should you care for the opinion of your fellow-men? If you are doing
right, what matter what they say of you?
Yes, my friends, if you are doing right. But if you are not doing
right--What then?
If you have only been fancying that you are doing right, and suspect
suddenly that you have been very likely doing wrong--What then?
When a man tells me that he does not care what people think of him; that
they cannot shame him: in the first place, I do not quite believe that he
is speaking truth; and in the next place, I hope he is _not_ speaking
truth. I hope--for his own sake--that he does care what people think of
him: or else I must suspect him of being very dull or very conceited.
And if he tells me that the old prophets, and holy, and just, and heroic
men in all ages, never cared for people's laughing at them and despising
them, provided they were doing right according to their own conscience: I
answer--That he knows nothing about the matter; that he has not honestly
read the writings of these men. I say that the Psalmist who wrote Ps.
119, was a man, on his own shewing, intensely open to the feeling of
shame, and felt intensely what men said of him; felt intensely slander
and insult. We talk of independent and true patriots now-a-days. I will
tell you of four of the noblest patriots the world ever saw, who were men
of that stamp. I say that Isaiah was such a man; that Jeremiah was such
a man; that Ezekiel was such a man; that their writings shew that they
felt intensely the rebukes and the contempt which they had to endure from
those whom they tried to warn and save. I say again that St Paul, as may
be seen from his own epistles, was such a man; a man who was intensely
sensitive of what men thought and said of him; yearning after the love
and approbation of his fellow-men, and above all of his
fellow-countrymen, his own flesh and blood; and that that feeling in him,
which may have been hurtful to him before he was converted, was of the
greatest use to him after his conversion; that it enabled him to win all
hearts, because he felt with men and for men; and gained him over the
hearts of men such a power as no mere human being ever had before or
since.
And I say that of all men the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, had that
feeling; that longing for the love and appreciation of men--and above
all, for the love and appreciation of His countrymen according to the
flesh, the Jews, He had--strange as it may seem, yet there it is in the
Gospels, written for ever and undeniable--that capacity of shame which is
the mark of true nobleness of soul.
He endured the cross, despising the shame. Yes: but there are too many
on earth who endure shame with brazen faces, just because they do not
feel it. If He had not felt the shame, what merit in despising it? It
was His glory that He felt the shame; and yet conquered the shame, and
crushed it down by the might of His love for fallen man.
Do you fancy that in His agony in the garden, when His sweat was as great
drops of blood, that it was only bodily fear of pain and death which
crushed Him for the moment? He felt that, I doubt not; as He had to
taste death for every man, and feel all human weakness, yet without sin.
But it was a deeper, more painful, and yet more noble feeling than mere
fear which then convulsed His sacred heart; even the feeling of shame--the
mockery of the crowd--the--But I dare not enlarge on anything so awful;
at least I will say this--That he had to cry as none ever cried before or
since, "O God, in thee have I trusted, let me never be confounded;" for
he had, it seems, actually, at one supreme moment, to feel confounded;
and to say, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" That was the
highest and most precious jewel of all his self-sacrifice. Of it let us
only say--
Our Lord and Saviour stooped to be confounded for a moment, that we might
not be confounded to all eternity.
And therefore our blessed Lord is to us an example. As he did, so must
we try to do. He entered into glory, by suffering shame, and yet
despising it. He submitted to be confounded before men, that He might
not be confounded in the sight of God His Father. And so must we,
sometimes, at least. Every man who makes up his mind to do right and to
be good, must expect ridicule now and then. Rich or poor, boy or man, if
you try to keep your hands clean, and your path straight, the world will
think you a fool, and will be ready enough to tell you so; for it is
cruel and insolent enough. And the more tender your heart; the more you
wish for the love and approbation of your fellow-men; the more of noble
and modest self-distrust there is in you, the more painful will that be
to you; the more you will be tempted to obey man, and not God, and to
follow after the multitude to do evil, merely to keep the peace, and live
a quiet life, and not be laughed at and tormented. And thus the fear of
man brings a snare; and naught can deliver you out of that snare, save
the opposite fear--the fear of God, which is the same as trust in God.
