Town and Country Sermons Part 5

Or they may answer them--they will be more likely to answer them in England just now, because there are those who will teach them so to answer--in another, but a scarcely less terrible tone. 'Yes, there is a G.o.d; and he is angry with us. And why? Because there is something, or some one, in the nation which he abhors--heretics, papists'--what not--any man, or cla.s.s of men, on whom cowardly and terrified ignorance may happen to fix as a scapegoat, and cry, 'These are the guilty! We have allowed these men, indulged them; the accursed thing is among us, therefore the face of the Lord is turned from us. We will serve him truly henceforth--and hate those whom he hates. We will be orthodox henceforth--and prove our orthodoxy by persecuting the heretic.'

Does this seem to you extravagant, impossible? Remember, my friends, that within the last century Lord George Gordon's riots convulsed London. Can you give me any reason why Lord George Gordon's riots cannot occur again? Believe me, the more you study history, the more you study human nature, the more possible it will seem to you. It is not, I believe, infidelity, but fanaticism, which England has to fear just now. The infidelity of England is one of mere doubt and denial, a scepticism; which is in itself weak and self-destructive. The infidelity of France in 1793 was strong enough, but just because it was no scepticism, but a faith; a positive creed concerning human reason, and the rights of man, which men could formulize, and believe in, and fight for, and persecute for, and, if need was, die for. But no such exists in England now.

And what we have most to fear in England under the pressure of some sudden distress, is a superst.i.tious panic, and the wickedness which is certain to accompany that panic; mean and unjust, cruel and abominable things, done in the name of orthodoxy: though meanwhile, whether what the ma.s.ses and their spiritual demagogues will mean by orthodoxy, will be the same that we and the Church of England mean thereby, is a question which I leave for your most solemn consideration. That, however, rather than any proclamation of the abstract rights of man, or installations of a G.o.ddess of Reason, is the form which spiritual hunger is most likely to take in England now. Alas! are there not tokens enough around us now, whereby we may discern the signs of this time?

I say, the spiritual hunger will reawaken; and woe to us who really understand and love the Church of England; woe to us who are really true to her principles, honestly subscribe her formulas, if we cannot appease it in that day.

But wherewith? We may look, my friends, appalled at the danger and the need. We may cry to our Lord, 'From whence can a man satisfy these men with bread in the wilderness?' But his answer will be, as far as I dare to predict it, the same as to his apostles of old on another and a similar occasion, 'Give ye them to eat. They need not depart.'

I am not going to draw any far-fetched a.n.a.logy between the miracle recorded in the gospel, and the subject on which I am speaking. I am not going to put any mystical and mediaeval interpretation on the seven loaves, or the two small fishes. I only ask you to accept the plain moral practical lesson which the words convey.--

Use the means which you have already, however few and weak they seem. If Christ be among you, as he is indeed, he will bless them, and multiply them you know not how.

Use the means which you have; though they may seem to you inadequate, though they may seem to the world antiquated, and decrepit, try them. They need not depart from us, these ma.s.ses, to seek spiritual food, they know not where, if we have but faith. Let us give them what we have; the organization of the Church of England, and the teaching of the Church of England.

The organization of the Church. Not merely its Parochial system, but its Diocesan system. In London, more than in any part of England, the Diocesan system is valuable. A London parish is not like a country one, a self-dependent, corporate body, made up of residents of every rank, capable of providing for the physical and spiritual wants of its own stationary population. In London, population fluctuates rapidly, sometimes rolling away from one quarter, always developing itself in fresh quarters; in London all ranks do not dwell side by side within sight and sound of each other: but the rich and the poor, the employed and the unemployed, dwell apart, work apart, and are but too often out of sight, out of mind. These, and many other reasons, make it impossible for the mere parochial system to bring out the zeal and the liberality of London Churchmen. If they are to realize their unity and their strength, they must do so not as members of a Parish, but of a Diocese; their Bishop must be to them the sign that they are one body; their good works must be organized more and more under him, and round him. This is no new theory of mine; it is a historic law.

The Priest for the village, the Bishop for the city, has been the natural and necessary organization of the Church in every age; and it was in strict accordance with this historic law, that the London Diocesan Board of Education was founded in 1846, not to override the parochial system, but to do for it what it cannot, in a great city, do for itself; to establish elementary schools (and now I am happy to say, evening schools also) in parishes which were too poor to furnish them for themselves. I, as the son of a London Rector, can bear my testimony to the excellent working of that Board; and it is with grief I hear that, in spite of the vast work which it has done since 1846, and which it is still doing, on an income which is now not 300 pounds a year--proving thereby how cheaply and easily your work may be done when it is done in the right way--it is with grief, I say, that I hear that it is more and more neglected by the religious public.

