If I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I
depart, I will send Him unto you.—JOHN xvi. 7.
WE are now coming near to two great days, Ascension-day and Whit-Sunday,
which our forefathers have appointed, year by year, to put us continually
in mind of two great works, which the Lord worked out for us, His most
unworthy subjects, and still unworthier brothers.
On Ascension-day He ascended up into Heaven, and received gifts for men,
even for His enemies, that the Lord God might dwell among them; and on
Whit-Sunday, He sent down those gifts. The Spirit of God came down to
dwell in the hearts of men, to be the right of everyone who asks for it,
white or black, young or old, rich or poor, and never to leave this earth
as long as there is a human being on it. And because we are coming near
to these two great days, the Prayer-book, in the Collects, Epistles, and
Gospels, tries to put us in mind of those days, and to make us ready to
ask for the blessings of which they are the yearly signs and witnesses.
The Gospel for last Sunday told us how the Lord told His disciples just
before His death, that for a little while they should not see Him; and
again a little while and they should see Him, because he was going to the
Father, and that they should have great sorrow, but that their sorrow
should be turned into joy. And the Gospel for to-day goes further still,
and tells us why He was going away—that He might send to them the
Comforter, His Holy Spirit, and that it was expedient—good for them, that
He should go away; for that if He did not, the Comforter would not come
to them. Now, in these words, I do not doubt He was speaking of
Ascension-day, and of Whit-Sunday; and therefore it is that these Gospels
have been chosen to be read before Ascension-day and Whit-Sunday; and in
proportion as we attend to these Gospels, and take in the meaning of
them, and act accordingly, Ascension-day and Whit-Sunday will be a
blessing and a profit to us; and in proportion as we neglect them, or
forget them, Ascension-day and Whit-Sunday will be witnesses against our
souls at the day of judgment, that the Lord Himself condescended to buy
for us with His own blood, blessings unspeakable, and offer them freely
unto us, in spite of all our sins, and yet we would have none of them,
but preferred our own will to God’s will, and the little which we thought
we could get for ourselves, to the unspeakable treasures which God had
promised to give us, and turned away from the blessings of His kingdom,
to our own foolish pleasure and covetousness, like “the dog to his vomit,
and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire.”
I said that God had promised to us an unspeakable treasure: and so He
has; a treasure that will make the poorest and weakest man among us,
richer than if he had all the wealth gathered from all the nations of the
world, which everyone is admiring now in that Great Exhibition in London,
and stronger than if he had all the wisdom which produced that wealth.
Let us see now what it is that God has promised us—and then those to whom
God has given ears to hear, and hearts to understand, will see that large
as my words may sound, they are no larger than the truth.
Christ said, that if He went away, He would send down the Comforter, the
Holy Spirit of God. The Nicene Creed says, that the Holy Spirit of God
is the Lord and Giver of life; and so He is. He gives life to the earth,
to the trees, to the flowers, to the dumb animals, to the bodies and
minds of men; all life, all growth, all health, all strength, all beauty,
all order, all help and assistance of one thing by another, which you see
in the world around you, comes from Him. He is the Lord and Giver of
life; in Him, the earth, the sun and stars, all live and move and have
their being. He is not them, or a part of them, but He gives life to
them. But to men He is more than that—for we men ourselves are more than
that, and need more. We have immortal spirits in us—a reason, a
conscience, and a will; strange rights and duties, strange hopes and
fears, of which the beasts and the plants know nothing. We have hearts
in us which can love, and feel, and sorrow, and be weak, and sinful, and
mistaken; and therefore we want a Comforter. And the Lord and Giver of
life has promised to be our Comforter; and the Father and the Son, from
both of whom He proceeds, have promised to send Him to us, to strengthen
and comfort us, and give our spirits life and health, and knit us
together to each other, and to God, in one common bond of love and
fellow-feeling even as He the Spirit knits together the Father and the
Son.
I said that we want a Comforter. If we consider what that word Comforter
means, we shall see that we do want a Comforter, and that the only
Comforter which can satisfy us for ever and ever, must be He, the very
Spirit of God, the Lord and Giver of life.
Now Comforter means one who gives comfort; so the meaning of it will
depend upon what comfort means. Our word comfort, comes from two old
Latin words, which mean _with_ and _to strengthen_. And, therefore, a
Comforter means anyone who is with us to strengthen us, and do for us
what we could not do for ourselves. You will see that this is the proper
meaning of the word, when you remember what bodily things we call
comforts. You say that a person is comfortable, or lives in comfort, if
he has a comfortable income, a comfortable house, comfortable clothes,
comfortable food, and so on. Now all these things, his money, his house,
his clothes, his food, are not himself. They make him stronger and more
at ease. They make his life more pleasant to him. But they are not
_him_; they are round him, with him, to strengthen him. So with a
person’s mind and feelings; when a man is in sorrow and trouble, he
cannot comfort himself. His friends must come to him and comfort him;
talk to him, advise him, show their kind feeling towards him, and in
short, be with him to strengthen him in his afflictions. And if we
require comfort for our bodies, and for our minds, my friends, how much
more do we for our spirits—our souls, as we call them! How weak, and
ignorant, and self-willed, and perplexed, and sinful they are—surely our
souls require a comforter far more than our bodies or our minds do! And
to comfort our spirits, we require a spirit; for we cannot see our own
spirits, our own souls, as we can our bodies. We cannot even tell by our
feelings what state they are in. We may deceive ourselves, and we do
deceive ourselves, again and again, and fancy that our souls are strong
when they are weak—that they are simple and truthful when they are full
of deceit and falsehood—that they are loving God when they are only
loving themselves—that they are doing God’s will when they are only doing
their own selfish and perverse wills. No man can take care of his own
spirit, much less give his own spirit life; “no man can quicken his own
soul,” says David, that is, no man can give his own soul life. And
therefore we must have someone beyond ourselves to give life to our
spirits. We must have someone to teach us the things that we could never
find out for ourselves, someone who will put into our hearts the good
desires that could never come of themselves. We must have someone who
can change these wills of ours, and make them love what they hate by
nature, and make them hate what they love by nature. For by nature we
are selfish. By nature we are inclined to love ourselves, rather than
anyone else; to take care of ourselves, rather than anyone else. By
nature we are inclined to follow our own will, rather than God’s will, to
do our own pleasure, rather than follow God’s commandments, and therefore
by nature our spirits are dead; for selfishness and self-will are
_spiritual death_. Spiritual life is love, pity, patience, courage,
honesty, truth, justice, humbleness, industry, self-sacrifice, obedience
to God, and therefore to those whom God sends to teach and guide us.
_That_ is spiritual life. That is the life of Jesus Christ; His
character, His conduct, was like that—to love, to help, to pity, all
around—to give up Himself even to death—to do His Father’s will and not
His own. That was His life. Because He was the Son of God He did it.
In proportion as we live like Him, we shall he living like sons of God.
In proportion as we live like Jesus Christ, the Son of God, our spirits
will be alive. For he that hath Jesus Christ the Son of God in him, hath
life, and he that hath not the Son of God, hath not life, says St. John.
But who can raise us from the death of sin and selfishness, to the life
of righteousness and love? Who can change us into the likeness of Jesus
Christ? Who can even show us what Jesus Christ’s likeness is, and take
the things of Christ and show them to us; so that by seeing what He was,
we may see what we should be? And who, if we have this life in us, will
keep it alive in us, and be with us to strengthen us? Who will give us
strength to force the foul and fierce and false thoughts out of our mind,
and say, “Get thee behind me, Satan?” Who will give our spirits life?
and who will strengthen that life in us?
Can we do it for ourselves? Oh! my friends, I pity the man who is so
blind and ignorant, who knows so little of himself, upon whom the lessons
which his own mistakes, and sins, and failings should have taught him,
have been so wasted that he fancies that he can teach and guide himself
without any help, and that he can raise his own soul to life, or keep it
alive without assistance. Can his body do without its comforts? Then
how can his spirit? If he left his house, and threw away his clothes,
and refused all help from his fellow-men, and went and lived in the woods
like a wild beast, we should call him a madman, because he refused the
help and comfort to his body which God has made necessary for him. But
just as great a madman is he who refuses the help and the strengthening
which God has made necessary for his spirit—just as great a madman is he
who fancies that his soul is any more able than his body is, to live
without continual help. It is just because man is nobler than the beast
that he requires help. The fox in the wood needs no house, no fire; he
needs no friends; he needs no comforts, and no comforters, because he is
a beast—because he is meant to live and die selfish and alone; therefore
God has provided him in himself with all things necessary to keep the
poor brute’s selfish life in him for a few short years. But just because
man is nobler than that; just because man is not intended to live selfish
and alone; just because his body, and his mind, and his spirit are
beautifully and delicately made, and intended for all sorts of wonderful
purposes, therefore God has appointed that from the moment he is born to
all eternity he cannot live alone; he cannot support himself; he stands
in continual need of the assistance of all around him, for body, and
soul, and spirit; he needs clothes, which other men must make; houses,
which other man must build; food, which other men must produce; he has to
get his livelihood by working for others, while others get their
livelihood in return by working for him. As a child he needs his parents
to be his comforters, to take care of him in body and mind. As he grows
up he needs the care of others; he cannot exist a day without his
fellow-men: he requires school-masters to educate him; books and masters
to teach him his trade; and when he has learnt it, and settled himself in
life, he requires laws made by other men, perhaps by men who died
hundreds of years before he was born, to secure to him his rights and
property, to secure to him comforts, and to make him feel comfortable in
his station; he needs friends and family to comfort him in sorrow and in
joy, to do for him the thousand things which he cannot do for himself.
