of God that gives us any ground to believe that in that same faith, or
believing, or pardon, we will be instantly lifted up into the stature
of a man in Christ Jesus. What I mean to say is this: That there is
not one word in this Book that will justify any man in believing that
he may be brought by any process to the stature of a man in Christ
Jesus in a minute. But some good brother will say: "Oh! now I am just
a little afraid that you are striking against that blest old Methodist
doctrine of sanctification." No, I am not. I haven't said anything
about sanctification. But I will. If you are sanctified, or cleansed,
that is God's work, through faith, and He can do it in a second. Now,
understand me definitely, you cannot cleanse yourself. God cleanses
you through faith in the cleansing blood of His Son. It is His work.
You cannot grow into it. You can grow in it, but if you don't grow in
it you may know you are not in it--you are in something else. But you
can grow in it, because it is God's work, and He will do it when you
believe. But what of that? What are you after you are cleansed? I will
tell you. You are a clean baby: that is all. You are not a man in
Christ Jesus; you are only a babe--cleansed, indeed, and greatly
improved by the process, too, but you are not matured. Do not miss,
now, the broad distinction between purity and maturity. You are
purified, through faith, in a second; you are matured through many a
struggle and many a year. God cannot make a twenty-one-year-old saint
in one second less than twenty-one years. There is no platform marked
over with faith upon which a man may step and be lifted up into the
perfect stature of a man in Christ Jesus in a minute. It is not the
teaching of the Book. But all the year, loving, and giving, and
fighting, and praying, and walking in righteousness, you will mature
characters, and by and by you will grow into the manhood in Christ
Jesus that is set before us in the gospel. Now, if you come in here
and tell me that there is a baby over yonder in the next square, that
is three weeks old, and can talk Greek and Latin, and Spanish and
Italian, and solve all the problems in mathematics, I will tell you
that that is a monstrosity, and you don't want that kind of babies in
your house: they will turn you out in a few days. So, if you come
in here and tell me that you have, down in your prayer-meeting, a
spiritual baby three or four weeks old, that can teach all the old
saints, and can tell them all about God, and heaven, and faith, and
theology, and all about everything in the Church, I will tell you
that that is a monstrosity. And you don't want that kind in your
prayer-meeting; they will turn you out before a great while. St. Paul
says: "Ye are born babes, and ye are fed on milk"; and the trouble
with too many of us is that we keep on that diet when we ought to be
eating meat. The Master says: "First the blade, then the ear; after
that, the full corn in the ear." So I am free to say that God's plan
of making saints is to give them the divine germ--if you please, the
supernatural principle; or, as our scientists would say, with proper
environments, "That have the divine initial impulse," but as our
fathers would have said, "They got through at the altar"; born of God,
and then cleansed of God in the true process of education and faith,
they matured at the harvest. God gives us the start and the cleansing,
and we have to do all the rest of it. He will give us opportunity for
growth by loading and goading us, by setting on our track every sort
of force to test us--to "polish us," as the old Hebrew word means.
When Abraham was tested he was "polished." He will put us on such
lines that, if we stand true to our convictions and walk according to
the light we have, He will bring us on to manhood.
See how wonderfully the Word of God fits down upon this? Take that
remarkable passage that, to me, is as beautiful as anything can be,
where He says: "Come unto Me, all ye that labor"--I know what
that means in the struggle under sin--"all ye that labor and are
heavy-laden, and I will give"--I will give: it is mine. You cannot
earn it: you cannot buy it; you cannot find it; you cannot dig it out.
It is mine--"I will give you rest"--the blest pardon that only God can
give. Then, in the very next second and breath, He says: "Take my yoke
upon you"--that means work--"and learn of me"--that is more work--and,
"For I am meek and lowly of heart, and ye shall find"--that is yours;
I do not give that to you; that is not mine to give; that is yours.
"Ye shall find rest to your souls." That is the rest that comes from
the crystallization of the character in righteousness; that comes from
the habit of believing, and the habit of obeying, and the habit of
praying; from the habit of righteousness, until the old saint is ready
for any struggle, and never expects to be turned aside. That, I take
it, is God's plan of building up saints, and for fitting them for the
rest that is in God, that abides.