Joseph of old feared God when he was tempted; and said, "How can I do
this great wickedness, and sin against God?" But I doubt not there were
plenty in Egypt who would have called him a fool for his pains. There
are hundreds of gay youths in any great city--there may be a few in this
Abbey now for aught I know--who would have laughed loudly enough at
Joseph for throwing away the opportunity of what certain foolish French
have learnt to call, as its proper name, a "bonne fortune"--a piece of
good luck.--As if breaking the 7th Commandment could be aught but bad
fortune, and the cause of endless miseries in this life and the life to
come.
And it may be, as Joseph was all but confounded and brought to shame, at
least from man, when he found that all that he gained by fearing God
was--a false accusation, the very shame and contempt from which he most
shrank, danger of death, imprisonment in a dungeon.
But he was true to God, and God was true to him. He trusted in God; and
therefore he feared God: for he trusted that God's laws were just and
good, and worth obeying; and therefore he was afraid to break them. He
trusted in God; and therefore he hoped in God; for he trusted that God
was strong enough and good enough to deliver him out of prison, and make
his righteousness as clear as the light and his just dealing as the
noonday. He cried out of his prison, doubt it not, many a time and
oft--"O God, in thee have I trusted; let me never be confounded."
And he was not confounded. He came into Egypt a slave. He was cast into
prison on a shameful accusation: but he came out of prison to be a ruler
and a prince, honoured and obeyed by the greatest nation of the old
world. He trusted in God, and he was not confounded for ever; even as
the Lord Christ trusted in God and was not confounded for ever; even as
we, if we do not wish to be confounded for ever, must trust in God; and
instead of being scornful, careless, conceited, must fear Him, and say,
"My flesh trembleth because of Thy righteous judgments." And then the
laughter of fools will end, where it began, in harmless noise, like (says
Solomon) the crackling of thorns under a pot. Then, whosoever may scorn
you on earth, the great God in heaven will not scorn you. You may be
confounded for a moment here on earth. Worldly people may take advantage
of your misfortunes, and cry over you--There, there, so would we have it.
Take him and persecute him, for there is none to deliver him; where is
now his God? So it may be with you; for as surely as you fall, many a
cur will spring up and bark at you, who dared not open his mouth at you
while you stood safe. Or--worse by far than that--the world may take
hold of your really weak points, of your inconsistencies, of your faults
and failings; and cry--Fie on thee, fie on thee. We saw it with our
eyes. For all his high professions, for all his talk of truth and
justice, he is no better than the rest of the world. And that scoff does
go very near to confound a man; because he feels that it is half true,
half deserved, and is afraid that it may be quite true and quite
deserved: and then confounded indeed he would be, by his own conscience
and by God, as well as by man. All he can do is, to cry to God, like him
who wrote the 119th Psalm,--I have stuck unto thy testimonies: O Lord,
confound me not. I know I am weak, ignorant, unsuccessful; full of
faults too, and failings, which make me ashamed of myself every day of my
life. I have gone astray like a sheep that is lost. But seek thy
servant, O Lord, for I do not forget thy commandments. I am trying to
learn my duty. I am trying to do my duty. I have stuck unto thy
testimonies: O Lord, confound me not. Man may confound me. But do not
thou, of thy mercy and pity, O Lord. Do not let me find, when I die, or
before I die, that all my labour has been in vain; that I am not a better
man, not a wiser man, not a more useful man after all. Do not let my
grey hairs go down with sorrow to the grave. Do not let me die with the
miserable thought that, in spite of all my struggles to do my duty, my
life has been a failure, and I a fool. Do not let me wake in the next
life, like Dives in the torment, to be utterly confounded; to find that I
was all wrong, and have nothing left but everlasting disappointment and
confusion of face. O Lord, who didst endure all shame for me, save me
from that most utter shame. O God, in thee have I trusted; let me never
be confounded.
