easier virtue, on the Mount of Beatitudes, than that which He had taught
fifteen centuries before on Mt. Sinai. He indeed pronounces a blessing;
and so did Moses, His servant, before Him. But in each instance, it is a
blessing upon condition of obedience; which, in both instances, involves
a curse upon disobedience. He who is meek shall be blest; but he who is
not shall be condemned. He who is pure in heart, he who is poor in
spirit, he who mourns over personal unworthiness, he who hungers and
thirsts after a righteousness of which he is destitute, he who is
merciful, he who is the peace-maker, he who endures persecution
patiently, and he who loves his enemies,--he who is and does all this in
a perfect manner, without a single slip or failure, is indeed blessed
with the beatitude of God. But where is the man? What single individual
in all the ages, and in all the generations since Adam, is entitled to
the great blessing of these beatitudes, and not deserving of the dreadful
curse which they involve? In applying such a high, ethereal test to human
character, the Founder of Christianity is the severest and sternest
preacher of law that has ever trod upon the planet. And he who stops with
the merely ethical and preceptive part of Christianity, and rejects its
forgiveness through atoning blood, and its regeneration by an indwelling
Spirit,--he who does not unite the fifth chapter of Matthew, with the
fifth chapter of Romans,--converts the Lamb of God into the Lion of the
tribe of Judah. He makes use of everything in the Christian system that
condemns man to everlasting destruction, but throws away the very and the
only part of it that takes off the burden and the curse.
It is not, then, a correct idea of Christ that we have, when we look upon
Him as unmixed complacency and unbalanced compassion. In all aspects,
He was a complex personage. He was God, and He was man. As God, He could
pronounce a blessing; and He could pronounce a curse, as none but God
can, or dare. As man, He was perfect; and into His perfection of feeling
and of character there entered those elements that fill a good being with
peace, and an evil one with woe. The Son of God exhibits goodness and
severity mingled and blended in perfect and majestic harmony; and that
man lacks sympathy with Jesus Christ who cannot, while feeling the purest
and most unselfish indignation towards the sinner's sin, at the same time
give up his own individual life, if need be, for the sinner's soul. The
two feelings are not only compatible in the same person, but necessarily
belong to a perfect being. Our Lord breathed out a prayer for His
murderers so fervent, and so full of pathos, that it will continue to
soften and melt the flinty human heart, to the end of time; and He also
poured out a denunciation of woes upon the Pharisees (Matt, xxiii.),
every syllable of which is dense enough with the wrath of God, to sink
the deserving objects of it "plumb down, ten thousand fathoms deep, to
bottomless perdition in adamantine chains and penal fire." The
utterances, "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do: Ye
serpents, ye generation of vipers! how can ye escape the damnation of
hell?" both fell from the same pure and gracious lips.
It is not surprising, therefore, that our Lord often appeals to the
principle of fear. He makes use of it in all its various forms,--from
that servile terror which is produced by the truth when the soul is
just waked up from its drowze in sin, to that filial fear which Solomon
affirms to be the beginning of wisdom.
The subject thus brought before our minds, by the inspired Word, has a
wide application to all ages and conditions of human life, and all
varieties of human character. We desire to direct attention to _the use
and value of religious fear, in the opening periods of human life_. There
are some special reasons why youth and early manhood should come
under the influence of this powerful feeling. "I write unto you young
men,"--says St. John,--"because ye are _strong_." We propose to urge upon
the young, the duty of cultivating the fear of God's displeasure, because
they are able to endure the emotion; because youth is the springtide and
prime of human life, and capable of carrying burdens, and standing up
under influences and impressions, that might crush a feebler period, or a
more exhausted stage of the human soul.
I. In the first place, the emotion of fear ought to enter into the
consciousness of the young, because _youth is naturally light-hearted_.