WHYTE
EXPERIENCE
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Alexander Whyte, senior minister of St. George's Free Church,
Edinburgh, was born at Kirriemuir (Thrums), Scotland, in 1837. He was
educated at Aberdeen University (M.A., 1862), and at New College,
Edinburgh (1862-66), and after being assistant minister of Free
St. John's, Glasgow, from 1866 to 1870, became at first assistant
minister, and later (1873) minister, of Free St. George's, Edinburgh,
a position which be still retains, having had there an uninterrupted
success. He is the author of a number of biographies, his most recent
work being "An Appreciation of Newman."
WHYTE
BORN IN 1837
EXPERIENCE
_And patience; experience; and experience, hope_.--Romans v., 4.
The deeper we search into the Holy Scriptures the more experimental
matter do we discover in that divine Book. Both in the Old Testament
and in the New Testament the spiritual experiences of godly men form a
large part of the sacred record. And it gives a very fresh and a very
impressive interest to many parts of the heavenly Book when we see how
much of its contents are made up of God's ways with His people as well
as of their ways with Him. In other words, when we see how much of
purely experimental matter is gathered up into the Word of God. In a
brilliant treatise published the other year, entitled, "The Gospel in
the Gospels," the author applies this experimental test even to our
Lord's teaching and preaching. Writing of the beatitudes in our Lord's
Sermon on the Mount that fresh and penetrating writer says: "When our
Savior speaks to us concerning what constitutes our true blessedness
He is simply describing His own experience. The beatitudes are not the
immediate revelation of His Godhead, they are much more the impressive
testimony of His manhood. He knew the truth of what He was saying
because He had verified it all in Himself for thirty experimental
years." Now if that is so demonstrably true of so many of our Lord's
contributions to Holy Scripture, in the nature of things, how much
more must it be true of the experimental contributions that David and
Paul have made to the same sacred record. And we ourselves are but
imitating them in their great experimental methods when we give our
very closest attention to personal and spiritual religion, both
in ourselves and in all our predecessors and in all our own
contemporaries in the life of grace in all lands and in all languages.
Now by far the deepest and by far the most personal experience of
every spiritually minded man is his experience of his own inward
sinfulness. The sinfulness of his sin; the malignity of his sin; the
ungodliness and the inhumanity of his sin; the dominion that his sin
still has over him; the simply indescribable evil of his sin in every
way: all that is a matter, not of any man's doctrine and authority;
all that is the personal experience and the scientific certainty, as
we say, of every spiritually minded man; every man, that is, who takes
any true observation of what goes on in his own heart. The simply
unspeakable sinfulness of our own hearts is not the doctrine of David,
and of Christ, and of Paul, and of Luther, and of Calvin, and of
Bunyan, and of Edwards, and of Shepard only. It is their universal
doctrine, indeed, it could not be otherwise; but it is also the
every-day experience and the every-day agony of every man among
ourselves whose eyes are open upon his own heart.
And then, if you are that spiritually enlightened man, from the day
when you begin to have that heart-sore experience of yourself you
will begin to search for and to discover those great passages of Holy
Scripture that contain the recorded experiences of men like yourself.
"I am but dust and ashes," said the first father of all penitent and
believing and praying men. "I am vile," sobs Job. "Behold, I am vile,
and I will lay my hand upon my mouth. I have heard of thee by the
hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor
myself and repent in dust and ashes." And David has scarcely heart or
a pen for anything else. "There is no soundness in my flesh because of
thine anger; neither is there any rest in my bones because of my sin.
My loins are filled with a loathsome disease. For, behold, I was
shapen in iniquity." And Daniel, the most blameless of men and a man
greatly beloved in heaven and on earth: "I was left alone and
there remained no strength in me: for my comeliness was turned to
corruption, and I retained no strength." And every truly spiritually
minded man has Paul's great experimental passage by heart; that great
experimental and autobiographic passage which has kept so many of
God's most experienced saints from absolute despair, as so many of
them have testified. Yes! There were experimental minds long before
Bacon and there was a great experimental literature long before the
Essays and the "Advancement" and the "_Instauratio Magna_."