Wake in the next life to find oneself confounded? Alas! alas! Many a
man wakes in this life to find himself that; and really sometimes by no
fault, seemingly, of his own: so that all he can do is to be dumb, and
not to open his mouth, for it is God's doing. For a man's worst miseries
and sorrows are, too often, caused not by himself, but by those whom he
loves.
Consider the one case of vice, or even of mere ingratitude, in those
nearest and dearest to a man's heart; and of being so confounded through
them, and by them, in spite of all love, care, strictness, tenderness,
teaching, prayers--what not--and all in vain.
No wonder that, under that bitterest blow, valiant and virtuous men, ere
now, have never lifted up their heads again, but turned their faces to
the wall, and died: and may the Lord have mercy on them. Confounded they
have been in this world; confounded they will not be, we must trust, in
the world to come. The Lord of all pity will pity them, and pour His oil
and wine into their aching wounds, and bring them to His own inn, and to
His secret dwelling-place, where the wicked cease from troubling, and the
weary are at rest.
One word more, and I have done. Do you wish to pray, with hope that you
may be heard,--O Lord, confound me not, and bring me not to shame? Then
hold to one commandment of Christ's. Do to others as you would they
should do to you. For with what measure you measure to your fellow-men,
it shall be measured to you again. Have charity, have patience, have
mercy. Never bring a human being, however silly, ignorant, or weak,
above all any little child, to shame and confusion of face. Never, by
cruelty, by petulance, by suspicion, by ridicule, even by selfish and
silly haste; never, above all, by indulging in the devilish pleasure of a
sneer, crush what is finest, and rouse up what is coarsest in the heart
of any fellow-creature. Never confound any human soul in the hour of its
weakness. For then, it may be, in the hour of thy weakness, Christ will
not confound thee.
SERMON VIII. THE SHAKING OF THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH.
HEBREWS XII. 26-29.
Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven. And this
word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are
shaken, as of things that are made, that those things which cannot be
shaken may remain. Wherefore we receiving a kingdom which cannot be
moved, let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with
reverence and godly fear: for our God is a consuming fire.
This is one of the Royal texts of Scripture. It is inexhaustible, like
the God who inspired it. It has fulfilled itself again and again, at
different epochs. It fulfilled itself specially and notoriously in the
first century. But it fulfilled itself again in the fifth century; and
again at the Crusades; and again at the Reformation in the sixteenth
century. And it may be that it is fulfilling itself at this very day;
that in this century, both in the time of our fathers and in our own, the
Lord has been shaking the heavens and the earth, that those things which
can be shaken may be removed, as things that are made, while those things
which cannot be shaken may remain.
All confess this to be true, each in his own words. They talk of this
age as one of change; of rapid progress, for good or evil; of unexpected
discoveries; of revolutions, intellectual, moral, social, as well as
political. Our notions of the physical universe are rapidly altering,
with the new discoveries of science; and our notions of ethics and
theology are altering as rapidly. The era assumes a different aspect to
different minds, just as did the first century after Christ, according as
men look forward to the future with hope, or back to the past with
regret. Some glory in the nineteenth century as one of rapid progress
for good; as the commencement of a new era for humanity; as the
inauguration of a Reformation as grand as that of the sixteenth century.
Others bewail it as an age of rapid decay; in which the old landmarks are
being removed, the old paths lost; in which we are rushing headlong into
scepticism and atheism; in which the world and the Church are both in
danger; and the last day is at hand.
Both parties may be right; and yet both may be wrong. Men have always
talked thus, at great crises in the world's life. They talked thus in
the first century; and in the fifth, and in the eleventh; and again in
the sixteenth; and then both parties were partially right and partially
wrong; and so they may be now. What they meant to say, what they wanted
to say, what we mean and want to say, has been said already for us in far
deeper, wider, and more accurate words, by him who wrote this wonderful
Epistle to the Hebrews, when he told the Jews of his time that the Lord
was shaking the heavens and the earth, that those things which were
shaken might be removed, as things that are made--cosmogonies, systems,
theories, prejudices, fashions, of man's invention: while those things
which could not be shaken might remain, because they were according to
the mind and will of God, eternal as that source from whence they came
forth, even the bosom of God the Father.