"Childhood and youth," saith the Preacher, "are vanity." The opening
period in human life is the happiest part of it, if we have respect
merely to the condition and circumstances in which the human being is
placed. He is free from all public cares, and responsibilities. He is
encircled within the strong arms of parents, and protectors. Even if he
tries, he cannot feel the pressure of those toils and anxieties which
will come of themselves, when he has passed the line that separates youth
from manhood. When he hears his elders discourse of the weight, and the
weariness, of this working-day world, it is with incredulity and
surprise. The world is bright before his eye, and he wonders that it
should ever wear any other aspect. He cannot understand how the
freshness, and vividness, and pomp of human life, should shift into its
soberer and sterner forms; and he will not, until the
"Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy."[2]
Now there is something, in this happy attitude of things, to fill the
heart of youth with gayety and abandonment. His pulses beat strong and
high. The currents of his soul flow like the mountain river. His mood is
buoyant and jubilant, and he flings himself with zest, and a sense of
vitality, into the joy and exhilaration all around him. But such a mood
as this, unbalanced and untempered by a loftier one, is hazardous to the
eternal interests of the soul. Perpetuate this gay festal abandonment
of the mind; let the human being, through the whole of his earthly
course, be filled with the sole single consciousness that _this_ is the
beautiful world; and will he, can he, live as a stranger and a pilgrim
in it? Perpetuate that vigorous pulse, and that youthful blood which
"runs tickling up and down the veins;" drive off, and preclude, all that
care and responsibility which renders human life so earnest; and will the
young immortal go through it, with that sacred fear and trembling with
which he is commanded to work out his salvation?
Yet, this buoyancy and light-heartedness are legitimate feelings. They
spring up, like wild-flowers, from the very nature of man. God intends
that prismatic hues and auroral lights shall flood our morning sky. He
must be filled with a sour and rancid misanthropy, who cannot bless the
Creator that there is one part of man's sinful and cursed life which
reminds of the time, and the state, when there was no sin and no curse.
There is, then, to be no extermination of this legitimate experience.
But there is to be its moderation and its regulation.
And this we get, by the introduction of the feeling and the principle of
religious fear. The youth ought to seek an impression from things unseen
and eternal. God, and His august attributes; Christ, and His awful
Passion; heaven, with its sacred scenes and joys; hell, with its just woe
and wail,--all these should come in, to modify, and temper, the jubilance
that without them becomes the riot of the soul. For this, we apprehend,
is the meaning of our Lord, when He says, "I will forewarn you whom ye
shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into
hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him." It is not so much any particular
species of fear that we are shut up to, by these words, as it is the
general habit and feeling. The fear of _hell_ is indeed specified,--and
this proves that such a fear is rational and proper in its own
place,--but our Lord would not have us stop with this single and isolated
form of the feeling. He recommends a solemn temper. He commands
a being who stands continually upon the brink of eternity and immensity,
to be aware of his position. He would have the great shadow of eternity
thrown in upon time. He desires that every man should realize, in those
very moments when the sun shines the brightest and the earth looks the
fairest, that there is another world than this, for which man is not
naturally prepared, and for which he must make a preparation. And what He
enjoins upon mankind at large, He specially enjoins upon youth. They need
to be sobered more than others. The ordinary cares of this life, which do
so much towards moderating our desires and aspirations, have not yet
pressed upon the ardent and expectant soul, and therefore it needs, more
than others, to fear and to "stand in awe."
II. Secondly, youth is _elastic, and readily recovers from undue
depression_. The skeptical Lucretius tells us that the divinities are the
creatures of man's fears, and would make us believe that all religion has
its ground in fright.[3] And do we not hear this theory repeated by the
modern unbeliever? What means this appeal to a universal, and an
unprincipled good-nature in the Supreme Being, and this rejection of
everything in Christianity that awakens misgivings and forebodings within
the sinful human soul? Why this opposition to the doctrine of an
absolute, and therefore endless punishment, unless it be that it awakens
a deep and permanent dread in the heart of guilty man?