And then among many other alterations of intellectual insight and
spiritual taste that will come to you with your open eyes, there will
be your new taste, not only for your Bible, but also for spiritual
and experimental preaching. The spiritual preachers of our day are
constantly being blamed for not tuning their pulpits to the new themes
of our so progressive day. Scientific themes are prest upon them
and critical themes and social themes and such like. But your new
experience of your own sinfulness and of God's salvation: your new
need and your new taste for spiritual and experimental truth will not
lead you to join in that stupid demand. As intelligent men you will
know where to find all the new themes of your new day and you will be
diligent students of them all, so far as your duty lies that way, and
so far as your ability and your opportunity go; but not on the Lord's
Day and not in His house of prayer and praise. The more inward, and
the more spiritual, and the more experimental, your own religion
becomes, the more will you value inward, and spiritual, and
experimental preaching. And the more will you resent the intrusion
into the evangelical pulpit of those secular matters that so much
absorb unspiritual men. There is another equally impertinent advice
that our preachers are continually having thrust upon them from the
same secular quarter. And that is that they ought entirely to drop
the old language of the Scriptures, and the creeds, and the classical
preachers, and ought to substitute for it the scientific and the
journalistic jargon of the passing day. But with your ever-deepening
knowledge of yourselves and with the disciplined and refined taste
that will accompany such knowledge you will rather demand of your
preachers more and more depth of spiritual preaching and more and more
purity of spiritual style. And then more and more your estimates of
preaching and your appreciations of preachers will have real insight
and real value and real weight with us. "The natural man receiveth
not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness to him:
neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." But
he that is spiritual discerneth spiritual things and spiritual persons
and he has the true authority to speak and to write about them.
And then, for all doubting and skeptically disposed persons among
you, your own experience of your evil heart, if you will receive that
experience and will seriously attend to it, that will prove to you
the true apologetic for the theism of the Holy Scriptures and for the
soul-saving faith of Jesus Christ. What is it about which you are
in such debate and doubt? Is it about the most fundamental of
all facts--the existence, and the nature, and the grace, and the
government of Almighty God? Well, if you are really in earnest to know
the truth, take this way of it: this way that has brought light and
peace of mind to so many men. Turn away at once and forever from all
your unbecoming debates about your Maker and Preserver and turn to
what is beyond all debate, your own experience of yourselves. There is
nothing else of which you can be so sure and certain as of the sin and
the misery of your own evil hearts, your own evil hearts so full
of self-seeking, and envy, and malice, and pride, and hatred, and
revenge, and lust. And on the other hand, there is nothing of which
you can be so convinced as that love, and humility, and meekness,
and purity, and benevolence, and brotherly kindness, are your true
happiness, or would be, if you could only attain to all these
beatitudes. Well, Jesus Christ has attained to them all. And Jesus
Christ came into this world at first, and He still comes into it by
His Word and by His Spirit in order that you may attain to all His
goodness and all His truth and may thus escape forever from all your
own ignorance and evil. As William Law, the prince of apologists,
has it: "Atheism is not the denial of a first omnipotent cause. Real
atheism is not that at all. Real atheism is purely and solely nothing
else but the disowning, and the forsaking, and the renouncing of the
goodness, and the virtue, and the benevolence and the meekness, of
the divine nature: that divine nature which has made itself so
experimental and so self-evident in us all. And as this experimental
and self-evident knowledge is the only sure knowledge you can have of
God; even so, it is such a knowledge that cannot be doubted or
debated away. For it is as sure and as self-evident as is your own
experience." And so is it through all the succeeding doctrines of
grace and truth: The incarnation of the divine Son: His life, His
death, His resurrection, and His intercession: and then your own life
of faith, and prayer, and holy obedience: and then your death, "dear
in God's sight." Beginning with this continually experienced need of
God, all these things will follow, with an intellectual, and a moral,
and a spiritual demonstration, that will soon place them beyond all
debate or doubt to you. Only know thyself and admit the knowledge:
and all else will follow as sure as the morning sun follows the dark
midnight.
And then in all these ways, you will attain to a religious experience
of your own, that will be wholly and exclusively your own. It will not
be David's experience, nor Paul's, nor Luther's, nor Bunyan's; much as
you will study their experiences, comparing them all with your own. As
you go deeper and ever deeper, into your own spiritual experience,
you will gradually gather a select and an invaluable library of such
experiences, and you will less and less read anything else with very
much interest or delight. But your own unwritten experience will, all
the time, be your own, and in your own spiritual experience you will
have no exact fellow. For your tribulations, which work in you your
experience,--as the text has it,--your tribulations are such that in
all your experimental reading in the Bible, in spiritual biography, in
spiritual autobiography, you have never met the like of them. Either
the writers have been afraid to speak out the whole truth about their
tribulations; or, what is far more likely, they had no tribulations
for a moment to match with yours. There has not been another so weak
and so evil heart as yours since weak and evil hearts began to be;
nor an evil life quite like yours; nor surrounding circumstances
so cross-bearing as yours; nor a sinner, beset with all manner of
temptations and trials, behind and before, like you. So much are you
alone that, if your fifty-first Psalm, or your seventh of the Romans,
or your "Confessions," or your "Private Devotions," or your "Grace
Abounding," could ever venture to be all honestly and wholly written
and published, your name would, far and away, eclipse them all. You do
not know what a singular and what an original and what an unheard-of
experience your experience is destined to be; if only you do not break
down under it; as you must not and will not do.