"Yet once more I shake, not the earth only, but also heaven."
How has the earth been shaken in our days; and the heaven likewise. How
rapidly have our conceptions of both altered. How easy, simple, certain,
it all looked to our forefathers in the middle age. How difficult,
complex, uncertain, it all looks to us. With increased knowledge has
come--not increased doubt: that I deny utterly. I deny, once and for
all, that this age is an irreverent age. I say that an irreverent age is
one like the age of the Schoolmen; when men defined and explained all
heaven and earth by a priori theories, and cosmogonies invented in the
cloister; and dared, poor, simple, ignorant mortals, to fancy that they
could comprehend and gauge the ways of Him Whom the heaven and the heaven
of heavens could not contain. This, this is irreverence: but it is
neither irreverence nor want of faith, if a man, awed by the mystery
which encompasses him from the cradle to the grave, shall lay his hand
upon his mouth, with Job, and obey the voice which cries to him from
earth and heaven--"Be still, and know that as the heavens are higher than
the earth, so are my ways higher than thy ways, and my thoughts higher
than thine."
But it was all easy, and simple, and certain enough to our forefathers.
The earth, according to the popular notion, was a flat plane; or, if it
were, as the wiser held, a sphere, yet antipodes were an unscriptural
heresy. Above it were the heavens, in which the stars were fixed, or
wandered; and above them heaven after heaven, each tenanted by its own
orders of beings, up to that heaven of heavens in which Deity--and by
Him, be it always remembered, the mother of Deity--was enthroned.
And if above the earth was the kingdom of light, and purity, and
holiness, what could be more plain, than that below it was the kingdom of
darkness, and impurity, and sin? That was no theory to our forefathers:
it was a physical fact. Had not even the heathens believed as much, and
said so, by the mouth of the poet Virgil? He had declared that the mouth
of Tartarus lay in Italy, hard by the volcanic lake Avernus; and after
the unexpected eruption of Vesuvius in the first century, nothing seemed
more clear than that Virgil was right; and that men were justified in
talking of Tartarus, Styx, and Phlegethon as indisputable Christian
entities. Etna, Stromboli, Hecla, were (according to this cosmogony) in
like wise mouths of hell; and there were not wanting holy hermits, who
had heard, from within those craters, shrieks, and clanking chains, and
the howls of demons tormenting the souls of the endlessly lost.
Our forefathers were not aware that, centuries before the Incarnation of
our Lord, the Buddhist priests had held exactly the same theory of moral
retribution; and that, painted on the walls of Buddhist temples, might be
seen horrors identical with those which adorned the walls of many a
Christian Church, in the days when men believed in this Tartarology as
firmly as they now believe in the results of chemistry or of astronomy.
And now--How is the earth shaken, and the heavens likewise, in that very
sense in which the expression is used by him who wrote to the Hebrews?
Our conceptions of them are shaken. How much of that mediaeval cosmogony
do educated men believe, in the sense in which they believe that the
three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, or that if they
steal their neighbour's goods they commit a sin?
The earth has been shaken for us, more and more violently, as the years
have rolled on. It was shaken when Astronomy told us that the earth was
not the centre of the universe, but a tiny planet revolving round a sun
in a remote region thereof.
It was shaken when Geology told us that the earth had endured for
countless ages, during which continents had become oceans, and oceans
continents, again and again. And even now, it is being shaken by
researches into the antiquity of man, into the origin and permanence of
species, which--let the result be what it will--must in the meanwhile
shake for us theories and dogmas which have been undisputed for 1500
years.