In proportion as he is alone and friendless he is pitiable and miserable,
let him be as rich as Solomon himself. From the moment, I say, he is
born, he needs continual comforts and comforters for his body, and mind,
and heart. And then he fancies that, though his body and his mind cannot
exist safely, or grow up healthily, without the continual care and
comforting of his fellow-men, that yet his soul, the part of him which is
at once the most important and the most in danger; the part of him of
which he knows least; the part of him which he understands least; the
part of him of which his body and mind cannot take care, because it has
to take care of them, can live, and grow, and prosper without any help
whatsoever!
And if we cannot strengthen our own souls no man can strengthen them for
us. No man can raise our bodies to life, much less can he raise our
souls. The physician himself cannot cure the sicknesses of our bodies;
he can only give us fit medicines, and leave them to cure us by certain
laws of nature, which he did not make, and which he cannot alter. And
though the physician can, by much learning, understand men’s bodies
somewhat, who can understand men’s souls? We cannot understand our own
souls; we do not know what they are, how they live; whence they come, or
whither they go. We cannot cure them ourselves, much less can anyone
cure them for us. The only one who can cure our souls is He that made
our souls; the only one who can give life to our souls is He who gives
life to everything. The only one who can cure, and strengthen, and
comfort our spirits, is He who understands our spirits, because He
himself is the Spirit of all spirits, the Spirit who searcheth all
things, even the deep things of God; because He is the Spirit of God the
Father, who made all heaven and earth, and of Jesus Christ the Son, who
understands the heart of man, who can be touched with the feelings of our
infirmities, and hath been tempted in all things, just as we are, yet
without sin.
He is the Comforter which God has promised to our spirits, the only
Comforter who can strengthen our spirits; and if we have Him with us, if
He is strengthening us, if He is leading us, if He is abiding with us, if
He is changing us day by day, more and more into the likeness of Jesus
Christ, are we not, as I said at the beginning of my sermon, richer than
if we possessed all the land of England, stronger than if we had all the
armies of the world at our command? For what is more precious than—God
Himself? What is stronger than—God Himself? The poorest man in whom
God’s Spirit dwells is greater than the greatest king in whom God’s
Spirit does not dwell. And so he will find in the day that he dies.
Then where will riches be, and power? The rich man will take none of
them away with him when he dieth, neither shall his pomp follow him.
Naked came he into this world, and naked shall he return out of it, to go
as he came, and carry with him none of the comforts which he thought in
this life the only ones worth having. But the Spirit of God remains with
us for ever; that treasure a man shall carry out of this world with him,
and keep to all eternity. That friend will never forsake him, for He is
the Spirit of Love, which abideth for ever. That Comforter will never
grow weak, for He is Himself the very eternal Lord and Giver of Life; and
the soul that is possessed by Him must live, must grow, must become
nobler, purer, freer, stronger, more loving, for ever and ever, as the
eternities roll by. That is what He will give you, my friends; that is
His treasure; that is the Spirit-life, the true and everlasting life,
which flows from Him as the stream flows from the fountain-head.
X.
WHIT-SUNDAY.
The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering,
gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance—against such there
is no law.—GALATIANS v. 22, 23.
IN all countries, and in all ages, the world has been full of complaints
of Law and Government. And one hears the same complaints in England now.
You hear complaints that the laws favour one party and one rank more than
another, that they are expensive, and harsh, and unfair, and what
not?—But I think, my friends, that for us, and especially on this
Whit-Sunday, it will be much wiser, instead of complaining of the laws,
to complain of ourselves, for needing those laws. For what is it that
makes laws necessary at all, except man’s sinfulness? Adam required no
laws in the garden of Eden. We should require no laws if we were what we
ought to be—what God has offered to make us. We may see this by looking
at the laws themselves, and considering the purposes for which they were
made. We shall then see, that, like Moses’ Laws of old, the greater part
of them have been added because of transgressions.—In plain English—to
prevent men from doing things which they ought not to do, and which, if
they were in a right state of mind, they would not do. How many laws are
passed, simply to prevent one man, or one class, from oppressing or
ill-using some other man or class? What a vast number of them are passed
simply to protect property, or to protect the weak from the cruel, the
ignorant from the cunning! It is plain that if there was no cruelty, no
cunning, no dishonesty, these laws, at all events, would not be needed.
Again, one of the great complaints against the laws and the government,
is that they are so expensive, that rates and taxes are heavy burdens—and
doubtless they are: but what makes them necessary except men’s sin? If
the poor were more justly and mercifully treated, and if they in their
turn were more thrifty and provident, there would be no need of the
expenses of poor rates. If there was no love of war and plunder, there
would be no need of the expense of an army. If there was no crime, there
would be no need of the expense of police and prisons. The thing is so
simple and self-evident, that it seems almost childish to mention it.
And yet, my friends, we forget it daily. We complain of the laws and
their harshness, of taxes and their expensiveness, and we forget all the
while that it is our own selfishness and sinfulness which brings this
expense upon us, which makes it necessary for the law to interfere and
protect us against others, and others against us. And while we are
complaining of the government for not doing its work somewhat more
cheaply, we are forgetting that if we chose, we might leave government
very little work to do—that every man if he chose, might be his own
law-maker and his own police—that every man if he will, may lead a life
“against which there is no law.”
I say again, that it is our own fault, the fault of our sinfulness, that
laws are necessary for us. In proportion as we are what Scripture calls
“natural men,” that is, savage, selfish, divided from each other, and
struggling against each other, each for his own interest; as long as we
are not renewed and changed into new men, so long will laws, heavy,
severe, and burdensome, be necessary for us. Without them we should be
torments to ourselves, to our neighbours, to our country. But these laws
are only necessary as long as we are full of selfishness and ungodliness.
The moment we yield ourselves up to God’s law, man’s laws are ready
enough to leave us alone. Take, for instance, a common example; as long
as anyone is a faithful husband and a good father, the law does not
interfere with his conduct towards his wife and children. But it is when
he is unfaithful to them, when he ill-treats them, or deserts them, that
the law interferes with its “Thou shalt not,” and compels him to behave,
against his will, in the way in which he ought to have behaved of his own
will. It was free to the man to have done his duty by his family,
without the law—the moment he neglects his duty, he becomes amenable to
it.
But the law can only force a man’s actions: it cannot change his heart.
In the instance which I have been just mentioning, the law can say to a
man, “You shall not ill-treat your family; you shall not leave them to
starve.” But the law cannot say to him “You shall love your family.”
The law can only command from a man outward obedience; the obedience of
the heart it cannot enforce. The law may make a man do his duty, it
cannot make a man _love_ his duty. And therefore laws will never set the
world right. They can punish persons after the wrong is done, and that
not certainly nor always: but they cannot certainly prevent the wrongs
being done. The law can punish a man for stealing: and yet, as we see
daily, men steal in the face of punishment. Or even if the law, by its
severity, makes persons afraid to commit certain particular crimes, yet
still as long as the sinful heart is left in them unchanged, the sin
which is checked in one direction is sure to break out in another. Sin,
like every other disease, is sure, when it is driven onwards, to break
out at a fresh point, or fester within some still more deadly, because
more hidden and unsuspected, shape. The man who dare not be an open
sinner for fear of the law, can be a hypocrite in spite of it. The man
who dare not steal for fear of the law, can cheat in spite of it. The
selfish man will find fresh ways of being selfish, the tyrannical man of
being tyrannical, however closely the law may watch him. He will
discover some means of evading it; and thus the law, after all, though it
may keep down crime, multiplies sin; and by the law, as St. Paul says, is
the knowledge of sin.
What then will do that for this poor world which the law cannot do—which,
as St. Paul tells us, not even the law of God given on Mount Sinai, holy,
just, good as it was, could do, because no law can give life? What will
give men a new heart and a new spirit, which shall love its duty and do
it willingly, and not by compulsion, everywhere and always, and not
merely just as far as it commanded? The text tells us that there is a
Spirit, the fruit of which is love, joy, peace, longsuffering,
gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance; a character such as no
laws can give to a man, and which no law dare punish in a man. Look at
this character as St. Paul sets it forth—and then think what need would
there be of all these burdensome and expensive laws, if all men were but
full of the fruits of that Spirit which St. Paul describes?
I know what answer will be ready, in some of your minds at least, to all
this. You will be ready to reply, almost angrily, “Of course if everyone
was perfect, we should need no laws: but people are not perfect, and you
cannot expect them to be.” My friends, whether or not _we_ expect
baptized people, living in a Christian country, to be perfect, God
expects them to be perfect; for He has said, by the mouth of His Son, our
Lord Jesus Christ, “Be ye therefore perfect, as our Father which is in
heaven is perfect.” And He has told us what being perfect is like; you
may read it for yourselves in His sermon on the Mount; and you may see
also that what He commands us to do in that sermon, from the beginning to
the end, is the exact opposite and contrary of the ways and rules of this
world, which, as I have shown, make burdensome laws necessary to prevent
our devouring each other. Now, do you think that God would have told us
to be perfect, if He knew that it was impossible for us? Do you think
that He, the God of truth, would have spoken such a cruel mockery against
poor sinful creatures like us, as to command us a duty without giving us
the means of fulfilling it? Do you think that He did not know ten
thousand times better than I what I have been just telling you, that laws
could not change men’s hearts and wills; that commanding a man to love
and like a thing will not make him love and like it; that a man’s heart
and spirit must be changed in him from within, and not merely laws and
commandments laid on him from without? Then why has He commanded us to
love each other, ay, to love our enemies, to bless those who curse us, to
pray for those who use us spitefully? Do you think the Lord meant to
make hypocrites of us; to tell us to go about, as some who call
themselves religious do go about, with their lips full of meek, and
humble, and simple, and loving words, while their hearts are full of
pride, and spite, and cunning, and hate, and selfishness, which are all
the more deadly for being kept in and plastered over by a smooth outside?
