Chapel Royal, St James'. 1873.
St. Matt. xxii. 2-7. "The kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king,
which made a marriage for his son, and sent forth his servants to call
them that were bidden to the wedding: and they would not come. Again,
he sent forth other servants, saying, Tell them which are bidden, Behold,
I have prepared my dinner: my oxen and fatlings are killed, and all
things are ready: come unto the marriage. But they made light of it,
and went their ways, one to his farm, another to his merchandise: And
the remnant took his servants, and entreated them spitefully, and slew
them. But when the king heard thereof, he was wroth: and he sent forth
his armies, and destroyed those murderers, and burned up their city."
This parable, if we understand it aright, will help to teach us theology-
-that is, the knowledge of God, and of the character of God. For it is a
parable concerning the kingdom of heaven, and the laws and customs of the
kingdom of heaven--that is, the spiritual and eternal laws by which God
governs men.
Now, what any kingdom or government is like must needs depend on what the
king or governor of it is like; at least if that king is all-powerful,
and can do what he likes. His laws will be like his character. If he be
good, he will make good laws. If he be bad, he will make bad laws. If
he be harsh and cruel--if he be careless and indulgent--so will his laws
be. If he be loving and generous, delighting in seeing his subjects
happy, then his laws will be so shaped that his subjects will be happy,
if they obey those laws. But also--and this is a very serious matter,
and one to which foolish people in all ages have tried to shut their
eyes, and false preachers in all ages have tried to blind men's eyes--
also, I say, if his laws be good, and bountiful, and sure to make men
happy, then the good king will have those laws obeyed. He will not be an
indulgent king, for in his case to be indulgent will be cruelty, and
nothing less. The good king will not say,--I have given you laws by
which you may live happy; but I do not care whether you obey them or not.
I have, as it were, set you up, in life, and given you advantages by
which you may prosper if you use them; but I do not care whether you use
them or not. For to say that would be as much as to say that I do not
care if you make yourselves miserable, and make others miserable
likewise. The good king will say,--You shall obey my laws, for they are
for your good. You shall use my gifts, for they are for your good. And
if you do not, I will punish you. You shall respect my authority. And
if you do not--if you go too far, if you become wanton and cruel, and
destroy your fellow-subjects unjustly off the face of the earth; then I
will destroy you off the face of he earth, and burn up your city. I will
destroy any government or system of society which you set up in
opposition to my good and just laws. And if you merely despise the
gifts, and refuse to use them--then I will cast you out of my kingdom,
inside which is freedom and happiness, and light and knowledge, into the
darkness outside, bound hand and foot, into the ignorance and brutal
slavery which you have chosen, where you may reconsider yourself, weeping
and gnashing your teeth as you discover what a fool you have been.
Our Lord's parable has fulfilled itself again and again in history, and
will fulfil itself as long as foolish and rebellious persons exist on
earth. This is one of the laws of the kingdom of heaven. It must be so,
for it arises by necessity out of the character of Christ, the king of
heaven.--Infinite bounty and generosity; but if that bounty be despised
and insulted, or still more, if it be outraged by wanton tyranny or
cruelty, then--for the benefit of the rest of mankind--awful severity.
So it is, and so it must be; simply because God is good.
At least, this is the kind of king which the parable shows to us. The
king in it begins, not by asking his subjects to pay him taxes, or even
to do him service, but to come to a great feast--a high court ceremonial-
-the marriage of his son. Whatsoever else that may mean, it certainly
means this--that the king intended to treat these men, not as his slaves,
but as his guests and friends. They will not come. They are too busy;
one over his farm, another over his merchandise. They owe, remember,
safe possession of their farm, and safe transit for their merchandise, to
the king, who governs and guards the land. But they forget that, and
refuse his invitation. Some of them, seemingly out of mere insolence,
and the spirit of rebellion against authority, just because it is
authority, go a step too far. To show that they are their own masters,
and intend to do what they like, they take the king's messengers, and
treat them spitefully, and kill them.
Then there arises in that king a noble indignation. We do not read that
the king sentimentalised over these rebels, and said,--"After all, their
evil, like all evil, is only a lower form of good. They had a fine
instinct of freedom and independence latent in them, only it was in this
case somewhat perverted. They are really only to be pitied for knowing
no better; but I trust, by careful education, to bring them to a clearer
sense of their own interests. I shall therefore send them to a
reformatory, where, in consideration of the depressing circumstances of
their imprisonment, they will be better looked after, and have lighter
work, than the average of my honest and peaceable subjects." If the king
had spoken thus, he would have won high applause in these days; at least
till the farms and the merchandise, the property and the profits of the
rest of his subjects, were endangered by these favoured objects of his
philanthropy; who, having found that rebellion and even murder was
pardonable in one case, would naturally try whether it was not pardonable
in other cases likewise. But what we read of the king--and we must
really remember, in fear and trembling, who spoke this parable, even our
Lord Himself,--is this--He sent forth his armies, soldiers, men
disciplined to do their duty at all risks, and sworn to carry out the
law, and destroyed those murderers, and burned up their city.
