Chapel Royal, Whitehall. 1865. For the consumptive hospital.
St John ii. 11. "This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of
Galilee, and manifested forth his glory."
This word glory, whether in its Greek or its Roman shape, had a very
definite meaning in the days of the Apostles. It meant the admiration of
men. The Greek word, as every scholar knows, is derived from a root
signifying to seem, and expresses that which a man seems, and appears to
his fellow men. The Latin word glory is expressly defined by Cicero to
mean the love, trust, and admiration of the multitude; and a consequent
opinion that the man is worthy of honour. Glory, in fact, is a relative
word, and can be only used of any being in relation to other rational
beings, and their opinion of him.
The glory of God, therefore, in Scripture, must needs mean that
admiration which men feel, or ought to feel for God. There is a deeper,
an altogether abysmal meaning for that word: "And now, O Father, glorify
thou me with thy own self, with the glory which I had with thee before
the world was." But on that text, speaking of the majesty of the ever-
blessed Trinity, I dare not attempt to comment; though, could I explain
it, I should. When St. John says that Christ manifested forth His glory,
and His disciples believed on Him, it is plain that He means by His glory
that which produced admiration and satisfaction, not alone in the mind of
God the Father, but in the minds of men.
Now, what the Romans thought glorious in their days is notorious enough.
No one can look upon the picture of a Roman triumph without seeing that
their idea of glory was force, power, brute force, self-willed dominion,
selfish aggrandizement. But this was not the glory which St. John saw in
Christ, for His glory was full of grace, which is incompatible with self-
will and selfishness.
The Greek's meaning of glory is equally notorious. He called it wisdom.
We call it craft--the glory of the sophist, who could prove or disprove
anything for gain or display; the glory of the successful adventurer,
whose shrewdness made its market out of the stupidity and vice of the
barbarian. But this is not the glory of Christ, for St. John saw that it
was full of truth.
Therefore, neither strength nor craft are the glory of Christ; and,
therefore, they are not the glory of God. For the glory of Christ is the
glory of God, and none other, because He is very God, of very God
begotten. In Christ, man sees the unseen, and absolute, and eternal God
as He is, was, and ever will be. "No man hath seen God at any time; the
only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared
Him:"--and that perfectly and utterly; for in Him dwells all the fulness
of the Godhead bodily, so that He Himself could say, "He that hath seen
me hath seen the Father." This is the Catholic Faith. God grant that I
may believe it with my whole heart. God grant that you may believe it
with your whole hearts likewise, and not merely with your intellects and
brains.
But, it may be said, though God be not glorious and admirable for selfish
force, which it were blasphemous to attribute to Him, He is still
admirable for His power. Though He be not glorious for craft, He is
still glorious for His wisdom. I deny both. I deny that power is any
object of admiration, unless it be used well for good ends. To admire
power for its own sake is one of those errors, which has been well called
Titanolatry, the worship of giants. Neither is wisdom an object of
admiration, unless it be used for good ends. To worship it for its own
sake is a common error enough--the idolatry of Intellect. But it is none
the less an error, and a grievous one. God's power and wisdom are
glorious only in as far as they are used (as they are utterly) for good
ends; only, in plain words, as far as God is (as He is perfectly) good.
And the true glory of God is that God is good. So says the Scripture;
and so I bid you all remember, for it is a truth which you and I and all
mankind are perpetually ready to forget.
Let me but ask you one question as a test whether or not I am right. If
the Supreme Being used His power, as the Roman Caesar used his; if He
used His wisdom as the Greek sophist used his, would He be glorious then
and worthy of admiration? The old heathen AEschylus answered that
question for mankind long ago on the Athenian stage. I should be ashamed
to answer it again in a Christian pulpit. And when I say GOOD, I mean
good, even as man can be, and ought to be, and is, more or less, good.