And with the rest of our cosmogony, that conception of a physical
Tartarus below the earth has been shaken likewise, till good men have
been fain to find a fresh place for it in the sun, or in a comet; or to
patronize the probable, but as yet unproved theory of a central fire
within the earth; not on any scientific grounds, but simply if by any
means they can assign a region in space, wherein material torment can be
inflicted on the spirits of the lost.
And meanwhile the heavens, the spiritual world, is being shaken no less.
More and more frequently, more and more loudly, men are asking--not
sceptics merely, but pious men, men who wish to be, and who believe
themselves to be, orthodox Christians--more and more loudly are such men
asking questions which demand an answer, with a learning and an
eloquence, as well as with a devoutness and a reverence for Scripture,
which--whether rightly or wrongly employed--is certain to command
attention.
Rightly or wrongly, these men are asking, whether the actual and literal
words of Scripture really involve the mediaeval theory of an endless
Tartarus.
They are saying, "It is not we who deny, but you who assert, endless
torments, who are playing fast and loose with the letter of Scripture.
You are reading into it conceptions borrowed from Virgil, Dante, Milton,
when you translate into the formula 'endless torment' such phrases as
'the outer darkness,' 'the fire of Gehenna,' 'the worm that dieth not;'
which, according to all just laws of interpretation, refer not to the
next life, but to this life, and specially to the approaching catastrophe
of the Jewish nation; or when you say that eternal death really means
eternal life--only life in torture."
Rightly or wrongly, they are saying this; and then they add, "We do not
yield to you in love and esteem for Scripture. We demand not a looser,
but a stricter; not a more metaphoric, but a more literal; not a more
contemptuous, but a more reverent interpretation thereof."
So these men speak, rightly or wrongly. And for good or for evil, they
will be heard.
And with these questions others have arisen, not new at all--say these
men--but to be found, amid many contradictions, in the writings of all
the best divines, when they have given up for a moment systems and
theories, and listened to the voice of their own hearts; questions
natural enough to an age which abhors cruelty, has abolished torture,
labours for the reformation of criminals, and debates--rightly or
wrongly--about abolishing capital punishment. Men are asking questions
about the heaven--the spiritual world--and saying--"The spiritual world?
Is it only another material world which happens to be invisible now, but
which may become visible hereafter: or is it not rather the moral
world--the world of right and wrong? Heaven? Is not the true and real
heaven the kingdom of love, justice, purity, beneficence? Is not that
the eternal heaven wherein God abides for ever, and with Him those who
are like God? And hell? Is it not rather the anarchy of hate,
injustice, impurity, uselessness; wherein abides all that is opposed to
God?"
And with those thoughts come others about moral retribution--"What is its
purpose? Can it--can any punishment have any right purpose save the
correction, or the annihilation, of the criminal? Can God, in this
respect, be at once less merciful and less powerful than man? Is He so
controlled by necessity that He is forced to bring into the world beings
whom He knows to be incorrigible, and doomed to endless misery? And if
not so controlled, is not the alternative as to His character even more
fearful? He bids us copy His justice, His love. Is that His justice,
that His love, which if we copied, we should call each other, and
deservedly, utterly unjust and unloving? Can there be one morality for
God, and another for man, made in the image of God? Are these dark
dogmas worthy of a Father who hateth nothing that He hath made, and is
perfect in this--that He makes His sun shine on the evil and on the good,
and His rain fall on the just and on the unjust, and is good to the
unthankful and to the evil? Are they worthy of a Son who, in the fire of
His divine charity, stooped from heaven to earth, to toil, to suffer, to
die on the Cross, that the world by Him might be saved? Are they worthy
of that Spirit which proceeds from the Father and the Son, even that
Spirit of boundless charity, and fervent love, by which the Son offered
Himself to the Father, a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world--and
surely not in vain?"
So men are asking--rightly or wrongly; and they are guarding themselves,
at the same time, from the imputation of disbelief in moral retribution;
of fancying God to be a careless, epicurean deity, cruelly indulgent to
sin, and therefore, in so far, immoral.