With grief: but not with surprise. For the religious public, even the Church portion of it, has of late been more and more inclined to undervalue the organization and the teaching of the Church of England, and to supply its place with nostrums, borrowed from those denominations who disagree with the Church, alike in their doctrines of what man should be, and of what G.o.d is. How have their energies, their zeal, their money (for zealous they are, and generous too) been frittered away! But I will not particularize, lest I hurt the feelings of better people than myself, by holding up their good works to the ridicule of those who do us no good works at all. But I entreat them to look at their own work; to look at the vastness of its expense, compared with the smallness of its results; and then to ask themselves, whether the one cause of their failure--for failures I must call too many of the religious movements of this day, in spite of their own loud self-laudations--whether, I say, one cause of these failures may not be, that the religious world is throwing itself into anything and everything novel and exciting, rather than into the simple and un.o.btrusive work of teaching little children their Catechism, that they may go home as angels of G.o.d and missionaries of Christ, teaching their parents in turn as they have been taught themselves, and so awakening that sacred family life, without which there can be no sound Christianity. I know well that there has been much work done in the right direction; but when I look at the ugly fact, that the population of London is increasing far faster than its schools; that in 25 of the poorest parishes thereof there are now nearly 60,000 children who go to no school at all; and that the proportion of scholars to the population is lower in Middles.e.x than in almost any county in England, while the proportion of crime is highest; I cannot but sigh over the thousands which I see squandered yearly on rash novelties by really pious and generous souls, and cry, Ah, that one-fourth, one-tenth of it all had been spent in the plain work of helping elementary schools; I cannot but call on all London churchmen of the plain old school, to stand by the organization and the doctrines of the Church to which they belong; to rally in this matter round their bishop; and work for him, and with him.

And now, there may be some here who will ask, scornfully enough, And do you talk of nostrums? and then, after confessing that the ma.s.ses are hungering for the bread of life, offer them nothing but your own nostrum, the Catechism?

Yes, my friends, I do. I know that the Church Catechism is not the bread of life. Neither, I beg you to remember, is any other Catechism, or doctrine, or tract, or sermon, or book or anything else whatsoever. Christ is the Bread of Life. But how shall they know Christ, unless they be taught what Christ is; and how can they be taught what Christ is, unless the conception of him which is offered them be true?

And, I say, that the Catechism does give a true conception of Christ; and more, a far truer one--I had almost said, an infinitely truer--than any which I have yet seen in these realms: that from the Catechism a child may learn who G.o.d is, who Christ is, who he himself is, what are his relation and duty to G.o.d, what are his relation and duty to his neighbours, to his country, and to the whole human race, far better than from any doc.u.ment of the kind of which I am aware.

I know well the subst.i.tutes for the Catechism which are becoming more and more fas.h.i.+onable; the limitations, the explainings away, the non-natural and dishonest interpretations, which are more and more applied to it when it is used; and I warn you, that those subst.i.tutes for, and those defacements of, the Catechism, will be no barrier against an outburst of fanaticism, did one arise; nay, that many of them would directly excite it; and prove, when too late, that instead of feeding the ma.s.ses with the bread of life, which should preserve them, soul and body, some persons had been feeding them with poison, which had maddened them, soul and body. But I see no such danger in the Catechism. I see in the Catechism; in its freedom alike from sentimental horror and sentimental raptures; its freedom alike from slavish terror, and from Pharisaic a.s.surance; a guarantee that those who learn it will learn something of that sound religion, sober, trusty, cheerful, manful, which may be seen still, thank G.o.d, in country Church folk of the good old school; and which will, in the day of trial, be proof against the phantoms of a diseased conscience, and the ravings of spiritual demagogues.

And therefore I preach gladly for this inst.i.tution; therefore I urge strongly its claims on you, whom I am bound to suppose honest Churchmen, because the fact of its being a Diocesan Board of Education is, at least in this diocese, a guarantee that the schools which it supports will teach their children, honestly and literally, the Catechism of the Church of England, which may G.o.d preserve!

Not that I expect it to teach only that. I take for granted, that that will be its primary object, the guarantee that all the rest is well done: but I know that much more than that must be done; that much more will be done, even unintentionally.

For, shall I--I trust that I shall not--make a too fanciful application of the last fact recorded of this great miracle, if I bid you find in it a fresh source of hope in your work?

