. No matter what relations he may have
filled, or solved, in the great mystery of government, still every
thing he undertook and bore was for forgiveness’ sake, and: he had
precisely the same reasons of feeling for withholding himself that
we have, when we withhold from our adversaries. He had his personal
indignations against the wrong of transgressors, he had his disgusts
towards their character, he had feelings wounded by the sense of
their wrongs, and if he could have let a little pride play among his
passions, he would have had his bitter, invincible grudges against
them; so that when he thought of them he would have said, “I want no
more to do with them. Perhaps I will consider them, if they
Do we, then,
undertake to say, that there is no salvation, out of this same
Christly forgiveness—has no man
Besides,
there is another answer to this question of salvation. As w6 just
now said that Christ was simply fulfilling the right in his blessed
ways of forgiveness, so we may conceive that he is simply fulfilling
the eternal love. For what is right coincides with love, and love
with what is right. Now Christ is in this kind of forgiveness
Taking now this high view of
the Christian spirit as related to Christ, it would not surprise me,
if there should be a feeling of special revulsion, or repulsion,
rising up in some of your hearts, to thrust away even farther than
ever the claims of religion. “I could not be a Christian after this
kind,” you will say, “and I never can be. If I must forgive all the
wrongs I meet, after this manner, I must give up any right to be a
proper man. Such a volunteering of forgiveness before it is sought,
and even when smarting under the bitter wrongs of an enemy, is too
spiritless and weak in the look of it—I could not endure being held
down to any such forgiving way.” All this, my friends, may be very
true, regarding only the present key of your feeling and life—I presume it is.
But it may be equally
Brethren in Christ, let me also turn the lessons of this subject specially towards you; for it was specially Christian brethren, even those of Ephesus, that the apostle was addressing when he exhorted—“forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.”
You have seen what this forgiveness
means, what a volunteering there is in it, how the true Christian
works in it, long before.the forgiveness is wanted, works in
sacrifice and patience, even as all love must. What I want therefore
to know, my brethren, is whether you find this forgiveness in you?
Can you give yourself for your brother, or do you hold off in the
stiff pretense, that he must come to you first and right himself?
Can you be the Christian towards hirn, or can you more easily hug
your injury, as a wound bleeding internally, and hold yourself
aloof? Let me tell you then how very bad the sign is, when a
Christian is slow to forgive. It does not show, it is true, that he
is a vicious, or viciously depraved, man, as other kinds of fault,
or deviation would, but it shows a great amount of unsanctified
nature in him—none can tell or guess how much. For it is our proud,
wild nature, just that in kind, though not in degree, that is
observed to burn so inextinguishably, in the bloody resentments of
savages, which makes it so hard for us to forgive. Therefore, if any
one finds it more easy to stay in the savage feeling, than to go
after his adversary in the Christian, the indication is fearfully
bad. Nay, it is even a very unpleasant and doubtful sign, when one
has an adversary long to forgive; for when a true Christian goes
after his adversary, in such temper as he ought, tender, assiduous,
proving himself in his love, by the most faithful sacrifices, he is
not like to stay by his enmity long. As the heat of a warm day will
make even a willful man take off his overcoat, so the silent melting
of forgiveness
Sometimes the alienated, or aggrieved parties, will
both of them be Christian brethren; and how very sad a sight is it,
and how much to be pitied when two brethren fall into an enmity!
How frightfully fallen is their look when you look at them! How much
worse their internal look. to themselves! When they go to pray in
secret, how are they choked in their prayers! How very likely are
they also, to be even choked off soon from prayer itself. How certain
are they in this manner, even against much endeavor, to go down in
their piety. The warm heart they once had, or seemed to have—where is it? If
they beamed in rich feeling once on every body, and it was a, blessing to meet
them and be warmed in the glow of their faces, the blessing and the glow are
soon gone, and we may almost say the faces too; for there is scarcely any but a
negative meaning left in them. O, ye pitiable and sad pair of disciples, that
are paired in your enmity! How easily
Sometimes it will happen that a whole
brotherhood of disciples will be scored and scorched by
disaffections, jealousies, wounded feelings that are akin to enmity,
in the same manner. There is much talk and a general talking down
of course, and as a family quarrel brings down family respect, so it
is when brethren are set to the work of diminishing each other’s
worth and character. Believe them and they are all no better than
they should be, If they once loved each other, and were firmly
locked together in their common cause, so much the worse now, for
the dishonor falls on their tendernesses and prayers, and all the
good things that seemed to be in their love. The Holy Dove flies
their assemblies, or only hovers doubtfully over them, unable
to light where there is no peace. When they come to pray together,
it is only locally together, and not in spirit that they pray. There
is a dreary chill in their assemblies. Neither the prayers appear to
go up, nor the preaching to come down. There is no savoring element
for the word, and of course there is as little due sense of savor
from it. It is neither fire, nor hammer, but a chill made audible
rather, like the ripping, rifting noises of some ice-clad lake or
river in a silent, freezing night. The power is all gone, fatally
benumbed. The power of the word, the power of the living epistle,
that of the
What then shall they do? Some of them
perhaps will finally begin to say, let us take the counsel of Lot
and Abraham—go to the right, and go to the left. Yes, but there is a
difference; these friends, Abraham and Lot, parted because they were
agreed, not because they were at variance; parted to save their
agreement and not to comfort their repugnances. Have then Christian
brethren, under Christ’s own gospel, nothing better left, than to
take themselves out of sight of each other?—going apart just to get
rid of forgiveness; going to carry the rankling with them, live in
the bitterness, die in the grudges of their untamable passion? What
is our gospel but a reconciling power even for sin itself, and what
is it good for—cross, and love, and patience, and all—if it can not
reconcile? No, there is a better way; Christ lays it on them, by
his own dear passion where he gave himself for them, by his bloody
sweat, by his pierced hands, and by his open side, to go about the
matter of forgiving one another even as he went about forgiving
them. O, it is a short method, and how beautiful, and one that never
failed. When they are ready to go before all relentings, and above
all grudges, and be weary, and sick, and sad, and sorrowful, and so
to give themselves for their adversaries, weeping on their necks in
tender and true confession, they will not be adversaries long, but
they will be turning all together to the cross, and joining in the
prayer—forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass
against us.