God forbid! He tells us to love each other, only because He has promised
us the spirit of love. He tells us to be humble, because He can make us
humble-hearted. He tells us to be honest, because He can make us love
and delight in honesty. He tells us to refrain ourselves from foul
thoughts as well as from foul actions, because He can take the foul heart
out of us, and give us instead the spirit of purity and holiness. He
tells us to lead new lives after the new pattern of Himself, because He
can give us new hearts and a new spring of life within us; in short, He
bids us behave as sons of God should behave, because, as He said Himself,
“If we, being evil, know how to give our children what is good for them,
much more will our heavenly Father give His Holy Spirit to those who ask
him.” If you would be perfect, ask your Father in heaven to make you
perfect. If you feel that your heart is wrong, ask Him to give you a new
and a right heart. If you feel yourselves—as you are, whether you feel
it or not—too weak, too ignorant, too selfish, to guide yourselves, ask
Him to send His Spirit to guide you; ask for the Spirit from which comes
all love, all light, all wisdom, all strength of mind. Ask for that
Spirit, and you _shall_ receive it; seek for it, and you shall find it;
knock at the gate of your Father’s treasure-house, and it shall be surely
opened to you.
But some of you, perhaps, are saying to yourselves, “How will my being
changed and renewed by the Spirit of God, render the laws less
burdensome, while the crime and sin around me remain unchanged? It is
others who want to be improved as much, and perhaps more than I do.” It
may be so, my friends; or, again, it may not; those who fancy that others
need God’s Spirit more than they do, may be the very persons who need it
really the most; those who say they see, may be only proving their
blindness by so saying; those who fancy that their souls are rich, and
are full of all knowledge, and understand the whole Bible, and want no
further teaching, may be, as they were in St. John’s time, just the ones
who are wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked in soul,
and do not know it. But at all events, if you think others need to be
changed by God’s Spirit, _pray_ that God’s Spirit may change them. For
believe me, unless you pray for God’s Spirit for each other, ay, for the
whole world, there is no use asking for yourselves. This, I believe, is
one of the reasons, perhaps the chief reason, why the fruits of God’s
Spirit are so little seen among us in these days; why our Christianity is
become more and more dead, and hollow, and barren, while expensive and
intricate laws and taxes are becoming more and more necessary every year;
because our religion has become so selfish, because we have been praying
for God’s Spirit too little for each other. Our prayers have become too
selfish. We have been looking for God’s Spirit not so much as a means to
enable us to do good to others, but as some sort of mysterious charm
which was to keep us ourselves from the punishment of our sins in the
next life, or give us a higher place in heaven; and, therefore, St.
James’s words have been fulfilled to us, even in our very prayers for
God’s Spirit, “Ye ask and have not, because ye ask amiss, to consume it
upon your lusts”—save our selfish souls from the pains of hell; to give
our selfish souls selfish pleasures and selfish glorification in the
world to come: but not to spread God’s kingdom upon earth, not to make us
live on earth such lives as Christ lived; a life of love and
self-sacrifice, and continual labour for the souls of others. Therefore
it is, that God’s Spirit is not poured out upon us in these days; for
God’s Spirit is the spirit of love and brotherhood, which delivers a man
from his selfishness; and if we do not desire to be delivered from our
selfishness, we do not desire the Spirit of God, and the Spirit of God
will not be bestowed upon us. And no man desires to be delivered from
his own selfishness, who in his very prayers, when he ought to be
thinking least about himself alone, is thinking about himself most of
all, and forgetting that he is the member of a family—that all mankind
are his brethren—that he can claim nothing for himself to which every
sinner around him has an equal right—that nothing is necessary for him,
which is not equally necessary for everyone around him; that he has all
the world besides himself to pray for, and that his prayers for himself
will be heard only according as he prays for all the world beside.
Baptism teaches us this, when it tells us that our old selfish nature is
to be washed away, and a new character, after the pattern of Christ, is
to live and grow up in us; that from the day we are baptized, to the day
of our death, we should live not for ourselves, but for Jesus, in whom
was no selfishness; when it teaches us that we are not only children of
God, but members of Christ’s Family, and heirs of God’s kingdom, and
therefore bound to make common cause with all other members of that
Family, to live and labour for the common good of all our fellow-citizens
in that kingdom. The Lord’s prayer teaches us this, when He tells us to
pray, not “My Father,” but “Our Father;” not “my soul be saved,” but “Thy
kingdom come;” not “give _me_,” but “give _us_ our daily bread;” not
“forgive _me_,” but “forgive _us_ our trespasses,” and that only as we
forgive others; not “lead _me_ not,” but “lead _us_ not into temptation;”
not “deliver _me_,” but “deliver _us_ from evil.” After _that_ manner
the Lord told us to pray; and, in proportion as we pray in that manner,
asking for nothing for ourselves which we do not ask for everyone else in
the whole world, just so far and no farther will God _hear_ our prayers.
He who asks for God’s Spirit for himself only, and forgets that all the
world need it as much as he, is not asking for God’s Spirit at all, and
does not know even what God’s Spirit is. The mystery of Pentecost, too,
which came to pass on this day 1818 years ago, teaches us the same thing
also. Those cloven tongues of fire, the tokens of God’s Spirit, fell not
upon one man, but upon many; not when they were apart from each other,
but when they were together; and what were the fruits of that Spirit in
the Apostles? Did they remain within that upper room, each priding
himself upon his own gifts, and trying merely to gain heaven for his own
soul? If they had any such fancies, as they very likely had before the
Spirit fell upon them, they had none such afterwards. The Spirit must
have taken all such thoughts from them, and given them a new notion of
what it was to be devout and holy: for instead of staying in that upper
room, they went forth instantly into the public place to preach in
foreign tongues to all the people. Instead of keeping themselves apart
from each other in silence, and fancying, as some have done, and some do
now, that they pleased God by being solitary, and melancholy, and
selfish—what do we read? the fruit of God’s Spirit was in them; that they
and the three thousand souls who were added to them, on the first day of
their preaching, “were all together, and had all things common, and sold
their possessions, and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man
had need, and continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and
breaking bread from house to house, did eat their bread in gladness and
singleness of heart, praising God and having favour with all the people.”
Those were the fruits of God’s Spirit in _them_. Till we see more of
that sort of life and society in England, we shall not be able to pride
ourselves on having much of God’s Spirit among us.
But above all, if anything will teach us that the strength of God’s
Spirit is not a strength which we must ask for for ourselves alone; that
the blessings of God’s kingdom are blessings which we cannot have in
order to keep them to ourselves, but can only enjoy in as far as we share
them with those around us; if anything, I say, ought to teach us that
lesson, it is the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Just consider a
moment, my friends, what a strange thing it is, if we will think of it,
that the Lord’s Supper, the most solemn and sacred thing with which a man
can have to do upon earth, is just a thing which he cannot transact for
himself, or by himself. Not alone in secret, in his chamber, but,
whether he will or not, in the company of others, not merely in the
company of his own private friends, but in the company of any or
everyone, rich or poor, who chooses to kneel beside him; he goes with
others, rich and poor alike, to the Lord’s Table, and there the same
bread, and the same wine, is shared among all by the same priest. If
that means anything, it means this—that rich and poor alike draw life for
their souls from the same well, not for themselves only, not apart from
each other, but all in common, all together, because they are brothers,
members of one family, as the leaves are members of the same tree; that
as the same bread and the same wine are needed to nourish the bodies of
all, the same spirit of God is needed to nourish the souls of all; and
that we cannot have this spirit, except as members of a body, any more
than a man’s limb can have life when it is cut off and parted from him.
This is the reason, and the only reason, why Protestant clergymen are
forbidden, thank God! to give the Holy Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, to
any one person singly. If a clergyman were to administer the Lord’s
Supper, to himself in private, without any congregation to partake with
him, it would not be the Lord’s Supper, it would be nothing, and worse
than nothing; it would be a sham and a mockery, and, I believe, a sin. I
do not believe that Christ would be present, that God’s Spirit would rest
on that man. For our Lord says, that it is where two or three are
gathered together in His name, that He is in the midst of them. And it
was at a supper, at a feast, where all the Apostles were met together,
that our Lord divided the bread amongst them, and told them to share the
cup amongst themselves, just as a sign that they were all members of one
body—that the welfare of each of them was bound up in the welfare of all
the rest that God’s blessing did not rest upon each singly, but upon all
together. And it is just because we have forgotten this, my
friends—because we have forgotten that we are all brothers and sisters,
children of one family, members of one body—because in short, we have
carried our selfishness into our very religion, and up to the altar of
God, that we neglect the Lord’s Supper as we do. People neglect the
Lord’s Supper because they either do not know or do not like that, of
which the Lord’s Supper is the token and warrant. It is not merely that
they feel themselves unfit for the Lord’s Supper, because they are not in
love and charity with all men. Oh! my dear friends, do not some of your
hearts tell you, that the reason why you stay away from the Lord’s Supper
is because you do not _wish_ to be fit for the Lord’s Supper—because you
do not like to be in love and charity with all men—because you do not
wish to be reminded that you are equals in God’s sight, all equally
sinful, all equally pardoned—and to see people whom you dislike or
despise, kneeling by your side, and partaking of the same bread and wine
with you, as a token that God sees no difference between you and them;
that God looks upon you all as brothers, however little brotherly love or
fellow-feeling there may be, alas! between you? Or, again, do not some
of you stay away from the Lord’s Supper, because you see no good in
going? because it seems to make those who go no better than they were
before? Shall I tell you the reason of that? Shall I tell you why, as
is too true, too many do come to the Lord’s Supper, and so far from being
the better for it, seem only the worse? Because they come to it in
selfishness. We have fallen into the same false and unscriptural way of
looking at the Lord’s Supper, into which the Papists have. People go to
the Lord’s Supper nowadays too much to get some private good for their
own souls, and it would not matter to many of them, I am afraid, if not
another person in the parish received it, provided they can get, as they
fancy, the same blessing from it. Thus they come to it in an utterly
false and wrong temper of mind. Instead of coming as members of Christ’s
body, to get from Him life and strength, to work, in their places, as
members of that body, they come to get something for themselves, as if
there was nobody else’s soul in the world to be saved but their own.