Yes, the king was very angry, as he had a right to be. Yes, let us lay
that to heart, and tremble, from the very worst of us all to the very
best of us all. There is an anger in God. There is indignation in God.
Our highest reason ought to tell us that there must be anger in God, as
long as sin and wrong exist in any corner of the universe. For all that
is good in man is of the likeness of God. And is it not a good feeling,
a noble feeling, in man, to be indignant, or to cry for vengeance on the
offender, whenever we hear of cruelty, injustice, or violence? Is that
not noble? I say it is. I say that the man whose heart does not burn
within him at the sight of tyranny and cruelty, of baseness and deceit,
who is not ready to say, Take him, and do to him as he has done to
others; that man's heart is not right with God, or with man either. His
moral sense is stunted. He is on the way to become, first, if he can, a
tyrant, and then a slave.
And shall there be no noble indignation in God when He beholds all the
wrong which is done on earth? Shall the just and holy God look on
carelessly and satisfied at injustice and unholiness which vexes even
poor sinful man? God forbid! To think that, would, to my mind, be to
fancy God less just, less merciful, than man. And if any one says, Anger
is a passion, a suffering from something outside oneself, and God can
have no passions; God cannot be moved by the sins and follies of such
paltry atoms as we human beings are: the answer is, Man's anger--even
just anger--is, too often, a passion; weak-minded persons, ill-educated
persons, especially when they get together in mobs, and excite each
other, are carried away when they hear even a false report of cruelty or
injustice, by their really wholesome indignation, and say and do foolish,
and cruel, and unjust things, the victims of their own passion. But even
among men, the wiser a man is, the purer, the stronger-minded, so much
the more can he control his indignation, and not let it rise into
passion, but punish the offender calmly, though sternly, according to
law. Even so, our reason bids us believe, does God, who does all things
by law. His eternal laws punish of themselves, just as they reward of
themselves. The same law of God may be the messenger of His anger to the
bad, while it is the messenger of His love to the good. For God has not
only no passions, but no parts; and therefore His anger and His love are
not different, but the same. And His love is His anger, and His anger is
His love.
An awful thought and yet a blessed thought. Think of it, my friends--
think of it day and night. Under God's anger, or under God's love, we
must be, whether we will or not. We cannot flee from His presence. We
cannot go from His spirit. If we are loving, and so rise up to heaven,
God is there--in love. If we are cruel, and wrathful, and so go down to
hell, God is there also--in wrath: with the clean He will be clean, with
the froward man He will be froward. In God we live and move, and have
our being. On us, and on us alone, it depends, what sort of a life we
shall live, and whether our being shall be happy or miserable. On us,
and on us alone, it depends, whether we shall live under God's anger, or
live under God's love. On us, and on us alone, it depends whether the
eternal and unchangeable God shall be to us a consuming fire, or light,
and life, and bliss for evermore.
We never had more need to think of this than now; for there has spread
over the greater part of the civilised world a strong spirit of disbelief
in the living God. Men do not believe that God punishes sin and wrong-
doing, either in this world or in the world to come. And it is not
confined to those who are called infidels, who disbelieve in the
incarnation and kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ. Would to God it were
so! Everywhere we find Christians of all creeds and denominations alike,
holding the very same ruinous notion, and saying to themselves, God does
not govern this present world. God does not punish or reward in this
present life. This world is all wrong, and the devil's world, and
therefore I cannot prosper in the world unless I am a little wrong
likewise, and do a little of the devil's work. So one lies, another
cheats, another oppresses, another neglects his plainest social duties,
another defiles himself with base political or religious intrigues,
another breaks the seventh commandment, or, indeed, any and every one of
the commandments which he finds troublesome. And when one asks in
astonishment--You call yourselves Christians? You believe in God, and
the Bible, and Christianity? Do you not think that God will punish YOU
for all this? Do you not hear from the psalmists, and prophets, and
apostles, of a God who judges and punishes such generations as this? Of
a wrath of God which is revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness
of men, who, like you, hold down the truth in unrighteousness, knowing
what is right and yet doing what is wrong? Then they answer, at least in
their hearts, Oh dear no! God does not govern men now, or judge men now.