“So Christ. was once
offered to bear the sins of many.”—
Christ bearing our sins ought to be the tenderest and most soul-subduing of all facts conceivable. And yet it may even be made quite revolting, by the over literal, and legally hard, face put upon it. Perhaps I ought to say that it too often is, and that what is given to be the new creating power of God in our lives, is made, in this manner, to be an offense that even balks our repentances. What I propose then, at the present time, is to answer, in a very practical way, the very practical question—
In what sense, or manner, it is, that Christ bears the sins of the world?
To make the answer clear, I begin by specifying some things which are not to be understood by it.
Thus we
are not to understand that the sins of the world are put upon him,
or transferred to him, so as to be his. That is impossible. Guilt is
a matter so strictly and eternally personal, that nobody can be in
it, but the transgressor himself to whom it belongs. Apart from him
it is nothing. Strike him out of existence and it
It follows, in the same view, that Christ does not
bear our sins in the sense that he bears our punishment. Everlasting
justice forbids any such commutation of places in punishment. What
is this justice? An indignation against wrong that wants pain out of somebody, caring only that the quantum be made up? Or is it,
rather, an indignation against the wrong-doer himself, and no other?
No matter if another consents to bear that indignation, and suffer
all the deserved pains of the wrong-doer, when that second person
comes to offer himself, God’s justice will forthwith object in the
question—“Are you guilty of this man’s sin? Doubtless you may be his
friend, but the only thing you can do for him is to be innocence in
him, and you can as well do that as to be guilty instead of him. But
as long as you are innocence yourself, what kind of transaction is
it that you undertake, when you come to be punished in innocence?
What opinion have you of my justice, when you expect me to release
the pains deserved, if only I can get enough that are not deserved?
Did I ever threaten to punish the guilty man, or somebody
Again, it is not conceivable
that Christ bears our sin, in the sense that the abhorrence of God
to our sin is laid upon him, and expressed through, and by means of,
his sufferings. How can God lay abhorrence upon what is not
abhorrent? Is he going to abhor goodness, truth, beauty itself? And
if Jesus, being all this, comes in as a volunteer into the place of
transgressors, challenging upon himself the abhorrence due to them,
will God falsify and mock all his own approving judgments and moral
affinities, by acting an abhorrence which he must renounce every one
of his perfections to feel? Perhaps it will be imagined that he only
puts great pains on Christ, which we ourselves are to look upon as
tokens of abhorrence to us. That would be very ingenious in us, but
how are we going to take up such a thought? In the first place, God
did not inflict those pains, but we ourselves. Are we then going to
put Christ to death and take it up as a religious discovery, having
a gospel in it, that God’s abhorrence to us is so far expressed by
our very abominable deed of murder, that it need not be any more, by
our punishment? We can easily enough imagine God’s abhorrence, in
such a case, to the sin perpetrated, and the murderers by whom it is
perpetrated, but the difficulty is to get either Christ
We come now, having dismissed these rather common misconceptions, to the positive matter of the question, or the positive answer to be given. And here let me indicate, beforehand, a certain point of fact that will probably distinguish any true answer; viz., that Christ, in bearing the sins of transgressors, simply fulfills principles of duty, or holiness, that are common to all moral beings, and does it as being obliged by those principles. If there is any fundamental truth in morals, it is that there is no superlative kind of merit or excellence; that as far as kind is concerned, the same kind is for all, and there is no other. Thus, if Christ has it incumbent on him, as a point of beneficence, or love, to bear the sins of transgressors, it will be incumbent on every moral being in the universe, ourselves included, to bear sins; only not perhaps in the same degree, or with the same effect. If he is to be a sacrifice for sin, it will be laid upon us to be, every man, a sacrifice and an offering in like manner, only not to accomplish all the same results. We are not then to look for some artificial, theologically contrived, never before heard of, kind of good, in the bearing of sins, but simply to look after what lies in the first principles of religious love and devotion, as related to the conduct of all. Having this intent in view I shall make out—
I. A general or inclusive answer to the
question, and then, secondly, a threefold, particular answer, the
points of which. are included under it. The general is this—that
Christ bears the sins of the world in a certain representative
sense, analogous to that in which the priests and the sacrifices of
the former altar-service, bore the sins of the people worshiping.
The phrase, “he shall bear his sin,” or “bear his iniquity,” means,
it is true, when applied to the guilty person, that he shall be
punished for his sin. But when it is applied, as it is many times,
to the priests and sacrifices at the altar, we are not to conceive
that the priests, or the altar victims, have the guilt actually put
upon them—nothing could be more absurd—but we are to take the words
in an accommodated, ritually formal sense, where the same thing is
true representatively; the design being to let the people feel or
believe, that their sins are being taken away, as if put over upon
the priests, or upon the head of the victims. Not to multiply
instances, we have the phrase “to bear sins” used in both senses in
a single passage, (
And here is the ready solution of all those expressions in the
New Testament, which are brought over from the priesthood and
sacrifices of the Old Testament, and used, with so great power, to
represent the relation of Christ to the sins of the world. Thus he
is declared to be “made sin for us,” just as the Levites were, in
bearing the iniquities of the congregation. Thus also it is declared
that he “was once offered to bear the sins of many.” The meaning is
that he comes representatively in our place, undertaking, or taking
on himself, the case of our sin, even as the priests at the altar
did. Such forms of speech come to be natural, as it were, to the
Jewish mind, under the uses of their ritual, and pass into new
applications of a different shade. Thus Paul
Christ then bears our sin, we answer inclusively and generally, in the sense that he has come representatively into our place and got such power in us by his sacrifice, as to take it wholly away.
