importance of attaining self-knowledge here upon earth, and while there
remaineth a sacrifice for sins_. The duty and wisdom of every man is, to
anticipate the revelations of the judgment day; to find out the sin of
his soul, while it is an accepted time and a day of salvation. For we
have seen that this self-inspection cannot ultimately be escaped. Man was
made to know himself, and he must sooner or later come to it.
Self-knowledge is as certain, in the end, as death. The utmost that can
be done, is to postpone it for a few days, or years. The article of death
and the exchange of worlds will pour it all in, like a deluge, upon every
man, whether he will or not. And he who does not wake up to a knowledge
of his heart, until he enters eternity, wakes up not to pardon but to
despair.
The simple question, then, which, meets us is: Wilt thou know thyself
_here_ and _now_, that thou mayest accept and feel God's pity in Christ's
blood, or wilt thou keep within the screen, and not know thyself until
beyond the grave, and then feel God's judicial wrath? The self-knowledge,
remember, must come in the one way or the other. It is a simple question
of time; a simple question whether it shall come here in this world,
where the blood of Christ "freely flows," or in the future world, where
"there remaineth no more sacrifice for sin." Turn the matter as we will,
this is the sum and substance,--a sinful man must either come to a
thorough self-knowledge, with a hearty repentance and a joyful pardon, in
this life; or he must come to a thorough, self-knowledge, with a total
despair and an eternal damnation, in the other. God is not mocked. God's
great pity in the blood of Christ must not be trifled with. He who
refuses, or neglects, to institute that self-examination which leads to
the sense of sin, and the felt need of Christ's work, by this very fact
proves that he does not desire to know his own heart, and that he has no
wish to repent of sin. But he who will not even look at his sin,--what
does not he deserve from that Being who poured out His own blood for it?
He who refuses even to open his eyes upon that bleeding Lamb of
God,--what must not he expect from the Lion of the tribe of Judah, in the
day of judgment? He who by a life of apathy, and indifference to sin,
puts himself out of all relations to the Divine pity,--what must he
experience in eternity, but the operations of stark, unmitigated law?
Find out your sin, then. God will forgive all that is found. Though your
sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. The great God
delights to forgive, and is waiting to forgive. But, _sin must be seen by
the sinner, before it can be pardoned by the Judge_. If you refuse at
this point; if you hide yourself from yourself; if you preclude all
feeling and conviction upon the subject of sin, by remaining ignorant of
it; if you continue to live an easy, thoughtless life in sin, then you
_cannot_ be forgiven, and the measure of God's love with which He would
have blessed you, had you searched yourself and repented, will be the
measure of God's righteous wrath with which He will search you, and
condemn you, because you have not.
[Footnote 1: "It is easy,"--says one of the keenest and most incisive of
theologians,--"for any one in the cloisters of the schools to indulge
himself in idle speculations on the merit of works to justify men; but
when he comes _into the presence of God_, he must bid farewell to these
amusements, for there the business is transacted with seriousness. To
this point must our attention be directed, if we wish to make any useful
inquiry concerning true righteousness: How we can answer the _celestial
Judge_ when He shall call us to an account? Let us place that Judge
before our eyes, not according to the inadequate imaginations of our
minds, but according to the descriptions given of him in the Scriptures,
which represent him as one whose refulgence eclipses the stars, whose
purity makes all things appear polluted, and who searches the inmost soul
of his creatures,--let us so conceive of the Judge of all the earth, and
every one must present himself as a criminal before Him, and voluntarily
prostrate and humble himself in deep solicitude concerning; his
absolution." CALVIN: Institutes, iii. 12.]
ALL MANKIND GUILTY; OR, EVERY MAN KNOWS MORE THAN HE PRACTISES.
ROMANS i. 24.--"When they knew God, they glorified him not as God."