Begin, then, to make some new experiments upon a new life of faith,
and of the obedience of faith. And begin to-day. If in anything you
have been following a false and an unphilosophical and an unscriptural
way of life, leave that wrong and evil way at once. Be true Baconians,
at once, as all the true men of science will tell you to be. "If we
were religious men like you," they will all say to you, "we would do,
and at once, what you are now being told to do. We would not debate,
or doubt, but we would make experiment, and would follow out the
experience": so all the scientifically minded men will say to you.
Come away then, and make some new experiments from this morning. For
one thing, make a new experiment on secret prayer. And then come forth
from your place of secret prayer and make immediate experiment on more
love, and more patience, and more consideration for other men,
and, especially, for the men of your own household. Be more
generous-minded, and more open-handed, as God has been so
generous-minded, and so open-handed toward you: if that has indeed
been so. Make experiment upon the poor and the needy and help them
according to your ability and opportunity and watch the result of the
experiment upon yourself; and so on, as your awakened conscience, and
as the regenerate part of your own heart, will prompt you and will
encourage you to do.
Make such experiments as these and see if a new peace of conscience
and a new happiness of heart does not begin to come to you, according
to that great experimental psalm,--"Oh, that my people had hearkened
unto me, and Israel had walked in my ways! I should soon have subdued
their enemies, and turned my hand against their adversaries. He should
have fed them also with the finest of the wheat: and with honey out of
the rock should I have satisfied thee."
WATKINSON
THE TRANSFIGURED SACKCLOTH
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
William L. Watkinson, Wesleyan minister, was born at Hull, 1838, was
educated privately and rose to eminence as a preacher and writer.
The Rev. William Durban calls him "The classic preacher of British
Methodism." "He ranks," says Dr. Durban, "with Dr. Dallinger and the
Rev. Thomas Gunn Selby as the three most learned and refined of living
preachers in the English Methodist pulpit. Dr. Watkinson is famous for
the glittering illustrations which adorn his style. These are for the
most part gathered from biography, the classics, and science, and
of late years Dr. Watkinson has become more and more addicted to
spiritualizing the aspects of modern scientific discovery. Dr.
Watkinson never reads his utterances from a manuscript. Nor does
he preach memoriter, as far as the language of his addresses is
concerned. They are always carefully thought out and are never
characterized by florid diction. His simple, strong Anglo-Saxon
endears him to the people, for he is never guilty of an obscure
sentence. He is in the habit of saying, 'I have always been aware that
I have no power of voice for declamation, and therefore I can only
hope for success in the pulpit by originality of thought.'" He was
president of the Wesleyan Conference, 1897-1898, and editor of the
_Wesleyan Church_, 1893-1890. He has published several volumes of
sermons.
WATKINSON
BORN IN 1838
THE TRANSFIGURED SACKCLOTH[1]
[Footnote: Printed by permission of B.P. Button & Company from "The
Transfigured Sackcloth and Other Sermons," by W.L. Watkinson.]
_For none might enter into the king's gate clothed with
sackcloth_.--Esther iv., 2.
The sign of affliction was thus excluded from the Persian court in
order that royalty might not be discomposed. The monarch was to see
bright raiment, flowers, pageantry, smiling faces only; to hear
only the voices of singing men and singing women; no smatch of the
abounding wormwood of life was to touch his lip, no glimpse of its we
to disturb his serenity. The master of an empire spreading from India
to Ethiopia was not to be annoyed by a passing shadow of mortality.
Now, this disposition to place an interdict on disagreeable and
painful things still survives. Men of all ranks and conditions
ingeniously hide from themselves the dark facts of life--putting these
aside, ignoring, disguising, forgetting, denying them. Revelation,
however, lends no sanction to this habit of passing by the tragedy
of life with averted face; and in this discourse we wish to show the
entire reasonableness of revelation in its frank recognition of the
dark aspects of existence. Christianity is sometimes scouted as "the
religion of sorrow," and many amongst us are ready to avow that the
Persian forbidding the sackcloth is more to their taste than the
Egyptian or the Christian dragging the corpse through the banquet; but
we confidently contend that the recognition by Christ of the morbid
phases of human life is altogether wise and gracious.