Pause
here now a moment at the threshhold, and raise the question, whether
we, as human beings, can have any thing in common with him, in such
a sacrifice?
Still it is remarkable how many of the scripture terms of sacrifice and priestly intervention are applied to Christian disciples, and how constantly they are called to maintain precisely the way of the cross. Nothing, in fact, is farther off from the New Testament, than to conceive that Christ is in a superlative kind of virtue, inappropriate, or impossible, to mortals.
Thus we are called to be
sacrifices and priests of sacrifice. “I beseech you therefore,
brethren, by the mercies of God, [that is, in Jesus Christ,] that
you present your bodies a living sacrifice, [in the same manner,]
holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service,” [the
dictate of your moral nature as it was of his.] The phrase “acceptable to God,” you will also observe, is a sacrificial phrase,
bearing an allusion to God’s acceptance of the sin offerings. And,
in this sense, it occurs again—“Ye also, as lively stones, are
built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up
spiritual sacrifices,
Having sketched this general outline of what is to be understood by the bearing of sins, we now proceed—
II.
To fill up the outline by a more particular statement of the subject
matter included under it. Christ, we have seen, bears the sins of the world
representatively, in a figure, much as the priesthood, or the scapegoat, bore
them, only procuring an absolution for them
1. He bears the sin of the world,
by that assumption which his love must needs make of it. Love puts
every being, from the eternal God downward, into the case of all
sufferers, wrong-doers, and enemies, to assume their evils, and be
concerned for them. Being love, it assumes their loss, danger,
present suffering, suffering to be; all their want, sorrow, shame,
and disorder; and goes into their case to restore and save. As a
father, who has a dear son straying from honor and virtue, assumes
that son to be an inevitable burden on his love, and bears him, sin
and all, as a heavy load upon his feeling, striving after him in
many tears, and prayers, and weary contrivings, and it may be under
great personal abuse, that he may regain him to a better life, just
so God assumes in Christ all transgressors and enemies, and all
their sin, and all their coming woes, and bears them on his paternal
feeling, through great waves of living conflict and dying passion—“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that
whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting
life.” The assumption is such that we may even look upon it and
speak of it, as a kind of substitution.
Let me not be understood now, in
transferring this analogy, to say, or suggest, that Christ came into
such a life of sympathy and death of passion, just to give us an
example which we are to copy. Nothing could be more impotent, or farther from the truth. Giving and copying examples is too tame a
matter to be conceived as making out a gospel. No, Christ took our
sin upon him in this manner and bore it as the burden of his
mission, just because it was in his love to do it; and that same
love, in any being, of any world, in us just struggling up out of
our lowness and bondage, will put us, in our human grade, and
according to the measure of our love, on making the same kind of
assumption. We shall take the child of sin, or sorrow, our friend,
our enemy, any. one, every one we see to be in evil, on our feeling,
and make him a charge upon our sacrifices and prayers. Paul knew
exactly what this meant when he said—“Bear ye one another’s burdens
and so fulfill the law of Christ;”—that is, the eternal love-law, or
standard of obligation, that he himself fulfilled. Paul had the
meaning too, the very Gethsemane of it, in his own heart, when he
cried, under his burden—“I have great heaviness, and continual
sorrow in my heart. For I could wish that myself were accursed from
Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen, according to the flesh.” And the
same we find recurring, in one form or another, in all the apostles,
all the brethren. When they hear the Master lay it on them to
minister—“Even as the Son of Man came, not to be ministered unto,
but to minister and to give his life a ransom for many”—they take
the sense
O, what a calling is this, my brethren, the bearing of sins, with Christ. Of course you have not the same things to do that he had, or the same. capacity to do them; you have not even the same things to do, one as another; but if his love has really been. quickened in you, the fact will be known by the burdens that have come upon your heart; covetousness, world-greediness, self-indulgence, prejudices, resentments, feelings wounded by injury—none of these will hold you: but there will be a most dear love going forth in you, not to your friends only, but even more consciously to your enemies, and God’s enemies. There will be times when you seem to be well nigh crushed, by the concern you feel and the burdens you bear. Is it so with you? Is it here that you sometimes find even your joy—the same which Christ himself had and bequeathed to you? Have you found, as every mother, for example, has, and every Christian may, that love-pains are the deepest attainable joys; tragic exaltations of a consciously great feeling that, in bearing enemies and sins, challenges eternal affinity with Christ and with God?
2. It is another and equally true conception of
the
Now,
my friends, it would seem, at first view, to be very wide of all
possibility, that we should be called to any such bearing of sin as
this. Are we going to be incarnated like our divine Master? Even so!
Dropping only the form of the word, the coming into flesh, it is no
inconsiderable part of our dignity and God-likeness in sacrifice,
that we are able to go directly down into the corporate evils of
men, for their good!—into some house, for example, or village, or
city, where a dreadful pestilence rages, to minister to their sick
ones and comfort their dying; into the disgusts of low and filthy
society, where vice rages, rescuing the victims and their children;
into works of reformation, or
3. Christ bears the sin of the
world, in the sense that he bears, consentingly, the direct attacks of wrong, or
And this kind also is for us,
my brethren. Here we also are to take the cross and follow, as our
Master bade us. Many persons appear to suppose, that we are required
to submit ourselves to wrong as a kind of tax, or tariff, levied
upon us, without any particular end. They take it as a mere blind
appointment, and think it must be so accepted. Far from that as
possible! On the contrary it is to be evil or wrong encountered in a
work of sacrifice, encountered by one who is after the ends of love,
even as Christ was. That death of his was great in power, not
because he bore it, but because he was in the work of God’s love,
and bore it on his way, unable to be diverted from his end by that
or any other death. In just that manner and degree, it was in
Having reached this point I see no reason why the subject should be farther protracted. There is nothing, in fact, to add, even for persuasion’s sake. The gospel, as we have here seen it, is complete in itself, asking, and in fact, permitting, no help from its advocate.