The theory that because God's morality is absolute, it may, therefore, be
different from man's morality, in KIND as well as in DEGREE, is equally
contrary to the letter and to the spirit of Scripture. Man, according to
Scripture, is made in God's moral image and likeness, and however fallen
and degraded that image may be, still the ultimate standard of right and
wrong is the same in God and in man. How else dare Abraham ask of God,
"Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" How else has God's
command to the old Jews any meaning, "Be ye holy, for I am holy?" How
else have all the passages in the Psalms, Prophets, Evangelists,
Apostles, which speak of God's justice, mercy, faithfulness, any honest
or practical meaning to human beings? How else can they be aught but a
mockery, a delusion, and a snare to the tens of thousands who have found
in them hope and trust, that God would deliver them and the world from
evil? What means the command to be perfect as our Father in heaven is
perfect? What mean the words that we partake of a divine nature? How
else is the command to love God anything but an arbitrary and impossible
demand,--demanding love, which every writer of fiction tells you, and
tells you truly, cannot be compelled--can only go forth toward a being
who shows himself worthy of our love, by possessing those qualities which
we admire in our fellow men? No. Against such a theory I must quote, as
embodying all that I would say, and corroborating, on entirely
independent ground, the Scriptural account of human morality--against
such a theory, I say I must quote the words of our greatest living
logician. "Language has no meaning for the words Just, Merciful,
Benevolent" (he might have added truthful likewise) "save that in which
we predicate them of our fellow creatures; and unless that is what we
intend to express by them, we have no business to employ the words. If
in affirming them of God we do not mean to affirm these very qualities,
differing only as greater in degree, we are neither philosophically nor
morally entitled to affirm them at all . . . What belongs to" God's
goodness "as Infinite (or more properly Absolute) I do not pretend to
know; but I know that infinite goodness must be goodness, and that what
is not consistent with goodness is not consistent with infinite goodness.
. . . Besides," he says--and to this sound reductio ad absurdum I call
the attention of all who believe their Bibles--"unless I believe God to
possess the same moral attributes which I find, in however inferior a
degree, in a good man, what ground of assurance have I of God's veracity?
All trust in a Revelation presupposes a conviction that God's attributes
are the same, in all but degree, with the best human attributes. If,
instead of the 'glad tidings' that there exists a Being in whom all the
excellences which the highest human mind can conceive, exist in a degree
inconceivable to us, I am informed that the world is ruled by a being
whose attributes are infinite, but what they are we cannot learn, nor
what are the principles of his government, except that 'the highest human
morality which we are capable of conceiving' does not sanction them;
convince me of it and I will bear my fate as I may. But when I am told
that I must believe this, and at the same time call this being by the
names which express and affirm the highest human morality, I say in plain
terms that I will not. Whatever power such a being may have over me,
there is one thing which he shall not do: he shall not compel me to
worship him. I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I
apply that epithet to my fellow creatures."
That St. John would have assented to these bold and honest words, that
such is St. John's conception of human and divine morality, the story in
the text shows, to my mind, especially. It is, so to speak, a crucial
experiment, by which the truth of the Scripture theory is verified. The
difficulty in all ages about a standard of morality has been--How can we
fix it? Even if we agree that man's goodness ought to be the counterpart
of God's goodness, we know that in practice it is not, as mankind has
differed in all ages and countries about what is right and wrong. The
Hindoo thinks it right to burn widows, wrong to eat animal food; and
between such extremes there are numberless minor differences. Hardly any
act is conceivable which has not been thought by some man, somewhere,
somehow, morally right or morally wrong. If all that we can do is, to
choose out those instances of morality which seem to us most right, and
impute them to God, shall we not have an ever-shifting, probably a merely
conventional standard of right and wrong? And worse--shall we not be
always in danger of deifying our own superstitions--perhaps our own
vices: of making a God in our own image, because we cannot know that God
in whose image we are made? Most true, unless "we believe rightly the
incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ," "perfect God and perfect man." In
Him, says the Bible, the perfect human morality is manifested, and shown
by His life and conduct to be identical with the divine. He bids us be
perfect even as our Father in heaven is perfect; and He only has a right-
-in the sense of a sound and fair reason--for so doing; because He can
say, and has said, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father."