'And they took up of the fragments which were left seven baskets full.'

The plain historic fact is, that not only do the seven loaves feed 4,000, but that what they leave, and are about to throw away, far exceeds the original supply.

I believe the fact: I ask you to consider why it was recorded?

Surely, like all facts in the gospels, to teach us more of the character of Christ, which (a fact too often forgotten in these days) is the character of G.o.d. To teach us that he is an utterly bountiful G.o.d. That as in him there is no weakness, nor difficulty, so in him is no grudging, no parsimony. That he is not only able, but willing, to give exceeding abundantly, beyond all that we can ask or think. That there is a magnificence in G.o.d and in G.o.d's workings, which ought to fill us with boundless hope, if we are but fellow-workers with G.o.d.

You see that magnificence in the seeming prodigality of nature; in the prodigality which creates a thousand beautiful species of b.u.t.terfly, where a single plain one would have sufficed; in the prodigality which creates a thousand acorns, only one of which is destined to grow into an oak. Everywhere in the kingdom of nature it shows itself; believe that it exists as richly in the higher kingdom of grace. Yes. Believe, that whenever you begin to work according to G.o.d's law and G.o.d's will, let your means seem as inadequate as they may, not only will your work multiply, as by miracle, under your hands; but the very fragments of it, which you are inclined to neglect and overlook, will form in time a heap of unexpected treasure. Plans which you have thrown aside, because they seemed to fail, details which seemed to enc.u.mber you, accessory work which formed no part of your original plan, all will be of use to some one, somehow, somewhere.

You began, for instance, by wis.h.i.+ng to educate the ma.s.ses of London; you are educating over and above, indirectly, thousands who never saw London. You began by wis.h.i.+ng to teach them spiritual truth; you have been drawn on to give them an excellent secular education besides. You intended to make them live as good Christians here at home. But since you began, the interpenetration of town and country by railroads, and the rush of emigrants to our colonies, have widened infinitely the sphere of your influence; and you are now teaching them also to live as useful men in the farthest corners of these isles, and in far lands beyond the seas, to become educated emigrants, loyal colonists; to raise, by their example, rude settlers, and ruder savages; and so, the very fragments of your good work, without your will or intent, will bless thousands of whom you never heard, and help to sow the seeds of civilization and Christianity, wherever the English flag commands Justice, and the English Church preaches Love.

SERMON XI. BLESSING AND CURSING

(Preached at the Chapel Royal, Whitehall, Ash Wednesday, 1860.)

Deuteronomy xxviii. 15. It shall come to pa.s.s, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy G.o.d, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee.

Many good people are pained by the Commination Service which we have just heard read. They dislike to listen to it. They cannot say 'Amen' to its awful words. It seems to them to curse men; and their conscience forbids them to join in curses. To imprecate evil on any living being seems to them unchristian, barbarous, a relic of dark ages and dark superst.i.tions.

But does the Commination Service curse men? Are these good people (who are certainly right in their horror of cursing) right in the accusations which they bring against it? Or have they fallen into a mistake as to the meaning of the service, owing, it may be supposed, to that carelessness about the exact use of words, that want of accurate and critical habits of mind, which is but too common among religious people at the present day?

I cannot but think that they mistake, when they say that the Commination Service curses men. For to curse a man, is to pray and wish that G.o.d may become angry with him, and may vent his anger on the man by punis.h.i.+ng him. But I find no such prayer and wish in any word of the Commination Service. Its form is not, 'Cursed _be_ he that doeth such and such things,' but 'Cursed _is_ he that doeth them.'

Does this seem to you a small difference? A fine-drawn question of words? Is it, then, a small difference whether I say to my fellow- man, I hope and pray that you may be stricken with disease, or whether I say, You are stricken with disease, whether you know it or not. I warn you of it, and I warn you to go to the physician? For so great, and no less, is the difference.

And if any one shall say, that it is very probable that the authors of the Liturgy were not conscious of this distinction; but that they meant by cursing what priests in most ages have meant by it; I must answer, that it is dealing them most hard and unfair measure, to take for granted that they were as careless about words as we are; that they were (like some of us) so ignorant of grammar as not to know the difference between the indicative and the imperative mood; and to a.s.sume this, in order to make them say exactly what they do _not_ say, and to impute to them a ferocity of which no hint is given in their Commination Service.