“But put ye on the Lord
Jesus Christ.”—
The highest distinction of man, taken
as an animal among animals, lies not in his two-handedness, or his
erect figure, but in his necessity and right of dress. The inferior
animals have no option concerning their outward figure and
appearing. Their dress, or covering, is a part of their
organization, growing on them, or out of them, as their bones are
grown within. Be it feathers, or fur, or hair, or wool; be it in
this color or that, brilliant as the rainbow, or shaggy, or
grizzled, or rusty and dull, they have no liberty to change it, even if they
could desire the change, for one that is glossier and more to their taste. But
man, as a creature gifted with a larger option, begins, at the very outset, to
show his superior dignity in the necessary option of dress. It is given him for
his really high prerogative, to dress himself, and come into just what form of
appearing will best satisfy the tastes into which he has grown; or, what is very
nearly the same thing, will best represent the quality of his feeling and
character. With this kind of liberty comes, of course, an immense peril; for
there is a peril that belongs to every kind of liberty. As
You already understand from this course of remark, that I am going to speak of dress as the outward analogon, or figure of character, and of character as the grand “putting on” of the soul. It would be instructive here to notice the immense reacting power of dress on character, showing how we not only choose our own figure in it, but our figure in turn chooses us; requiring us to feel and act, or helping us to feel and act, according to the appearing we are in. But I hasten to speak of the analogy referred to. Dress relates to the form or figure of the body, character to the form or figure of the soul—it is, in fact, the dress of the soul. The option we have, in one, typifies the grander option we have in the other. The right we have in one, above the mere animals, to choose the color, type and figure of the outward man, foreshadows the nobler right we also have to cast the mold, fashion or despoil the beauty, of the inward man. There is also an immense reaction in character; what we have become already, in the cast of life, going far to shape our doings and possible becomings hereafter.
On the ground of this analogy it is that the
scriptures
All the figures of dress or clothing are used up, in this manner, by the scriptures, to represent the forms of disgrace and filthiness, or of beauty and glory, into which the inner man of the soul may be fashioned—wearing heaven’s livery or that of sin. As character is the soul’s dress, and dress analogical to character, whatever has power to produce a character when received, is represented as a dress to be put on.
Passing thus into
the great problem of life as a moral
No sooner is the deed done, than the culprits,
all covered in before by the sense of God’s beauty on their
feeling—for exactly that was their original righteousness and not
any beauty of their own culture—begin to be troubled by the
discovery of their nakedness! The real difficulty is that the pure
investiture of God upon their consciousness has been stripped away,
thrown off by their sin. Nothing is changed without, as they foolishly think—stitching their scant leaves, vain hope! to hide a
loss that is within. And probably the same is true of the immense
dressing art and trade of the world; it is put agoing and continued,
as regards the fearfully deep zeal of it, by just that shame of the
mind which keeps it company in evil, and makes it always emulous of
some better figure. Were this inward shame taken away, and the soul
inwrapped, as at the first, by the sense of God’s beauty upon it,
the secret phrenzy at least would soon be over. The maiden would
forget her torment in the sense of a holier beauty
In the same way it
is, just according to the manner of the fig-leaf history, that such
an immense patching art, in the matter of character, is kept in
practice in all ages of the world. It is the general admission of
souls, that they are not in a true figure of respect before
themselves; but instead of returning to God, and the complete investure in which he will cover them, they imagine, or get up,
small shows of excellence, which they contrive to think are as good,
for the matter of character, as they need. These small shows we
have a name for, calling them pretexts, shows of covering that,
after all, do not cover—patches, fig-leaves. In one view the absurd
figures continually put forward as pretexts, in this way, are
abundantly ludicrous; in another they carry a look most sad, as well
as profoundly serious. Politeness—this is one of the fig-leaves;
taken for a complete character by many, and carefully maintained, as
the standard excellence of life. Honor is another and scantier,
assuming still to be even a superlative kind of character; more
imposing and airy than it could be under the restrictions of virtue.
Bravery, again, is a fig-leaf pretext, put on to cover the loss of
courage; for evil in the soul is of a coward nature, and can only
keep itself up, without heart, by sallies and wild dashes
Nor let any one imagine that these deep wants of spiritual nakedness we speak of are to be satisfied, by any uprightness in the moral life. The shame is religious, not moral—it belongs entirely to the religious nature, divested as it is of what was to be everlastingly upon it, the conscious infolding of God. The law moral is a law of this world, sanctioned by this world’s custom. It was not this out which the first man fell; for custom had not yet arrived. No, it was the original inspiration, that enveloped and, as it were, covered in his life; the holy investiture that he had inductively from God, by community of being with him—this it was that he had put off, and the loss of which was the dreadful shame of his uncovering. Impossible, therefore, it is for any one to reinvest himself with the covering he needs. He can not dew himself in the dews of his lost morning, can not cover in himself in the righteousness that was God’s infolding of character upon him. What he had by community of being he can never reproduce by his personal will. lie must have it again, as he had it at the first; only by that same righteousness of God revealed to faith, in Christ his Son. Here again the robe is offered back, and he may have good use of his liberty in putting it on; he only can not make a thread of it himself; the warp and woof must be wholly divine—the incovering beauty of God’s own feeling and Spirit, that enveloped our first father, and, in Christ, are offered to us all.