Instead of coming to ask for the Spirit of God to deliver them from their
selfishness, and make them care less about themselves, and more about all
around them, they come to ask for the Spirit of God because they think it
will make themselves higher and happier in heaven. And of course they do
not get what they come for, because they come for the wrong thing. Thus
those who see them, begin to fancy that the Lord’s Supper is not, after
all, so very important for the salvation of their souls; and not finding
in the Bible actually written these words, “Thou shalt perish
everlastingly unless thou take the Lord’s Supper,” they end by staying
away from it, and utterly neglecting it, they and their children after
them; preferring their own selfishness, to God’s Spirit of love, and
saying, like Esau of old, “I am hungry, and I must live. I must get on
in this selfish world by following its selfish ways; what is the use of a
spirit of love and brotherhood to me? If I were to obey the Gospel, and
sacrifice my own interest for those around me, I should starve; what good
will my birthright do me?”
Oh! my friends, I pray God that some of you, at least, may change your
mind. I pray God that some of you may see at last, that all the misery
and the burdens of this time, spring from one root, which is selfishness;
and that the reason why we are selfish, is because we have not with us
the Spirit of God, which is the spirit of brotherhood and love. Let us
pray God now, and henceforth, to take that selfishness out of all our
hearts. Let us pray God now, and henceforth, to pour upon us, and upon
all our countrymen, ay, and upon the whole world, the spirit of
friendship and fellow-feeling, the spirit which when men have among them,
they need no laws to keep them from supplanting, and oppressing, and
devouring each other, because its fruits are love, cheerfulness, peace,
long suffering, gentleness, goodness, honesty, meekness, temperance Then
there will be no need, my friends, for me to call you to the Supper of
the Lord. You will no more think of staying away from it, than the
Apostles did, when the Spirit was poured out on them. For what do we
read that they did after the first Whit-Sunday? That altogether with one
accord, they broke bread daily; that is, partook of the Lord’s Supper
every day, from house to house. They did not need to be told to do it.
They did it, as I may say, by instinct. There was no question or
argument about it in their minds. They had found out that they were all
brothers, with one common cause in joy and sorrow—that they were all
members of one body—that the life of their souls came from one root and
spring, from one Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the light and the life of
men, in whom they were all one, members of each other; and therefore,
they delighted in that Lord’s Supper, just because it brought them
together; just because it was a sign and a token to them that they did
belong to each other, that they had one Lord, one faith, one interest,
one common cause for this life, and for all eternity. And therefore the
blessing of that Lord’s Supper did come to them, and in it they did
receive strength to live like children of God and members of Christ, and
brothers to each other and to all mankind. They proved by their actions
what that Communion Feast, that Sacrament of Brotherhood, had done for
them. They proved it by not counting their own lives dear to them, but
going forth in the face of poverty and persecution, and death itself, to
preach to the whole world the good news that Christ was their King. They
proved it by their conduct to each other when they had all things in
common, and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all, as
every man had need. They proved it by needing no laws to bind them to
each other from without, because they were bound to each other from
within, by the love which comes down from God, and is the very bond of
peace, and of every virtue which becomes a man.
XI.
ASCENSION-DAY.
And Jesus led them out as far as to Bethany; and he lifted up his
hands and blessed them. And it came to pass while he blessed them,
he was parted from them, and carried up into heaven. And they
worshipped him and returned to Jerusalem, with great joy; and were
continually in the temple, praising and blessing God.—LUKE xxiv.
50–53.
ON this day it is fit and proper for us—if we have understood, and
enjoyed, and profited by the wonder of the Lord’s Ascension into
Heaven—to be in the same state of mind as the Apostles were after His
Ascension: for what was right for them is right for us and for all men;
the same effects which it produced on them it ought to produce on us.
And we may know whether we are in the state in which Christian men ought
to be, by seeing how far we are in the same state of mind as the Apostles
were. Now the text tells us in what state of mind they were; how that,
after the Lord Jesus was parted from them, and carried up into Heaven,
they worshipped Him, and returned to Jerusalem, with great joy, and were
continually in the temple, praising and blessing God. It seems at first
sight certainly very strange that they should go back with great joy.
They had just lost their Teacher, their Master—One who had been more to
them than all friends and fathers could be; One who had taken them, poor
simple fishermen, and changed the whole course of their lives, and taught
them things which He had taught to no one else, and given them a great
and awful work to do—the work of changing the ways and thoughts and
doings of the whole world. He had sent them out—eleven unlettered
working men—to fight against the sin and the misery of the whole world.
And He had given them open warning of what they were to expect; that by
it they should win neither credit, nor riches, nor ease, nor anything
else that the world thinks worth having. He gave them fair warning that
the world would hate them, and try to crush them. He told them, as the
Gospel for to-day says, that they should be driven out of the churches;
that the religious people, as well as the irreligious, would be against
them; that the time would come when those who killed them would think
that they did God service; that nothing but labour, and want, and
persecution, and slander, and torture, and death was before them—and now
He had gone away and left them. He had vanished up into the empty air.
They were to see His face, and hear His voice no more. They were to have
no more of His advice, no more of His teaching, no more of His tender
comfortings; they were to be alone in the world—eleven poor working men,
with the whole world against them, and so great a business to do that
they would not have time to get their bread by the labour of their hands.
Is it not wonderful that they did not sit down in despair, and say, “What
will become of us?” Is it not wonderful that they did not give
themselves up to grief at losing the Teacher who was worth all the rest
of the world put together? Is it not wonderful that they did not go
back, each one to his old trade, to his fishing and to his daily labour,
saying, “At all events we must eat; at all events we must get our
livelihood;” and end, as they had begun, in being mere labouring men, of
whom the world would never have heard a word? And instead of that we
read that they went back with great joy not to their homes but to
Jerusalem, the capital city of their country, and “were continually in
the temple blessing and praising God.” Well, my friends, and if it is
possible for one man to judge what another man would have done—if it is
possible to guess what we should have done in their case—common-sense
must show us this, that if He was merely their Teacher, they would have
either given themselves up to despair, or gone back, some to their
plough, some to their fishing-nets, and some, like Matthew, to their
counting-houses, and we should never have heard a word of them. But if
you will look in your Bibles, you will find that they thought Him much
more than a teacher—that they thought Him to be the Lord and King of the
whole world; and you will find that the great joy with which the
disciples went back, after He ascended into heaven, came from certain
very strange words that He had been speaking to them just before He
ascended—words about which they could have but two opinions: either they
must have thought that they were utter falsehood, and self-conceit, and
blasphemy; and that Jesus, who had been all along speaking to them such
words of wisdom and holiness as never man spake before, had suddenly
changed His whole character at the last, and become such a sort of person
as it is neither fit for me to speak of, or you to hear me speak of, in
God’s church, and in Jesus Christ’s hearing, even though it be merely for
the sake of argument; or else they must have thought _this_ about His
words, that they were the most joyful and blessed words that ever had
been spoken on the earth; that they were the best of all news; the most
complete of all Gospels for this poor sinful world; that what Jesus had
said about Himself was true; and that as long as it was true, it did not
matter in the least what became of them; it did not matter in the least
what difficulties stood in their way, for they would be certain to
conquer them all; it did not matter in the least how men might persecute
and slander them, for they would be sure to get their reward; it did not
matter in the least how miserable and sinful the world might be just
then, for it was certain to be changed, and converted, and brought to
God, to righteousness, to love, to freedom, to light, at last.
If you look at the various accounts, in the four gospels, of the Lord’s
last words on earth, you will see, surely, what I mean. Let us take them
one by one.