But some will say, Granted that the authors of the Commination Service did not wish evil to sinners--granted that they did not long to pray, with bell, book, and candle, that they might be tormented for ever in Gehenna--granted that they did not desire to burn their bodies on earth; those words are still dark and unchristian. They could only be written by men who believed that G.o.d hates sinners, that his will is to destroy them on earth, and torture them for ever after death.

We may impute, alas! what motives and thoughts we choose, in the face of our Lord's own words, Judge not, and ye shall not be judged.

But we shall not be fair and honest in imputing, unless we first settle what these men meant, in the words which they have actually written. What did they mean by 'cursed' is the question. And that we can only answer by the context of the Commination Service. And that again we can only answer by seeing what it means in the Bible, which the Reformers profess to follow in all their writings.

Now, what does the Bible mean by a curse, and cursing?--For we are bound to believe, in all fairness, that the Reformers meant the same, and neither more nor less. The text, I think, tells us plainly enough. We know that its words came true. We know that the Jews _did_ perish out of their native land, as the Author of this book foretold, in consequence of doing that against which Moses warned them. We know also that they did not perish by any miraculous intervention of Providence: but simply as any other nation would have perished; by profligacy, internal weakness, civil war, and, at last, by foreign conquest.

We know that their destruction was the natural consequence of their own folly. Why are we to suppose that the prophet meant anything but that? He foretells the result. Why are we to suppose that he did not foresee the means by which that result would happen? Why are we, in the name of all justice, to impute to him an expectation of miraculous interferences, about which he says no word? The curse which he foretold was the natural consequence of the sins of the nation. Why are we not to believe that he considered it as such?

Why are we not to believe that the Bible meaning of a curse, is simply the natural ill-consequence of men's own ill-actions? I believe that if you will apply the same rule to other places of Scripture, you will have reason to reverence the letter and the Spirit of Scripture more and more, and will free your minds from many a superst.i.tious and magical fancy, which will prevent you alike from understanding the Bible and the Commination Service.

The Book of Deuteronomy, like the rest of Moses' laws, says nothing whatever about the life to come. It says, that sin is to be punished, and virtue rewarded, in this life; and the Commination Service, when it quotes the Book of Deuteronomy, means so, so I presume, likewise. Indeed, if we look at the very remarkable, and most invaluable address which the Commination Service contains, we shall find its author saying the same thing, in the very pa.s.sages which are to some minds most offensive.

For even in this life the door of mercy may be shut, and we may cry in vain for mercy, when it is the time for justice. This is not merely a doctrine: it is a fact; a common, patent fact. Men do wrong, and escape, again and again, the just punishment of their deeds; but how often there are cases in which a man does not escape; when he is filled with the fruit of his own devices, and left to the misery which he has earned; when the covetous and dishonest man ruins himself past all recovery; when the profligate is left in a shameful old age, with worn-out body and defiled mind, to rot into an unhonoured grave; when the hypocrite who has tampered with his conscience is left without any conscience at all.

They have chosen the curse, and the curse is come upon them to the uttermost. So it is. Is the Commination service uncharitable, is the preacher uncharitable, when they tell men so? No more so, than the physician is uncharitable, when he says,--'If you go on misusing thus your lungs, or your digestion, you will ruin them past all cure.' Is G.o.d to be blamed because this is a fact? Why then because the other is a fact likewise?

Now if this be, as I believe, the doctrine of the commination service; if this be, as I believe, the message of Ash-Wednesday, it is one which is quite free from superst.i.tion or cruelty: but it is a message more disagreeable, and more terrible too, than any magical imprecations of harm to the sinner could bring. More disagreeable.

For which is more galling to human pride, to be told,--Sin is certainly a clever, and politic, and successful trade, as far as this world is concerned. It is only in the next world, or in the case of rare and peculiar visitations and judgments in this world, that it will harm you? Or to be told,--Sin is no more clever, politic, or successful here, than hereafter. The wrong-doing which looks to you so prudent is folly. You, man of the world as you may think yourself, are simply, as often as you do wrong, blind, ignorant, suicidal. You are your own curse; your acts are their own curse. The injury to your own character and spirit, the injury to your fellow-creatures, which will again re-act on you,--these are the curses of G.o.d, which you will feel some day too heavy to be borne. And which is more terrible? To tell a man, that G.o.d will judge and curse him by unexpected afflictions, or at least by casting him into Gehenna in the world to come: or to tell him, 'You are judged already. The curse is on you already?'

The first threat he may get rid of, by denying the fact; by saying that G.o.d does not generally interfere to punish bad men in this life; that he does not strike them dead, swallow them up; and he may even quote Scripture on his side, and call on Solomon to bear witness how as dieth the fool, so dieth wise man; and that there is one event to the righteous and the wicked.