At least, such is the doctrine of St. John. He tells us that the Word,
who was God, was made flesh, and dwelt in his land and neighbourhood; and
that he and his fellows beheld His glory; and saw that it was the glory
of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. And then,
in the next chapter, he goes on to tell us how that glory was first
manifested forth--by turning water into wine at a marriage feast. On the
truth of the story, I say simply, in passing, that I believe it fully and
literally; as I do also St. John's assertions about our Lord's Divinity.
But I only wish to point out to you why I called this miracle the crucial
experiment, which proved God's goodness to be identical with that which
we call (and rightly) goodness in man. It is by the seeming
insignificance thereof, by the seeming non-necessity, by the seeming
humbleness of its circumstances, by the seeming smallness of its results,
issuing merely (as far as Scripture tells us, and therefore as far as we
need know, or have a right to imagine) in the giving of a transitory and
unnecessary physical pleasure. In short, by the very absence of that
Dignus deo vindice nodus, that knot which only a God could untie, which
heathens demanded ere a god was allowed to interfere in the plot of a
tragedy; which too many who call themselves Christians demand before the
living God is allowed to interfere in that world in which without Him not
a sparrow falls to the ground. In a moral case of this kind, if you will
consider, that which seems least is often the greatest. That which seems
the lowest, because the simplest and meanest manifestation of a moral
law, may be--probably is--the deepest, the highest, the most universal.
Life is made up of little things, say the practically wise, and they say
true, for our Lord says so likewise. "He that is faithful in that which
is least is faithful also in much." If you look on morality, virtue,
goodness, holiness, sanctification--call it what you will--as merely the
obligation of an EXTERNAL law, you will be tempted to say, "Let me be
faithful to it in its greater and more important cases, and that is
enough. The pettier ones must take care of themselves, I have not time
enough to attend to them, and God will not, it may be, require them of
me." But if the morality, goodness, holiness be in you what it was in
Christ, without measure--a SPIRIT, even the spirit of God--a spirit
within you, possessing you, and working on you, and in you--then that
which seems most petty and unimportant will often be most important, the
test of the soundness of your heart, of the reality of your feelings.
We all know--every writer of fiction, at least, should know--how true
this is in the case of love between man and woman, between parent and
child: how the little kindnesses, the half-unconscious gestures, the
petty labours of love, of which their object will never be aware, the
scrupulousness which is able "to greatly find quarrel in a straw, when
honour is at stake,"--how these are the very things which show that the
affection is neither the offspring of dry and legal duty, nor of selfish
enjoyment, but lies far down in the unconscious abysses of the heart and
being itself:--as Christ--to compare (for He Himself permits, nay
commands, us to do so in His parables) our littleness with His immensity-
-as Christ, I say, showed, when He chose first to manifest His glory--the
glory of His grace and truth--by increasing for a short hour the
pleasures of a village feast.
I might say much more on the point; how He showed these by His truth; how
He proved that He, and therefore His Father and your Father, was not that
Deus quidam deceptor, whom some suppose Him, mocking the intellect of His
creatures by the FACTS of nature which He has created, tempting the souls
of His creatures by the very faculties and desires which He Himself has
given them.
But I wish now to draw your minds rather to that one word GRACE--Grace,
what it means, and how it is a manifestation of glory. Few Scriptural
expressions have suffered more that this word Grace from the storms of
theological controversy. Springing flesh in the minds of Apostles, as
did many other noble words in that heaven-enriched soil, the only
adequate expressions of an idea which till then had never fully possessed
the mind of man, it meant more than we can now imagine; perhaps more that
we shall ever imagine again. We, alas! only know the word with its
fragrance battered out, its hues rubbed off, its very life anatomized out
of it by the battles of rival divines, till its mere skeleton is left,
and all that grace means to most of us is simply and dryly a certain
spiritual gift of God. Doubtless it means that; but if it meant nothing
more at first, why was not the plain word Gift enough for the Apostles?