I. We consider, first, the recognition by revelation of sin. Sackcloth
is the outward and visible sign of sin, guilt, and misery. How men
shut their eyes to this most terrible reality--coolly ignoring,
skilfully veiling, emphatically denying it! "The heart from the moment
of its first beat instinctively longs for the beautiful...." We strive
for the right and the true: it is circumstance that thrusts wrong
upon us. What is popularly called sin these philosophers call error,
accident, inexperience, indecision, misdirection, imperfection,
disharmony; but they will not allow the presence in the human heart of
a malign force which asserts itself against God, and against the
order of His universe. That principle which is darkness in the mind,
perverseness in the will, idolatry in the affections, "every passion's
wild excess, anger, lust, and pride,"--the existence of any such
principle they absolutely and scornfully deny. There is no evil in the
universe, all is good, and where everything is good human nature is
still the best. A single substance comprises all that is, and no place
is left for that profoundly decisive and destructive element called
sin; all that we have to do is to descant on the marvelous loveliness
of the world, the serene harmony of the universe, man's love of the
true, the beautiful, and the good. Intellectual masters like Emerson
and Renan. ignore conscience; they refuse to acknowledge the
selfishness, the baseness, the cruelty of society; they are deaf to
the groans of creation; they smile, and expect us to smile, whilst
they clap a purple patch of rhetoric on the running sores of humanity.
No sackcloth must pass their gate, and no craftsman of Ind ever wove
gossamer half so delicate and delightful as the verbal veil with which
these literary artists attempt to conceal the leprosy of our nature.
And men generally are willing to dupe themselves touching the fact
and power of sin; they are strongly disinclined to look directly and
honestly at that inner confusion of which we are all more or less
conscious. We willingly acknowledge our transgression of the higher
law, that we do the things we ought not to do, and leave undone the
things that we ought to do; we have an unpleasant feeling that all is
not right, nay, indeed, that something is seriously wrong; but we do
not unshrinkingly acquaint ourselves with the malady of the spirit as
we should at once acquaint ourselves with any malady hinting itself in
the flesh. The sackcloth must not mar our shallow happiness. Great is
the power of self-deception, but in no other direction do we permit
ourselves to be more profoundly cheated than we do in this. In the
vision of beautiful things we forget the troubles of conscience,
as the first sinners hid themselves amid the leaves and flowers of
Paradise; in fashion and splendor we forget our guilty sorrow, as
medieval mourners sometimes concealed their cerements with raiment of
purple and gold; in the noises of the world we become oblivious of the
interior discords, as soldiers forget their wounds amid the stir and
trumpets of the battle. With a busy life, a gay life, we manage to
forget the skeleton of the heart, rarely permitting ourselves to look
upon the ominous specter which some way or other has entrenched itself
within us, and which is the bane of our existence.
Nevertheless, sin thrusts itself upon our attention. The greatest
thinkers in all ages have been constrained to recognize its presence
and power. The creeds of all nations declare the fact that men
everywhere feel the bitter working and intolerable burden of
conscience. And, however we may strive to forget our personal
sinfulness, the cry is ever being wrung from us in the deepest moments
of life, "O wretched man that I am! who can deliver me from the body
of this death?" The sense of sin has persisted through changing
generations; it is the burden of experience and philosophy, and
the genius of the race has exhausted itself in devising schemes of
salvation.
Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, knew of truth, justice, purity, and
love, of the supreme and eternal law of righteousness; they knew that
man alone of all this lower creation is subject to this transcendental
rule; they knew also that the violation of this highest law lay at the
root of the world's mysterious and complex suffering--in other words,
that sin was the secret of the tragedy of life. The beasts are happy
because they are beasts; they do not lie awake in the dark weeping
over their sins, because they have no sins to weep over; they do not
discuss their duty to God, they do it; whilst, on the contrary, men
are unhappy because being subject to the highest law of all, and
competent to fulfil that law in its utmost requirements, they have
consciously fallen short of it, wilfully contradicted it. We cannot
accept the coat of many colors, whatever the flatterers may say; the
sackcloth is ours, and it eats our spirit like fire.