The idea of God is the most important and comprehensive of all the ideas
of which the human mind is possessed. It is the foundation of religion;
of all right doctrine, and all right conduct. A correct intuition of it
leads to correct religious theories and practice; while any erroneous or
defective view of the Supreme Being will pervade the whole province of
religion, and exert a most pernicious influence upon the entire character
and conduct of men.
In proof of this, we have only to turn to the opening chapters of St.
Paul's Epistle to the Romans. Here we find a profound and accurate
account of the process by which human nature becomes corrupt, and runs
its downward career of unbelief, vice, and sensuality. The apostle traces
back the horrible depravity of the heathen world, which he depicts with a
pen as sharp as that of Juvenal, but with none of Juvenal's bitterness
and vitriolic sarcasm, to a distorted and false conception of the being
and attributes of God. He does not, for an instant, concede that this
distorted and false conception is founded in the original structure and
constitution of the human soul, and that this moral ignorance is
necessary and inevitable. This mutilated idea of the Supreme Being was
not inlaid in the rational creature on the morning of creation, when God
said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." On the
contrary, the apostle affirms that the Creator originally gave all
mankind, in the moral constitution of a rational soul and in the works of
creation and providence, the media to a correct idea of Himself, and
asserts, by implication, that if they had always employed these media
they would have always possessed this idea. "The wrath of God," he says,
"is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of
men who hold the truth in unrighteousness; _because_ that which may be
known of God is manifest in them, for God hath shewed it unto them. _For_
the invisible things of him, even his eternal power and Godhead, are
clearly seen from the creation of the world, being understood by the
things that are made, so that they are without excuse; _because_ that
when they _knew_ God, they glorified him not as God" (Rom. i. 18-21).
From this, it appears that the mind of man has not kept what was
committed to its charge. It has not employed the moral instrumentalities,
nor elicited the moral ideas, with which it has been furnished. And,
notice that the apostle does not confine this statement to those who live
within the pale of Revelation. His description is unlimited and
universal. The affirmation of the text, that "when man knew God he
glorified him not as God," applies to the Gentile as well as to the Jew.
Nay, the primary reference of these statements was to the pagan world. It
was respecting the millions of idolaters in cultivated Greece and Rome,
and the millions of idolaters in barbarous India and China,--it was
respecting the whole world lying in wickedness, that St. Paul remarked:
"The invisible things of God, even his eternal power and Godhead, are
clearly seen from the creation of the world down to the present moment,
being understood by the things that are made; _so that they are without
excuse_."
When Napoleon was returning from his campaign in Egypt and Syria, he was
seated one night upon the deck of the vessel, under the open canopy of
the heavens, surrounded by his captains and generals. The conversation
had taken a skeptical direction, and most of the party had combated the
doctrine of the Divine existence. Napoleon had sat silent and musing,
apparently taking no interest in the discussion, when suddenly raising
his hand, and pointing at the crystalline firmament crowded with its
mildly shining planets and its keen glittering stars, he broke out, in
those startling tones that so often electrified a million of men:
"Gentlemen, who made all that?" The eternal power and Godhead of the
Creator are impressed by the things that are made, and these words of
Napoleon to his atheistic captains silenced them. And the same impression
is made the world over. Go to-day into the heart of Africa, or into the
centre of New Holland; select the most imbruted pagan that can be found;
take him out under a clear star-lit heaven and ask him who made all that,
and the idea of a Superior Being,--superior to all his fetishes and
idols,--possessing eternal power and supremacy ([Greek: theotaes])
immediately emerges in his consciousness. The instant the missionary
takes this lustful idolater away from the circle of his idols, and brings
him face to face with the heavens and the earth, as Napoleon brought his
captains, the constitutional idea dawns again, and the pagan trembles
before the unseen Power.[1]
But it will be objected that it is a very dim, and inadequate idea of the
Deity that thus rises in the pagan's mind, and that therefore the
apostle's affirmation that he is "without excuse" for being an idolater
and a sensualist requires some qualification. This imbruted creature,
says the objector, does not possess the metaphysical conception of God as
a Spirit, and of all his various attributes and qualities, like the
dweller in Christendom. How then can he be brought in guilty before the