As for the fear of Gehenna, again, after he dies: that is too dim and distant; too unlike anything which he has seen in this life (now that the tortures and Autos da fe of the middle age have disappeared) to frighten him very severely, except in rare moments, when his imagination is highly excited. And even then, he can--in practice he does--look forward to 'making his peace with G.o.d' as it is called, at last, and fulfilling Baalam's wish of dying the death of the righteous, after living the life of the wicked. He knows well, too, that when that day comes, he can find--alas! that it should be so--priests and preachers in plenty, of some communion or other, who will give him his viatic.u.m, and bid him depart in peace to that G.o.d, who has said that there is no peace to the wicked.

But terrible, truly terrible and heart searching for the wrongdoer is the message--G.o.d does not curse thee: thou hast cursed thyself.

G.o.d will not go out of his way to punish thee: thou hast gone out of his way, and thereby thou art punis.h.i.+ng thyself, just as, by abusing thy body, thou bringest a curse upon it; so by abusing thy soul. G.o.d does not break his laws to punish drunkenness or gluttony. The laws themselves, the laws of nature, the beneficent laws of life, nutrition, growth, and health, they punish thee; and kill by the very same means by which they make alive. And so with thy soul, thy character, thy humanity. G.o.d does not break his laws to punish its sins. The laws themselves punish; every fresh wrong deed, and wrong thought, and wrong desire of thine sets thee more and more out of tune with those immutable and eternal laws of the Moral Universe, which have their root in the absolute and necessary character of G.o.d himself. All things that he has ordained; the laws of the human body, the laws of the human soul, the laws of society, the laws of all heaven and earth are arrayed against thee; for thou hast arrayed thyself against them. They have not excommunicated thee: thou hast, single-handed, excommunicated thyself. In thine own self-will, thou hast set thyself to try thy strength against G.o.d and his whole universe. Dost thou fancy that he needs to interfere with the working of that universe, to punish such a worm as thee?

No more than the great mill engine need stop, and the overseer of it interfere with the machinery, if the drunken or careless workman should entangle himself among the wheels. The wheels move on, doing their duty, spinning cloth for the use of man: but the workman who should have worked with them, is entangled among them. He is out of his place; and slowly, but irresistibly, they are grinding him to powder, as the whole universe is grinding thee. Heart-searching, indeed, is such a message; for it will come home, not merely to that very rare character, the absolutely wicked man, the ideal sinner, at whom the preacher too often aims ideal arrows, which vanish in the air: not to him merely will it come home, but to ourselves, to us average human beings, inconsistent, half-formed, struggling lamely and confusedly between good and evil. Oh let us take home with us to-day this belief, the only belief in this matter possible in an age of science, which is daily revealing more and more that G.o.d is a G.o.d, not of disorder, but of order. Let us take home, I say, the awful belief, that every wrong act of ours does of itself sow the seeds of its own punishment; and that those seeds will a.s.suredly bear fruit, now, here in this life. Let us believe that G.o.d's judgments, though they will culminate, no doubt, hereafter in one great day, and "one divine far-off event, to which the whole creation moves," are yet about our path and about our bed, now, here, in this life. Let us believe, that if we are to prepare to meet our G.o.d, we must do it now, here in this life, yea and all day long; for he is not far off from any one of us, seeing that in him we live, and move, and have our being; and can never go from his presence, never flee from his spirit. Let us believe that G.o.d's good laws, and G.o.d's good order, are in themselves and of themselves, the curse and punishment of every sin of ours; and that Ash-Wednesday, returning year after year, whether we be glad or sorry, good or evil, bears witness to that most awful and yet most blessed fact.

My friends, this is the preacher's Ash-Wednesday's message: but, thanks be to G.o.d, it is not all. It is written--'If thou, Lord, wilt be extreme to mark what is done amiss: Oh Lord, who may abide it? For there is mercy with thee; therefore shalt thou be feared.'

It is written--'On whomsoever this stone shall fall, it shall grind him to powder:' but it is written too--'Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken;' and again, 'The broken and the contrite heart, O G.o.d, thou shall not despise.' There is such a thing as pardon; pardon full and free, for the sake of the precious blood of Christ. Lent may be a time of awe and of shame: but it is not a time of despair. Meanwhile remember this; that G.o.d has set before you blessing and cursing, and that you may turn your life and G.o.d's whole universe, as you will, either into that blessing or into that curse.

SERMON XII. WORK