Now, we are not of that number who believe that thoughtless and lethargic
man has been greatly damaged by his moral fears. It is the lack of a
bold and distinct impression from the solemn objects of another world,
and the utter absence of fear, that is ruining man from generation to
generation. If we were at liberty, and had the power, to induce into the
thousands and millions of our race who are running the rounds of sin and
vice, some one particular emotion that should be medicinal and salutary
to the soul, we would select that very one which our Lord had in view
when He said: "I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which
after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you,
Fear him." If we were at liberty, and had the power, we would
instantaneously stop these human souls that are crowding our avenues,
intent only upon pleasure and earth, and would fill them with the
emotions of the day of doom; we would deluge them with the fear of God,
that they might flee from their sins and the wrath to come.
But while we say this, we also concede that it is possible for the human
soul to be injured, by the undue exercise of this emotion. The bruised
reed may be broken, and the smoking flax may be quenched; and hence it is
the very function and office-work of the Blessed Comforter, to prevent
this. God's own children sometimes pass through a horror of great
darkness, like that which enveloped Abraham; and the unregenerate mind is
sometimes so overborne by its fears of death, judgment, and eternity,
that the entire experience becomes for a time morbid and confused. Yet,
even in this instance, the excess is better than the lack. We had better
travel this road to heaven, than none at all. It is better to enter into
the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into
hell-fire. When the saints from the heavenly heights look back upon their
severe religious experience here on earth,--upon their footprints stained
with their own blood,--they count it a small matter that they entered
into eternal joy through much tribulation. And if we could but for one
instant take their position, we should form their estimate; we should not
shrink, if God so pleased, from passing through that martyrdom and
crucifixion which has been undergone by so many of those gentle spirits,
broken spirits, holy spirits, upon whom the burden of mystery once lay
like night, and the far heavier burden of guilt lay like hell.
There is less danger, however, that the feeling and principle of fear
should exert an excessive influence upon youth. There is an elasticity,
in the earlier periods of human life, that prevents long-continued
depression. How rare it is to see a young person smitten with insanity.
It is not until the pressure of anxiety has been long continued,
and the impulsive spring of the soul has been destroyed, that reason is
dethroned. The morning of our life may, therefore, be subjected to a
subduing and repressing influence, with very great safety. It is well to
bear the yoke in youth. The awe produced by a vivid impression from the
eternal world may enter into the exuberant and gladsome experience of the
young, with very little danger of actually extinguishing it, and
rendering life permanently gloomy and unhappy.
III. Thirdly, youth is _exposed to sudden temptations, and surprisals
into sin_. The general traits that have been mentioned as belonging to
the early period in human life render it peculiarly liable to
solicitations. The whole being of a healthful hilarious youth, who feels
life in every limb, thrills to temptation, like the lyre to the plectrum.
Body and soul are alive to all the enticements of the world of sense; and
in certain critical moments, the entire sensorium, upon the approach of
bold and powerful excitements, flutters and trembles like an electrometer
in a thunder-storm. All passionate poetry breathes of youth and spring.
Most of the catastrophes of the novel and the drama turn upon the violent
action of some temptation, upon the highly excitable nature of youth. All
literature testifies to the hazards that attend the morning of our
existence; and daily experience and observation, certainly, corroborate
the testimony. It becomes necessary, therefore, to guard the human soul
against these liabilities which attend it in its forming period. And,
next to a deep and all-absorbing _love_ of God, there is nothing so well
adapted to protect against sudden surprisals, as a profound and definite
fear of God.