same eternal bar, and be condemned to the same eternal punishment, with
the nominal Christian? The answer is plain, and decisive, and derivable
out of the apostle's own statements. In order to establish the guiltiness
of a rational creature before the bar of justice, it is not necessary to
show that he has lived in the seventh heavens, and under a blaze of moral
intelligence like that of the archangel Gabriel. It is only necessary to
show that he has enjoyed _some_ degree of moral light, and that he _has
not lived up to it_. Any creature who knows more than he practises is a
guilty creature. If the light in the pagan's intellect concerning God and
the moral law, small though it be, is yet actually in advance of the
inclination and affections of his heart and the actions of his life, he
deserves to be punished, like any and every other creature, under the
Divine government, of whom the same thing is true. Grades of knowledge
vary indefinitely. No two men upon the planet, no two men in Christendom,
possess precisely the same degree of moral intelligence. There are men
walking the streets of this city to-day, under the full light of the
Christian revelation, whose notions respecting God and law are
exceedingly dim and inadequate; and there are others whose views are
clear and correct in a high degree. But there is not a person in this
city, young or old, rich or poor, ignorant or cultivated, in the purlieus
of vice or the saloons of wealth, whose knowledge of God is not in
advance of his own character and conduct. Every man, whatever be the
grade of his intelligence, knows more than he puts in practice. Ask the
young thief, in the subterranean haunts of vice and crime, if he does not
know that it is wicked to steal, and if he renders an honest answer, it
is in the affirmative. Ask the most besotted soul, immersed and
petrified in sensuality, if his course of life upon earth has been in
accordance with his own knowledge and conviction of what is right, and
required by his Maker, and he will answer No, if he answers truly. The
grade of knowledge in the Christian land is almost infinitely various;
but in every instance the amount of knowledge is greater than the amount
of virtue. Whether he knows little or much, the man knows more than he
performs; and _therefore_ his mouth must be stopped in the judgment, and
he must plead guilty before God. He will not be condemned for not
possessing that ethereal vision of God possessed by the seraphim; but he
will be condemned because his perception of the holiness and the holy
requirements of God was sufficient, at any moment, to rebuke his
disregard of them; because when he knew God in some degree, he glorified
him not as God up to that degree.
And this principle will be applied to the pagan world. It is so applied
by the apostle Paul. He himself concedes that the Gentile has not enjoyed
all the advantages of the Jew, and argues that the ungodly Jew will be
visited with a more severe punishment than the ungodly Gentile. But he
expressly affirms that the pagan is _under law_, and _knows_ that he is;
that he shows the work of the law that is written on the heart, in the
operations of an accusing and condemning conscience. But the knowledge of
law involves the knowledge of _God_ in an equal degree. Who can feel
himself amenable to a moral law, without at the same time thinking of its
Author? The law and the Lawgiver are inseparable. The one is the mirror
and index of the other. If the eye opens dimly upon the commandment, it
opens dimly upon the Sovereign; if it perceives eternal right and law
with clear and celestial vision, it then looks directly into the face of
God. Law and God are correlative to each other; and just so far,
consequently, as the heathen understands the law that is written on the
heart does he apprehend the Being who sitteth upon the circle of the
heavens, and who impinges Himself upon the consciousness of men. This
being so, it is plain that we can confront the ungodly pagan with the
same statements with which we confront the ungodly nominal Christian. We
can tell him with positiveness, wherever we find him, be it upon the
burning sands of Africa or in the frozen home of the Esquimaux, that he
knows more than he puts in practice. We will concede to him that the
quantum of his moral knowledge is very stinted and meagre; but in the
same breath we will remind him that small as it is, he has not lived up
to it; that he too has "come short"; that he too, knowing God in the
dimmest, faintest degree, has yet not glorified him as God in the
slightest, faintest manner. The Bible sends the ungodly and licentious
pagan to hell, upon the same principle that it sends the ungodly and
licentious nominal Christian. It is the principle enunciated by our Lord
Christ, the judge of quick and dead, when he says, "He who knew his
master's will [clearly], and did it not, shall be beaten with many
stripes; and he who knew not his master's will [clearly, but knew it
dimly,] and did it not, shall be beaten with few stripes." It is the
just principle enunciated by St. Paul, that "as many as have sinned
without [written] law shall also _perish_ without [written] law."[2] And
this is right and righteous; and let all the universe say, Amen.