St. Matthew tells us that, a few days before the Lord’s ascension, He met
His disciples on a mountain in Galilee, where he had appointed them to
await him; and there told them, that all power was given to Him in heaven
and earth. Was not that blessed news—was not that a gospel? That all
the power in heaven and earth belonged to _Him_? To Him, who had all His
life been doing good? To Him, in whom there had never been one single
stain of tyranny or selfishness? To Him, who had been the friend of
publicans and sinners? To Him, who had rebuked the very richest, and
loved the very poorest? To him, who had shown that He had both the power
and the will to heal every kind of sickness and disease? To Him, who had
conquered and driven out, wherever He met them, all the evil spirits
which enslave and torment poor sinful men? To Him, who had shown by
rising from the dead, that He was stronger than even death itself? To
Him, who had declared that He was the Son of God the Father, that the
great God who had made heaven and earth, and all therein, was perfectly
pleased and satisfied with Him, that He was come to do His Father’s will,
and not His own; that He was the ancient Lord of the earth, the I AM who
was before Abraham? And He was now to have all power in heaven and
earth! Everything which was done right in the world henceforth, was to
be His doing. The kingdom and rule over the whole universe, was to be
His. So He said; and His disciples believed Him; and if they believed
Him, how could they but rejoice? How could they but rejoice at the
glorious thought that He, the son of the village maiden, the champion of
the poor and the suffering, was to have the government of the world for
ever? That He, who all the while He had been on earth had showed that He
was perfect justice, perfect love, perfect humanity, was to reign till He
had put all His enemies under His feet? How could the world but prosper
under such a King as that? How could wickedness triumph, while He, the
perfectly righteous one, was King? How could misery triumph, while He,
the perfectly merciful one, was King? How could ignorance triumph, while
He, the perfectly wise one, who had declared that God the Father hid
nothing from Him, was King? Unless the disciples had been more dull and
selfish than the dumb beasts around them, what could they do but rejoice
at that news? What matter to them if Jesus were taken out of their
sight, as long as all power was given to Him in heaven and earth?
But He had told them more. He had told them that they were not to keep
this glorious secret to themselves. No: they were to go forth and preach
the gospel of it, the good news of it, to every creature—to preach the
gospel of the kingdom of God. The good news that God was the King of
men, after all; that cruel tyrants and oppressors, and conquerors, were
not their kings; that neither the storms over their heads, nor the earth
under their feet, nor the clouds and the rivers whom the heathens used to
worship in the hope of persuading the earth and the weather to be
favourable to them, and bless their harvests, were their kings; that
idols of wood and stone, and evil spirits of lust, and cruelty, and
covetousness, were not their kings; but that God was their King; that He
loved them, He pitied them in spite of all their sins; that He had sent
His only begotten Son into the world to teach them, to live for them—to
die for them—to claim them for His own. And, therefore, they were to go
and baptize all nations, as a sign that they were to repent, and change,
and put away all their old false and evil heathen life, and rise to a new
life, they and their children after them, as God’s children, God’s
family, brothers of the Son of God. And they were to baptize them into a
name; showing that they belonged to those into whose name they were
baptized; into the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
They were to be baptized into the name of the Father, as a sign that God
was their Father, and they His children. They were to be baptized into
the name of the Son, as a sign that the Son, Jesus Christ, was their King
and head; and not merely their King and head, but their Saviour, who had
taken away the sin of the world, and redeemed it for God, with His own
most precious blood; and not merely their Saviour, but their pattern;
that they might know that they were bound to become as far as is possible
for mortal man such sons of God as Jesus himself had been, like Him
obedient, pure, forgiving, brotherly, caring for each other and not for
themselves, doing their heavenly Father’s will and not their own. And
they were to baptize all nations into the name of the Holy Spirit, for a
sign that God’s Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, would be with them,
to give them new life, new holiness, new manfulness; to teach, and guide,
and strengthen them for ever. That was the gospel which they had to
preach. The good news that the Son of God was the King of men. That was
the name into which they were to baptize all nations—the name of children
of God, members of Christ, heirs of a heavenly and spiritual kingdom,
which should go on age after age, for ever, growing and spreading men
knew not how, as the grains of mustard-seed, which at first the least of
all seeds, grows up into a great tree, and the birds of the air come and
lodge in the branches of it—to go on, I say, from age to age, improving,
cleansing, and humanising, and teaching the whole world, till the
kingdoms of the earth became the kingdoms of God and of His Christ. That
was the work which the Apostles had given them to do. Do you not see,
friends, that unless those Apostles had been the most selfish of men,
unless all they cared for was their own gain and comfort, they must have
rejoiced? The whole world was to be set right—what matter what happened
to them? And, therefore, I said at the beginning of my sermon, that a
sure way to know whether our minds were in a right state, was to see
whether we felt about it as the Apostles felt. The Bible tells us to
rejoice always, to praise and give thanks to God always. If we believe
what the Apostles believed, we shall be joyful; if we do not, we shall
not be joyful. If we believe in the words which the Lord spoke before He
ascended on high, we shall be joyful. If we believe that all power in
heaven and earth is His, we shall be joyful. If we believe that the son
of the village maiden has ascended up on high, and received gifts for
men, we shall be joyful. If we believe that, as our baptism told us, God
is our Father, the Son of God our Saviour, the Spirit of God ready to
teach and guide us, we shall be joyful. Do you answer me, “But the world
goes on so ill; there is so much sin, and misery, and folly, and cruelty
in it; how can we be joyful?” I answer: There was a hundred times as
much sin, and misery, and folly, and cruelty, in the Apostles’ time, and
yet they were joyful, and full of gladness, blessing and praising God.
If you answer, “But we are so slandered, and neglected, and
misunderstood, and hard-worked, and ill-treated; we have no time to enjoy
ourselves, or do the things which we should like best. How can we be
joyful?” I answer: So were the Apostles. They knew that they would be a
hundred times as much slandered, and neglected, and misunderstood, as you
can ever be; that they would have far less time to enjoy themselves, far
less opportunity of doing the things which they liked best, than you can
ever have; they knew that misery, and persecution, and a shameful death
were before them, and yet they were joyful and full of gladness, blessing
and praising God. And why should you not be? For what was true for them
is true for you. They had no blessing, no hope, but what you have just
as good a right to as they had. They were joyful, because God was their
Father, and God is your Father. They were joyful because they and all
men belonged to God’s family; and you belong to it. They were joyful,
because God’s Spirit was promised to them, to make them like God; and
God’s Spirit was promised to you. They were joyful, because a poor man
was king of heaven and earth; and that poor man, Jesus Christ, who was
born at Bethlehem, is as much your King now as He was theirs then. They
were joyful, because the whole world was going to improve under His rule
and government; and the whole world is improving, and will go on
improving for ever. They were joyful, because Jesus, whom they had known
as a poor, despised, crucified man on earth, had ascended up to heaven in
glory; and if you believe the same, you will be joyful too. In
proportion as you believe the mystery of Ascension-day; if you believe
the words which the Lord spoke before He ascended, you will have
cheerful, joyful, hopeful thoughts about yourselves, and about the whole
world; if you do not, you will be in continual danger of becoming
suspicious and despairing, fancying the world still worse than it is,
fancying that God has neglected and forgotten it, fancying that the devil
is stronger than God, and man’s sins wider than Christ’s redemption till
you will think it neither worth while to do right yourselves, nor to make
others do right towards you.
XII.
THE FOUNT OF SCIENCE.
(_A Sermon Preached at St. Margaret’s Church_, _Westminster_, _May_
4_th_, 1851, _in behalf of the Westminster Hospital_.)
When He ascended up on high, He led captivity captive, and received
gifts for men, yea, even for his enemies, that the Lord God might
dwell among them.—PSALM lxviii. 18, and EPHESIANS iv. 8.
IF, a thousand years ago, a congregation in this place had been addressed
upon the text which I have chosen, they would have had, I think, little
difficulty in applying its meaning to themselves, and in mentioning at
once innumerable instances of those gifts which the King of men had
received for men, innumerable signs that the Lord God was really dwelling
amongst them. But amongst those signs, I think, they would have
mentioned several which we are not now generally accustomed to consider
in such a light. They would have pointed not merely to the building of
churches, the founding of schools, the spread of peace, the decay of
slavery; but to the importation of foreign literature, the extension of
the arts of reading, writing, painting, architecture, the improvement of
agriculture, and the introduction of new and more successful methods of
the cure of diseases. They might have expressed themselves on these
points in a way that we consider now puerile and superstitious. They
might have attributed to the efficacy of prayer, many cures which we now
attribute—shall I say? to no cause whatsoever. They may have quoted as
an instance of St. Cuthbert’s sanctity, rather than of his shrewd
observations, his discovery of a spring of water in the rocky floor of
his cell, and his success in growing barley upon the barren island where
wheat refused to germinate; and we might have smiled at their
superstition, and smiled, too, at their seeing any consequence of
Christianity, any token that the kingdom of God was among them, in Bishop
Wilfred’s rescuing the Hampshire Saxons from the horrors of famine, by
teaching them the use of fishing-nets. But still so they would have
spoken—men of a turn of mind no less keen, shrewd, and practical than we,
their children; and if we had objected to their so-called superstition
that all these improvements in the physical state of England were only
the natural consequences of the introduction of Roman civilisation by
French and Italian missionaries, they would have smiled at us in their
turn, not perhaps without some astonishment at our stupidity, and asked:
“Do you not see, too, that _that_ is in itself a sign of the kingdom of
God—that these nations who have been for ages selfishly isolated from
each other, except for purposes of conquest and desolation, should be now
teaching each other, helping each other, interchanging more and more,
generation by generation, their arts, their laws, their learning becoming
fused down under the influence of a common Creed, and loyalty to one
common King in Heaven, from their state of savage jealousy and warfare,
into one great Christendom, and family of God?” And if, my friends, as I
think, those forefathers of ours could rise from their graves this day,
they would be inclined to see in our hospitals, in our railroads, in the
achievements of our physical Science, confirmation of that old
superstition of theirs, proofs of the kingdom of God, realisations of the
gifts which Christ received for men, vaster than any of which they had
ever dreamed. They might be startled at God’s continuing those gifts to
us, who hold on many points a creed so different from theirs. They might
be still more startled to see in the Great Exhibition of all Nations,
which is our present nine-days’ wonder, that those blessings were not
restricted by God even to nominal Christians, but that His love, His
teaching, with regard to matters of civilisation and physical science,
were extended, though more slowly and partially, to the Mahometan and the
Heathen. And it would be a wholesome lesson to them, to find that God’s
grace was wider than their narrow theories; perhaps they may have learnt
it already in the world of spirits. But of its _being_ God’s grace,
there would be no doubt in their minds. They would claim unhesitatingly,
and at once, that great Exhibition established in a Christian country, as
a point of union and brotherhood for all people, for a sign that God was
indeed claiming all the nations of the world as His own—proving by the
most enormous facts that He had sent down a Pentecost, gifts to men which
would raise them not merely spiritually, but physically and
intellectually, beyond anything which the world had ever seen, and had
poured out a spirit among them which would convert them in the course of
ages, gradually, but most surely and really, from a pandemonium of
conquerors and conquered, devourers and devoured, into a family of
fellow-helping brothers, until the kingdoms of the world became the
kingdoms of God and of His Christ.