It is a great mistake, to suppose that apostate and corrupt beings like
ourselves can pass through all the temptations of this life unscathed,
while looking _solely_ at the pleasant aspects of the Divine Being, and
the winning forms of religious truth. We are not yet seraphs; and we
cannot always trust to our affectionateness, to carry us through a
violent attack of temptation. There are moments in the experience of the
Christian himself, when he is compelled to call in the _fear_ of God to
his aid, and to steady his infirm and wavering virtue by the recollection
that "the wages of sin is death." "By the fear of the Lord, men,"--and
Christian men too,--"depart from evil." It will not always be so. When
that which is perfect is come, perfect love shall cast out fear; but,
until the disciple of Christ reaches heaven, his religious experience
must be a somewhat complex one. A reasonable and well-defined
apprehensiveness must mix with his affectionateness, and deter him from
transgression, in those severe passages in his history when love is
languid and fails to draw him. Says an old English divine: "The fear of
God's judgments, or of the threatenings of God, is of much efficiency,
when some present temptation presseth upon us. When conscience and the
affections are divided; when conscience doth withdraw a man from sin,
and when his carnal affections draw him forth to it; then should the fear
of God come in. It is a holy design for a Christian, to counterbalance
the pleasures of sin with the terrors of it, and thus to cure the poison
of the viper by the flesh of the viper. Thus that admirable saint and
martyr, Bishop Hooper, when he came to die, one endeavored to dehort him
from death by this: O sir, consider that life is sweet and death is
bitter; presently he replied, Life to come is more sweet, and death to
come is more bitter, and so went to the stake and patiently endured the
fire. Thus, as a Christian may sometimes outweigh the pleasures of sin by
the consideration of the reward of God, so, sometimes, he may quench the
pleasures of sin by the consideration of the terrors of God."[4]
But much more is all this true, in the instance of the hot-blooded youth.
How shall he resist temptation, unless he has some _fear_ of God before
his eyes? There are moments in the experience of the young, when all
power of resistance seems to be taken away, by the very witchery and
blandishment of the object. He has no heart, and no nerve, to resist the
beautiful siren. And it is precisely in these emergencies in his
experience,--in these moments when this world comes up before him clothed
in pomp and gold, and the other world is so entirely lost sight of, that
it throws in upon him none of its solemn shadows and warnings,--it is
precisely now, when he is just upon the point of yielding to the mighty
yet fascinating pressure, that he needs to feel an impression, bold and
startling, from the _wrath_ of God. Nothing but the most active remedies
will have any effect, in this tumult and uproar of the soul. When the
whole system is at fever-heat, and the voice of reason and conscience is
drowned in the clamors of sense and earth, nothing can startle and stop
but the trumpet of Sinai.[5]
It is in these severe experiences, which are more common to youth than
they are to manhood, that we see the great value of the feeling and
principle of fear. It is, comparatively, in vain for a youth under the
influence of strong temptations,--and particularly when the surprise is
sprung upon him,--to ply himself with arguments drawn from the beauty of
virtue, and the excellence of piety. They are too ethereal for him, in
his present mood. Such arguments are for a calmer moment, and a more
dispassionate hour. His blood is now boiling, and those higher motives
which would influence the saint, and would have some influence with him,
if he were not in this critical condition, have little power to deter him
from sin. Let him therefore pass by the love of God, and betake himself
to the _anger_ of God, for safety. Let him say to himself, in this moment
when the forces of Satan, in alliance with the propensities of his own
nature, are making an onset,--when all other considerations are being
swept away in the rush and whirlwind of his passions,--let him coolly
bethink himself and say: "If I do this abominable thing which the soul of
God hates, then God, the Holy and Immaculate, will burn my spotted soul
in His pure eternal flame." For, there is great power, in what the
Scriptures term "the terror of the Lord," to destroy the edge of
temptation. "A wise man feareth and departeth from evil." Fear kills out
the delight in sin. Damocles cannot eat the banquet with any pleasure, so
long as the naked sword hangs by a single hair over his head. No one can
find much enjoyment in transgression, if his conscience is feeling the
action of God's holiness within it. And well would it be, if, in every
instance in which a youth is tempted to fling himself into the current of
sin that is flowing all around him, his moral sense might at that very
moment be filled with some of that terror, and some of that horror, which
breaks upon the damned in eternity. Well would it be, if the youth in the
moment of violent temptation could lay upon the emotion or the lust that
entices him, a distinct and red coal of hell-fire.[6] No injury would
result from the most terrible fear of God, provided it could always fall
upon the human soul in those moments of strong temptation, and of
surprisals, when all other motives fail to influence, and the human will
is carried headlong by the human passions. There may be a fear and a
terror that does harm, but man need be under no concern lest he
experience too much of this feeling, in his hours of weakness and
irresolution, in his youthful days of temptation and of dalliance. Let
him rather bless God that there is such an intense light, and such a pure
fire, in the Divine Essence, and seek to have his whole vitiated and
poisoned nature penetrated and purified by it. Have you never looked with
a steadfast gaze into a grate of burning anthracite, and noticed the
quiet intense glow of the heat, and how silently the fire throbs and
pulsates through the fuel, burning up everything that is inflammable,
and, making the whole mass as pure, and clean, and clear, as the element
of fire itself? Such is the effect of a contact of God's wrath with man's
sin; of the penetration of man's corruption by the wrath of the Lord.