The doctrine taught in the text, that no human creature, in any country
or grade of civilization, has ever glorified God to the extent of his
knowledge of God, is very fertile in solemn and startling inferences, to
some of which we now invite attention.
1. In the first place, it follows from this affirmation of the apostle
Paul, that _the entire heathen world is in a state of condemnation and
perdition_. He himself draws this inference, in saying that in the
judgment "_every_ mouth must be stopped, and the _whole_ world become
guilty before God."
The present and future condition of the heathen world is a subject that
has always enlisted the interest of two very different classes of men.
The Church of God has pondered, and labored, and prayed over this
subject, and will continue to do so until the millennium. And the
disbeliever in Revelation has also turned his mind to the consideration
of this black mass of ignorance and misery, which welters upon the globe
like a chaotic ocean; these teeming millions of barbarians and savages
who render the aspect of the world so sad and so dark. The Church, we
need not say, have accepted the Biblical theory, and have traced the lost
condition of the pagan world, as the apostle Paul does, to their sin and
transgression. They have held that every pagan is a rational being, and
by virtue of this fact has known something of the moral law; and that to
the extent of the knowledge he has had, he is as guilty for the
transgression of law, and as really under its condemnation, as the
dweller under the light of revelation and civilization. They have
maintained that every human creature has enjoyed sufficient light, in the
workings of natural reason and conscience, and in the impressions that
are made by the glory and the terror of the natural world above and
around him, to render him guilty before the Everlasting Judge. For this
reason, the Church has denied that the pagan is an innocent creature, or
that he can stand in the judgment before the Searcher of hearts. For this
reason, the Church has believed the declaration of the apostle John, that
"the _whole_ world lieth in wickedness" (1 John v. 19), and has
endeavored to obey the command of Him who came to redeem pagans as much
as nominal Christians, to go and preach the gospel to _every_ creature,
because every creature is a lost creature.
But the disbeliever in Revelation adopts the theory of human innocency,
and looks upon all the wretchedness and ignorance of paganism, as he
looks upon suffering, decay, and death, in the vegetable and animal
worlds. Temporary evil is the necessary condition, he asserts, of all
finite existence; and as decay and death in the vegetable and animal
worlds only result in a more luxuriant vegetation, and an increased
multiplication of living creatures, so the evil and woe of the hundreds
of generations, and the millions of individuals, during the sixty
centuries that have elapsed since the origin of man, will all of it
minister to the ultimate and everlasting weal of the entire race. There
is no need therefore, he affirms, of endeavoring to save such feeble and
ignorant beings from judicial condemnation and eternal penalty. Such
finiteness and helplessness cannot be put into relations to such an awful
attribute as the eternal nemesis of God. Can it be,--he asks,--that the
millions upon millions that have been born, lived their brief hour,
enjoyed their little joys and suffered their sharp sorrows, and then
dropped into "the dark backward and abysm of time," have really been
_guilty_ creatures, and have gone down to an endless hell?