But I think one thing, if anything, would stagger their simple old Saxon
faith; one thing would make them fearful, as indeed it makes the preacher
this day, that the time of real brotherhood and peace is still but too
far off; and that the achievements of our physical science, the unity of
this great Exhibition, noble as they are, are still only dim forecastings
and prophecies, as it were, of a higher, nobler reality. And they would
say sadly to us, their children: “Sons, you ought to be so near to God;
He seems to have given you so much and to have worked among you as He
never worked for any nation under heaven. How is it that you give the
glory to yourselves, and not to Him?”
For do we give the glory of our scientific discoveries to God, in any
real, honest, and practical sense? There may be some official and
perfunctory talk of God’s blessing on our endeavours; but there seems to
be no real belief in us that God, the inspiration of God, is the very
fount and root of the endeavours themselves; that He teaches us these
great discoveries; that He gives us wisdom to get this wondrous wealth;
that He works in us to will and to do of his good pleasure. True, we
keep up something of the form and tradition of the old talk about such
things; we join in prayer to God to bless our great Exhibition, but we do
not believe—we do not believe, my friends—that it was God who taught us
to conceive, build, and arrange that Great Exhibition; and our notion of
God’s blessing it, seems to be God’s absence from it; a hope and trust
that God will leave it and us alone, and not “visit” it or us in it, or
“interfere” by any “special providences,” by storms, or lightning, or
sickness, or panic, or conspiracy; a sort of dim feeling that we could
manage it all perfectly well without God, but that as He exists, and has
some power over natural phenomena, which is not very exactly defined, we
must notice His existence over and above our work, lest He should become
angry and “visit” us . . . And this in spite of words which were spoken
by one whose office it was to speak them, as the representative of the
highest and most sacred personage in these realms; words which deserve to
be written in letters of gold on the high places of this city; in which
he spoke of this Exhibition as an “approach to a more complete fulfilment
of the great and sacred mission which man has to perform in the world;”
when he told the English people that “man’s reason being created in the
image of God, he has to discover the laws by which Almighty God governs
His creations, and by making these laws the standard of his action, to
conquer nature to his use, himself a divine instrument;” when he spoke of
“thankfulness to Almighty God for what he has already _given_,” as the
first feeling which that Exhibition ought to excite in us; and as the
second, “the deep conviction that those blessings can only be realised in
proportion to”—not, as some would have it, the rivalry and selfish
competition—but “in proportion to the _help_ which we are prepared to
render to each other; and, therefore, by peace, love, and ready
assistance, not only between individuals, but between all nations of the
earth.” We read those great words; but in the hearts of how few, alas!
to judge from our modern creed on such matters, must the really important
and distinctive points of them find an echo! To how few does this whole
Exhibition seem to have been anything but a matter of personal gain or
curiosity, for national aggrandisement, insular self-glorification, and
selfish—I had almost said, treacherous—rivalry with the very foreigners
whom we invited as our guests?
And so, too, with our cures of diseases. We speak of God’s blessing the
means, and God’s blessing the cure. But all we really mean by blessing
them, is permitting them. Do not our hearts confess that our notion of
His blessing the means, is His leaving the means to themselves and their
own physical laws—leaving, in short, the cure to us and not preventing
our science doing its work, and asserting His own existence by bringing
on some unexpected crisis, or unfortunate relapse—if, indeed, the old
theory that He does bring on such, be true?
Our old forefathers, on the other hand, used to believe that in medicine,
as in everything else, God taught men all that they knew. They believed
the words of the Wise Man when he said that “the Spirit of God gives man
understanding.” The method by which Solomon believed himself to have
obtained all his physical science and knowledge of trees, from the cedar
of Lebanon to the hyssop which groweth on the wall, was in their eyes the
only possible method. They believed the words of Isaiah when he said of
the tillage and the rotation of crops in use among the peasants of his
country, that their God instructed them to discretion and taught them;
and that even the various methods of threshing out the various species of
grain came “forth from the Lord of hosts, who is excellent in counsel,
and wonderful in working.”
Such a method, you say, seems to you now miraculous. It did not seem to
our forefathers miraculous that God should teach man; it seemed to them
most simple, most rational, most natural, an utterly every-day axiom.
They thought it was because so few of the heathen were taught by God that
they were no wiser than they were. They thought that since the Son of
God had come down and taken our nature upon Him, and ascended up on high
and received gifts for men, that it was now the right and privilege of
every human being who was willing to be taught of God, as the prophet
foretold in those very words; and that baptism was the very sign and seal
of that fact—a sign that for every human being, whatever his age, sex,
rank, intellect, or race, a certain measure of the teaching of God and of
the Spirit of God was ready, promised, sure as the oath of Him that made
heaven and the earth, and all things therein. That was Solomon’s belief.
We do not find that it made him a fanatic and an idler, waiting with
folded hands for inspiration to come to him he knew not how nor whence.
His belief that wisdom was the revelation and gift of God did not prevent
him from seeking her as silver, and searching for her as hid treasures,
from applying his heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all
things that are done under heaven; and we do not find that it prevented
our forefathers. Ceadmon’s belief that God inspired him with the poetic
faculty, did not make him the less laborious and careful versifier.
Bishop John’s blessing the dumb boy’s tongue in the name of Him whom he
believed to be Word of God and the Master of that poor dumb boy, did not
prevent his anticipating some of the discoveries of our modern wise men,
in setting about a most practical and scientific cure. Alfred’s
continual prayers for light and inspiration made him no less a laborious
and thoughtful student of war and law, of physics, language, and
geography. These old Teutons, for all these superstitions of theirs,
were perhaps as businesslike and practical in those days as we their
children are in these. But that did not prevent their believing that
unless God showed them a thing, they could not see it, and thanking Him
honestly enough for the comparative little which He did show them. But
we who enjoy the accumulated teaching of ages—we to whose researches He
is revealing year by year, almost week by weeks wonders of which they
never dreamed—we whom He has taught to make the lame to walk, the dumb to
speak, the blind to see, to exterminate the pestilence and defy the
thunderbolt, to multiply millionfold the fruits of learning, to
annihilate time and space, to span the heavens, and to weigh the sun—what
madness is this which has come upon us in these last days, to make us
fancy that we, insects of a day, have found out these things for
ourselves, and talk big about the progress of the species, and the
triumphs of intellect, and the all-conquering powers of the human mind,
and give the glory of all this inspiration and revelation, not to God,
but to ourselves? Let us beware, beware—lest our boundless pride and
self-satisfaction, by some mysterious yet most certain law, avenge
itself—lest like the Assyrian conqueror of old, while we stand and cry,
“Is not this great Babylon which I have built?” our reason, like his,
should reel and fall beneath the narcotic of our own maddening
self-conceit, and while attempting to scale the heavens we overlook some
pitfall at our feet, and fall as learned idiots, suicidal pedants, to be
a degradation, and a hissing, and a shame.
However strongly you may differ from these opinions of our own
forefathers with regard to the ground and cause of physical science, and
the arts of healing, I am sure that the recollection of the thrice holy
ground upon which we stand, beneath the shadow of venerable piles,
witnesses for the creeds, the laws, the liberties, which those our
ancestors have handed down to us, will preserve you from the temptation
of dismissing with hasty contempt their thoughts upon any subject so
important; will make you inclined to listen to their opinion with
affection, if not with reverence; and save, perhaps, the preacher from a
sneer when he declares that the doctrine of those old Saxon men is, in
his belief, not only the most Scriptural, but the most rational and
scientific explanation of the grounds of all human knowledge.
At least, I shall be able to quote in support of my own opinion a name
from which there can be no appeal in the minds of a congregation of
educated Englishmen—I mean Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, the spiritual
father of the modern science, and, therefore, of the chemistry and the
medicine of the whole civilised world. If there is one thing which more
than another ought to impress itself on the mind of a careful student of
his works, it is this—that he considered science as the inspiration of
God, and every separate act of induction by which man arrives at a
physical law, as a revelation from the Maker of those laws; and that the
faith which gave him daring to face the mystery of the universe, and
proclaim to men that they could conquer nature by obeying her, was his
deep, living, practical belief that there was One who had ascended up on
high and led captive in the flesh and spirit of a man those very idols of
sense which had been themselves leading men’s minds captive, enslaving
them to the illusions of their own senses, forcing them to bow down in
vague awe and terror before those powers of Nature, which God had
appointed, not to be their tyrants, but their slaves. I will not
special-plead particulars from his works, wherein I may consider that he
asserts this. I will rather say boldly that the idea runs through every
line he ever wrote; that unless seen in the light of that faith, the
grounds of his philosophy ought to be as inexplicable to us, as they
would, without it, have been impossible to himself. As has been well
said of him: “Faith in God as the absolute ground of all human as well as
of all natural laws; the belief that He had actually made Himself known
to His creatures, and that it was possible for them to have a knowledge
of Him, cleared from the phantasies and idols of their own imaginations
and understandings; this was the necessary foundation of all that great
man’s mind and speculations, to whatever point they were tending, and
however at times they might be darkened by too close a familiarity with
the corruptions and meannesses of man, or too passionate an addiction to
the contemplation of Nature. Nor should it ever be forgotten that he
owed all the clearness and distinctness of his mind to his freedom from
that Pantheism which naturally disposes to a vague admiration and
adoration of Nature, to the belief that it is stronger and nobler than
ourselves; that we are servants, and puppets, and portions of it, and not
its lords and rulers. If Bacon had in anywise confounded Nature with
God—if he had not entertained the strongest practical feeling that men
were connected with God through One who had taken upon Him their nature,
it is impossible that he could have discovered that method of dealing
with physics which has made a physical science possible.”