IV. In the fourth place, the feeling and principle of fear ought to enter
into the experience of both youth and manhood, _because it relieves from
all other fear_. He who stands in awe of God can look down, from a very
great height, upon all other perturbation. When we have seen Him from
whose sight the heavens and the earth flee away, there is nothing, in
either the heavens or the earth, that can produce a single ripple upon
the surface of our souls. This is true, even of the unregenerate mind.
The fear in this instance is a servile one,--it is not filial and
affectionate,--and yet it serves to protect the subject of it from all
other feelings of this species, because it is greater than all others,
and like Aaron's serpent swallows up the rest. If we must be liable to
fears,--and the transgressor always must be,--it is best that they should
all be concentrated in one single overmastering sentiment. Unity is ever
desirable; and even if the human soul were to be visited by none but the
servile forms of fear, it would be better that this should be the "terror
of the Lord." If, by having the fear of God before our eyes, we could
thereby be delivered from the fear of man, and all those apprehensions
which are connected with time and sense, would it not be wisdom to choose
it? We should then know that there was but one quarter from which our
peace could be assailed. This would lead us to look in that direction;
and, here upon earth, sinful man cannot look at God long, without coming
to terms and becoming reconciled with Him.
V. The fifth and last reason which we assign for cherishing the feeling
and principle of fear applies to youth, to manhood, and to old age,
alike: _The fear of God conducts to the love of God_. Our Lord does not
command us to fear "Him, who after he hath killed hath power to cast into
hell," because such a feeling as this is intrinsically desirable, and is
an ultimate end in itself. It is, in itself, undesirable, and it is only
a means to an end. By it, our torpid souls are to be awakened from their
torpor; our numbness and hardness of mind, in respect to spiritual
objects, is to be removed. We are never for a moment, to suppose that the
fear of perdition is set before us as a model and permanent form of
experience to be toiled after,--a positive virtue and grace intended to
be perpetuated through the whole future history of the soul. It is
employed only as an antecedent to a higher and a happier emotion; and
when the purpose for which it has been elicited has been answered, it
then disappears. "Perfect love casteth out fear; for fear hath torment,"
(1 John iv. 18.[7])
But, at the same time, we desire to direct attention to the fact that he
who has been exercised with this emotion, thoroughly and deeply, is
conducted by it into the higher and happier form of religious experience.
Religious fear and anxiety are the prelude to religious peace and joy.
These are the discords that prepare for the concords. He, who in the
Psalmist's phrase has known the power of the Divine anger, is visited
with the manifestation of the Divine love. The method in the
thirty-second psalm is the method of salvation. Day and night God's hand
is heavy upon the soul; the fear and sense of the Divine displeasure is
passing through the conscience, like electric currents. The moisture,
the sweet dew of health and happiness, is turned into the drought of
summer, by this preparatory process. Then the soul acknowledges its sin,
and its iniquity it hides no longer. It confesses its transgressions unto
the Lord,--it justifies and approves of this wrath which it has
felt,--and He forgives the iniquity of its sin.