But what does all this reasoning and querying imply? Will the objector
really take the position and stand to it, that the pagan man is not a
rational and responsible creature? that he does not possess sufficient
knowledge of moral truth, to justify his being brought to the bar of
judgment? Will he say that the population that knew enough to build the
pyramids did not know enough to break the law of God? Will he affirm that
the civilization of Babylon and Nineveh, of Greece and Rome, did not
contain within it enough of moral intelligence to constitute a foundation
for rewards and punishments? Will he tell us that the people of Sodom and
Gomorrah stood upon the same plane with the brutes that perish, and the
trees of the field that rot and die, having no idea of God, knowing
nothing of the distinction between right and wrong, and never feeling the
pains of an accusing conscience? Will he maintain that the populations
of India, in the midst of whom one of the most subtile and ingenious
systems of pantheism has sprung up with the luxuriance and involutions of
one of their own jungles, and has enervated the whole religious sentiment
of the Hindoo race as opium has enervated their physical frame,--will he
maintain that such an untiring and persistent mental activity as this is
incapable of apprehending the first principles of ethics and natural
religion, which, in comparison with the complicated and obscure
ratiocinations of Boodhism, are clear as water, and lucid as atmospheric
air? In other connections, this theorist does not speak in this style. In
other connections, and for the purpose of exaggerating natural religion
and disparaging revealed, he enlarges upon the dignity of man, of every
man, and eulogizes the power of reason which so exalts him in the scale
of being. With Hamlet, he dilates in proud and swelling phrase: "What a
piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in
form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of
animals!" It is from that very class of theorizers who deny that the
heathen are in danger of eternal perdition, and who represent the whole
missionary enterprise as a work of supererogation, that we receive the
most extravagant accounts of the natural powers and gifts of man. Now if
these powers and gifts do belong to human nature by its constitution,
they certainly lay a foundation for responsibility; and all such
theorists must either be able to show that the pagan man has made a
right use of them, and has walked according to this large amount of truth
and reason with which, according to their own statement, he is endowed,
or else they consign him, as St. Paul does, to "the wrath of God which is
revealed from heaven against all ungodliness, and unrighteousness of _men
who hold the truth in unrighteousness_." If you assert that the pagan man
has had no talents at all committed to him, and can prove your assertion,
and will stand by it, you are consistent in denying that he can be
summoned to the bar of God, and be tried for eternal life or death. But
if you concede that he has had one talent, or two talents, committed to
his charge; and still more, if you exaggerate his gifts and endow him
with five or ten talents, then it is impossible for you to save him from
the judgment to come, except you can prove a _perfect_ administration and
use of the trust.[3]
2. In the second place, it follows from the doctrine of the text, that
_the degraded and brutalized population of large cities is in a state of
condemnation and perdition_.
There are heathen near our own doors whose religious condition is as sad,
and hopeless, as that of the heathen of Patagonia or New Zealand. The
vice and crime that nestles and riots in the large cities of Christendom
has become a common theme, and has lost much of its interest for the
worldly mind by losing its novelty. The manners and way of life of the
outcast population of London and Paris have been depicted by the
novelist, and wakened a momentary emotion in the readers of fiction. But
the reality is stern and dreadful, beyond imagination or conception.
There is in the cess-pools of the great capitals of Christendom a mass of
human creatures who are born, who live, and who die, in moral
putrefaction. Their existence is a continued career of sin and woe. Body
and soul, mind and heart, are given up to earth, to sense, to corruption.
They emerge for a brief season into the light of day, run their swift and
fiery career of sin, and then disappear. Dante, in that wonderful Vision
which embodies so much of true ethics and theology, represents the
wrathful and gloomy class as sinking down under the miry waters and
continuing to breathe in a convulsive, suffocating manner, sending up
bubbles to the surface, that mark the place where they are drawing out
their lingering existence.[4] Something like this, is the wretched life
of a vicious population. As we look in upon the fermenting mass, the only
signs of life that meet our view indicate that the life is feverish,
spasmodic, and suffocating. The bubbles rising to the dark and turbid
surface reveal that it is a life in death.