No really careful student of his works, but must have perceived this,
however glad, alas! he may have felt at times to thrust the thought of it
from him, and try to think that Francis Bacon’s Christianity was
something over and above his philosophy—a religion which he left behind
him at the church-door—or only sprinkled up and down his works so much of
it as should shield him in a bigoted age from the suspicion of
materialism. A strange theory, and yet one which so determined is man to
see nothing, whether it be in the Bible or in the Novum Organum, but what
each wishes to see, has been deliberately put forth again and again by
men who fancy, forsooth, that the greatest of English heroes was even
such an one as themselves. One does not wonder to find among the general
characteristics of those writers who admire Bacon as a materialist, the
most utter incapacity of philosophising on Bacon’s method, the very
restless conceit, the hasty generalisation, the hankering after
cosmogonic theories, which Bacon anathematises in every page. Yes, I
repeat it, we owe our medical and sanitary science to Bacon’s philosophy;
and Bacon owed his philosophy to his Christianity.
Oh! it is easy for us, amid the marvels of our great hospitals, now grown
commonplace in our eyes from very custom, to talk of the empire of mind
over matter; for us—who reap the harvest whereof Bacon sowed the seed.
But consider, how great the faith of that man must have been, who died in
hope, not having received the promises, but seeing them afar off, and
haunted to his dying day with glorious visions of a time when famine and
pestilence should vanish before a scientific obedience—to use his own
expression—to the will of God, revealed in natural facts. Thus we can
understand how he dared to denounce all that had gone before him as blind
and worthless guides, and to proclaim himself to the world as the one
restorer of true physical philosophy. Thus we can understand how he, the
cautious and patient man of the world, dared indulge in those vast dreams
of the scientific triumphs of the future. Thus we can understand how he
dared hint at the expectation that men would some day even conquer death
itself; because he believed that man had conquered death already, in the
person of its King and Lord—in the flesh of Him who ascended up on high,
and led captivity captive, and received gifts for men. The “empire of
mind over matter?” What practical proof had he of it amid the miserable
alternations of empiricism and magic which made up the pseudo-science of
his time; amid the theories and speculations of mankind, which, as he
said, were “but a sort of madness—useless alike for discovery or for
operation.” What right had he, more than any other man who had gone
before him, to believe that man could conquer and mould to his will the
unseen and tremendous powers which work in every cloud and every flower?
that he could dive into the secret mysteries of his own body, and renew
his youth like the eagle’s? This ground he had for that faith—that he
believed, as he says himself, that he must “begin from God; and that the
pursuit of physical science clearly proceeds from Him, the Author of
good, and Father of light.” This gave him faith to say that in this as
in all other Divine works, the smallest beginnings lead assuredly to some
result, and that the “remark in spiritual matters, that the kingdom of
God cometh without observation, is also found to be true in every great
work of Divine Providence; so that everything glides on quietly without
confusion or noise, and the matter is achieved before men either think or
perceive that it is commenced.” This it was which gave him courage to
believe that his own philosophy might be the actual fulfilment of the
prophecy, that in the last days many should run to and fro, and knowledge
should be increased—words which, like hundreds of others in his works,
sound like the outpourings of an almost blasphemous self-conceit, till we
recollect that he looked on science only as the inspiration of God, and
man’s empire over nature only as the consequence of the redemption worked
out for him by Christ, and begin to see in them the expressions of the
deepest and most divine humility.
I doubt not that many here will be far more able than I am practically to
apply the facts which I have been adducing to the cause of the hospital
for which I am pleading. But there is one consequence of them to which I
must beg leave to draw attention more particularly, especially at the
present era of our nation. If, then, these discoveries of science be
indeed revelations and inspirations from God, does it not follow that all
classes, even the poorest and the most ignorant, the most brutal, have an
equal right to enjoy the fruits of them? Does it not follow that to give
to the poor their share in the blessings which chemical and medical
science are working out for us, is not a matter of charity or
benevolence, but of _duty_, of indefeasible, peremptory, immediate duty?
For consider, my friends; the Son of God descends on earth, and takes on
Him not only the form, but the very nature, affections, trials, and
sorrows of a man. He proclaims Himself as the person who has been all
along ruling, guiding, teaching, improving men; the light who lighteth
every man who cometh into the world. He proclaims Himself by acts of
wondrous power to be the internecine foe and conqueror of every form of
sorrow, slavery, barbarism, weakness, sickness, death itself. He
proclaims Himself as One who is come to give His life for His sheep—One
who is come to restore to men the likeness in which they were originally
created, the likeness of their Father in Heaven, who accepteth the person
of no man—who causeth His sun to shine on the evil and on the good, who
sendeth His rain on the just and on the unjust, in whose sight the
meanest publican, if his only consciousness be that of his own baseness
and worthlessness, is more righteous than the most learned, respectable,
and self-satisfied pharisee. He proclaims Himself the setter-up of a
kingdom into which the publican and the harlot will pass sooner than the
rich, the mighty, and the noble; a kingdom in which all men are to be
brothers, and their bond of union loyalty to One who spared not His own
life for the sheep, who came not to do His own, but the will of the
Father who had sent Him, and who showed by His toil among the poor, the
outcast, the ignorant, and the brutal, what that same will was like.
With His own life-blood He seals this Covenant between God and man. He
offers up His own body as the first-fruits of this great kingdom of
self-sacrifice. He takes poor fishermen and mechanics, and sends them
forth to acquaint all men with the good news that God is their King, and
to baptize them as subjects of that kingdom, bound to rise in baptism to
a new life, a life of love, and brotherhood, and self-sacrifice, like His
own. He commands them to call all nations to that sacred Feast wherein
there is neither rich nor poor, but the same bread and the same wine are
offered to the monarch and to the slave, as signs of their common
humanity, their common redemption, their common interest—signs that they
derive their life, their health, their reason, their every faculty of
body, soul, and spirit, from One who walked the earth as the son of a
poor carpenter, who ate and drank with publicans and sinners. He sends
down His Spirit on them with gifts of language, eloquence, wisdom, and
healing, as mere earnests and first-fruits; so they said, of that
prophecy that He would pour out His Spirit upon all flesh, even upon
slaves and handmaids. And these poor fishermen feel themselves impelled
by a divine and irresistible impulse to go forth to the ends of the
world, and face persecution, insult, torture, and death—not in order that
they may make themselves lords over mankind, but that they may tell them
that One is their Master, even Jesus Christ, both God and man—that _He_
rules the world, and will rule it, and _can_ rule it, that in His sight
there is no distinction of race, or rank, or riches, neither Jew nor
Greek, barbarian, Scythian, bond or free. And, as a fact, their message
has prevailed and been believed; and in proportion as it has prevailed,
not merely individual sanctity or piety, but liberty, law, peace,
civilisation, learning, art, science, the gifts which he bought for men
with His blood, have followed in its train: while the nations who have
not received that message that God was their King, or having received it
have forgotten it, or perverted it into a superstition and an hypocrisy,
have in exactly that proportion fallen back into barbarism and bloodshed,
slavery and misery. My friends, if this philosophy of history, this
theory of human progress, or as I should call it, this Gospel of the
Kingdom of God mean anything—does it not mean this? this which our
forefathers believed, dimly and inconsistently perhaps, but still
believed it, else we had not been here this day—that we are not our own,
but the servants of Jesus Christ, and brothers of each other—that the
very constitution and ground-law of this human species which has been
redeemed by Christ, is the self-sacrifice which Christ displayed as the
one perfection of humanity—that all rank, property, learning, science,
are only held by their possessors in trust from that King who has
distributed them to each according as He will, that each might use them
for the good of all, certain—as certain as God’s promise can make
man—that if by giving up our own interest for the interest of others, we
seek first the kingdom of God, and the righteousness between man and man,
which we call _mercy_, according to which it is constituted, all other
things, health, wealth, peace, and every other blessing which humanity
can desire, shall be added unto us over and above, as the natural and
necessary fruits of a society founded according to the will of God, and
declared in his Son Jesus Christ, and therefore according to those
physical laws, whereof He is at once the Creator, the Director, and the
Revealer?