Why did they use Grace? Why did they use, too, in the sense of giving
and gifts, nouns and verbs derived from that root-word, CHARIS, grace,
which plainly signified so much to them? A word, the root-meaning of
which was neither more nor less than a certain heathen goddess, or
goddesses--the inspirer of beauty in art, the impersonation of all that
is pure, charming, winning, bountiful--in one word, of all that is
graceful and gracious in the human character. The fact is strange, but
the fact is there; and being there, we must face it and explain it. Of
course, the Apostles use the word grace in a far deeper and loftier
meaning; raise it, mathematically speaking, to a far higher power. There
is no need to remind you of that. But why did they choose and use the
word at all--a word whose old meaning every heathen knew--unless for some
innate fitness in it to express something in the character of God? To
tell men that there was in God a graciousness, as of the most gracious of
all human beings, which gave to His character a moral beauty, a charm, a
winningness, which, as even the old Jewish prophet, before the
Incarnation, could perceive and boldly declare, drew them with the cords
of a man and with the bands of love, attracting them by the very human
character of its graciousness.
"The glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace."
Meditate on those words. "Full of grace,"--of that spirit which we, like
the old heathens, consider rather a feminine than a masculine excellence;
the spirit, which, as St. James says of God the Father, gives simply and
upbraideth not; gives gracefully, as we ourselves say--in the right and
happy use of the adverb; does not spoil its gifts by throwing them in the
teeth of the giver, but gives for mere giving's sake; pleases where it
can be done, without sin or harm, for mere pleasing's sake; most human
and humane when it is most divine; the spirit by which Christ turned the
water into wine at the marriage feast, and so manifested forth His
absolute and eternal glory. And how? How?
Thus, if you will receive it; if you will believe a truth which is too
often hidden from the wise and prudent, and yet revealed unto babes;
which will never be understood by the proud Pharisee, the sour fanatic,
the ascetic who dreads and distrusts his Father in heaven; but which is
clear and simple enough to many a clear and simple heart, honest and
single-eyed, sunny itself, and bringing sunshine wherever it comes,
because it is inspired by the gracious spirit of God, and delights to
show kindness for kindness' sake, and to make happy for happiness' sake,
taking no merit to itself for doing that, which is as instinctive as its
very breath.
This,--that the graciousness which Christ showed at that marriage feast
is neither more nor less than the boundless love of God, who could not
live alone in the abyss, but must needs, out of His own Divine Charity,
create the universe, that He might have somewhat beside Himself whereon
to pour out the ocean of His love, which finds its own happiness in
giving happiness to all created things, from the loftiest of rational
beings down to the gnat which dances in the sun, and for aught we know,
to the very lichen which nestles in the Alpine rock.
This is the character of God, unless Scripture be a dream of man's
imagination. Thus far you may know God; thus far you may see God as He
is; and know and see that He is just with the justice of a man, only more
just; merciful with the mercy of a man, only more merciful; truthful with
the truthfulness of a man, only more truthful; gracious with the
graciousness of a man, only more gracious; and loving? That we dare not
say: for if we say so much, the Scripture commands us to say more. The
Scripture tells us that the whole absolute morality of God is summed up--
as our own human morality ought to be--in His Love. That love is the
fulfilment of the Moral Law in Him as in us; that it is the root and
cause and spirit of His justice, mercy, truth, and graciousness; that it
belongs not to His attributes, as they may be said to be, but to His
essence and His spirit; that we must not, if we be careful of our words,
say, God is loving, because we are bidden to say, "God is Love."
Thus, the commands, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God--and thy neighbour
as thyself, are shown to be not arbitrary and impossible demands,
miscalled moral obligations, while they are merely legal and external
ones; but true moral obligations, in the moral sense, to which heart and
spirit can answer, "I rejoice to do thy will, O God; Thy law is within my
heart." You ought to love God, because He is supremely loveable and
worthy of your love. You can love God, because you can appreciate and
know God; for you are His child, made in His moral likeness, and capable
of seeing Him as He is morally, and of seeing in Him the full perfection
of all that attracts your moral sense, when it is manifested in any human
being. And you can love your neighbour as yourselves, because, and in as
far as you have in you the Spirit of God, the spirit of universal love,
which proceedeth out for ever both from the Father and the Son to all
beings and things which They have made.