We pass,
then, here to another point in advance, viz.,
Furthermore, there is this wonderful art, so to speak, in the
incarnate human appearing of Jesus, that he humanizes God to us, or brings out
into the human molds of feeling, conduct and expression, the infinite
perfection, otherwise inappropriable and very nearly inconceivable. Since we are
finite, God must needs take the finite in all revelation. He can never draw
himself close enough to get hold of our feeling, or sympathy, and be revealed to
our heart, till he takes the finite of humanity. In the man-wise form only can
we put him on. Otherwise his very perfections, elaborated by our human thought,
would be only impassive, distant, autocratic, it may be, and even repulsive; as
they often are, even in the teachings now of Christian theology. That he has any
particular feeling for men, or this, or that man, that his great spirit can be
overcast and burdened with concern for us under sin, that he is complete in all
the passive virtues he puts it upon us to practice—how could we think it, or be
at all sure of it? But here he is, in Jesus Christ, moving up out of a
childhood, into a great manhood, filling all the human relations with offices
and ministries in human shapes of good; helping the sick with kind words, and
healing them by the touch, so to speak, of his sympathies, careful of the poor,
patient with enemies, burdened for them in feeling even to the pitch of agony,
simple, and true, and faithful unto death. And so we have God’s
In this
manner, for this, in brief, is the gospel, we are to be new charactered, by the putting on of Christ; not by some imitation or
copying of Christ that we practice, item by item, in a way of
self-culture—the Christian idea is not that—but that Christ is to be
a complete wardrobe for us himself, and that by simply receiving his
person, we are to have the holy texture of his life upon us, and
live in the infolding of his character. And this is the meaning of
that “righteousness of faith” which is variously spoken of in the
But we are to put him on—“put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ.” And here is the difficulty—you can not see, it may be, how it is done. The very conception is unintelligible, or mystical, and you can not guess, it may be, what it means. What then does it mean to put on Christ?
It
does not mean, of course, that you are only to make an experiment of
putting on the garb of a new life, and see how you will like it. No
man puts on Christ for any thing short of eternity. The act must be
a finality, even at the beginning. He must be accepted as the Alpha
and Omega. Whoever contemplates even
Neither do you put him on, when you undertake to copy some one or more of the virtues, or characters, in him—the gentleness, for example, the love, the dignity—without being willing to accept the sacrifice in him, to bear the world’s contempt with him, to be singular, to be hated, to go through your Gethsemane, and groan with him under the burdens of love. There can be no choosing out here of shreds and patches from his divine beauty; you must take the whole suit, else you can not put him on. The garment is seamless, and can not be divided.
Neither do you put him on, when you undertake only to realize some previous conceptions of character that are your own. The dress is to be not from you, but from him—the whole Christ, just as he is, taken upon you to shape you in the molds of his own divine life and spirit.
But we must be more positive. First, then, there must be a full and hearty renunciation of your past life. As the apostle words it in another place, you must put off the old man in order to put on the new. You can not have the new character to put on over the old. The filthy garments, all the rags, must be thrown off, thrown completely away. Christ will be no mere overall to the old affections and lusts.
How, then, for the next thing, do we put
him on? By faith, I answer, only by faith. For in that the soul
comes to him, shivering in the cold shame of its sin,
Take another
conception, which may be more intelligible to some, viz., that you
will put on Christ by obedience to him; for whoever obeys Christ
willingly trusts him, and whoever trusts him obeys him. Hence the
promise—“If a man love me, he will keep my words, and my father will
love him. and we will come unto him and make our abode with him.”
And then it follows that whoever has the abode with him, consciously, of the Father and the Son, will be all folded in by the
thought of it, and will live as being in the sacred investiture of
the divine character and power. If, then, you can not understand
faith, you can understand obedience, and if you go into that, as
the final, total, giving over of your life, I will answer for it, that there
will be a faith in your obedience, and that Christ will be
I have only to add on this point, that you are to be always putting on Christ afterwards, as you begin to put him on at the first. All the success of your Christian life will consist in the closeness of your walk with Christ, and the completeness of your trust in him. You are not so much to fashion yourself by him, as to let him fashion you by himself—to be upon you, as he is with you, and cover you with all the graces of his inimitable love and beauty; and this you will do most perfectly, when you trust him most implicitly, and keep his words most faithfully.
It only remains, now, to bring our subject to
its fit conclusion, by speaking of the consequences of this putting
on of Christ. And I name, first of all, that which the apostle
suggests, in a kind of cadence that immediately follows and finishes
out the text. “But put ye on,” he says, “the Lord Jesus Christ, and
make not provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof.”