He only did so, our preachers tell us, under the old Jewish dispensation;
and such words as you quote from our Lord, or St Paul, have only to do
with the day of judgment, and the next life, and we have made it all
right for the next life. I, says one, regularly perform my religious
duties; and I, says another, build churches and chapels, and give large
sums in charity; and I, says another, am converted, and a member of a
church; and I, says another, am elect, and predestined to everlasting
life--and so forth, and so forth. Each man turning the grace of God into
a cloak for licentiousness, and deluding himself into the notion that he
may break the eternal laws of God, and yet go to heaven, as he calls it,
when he dies: not knowing, poor foolish man, that as the noble
commination service well says, the dreadful judgments of God are not
waiting for certain people at the last day, thousands of years hence, but
hanging over all our heads already, and always ready to fall on us. Not
knowing that it is as true now as it was two thousand years ago, that
"God is a righteous judge, strong and patient." "If a man will not turn,
He will whet His sword; He hath bent His bow, and made it ready," against
those who travail with mischief, who conceive sorrow, and bring forth
ungodliness. They dig up pits for their neighbours, and fall themselves
into the destruction which they have made for others; not knowing that it
is as true now as it was two thousand years ago, that God is for ever
saying to the ungodly, "Why dost thou preach my laws, and takest my
covenant in thy mouth; whereas thou hatest to be reformed, and hast cast
my words behind thee? Thou hast let thy mouth speak wickedness, and with
thy tongue thou hast set forth deceit. These things hast thou done, and
I held my tongue, and thou thoughtest, wickedly, that I am even such a
one as thyself. But I will reprove thee, and set before thee the things
which thou hast done. O consider this, ye that forget God: lest I pluck
you away, and there be none to deliver you."
Let us lay this to heart, and say, there can be no doubt--I at least have
none--that there is growing up among us a serious divorce between faith
and practice; a serious disbelief that the kingdom of heaven is about us,
and that Christ is ruling us, as He told us plainly enough in His
parables, by the laws of the kingdom of heaven; and that He does, and
will punish and reward each man according to those laws, and according to
nothing else.
We pride ourselves on our superior light, and our improved civilisation,
and look down on the old Roman Catholic missionaries, who converted our
forefathers from heathendom in the Middle Ages. Now, I am a Protestant,
if ever there was one, and I know well that these men had their
superstitions and false doctrines. They made mistakes, and often worse
than mistakes, for they were but men. But this I tell you, that if they
had not had a deep and sound belief that they were in the kingdom of God,
the kingdom of heaven; and that they and all men must obey the laws of
the kingdom of heaven; and that the first law of it was, that wrongdoing
would be punished, and rightdoing rewarded, in this life, every day, and
all day long, as sure as Christ the living Lord reigned in righteousness
over all the earth; if they had not believed that, I say, and acted on
it, we should probably have been heathen at this day. As it is, unless
we Protestants get back the old belief, that God is a living God, and
that His judgments are abroad in the earth, and that only in keeping His
commandments can we get life, and not perish, we shall be seriously in
danger of sinking at last into that hopeless state of popular feeling,
into which more than one nation in our own time has fallen,--that, as the
prophet of old says, a wonderful and horrible thing is committed in the
land; the prophets--that is, the preachers and teachers--prophesy
falsely; and the priests--the ministers of religion--bear rule by their
means; and my people love to have it so--love to have their consciences
drugged by the news that they may live bad lives, and yet die good
deaths.
"And what will ye do in the end thereof?" asks Jeremiah. What indeed!
What the Jews did in the end thereof you may read in the book of the
prophet Jeremiah. They did nothing, and could do nothing--with their
morality their manhood was gone. Sin had borne its certain fruit of
anarchy and decrepitude. The wrath of God revealed itself as usual, by
no miracle, but through inscrutable social laws. They had to submit,
cowardly and broken-hearted, to an invasion, a siege, and an utter ruin.
I do not say, God forbid, that we shall ever sink so low, and have to
endure so terrible a chastisement: but this I say, that the only way in
which any nation of which I ever read in history, can escape, sooner or
later, from such a fate, is to remember every day, and all day long, that
the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ill-doing of men,
who hold the truth in unrighteousness, knowing what is true and what is
right, yet telling lies, and doing wrong.
Let us lay this to heart, with seriousness and godly fear. For so we
shall look up with reverence, and yet with hope, to Christ the ascended
king, to whom all power is given in heaven and earth; for ever asking Him
for His Holy Spirit, to put into our minds good desires, and to enable us
to bring these desires to good effect. And so we shall live for ever
under our great taskmaster's eye, and find out that that eye is not
merely the eye of a just judge, not merely the eye of a bountiful king,
but more the eye of a loving and merciful Saviour, in whose presence is
life even here on earth; and at whose right hand, even in this sinful
world, are pleasures for evermore.