And of one thing I am sure, that in proportion as you are led and
inspired by that Spirit of God which showed in our Lord, in the very
deepest and truest sense, as the spirit of humanity, just so you will
feel a genial and hearty pleasure in lessening all human suffering,
however slight; in increasing all harmless human pleasure, however
transitory; and in copying Him who, at the marriage feast, gracefully and
graciously turned the water into wine. I do not, of course, mean that
you are to do no more than that; to prefer sentiment to duty, to amuse
and glorify yourselves by paying tithe of mint, anise, and cummin, and
neglect the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith.
But I do mean that you are not to distrust your own sentiments, not to
crush your own instinctive sympathies. The very lowest of them--that
which makes you shrink at the sight of pain, and rejoice in the sight of
pleasure, is not natural, and common to you with the animals; it is
supernatural and divine. It is a schoolmaster to bring you to Christ, to
that higher inspiration of His, which tells your heart to alleviate the
unseen woes which will never come into painful contact with your
sensibilities, to bestow pleasures in which you yourself have no
immediate share. It will tell your hearts especially in the case of this
very Hospital for Consumption not to be slack in giving, because so much
of what you will give--it is painful to recollect how much--will be
spent, not in prevention, not even in cure, but in mere alleviation, mere
increased bodily ease, mere savoury food, even mere passing amusements
for wearied minds. Be it so. If (which God forbid) we could do nothing
SAVE alleviate; if (which God forbid) permanent cure, even lengthening of
life, were impossible, I should say just as much, Give. Give money to
alleviate; give, even though what you give were, in the strictly economic
sense, WASTED. We are ready enough, most of us, to waste upon ourselves.
It is well for us to taste once in a way the luxury of wasting on others;
though I have yet to learn that anything can be called wasted which
lessens, even for a moment, the amount of human suffering. A plan, for
instance, is on foot for sending twenty of the patients to Madeira for
the winter. The British Consul, to his honour, guarantees their
maintenance, if the Hospital will pay their passage out and home. Some
may say--An unnecessary expense--a problematical benefit. Be it so. I
believe that it will not be such; that it may save many lives--they may
revive: but were it not so, I would still say Give. Let them go, even
if every soul in that ship were doomed. Let them go. Let them drink the
fresh sea breeze before they die; let them see the green tropic world;
let them forget their sorrow for a while; let them feel springing up
afresh in them the celestial fount of hope. We let the guilty criminal
eat and drink well the morn ere he is led forth to die--shall we not do
as much by those who are innocent?
But especially would I say, try to lessen such suffering as that for
which I plead to-day, because it is undeserved in the true sense of that
word--not earned by any act of their own. These poor souls suffer for no
sins of their own; they have done nothing to bring on themselves a
disease which attacks too often the fairest, the seemingly strongest and
healthiest, the most temperate and most pure. They suffer, some it may
be for the sins of their forefathers, some from causes of disease which
science cannot as yet control, cannot even discover. They are objects of
unmixed pity and sympathy: they should be so to us; for they are so to
Him who made them. On this disease God does bestow a special
alleviation--a special mark of His pity, of His tenderness, in a word of
His grace. That unclouded intellect, that unruffled temper, that
cheerful resignation, that brave and yet calm facing of the inevitable
future, that ever-fresh hope, which is no delusion but a token that God
Himself has taken away the sting of death and the victory of the grave,
till the very thought of death has vanished, or is looked on merely as
the gate to a life of health, and strength, and peace, and joy:--all
these symptoms, so common, so normal, all but universal--this Euthanasia
which God has provided for those who, humanly speaking, are innocent, yet
must, for the general good of humanity, leave this world for another;--
what are they but the voice of God to us, telling that He loves, that He
pities, that He alleviates; and bidding us go and do likewise? God has
alleviated where we cannot. He has bidden us thereby, if His likeness
and spirit be indeed in us, to alleviate where we can; and believe that
by every additional comfort, however petty, which we provide, we are
copying the Ideal Man, who, because He was very God of very God, could
condescend, at the marriage feast, to turn the water into wine.