Where he conceives, it will be seen, that one substitutes, or takes
place of, the other—that when Christ is really put on, the world
falls off, and the lusts of property, and fame, and power, and
appetite, subside or fall away. The effect runs both ways, under the
great law of action and reaction—as the old man is put off that the
new may be put on, so the new put on still further displaces the
old. This, too, we know by the attestations of experience. He that
has the sense of Christ upon
There is also this most admirable
effect in the putting on of Christ, that being thus enveloped in his
life and feeling, a power will move inward from him, that will
search out all most subtle, inbred evils in you, even those which
are hidden from your consciousness, and will finally assimilate you
in them, and in all beside, to
Here, too, is the true idea of
Christian sanctification. It is that we may so put on Christ, and
be so infolded in him, as to be consciously raised above all bad
impulse into good, above all guiltiness into a conscience void of
offense, above all detentions of bondage into perfect liberty, above
all fear into perfect assurance, and so continue as long as we
falter not in the faith, by which Christ is thus brought in upon the
soul, to be its impulse and the appetizing force of its life. But
whether this can be fitly called a perfect sanctification is more
doubtful. That it leaves the soul in a temptable state all must and
do in fact agree, and if the faith, at any time, gives way, the
subject will immediately lapse into some kind of sin. Nay, if he
were sanctified far down, in all the deepest, most underground cells
of feeling he was ever conscious of, there would yet be treasons hid
still deeper in the soul, and he would fall at once, the
But it is
much, how very much, that all these can
Observe again the
consciousness of strength, and the exalted confidence of feeling,
that must gird any soul that has truly put on Christ. It will be
with him, in his faith, as it was with the prodigal, when the Father
said, “bring forth the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring
on his finger and shoes on his feet.” From that moment he felt
strong in the family. The shame fell off as the robe went on, and
the confidence of a son come back upon him. So it is that every
Christian is strong who has really put on Christ. He is clothed
with strength and honor, as with salvation. He lives in the garment
of praise. All misgivings flee, all mutinous passions fall under. Do
you sometimes try, my brethren, to be strong by your will, strong by
your works, strong by what you can raise of excitement, or high
resolve, that is only weakness, and a great part of all weakness
comes in that way. Nothing is more natural for a Christian losing
ground, than to put forth all the force he has, in a strain of hard
endeavor, lashing up and thrusting on himself; but in that, he is
believing, probably, just as much less as he is goading himself
more. Let him go back to faith,
Here, too, be it understood, is the source of that strange power of impression, which is felt in the life and society of all earnest Christians. Everybody feels that there is a something about them not human. And the reason is that they have put on Christ. The serious, loving, gentle, sacrificing and firm spirit of Jesus, is revealed within, or upon them, and they signify to men’s feeling just what he signified. They fulfill that gracious name that was formerly in so great favor in the Church—they are all Christophers, Christ-bearers. They will even put so much meaning into their “good morning,” or their bow of courtesy, as to carry a Christly impression in the heart of a stranger. This, my brethren, is the true power. Would that the multitude in our day, who can think to be powerful only as they strive and cry, and go dinning through the world in a perpetual ado of hard endeavor, could just learn how much it means, to put on Christ.
It only remains to add, what has
been coming into view in the whole progress of our subject, that the
only true salvation-title is Christ put on, and found upon the soul
as its heavenly investiture. A great many persons are at work, in
these times, to fashion a character for themselves, and demanding it
of them who preach the gospel, that they preach conduct, tell men
how to be good and right, correct their faults, make them good
husbands, wives, children, citizens—cease, in a word, from the
mystic matter of faith and divine
Here then, brethren and friends, I speak now to you all without distinction, here is the fearfully precise point on which our eternity hinges—the putting on of Christ. Observe, we are to put on no great name or standard, no sectarian badge or livery, no lawn, or saintly drab, or veil, or stole, or girdle—none of these are the real new man to be put on. No! Christ! we must put on Christ himself, and none but him. We must be in-Christed, found in him, covered in the seamless, indivisible robe of his blessed life and passion. Far be it also from us, when we put on Christ, to think of turning ourselves about, in the search after some other, finer, pretext that we may put on over him, to make him attractive, pleasing, acceptable. No, we are to put him on just as he is, wear him outside, walk in him, bear his reproach, glory in his beauty, call it good to die with him, so to be found in him not having our own righteousness, but the righteousness that is of God by faith. Cover us in it, O thou Christ of God, and let our shame be hid eternally in thee.
“And he saith unto him—Verily, verily, I say
unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God
ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”—
With a singular felicity and power of statement, Mr. Coleridge gives it for his doctrine of scripture inspiration—“In the Bible there is more that finds me, than I have experienced in all other books put together; the words of the Bible find me at greater depths of my being; and whatever finds me brings with it an irresistible evidence of its having proceeded from the Holy Spirit.” God only can be so far privy, that is, to the soul, as to make it answer thus, all through, in its deepest and most hidden parts, to his words. Whatever may be thought of his doctrine, as a complete and sufficient solution of the question, it is certainly good, and even powerfully good, as far as it goes. And it has a beautiful coincidence, which he probably had never observed, with the very simple and truly natural sentiment of Christ’s interview with Nathanael.
Fig-trees make a very dense covering of leaves and
sometimes drop their boughs very low. Nathanael had lately retired
into the cabin of thick foliage thus provided
The two main points of
the dialogue are, first, that Nathanael was so impressed by the finding of Christ, or the privity of Christ’s knowledge of him,
under the fig-tree, that he at once declared his belief in him as the
Messiah; and secondly, that Christ immediately proclaims a deeper
finding, and a more convincing privity of knowledge, that shall, in,
due time, be shown or proved, by the opening, within his own bosom,
of a supernatural, sense and the discovery to him thus of
Now this opening of heaven, which is to be our subject,
is presented by the Saviour in terms that may seem to be a little
enigmatical. We shall conceive his meaning perhaps more
sufficiently, if we note three principal views of the heavenly state
that occur in the scripture. First, there is the local objective
view, that conceives it as a place somewhere in the upper worlds of
heaven or the sky. Secondly, there is the terrestrial objective
view, where the New Jerusalem descending from God out of heaven and
refitting our world itself to be the abode of God with men, makes it
a province, in that manner, of the other. Thirdly, the subjective
view, which has nothing to do with place or locality, but conceives
the heavenly state simply as a state of spiritual beholding and
social commerce opened in the soul itself. There is no necessary
contradiction or disagreement between the three conceptions stated;
they are all true, though probably in different senses, and may be
taken as complementary, in fact, to each other. The first is more
impressive and popular and more commonly used; the second, as being
more geographical, is more closely
In the conversation with Nathanael, the
Saviour appears to be speaking in the subjective way, as of a heaven
to be opened in the soul itself. In his terms of description, he
refers, apparently, to Jacob’s dream, where that patriarch beholds,
not without, but in the chamber of his own brain, in a dream of the
night when the senses are fast locked in sleep, a ladder set up and
the angels of God coursing up and down upon it; only what transpired
subjectively in his brain he naturally associated with the place,
conceiving also that the sky above was somehow specially set open
there, saying—“how dreadful is this place,” and calling it “the
gate of heaven.” So the Saviour says, “ascending and descending,”
putting the ascending first; as if the metropolis or point or
departure, in the commerce begun, were to be from within the soul
itself. There lives the Son of Man, reigning in his heavenly kingdom
at the soul’s own center, and from him go up couriers and ministers
of glory, descending also back upon him there. The precise point
made, in this manner, with Nathanael is, that as he was discovered
under the fig-tree, so he shall be discovered, as regards the immense
I. That there is a supernatural sense, now slumbering or closed up in souls, by which they might perceive, or cognize, supernatural beings and things, even as they cognize material beings and things by the natural sense. And
II. That Christ undertakes to open this supernatural sense, and make it the organ or inlet of universal society.
I. There is a supernatural sense now closed up, or existing under a state of suppression.
We encounter a difficulty
here, in attempting to prove the existence of faculties and powers
that are shut in, or suppressed in their action. And yet even our
natural faculties are very nearly in that condition at the first—no
man knowing, or conceiving, what is in him, till it is brought
forth. We also know that all finest qualities and highest powers
are stifled, for the time, or even permanently, by wrongs and vices.
What we here suppose to be true is, that in the original and
properly normal state, souls were open to God, and a full, free
commerce with his upright society. Being made in God’s image, they
were to be children with God their Father, living in society with
him, having him to know, enjoy, and love, and having all their
desires freely met and satisfied by the open ministry of his
friendship. He was, and, with all his glorious company, was
eternally
But this
original and properly normal state was necessarily broken up and
brought to a full end, by their fall into sin. They now become
afraid of him and hide themselves instinctively from him. No longer
can he be revealed to their immediate knowledge, because the
personal affinities through which he was to be revealed are closed
up in them. They fall off thus into their senses, and become
occupied with the objects of the senses; having the understanding
darkened, being alienated from the life of God, through the
ignorance that is in them. So they live as under heavy storm-clouds
in the night; the. lightning flashes in sharp gleams across the
clouds, or glares in red anger fits from within their body, but
there is no opening through, to let in the light of the stars.
Heaven is gone out to them in the same manner; God is hid, and they
know not where they can find Him; spirit and spiritual being and
spiritual society with his great family is so far a lost
possibility, that, if they think it, they can not give it reality.
There is something too in guilt, or the state of guiltiness, that
amounts to a virtual shutting up, or suppression, of all affinities
with supernatural being. It freezes in perception. It condenses all
the Godward and pure aspirations and gathers them in, by the
dreadful recoil it makes on the soul’s own center. It pronounces a
damnation too upon itself, and by its own remorseful severities
makes the sentence good. Falling away thus from God, and closing
itself up as regards all
Is there now any such supernatural sense existing under suppression in the soul, as the statement I have made supposes? The question is a very great, and is getting to be the almost only, question for our day.
To go over the evidence briefly, there is obviously nothing impossible in the fact of such a sense. There may as well be a power to cognize immaterial, supernatural being, as material.
Neither is it any thing, that our philosophers recognize no such higher ranges of faculty. No faculty is ever recognized, save as it comes into consciousness by use. That which is shut up, therefore, can be nothing to philosophy. When the lantern of a light-house has no light burning within, it will be an opaque body at the top, as it is in the base below—even the transparency will be opaque.
But we can
affirm, I think, with confidence, for one distinct argument, that
there ought to be just this upper world of supernatural insight in
souls. As they are related to God, there ought to be a power of
immediate knowledge, in which he is revealed—they require, in fact,
to be as truly conscious of God as of themselves; for God is the
complement of their being, and without him they only half exist.
Again, as they are related to eternal society with all good beings,
they ought also to have powers of discerning that may apprehend
them. In this manner, as they are not made to be mere
Again, there not only ought to be
aspirations in the soul, and powers of sensing for the supernatural,
but we can see, by many signs, more or less definite, that there
are. Sometimes a groping will signify as much as an open discovery,
and what has the race been doing, in all the past ages and
everywhere, but groping after gods, and demons, and populating even
the earth and the sky with mythologic creations. It is as if some
divine phrenzy were in them, goading them on after what they so
mightily want. Little, indeed, do they discover of what is real and
true; they only go a marveling, as the phrenologists would say,
carried off from the mere plane of reason, by they know not what.
They grope with their eyes shut, and their groping signifies more
than their discoveries. I think also that we can find, every one of
us, in ourselves, dim yearnings, imaginations
We are able, again, to conceive certain
things about this supernatural sense, taking in supernatural things
and beings, which makes it seem less extravagant. To say that we can
sense, or could, other ranges of being, and have them in the open
heaven of the soul, appears to be violent, or extravagant. Just as
violent is it still to say, that we do take in the world of matter
by the natural senses, and have it in us, even from the sky
downward. We do not go to things in our perception of them, neither
do they come locally to us; the latitudes, and longitudes, and
altitudes, are still there; we do not spread ourselves in presence
upon them; and yet we somehow have them in us, and subjectively
possess them. Besides, in the relation of spirits and beings
supernatural, we know not by what presences and revelations they may
come within the precincts of knowledge; as little by what fences
they are kept asunder. Place in this matter may be nothing,
congenialities every thing. It does not surprise us that the bad
should somehow come upon the bad; as little should
Furthermore it is a fact well attested, in all ages, and proved by manifold experience, that minds do consciously approximate God and the heavenly society, accordingly as they are turned away from evil and set open to good. They feel a certain nearness to beings and words supernatural, that amounts to society begun. And then how very often, as their affinities are more completely fined and set open, do they, in their last hours, hail the Saviour present, and good angels revealed, and departed friends whom they salute by name, waiting to receive them. Doubtless all such things will be set down as the illusions of their wandering faculty, but what if they should happen to be true—even the truest truths ever beheld by them, and most profoundly wanted by us all?
I will only add that the scriptures constantly assume,
Assuming now the fact of a supernatural sense in souls, that it is shut up by sin, we are next to consider—
II. How Christ, as he declares to Nathanael, will open this suppressed faculty, and make it the organ, or inlet, of universal society.
And here it will
be remembered, that angelic visitations had been coursing back and
forth upon the world and through it, in all ages, both before
Christ’s coming, and at his coming, and after. Moses had gone up
into the mount and brought down tables lettered, as it were, in
heaven. Fires had been kindled, from above, in sacrifices offered on
rocks, and altars of turf. Two holy men had been visibly translated.
And yet heaven still appears to be somehow shut. The angels—not
ascending and descending but descending and ascending—are thought of
only as having gone away, to some invisible
If now any one should ask what this means—how the world
above seems to be already opened if it ever can be, and yet is
shut?—the answer is, that all this apparitional machinery goes on
without, before men’s eyes, while the heaven of the soul is shut;
and that so many angels therefore, coming and going, are looked upon
only as ghosts of the fancy, or at least mere outsiders and
strangers. They do not stay to be citizens, they
Here then is the deeper work Christ undertakes to do; viz., to open the heaven of the soul itself, or, what is nowise different, to waken in it that higher sense, by which it may discern the supernatural being and society of God’s realm. How he does it we shall hardly be at a loss to find.
First, he comes into the. world himself, not apparitionally, like an
irruption of angels, but he comes up, so to speak, out of humanity,
emerging into his visibly divine glory, through a glorious and
perfect manhood. And so it comes to pass that, while they accomplish
nothing by their character, and have, in fact, no character beyond
what is implied in their message, he is bringing on his wonderful,
visibly divine manhood, and becoming, by force of his mere
supernatural character alone, the greatest miracle of time—with the
advantage that, being self-evident, even as the sun, all other
miracle is upheld by it. At first he appears to be only a man among
men, the Son of Mary, growing up in the mold and mortal weakness of
a man; but his life unfolds silently and imperceptibly, till the
magnificent proportions of his Godhood begin to appear in his
manhood, and the tremendous fact is revealed, that a being from
above the world is living in it! Supernatural event and character
are built in solidly thus, into the world’s history, to be an
integral part of it. Mere nature is no longer all, and never can be
again. The very world
He comes too in no light figure, but in the heavy tread of one that bears eternal government upon his shoulder—comes to reconcile the world, to justify, and gather, and pacify, and save, the world; “For it pleased the Father that in him should all fullness dwell, and having made peace by the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all unto himself, whether they be things in earth or things in heaven.” Everlasting order hangs tremulous in expectation round his cross, and eternity rings out from it, tolling in the world. As the veil of the temple is rent, so the way into the holiest opens. As the dead are shaken out their graves when he dies, so the souls shut up in death are loosened from the senses, to behold the new-sprung day. The middle wall is now broken down, the dividing isthmus cut through, and things in heaven, and things in earth, are set in a common headship in his person. Heaven is become an open door which no man shutteth, an abundant and free entrance is ministered, that we may enter with boldness into the holiest.
It is
a great point also, as regards the impression effected, that every
thing taught by him, in his doctrine, holds the footing of
immortality and eternity, looking towards a higher and relatively
supernatural state. Nothing is allowed to stop short, within the
boundaries of time, as in the old religion. The very law of God is
carried forward into spiritual applications; the temporal and
outward sanctions are taken away, and
Let us not imagine now that, by any or all these
things, the supernatural sense, or heaven of the soul, is really
opened. These are preparations, all, including even the cross
itself—powers that move on our consent, but without that consent accomplish no
result. Nothing done will ever accomplish that result with many; they will go to
their graves denying that any such upper world of faculty is in them. But with
some it will be otherwise; they will respond, they will believe, and their faith
will be the opening of heaven. In that faith the Son of Man will be revealed,
and the angels of God ascending and descending upon him. But this faith, in
still another view, is love, and here we have the grand finality. Christ and his
cross are a movement on the
And what a finding of the soul will it be! what a sublime privity of knowledge will it reveal! when Christ, as in the promise made to Nathanael, shall have made it conscious eternally, in this manner, of the paradise hid in its own higher faculty, so long shut up and suppressed.
Some very important consequences follow, in the train of the subject thus presented, and with these I conclude.
1. The real
merit of the issue made up between Christ and the naturalizing
critics of his gospels is here distinctly shown. Professing much
respect to his character, they are offended by the supernatural
matters reported in his life, and set themselves at work to produce
a new Christianity, without either miracle or mystery, or more than
natural fact in it—and, of course, without even Christ himself, who
is the greatest miracle of all. Christ, on the other hand,
undertakes to give them, over and above the supernatural facts they
reject,
They are men of high talent, if any talent is high in the
lower ranges only of the nature, they are some of them scholars
specially advanced in their culture, but talent and scholarship are,
alas, how pitiably shriveled in their figure, when they undertake to
handle the questions of religion, without so much as a conception
You assume that you can settle questions of being, or
not being—supernatural being, or not being—by logic, and criticism,
and the processes of the head, even as you do questions of thought,
or idea. Can you then reason a rock, as being or not being, in that
manner? No,
2. We have given back to us, here, the most solid, only
sufficient, proof of our immortality. How often do we stagger at
this point, even the best of us. All mere
3. To note precisely, as we can at no other point of view,
the meaning of salvation, or the saving of souls. Christ does not
undertake to save them as they are only half existing in the plane of
nature. Do we call it saving the hand, that we save it in all but
the fingers? Is it saving an eye, that we save it in all but the
sight? Do we save a tree, when we save the stump and the roots, and
not the leafy crown of shade and flower?
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