This was the faith of our forefathers, both laity and clergy—that the
Lord was King, be the people never so unquiet; that men were His stewards
and His pupils only, and not His vicars; that they were equal in His
sight, and not the slaves and tyrants of each other; and that the help
that was done upon earth, He did it all Himself. Dimly, doubtless, they
saw it, and inconsistently: but they saw it, and to their faith in that
great truth we owe all that has made England really noble among the
nations. Of the fruits of that faith every venerable building around us
should remind us. To that faith in the laity, we owe the abolition of
serfdom, the freedom of our institutions, the laws which provide equal
justice between man and man; to that faith in the clergy, and especially
in the monastic orders, we owe the endowment of our schools and
universities, the improvement of agriculture, the preservation and the
spread of all the liberal arts and sciences, as far as they were then
discovered; so that every one of those abbeys which we now revile so
ignorantly, became a centre of freedom, protection, healing, and
civilisation, a refuge for the oppressed, a well-spring of mercy for the
afflicted, a practical witness to the nation that property and science
were not the private and absolute possession of men, but only held in
trust from God for the benefit of the common weal: and just in proportion
as in the 14th and 15th centuries those institutions fell from their
first estate, and began to fancy that their wealth and wisdom was their
own, acquired by their own cunning, to be used for their own
aggrandizement, they became an imposture and imbecility, an abomination
and a ruin. And it was this faith, too, in a still nobler and clearer
form, which at the Reformation inspired the age which could produce a
Ridley, a Latimer, an Elizabeth, a Shakspeare, a Spenser, a Raleigh, a
Bacon, and a Milton; which knit together, in spite of religious feuds and
social wrongs, the nation of England with a bond which all the powers of
hell endeavoured in vain to break. Doubtless, there too there was
inconsistency enough. Elizabeth may have mixed up ambitious dynastic
dreams with her intense belief that God had given her her wisdom, her
learning, her mighty will, only to be the servant of His servants and
defender of the faith. Men like Drake and Raleigh, while they were
believing that God had sent them forth to smite with the sword of the
Lord the devourers of the earth, the destroyers of religion, freedom,
civilisation, and national life, may have been unfaithful to what they
believed their divine mission, and fancied that they might use their
wisdom and valour that God gave them for their selfish ends, till they
committed (as some say) acts of rapacity and cruelty worthy of the merest
buccaneer. But _that_ was not what made them conquer—that was not what
made the wealth and the might of Spain melt away before their little
bands of heroes; but the same old faith, shining out in all their noblest
acts and words, that “the Lord _was_ King, and that the help that was
done upon earth, He did it all Himself?” So again, Bacon may have
fancied, and did fancy in his old age, that he might use his deep
knowledge of mankind for his own selfish ends—that he might indulge
himself in building himself up a name that might fill all the earth, that
he who had done so much for God and for mankind, might be allowed to do
at last somewhat for himself, and tempted, by a paltry bribe, fall for
awhile, as David did before him, that God, and not he, might have the
glory of all his wisdom. But then he was less than himself; then he had
but lost sight of his lode-star. Then he had forgotten, but only for
awhile, that he owed all to the teaching of that God who had given to the
young and obscure advocate the mission of affecting the destinies of
nations yet unborn.
And believe me, my friends, even as it has been with our forefathers, so
it will be with us. According to our faith will it be unto us, now as it
was of old. In proportion as we believe that wealth, science, and
civilisation are the work and property of man, in just that proportion we
shall be tempted to keep them selfishly and exclusively to ourselves.
The man of science will be tempted to hide his discoveries, though men
may be perishing for lack of them, till he can sell them to the highest
bidder; the rich man will be tempted to purchase them for himself, in
order that he may increase his own comfort and luxury, and feel
comparatively lazy and careless about their application to the welfare of
the masses; he will be tempted to pay an exorbitant price for anything
that can increase his personal convenience, and yet when the question is
about improving the supply of necessaries to the poor, stand haggling
about considerations of profitable investment, excuse himself from doing
the duty which lies nearest to him by visions of distant profit, of which
a thousand unexpected accidents may deprive him after all, and make his
boasted scientific care for the wealth of the nation an excuse for
leaving tens of thousands worse housed and worse fed than his own beasts
of burden. The poor man will be tempted franctically to oppose his
selfishness and unbelief to the selfishness and unbelief of the rich, and
clutch from him by force the comfort which really belong to neither of
them, in order that he may pride himself in them and misuse them in his
turn; and the clergy will be tempted, as they have too often been tempted
already, to fancy that reason is the enemy, and not the twin sister of
faith; to oppose revelation to science, as if God’s two messages could
contradict each other; to widen the Manichæan distinction between secular
and spiritual matters, so pleasant to the natural atheism of fallen man;
to fancy that they honour God by limiting as much as possible His
teaching, His providence, His wisdom, His love, and His kingdom, and to
pretend that they are defending the creeds of the Catholic Church, by
denying to them any practical or real influence on the economic,
political, and physical welfare of mankind. But in proportion as we hold
to the old faith of our forefathers concerning science and civilisation,
we shall feel it not only a duty, but a glory and a delight, to make all
men sharers in them; to go out into the streets and lanes of the city and
call in the maimed, and the halt, and the blind, that they may sit down
and take their share of the good things which God has provided in His
kingdom for those who obey Him. Every new discovery will be hailed by us
as a fresh boon from God to be bestowed by the rain and the sunshine
freely upon us all. The sight of every sufferer will make us ready to
suspect and to examine ourselves lest we should be in some indirect way
the victim of some neglect or selfishness of our own. Every disease will
be a sign to us that in some respect or other, the physical or moral laws
of human nature have been overlooked or broken. The existence of an
unhealthy locality, the recurrence of an epidemic, will be to us a
subject of public shame and self-reproach. Men of science will no longer
go up and down entreating mankind in vain to make use of their
discoveries; the sanitary reformer will be no longer like Wisdom crying
in the streets and no man regarding her; and in every ill to which flesh
is heir we shall see an enemy of our King and Lord, and an intruder into
His Kingdom, against which we swore at our baptism to fight with an
inspiring and delicious certainty that God will prosper the right; that
His laws cannot change; that nature, and the disturbances and poisons,
and brute powers thereof, were meant to be the slaves, and not the
tyrants of a race whose head has conquered the grave itself.
This is no speculative dream. The progress of science is daily proving
it to be an actual truth; proving to us that a large proportion of
diseases—how large a proportion, no man yet dare say—are preventible by
science under the direction of that common justice and mercy which man
owes to man. The proper cultivation of the soil, it is now clearly seen,
will exterminate fevers and agues, and all the frightful consequences of
malaria. An attention to those simple decencies and cleanlinesses of
life of which even the wild animals feel the necessity, will prevent the
epidemics of our cities, and all the frightful train of secondary
diseases which follow them, or supply their place. The question which is
generally more and more forcing itself on the minds of scientific men is
not how many diseases are, but how few are not, the consequences of man’s
ignorance, barbarism, and folly. The medical man is felt more and more
to be as necessary in health as he is in sickness, to be the
fellow-workman not merely of the clergyman, but of the social reformer,
the political economist, and the statesman; and the first object of his
science to be prevention, and not cure. But if all this be true, as true
it is, we ought to begin to look on hospitals as many medical men I doubt
not do already, in a sadder though in a no less important light. When we
remember that the majority of cases which fill their wards are cases of
more or less directly preventible diseases, the fruits of our social
neglect, too often of our neglect of the sufferers themselves, too often
also our neglect of their parents and forefathers; when we think how many
a bitter pang is engendered and propagated from generation to generation
in the noisome alleys and courts of this metropolis, by foul food, foul
bedrooms, foul air, foul water, by intemperance, the natural and almost
pardonable consequence of want of water, depressing and degrading
employments, and lives spent in such an atmosphere of filth as our
daintier nostrils could not endure a day: then we should learn to look
upon these hospitals not as acts of charity, supererogatory benevolences
of ours towards those to whom we owe nothing, but as confessions of sin,
and worthy fruits of penitence; as poor and late and partial compensation
for misery which we might have prevented. And when again, taking up
scientific works, we find how vast a proportion of the remaining cases of
disease are produced directly or indirectly by the unhealthiness of
certain occupations, so certainly that the scientific man can almost
prophesy the average shortening of life, and the peculiar form of
disease, incident to any given form of city labour—when we find, to quote
a single instance, that a large proportion—one half, as I am informed—of
the female cases in certain hospitals, are those of women-servants
suffering from diseases produced by overwork in household labour,
especially by carrying heavy weights up the steep stairs of our London
houses—when we consider the large proportion of accident cases which are
the result, if not always of neglect in our social arrangements, still of
danger incurred in labouring for us, we shall begin to feel that our
debts towards the poorer classes, for whom this and other hospitals are
instituted, swells and mounts up to a burden which ought to be and would
be intolerable to us, if we had not some such means as this hospital
affords of testifying our contrition for neglect for which we cannot
atone, and of practically claiming in the hospital our brotherhood with
those masses whom we pass by so carelessly in the workshop and the
street. What matters it that they have undertaken a life of labour from
necessity, and with a full consciousness of the dangers they incur in it?
For whom have they been labouring, but for us? Their handiwork renders
our houses luxurious. We wear the clothes they make. We eat the food
they produce. They sit in darkness and the shadow of death that we may
enjoy light and life and luxury and civilisation. True, they are free
men, in name, not free though from the iron necessity of crushing toil.
Shall we make their liberty a cloak for our licentiousness? and because
they are our brothers and not our slaves, answer with Cain, “Am I my
brother’s keeper?” What if we have paid them the wages which they ask?
We do not feed our beasts of burden only as long as they are in health,
and when they fall sick leave them to cure themselves and starve—and
these are not our beasts of burden; they are members of Christ, children
of God, inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven. Prove it to them, then, for
they are in bitter danger of forgetting it in these days. Prove to them,
by helping to cure their maladies, that they are members of Christ, that
they do indeed belong to Him who without fee or payment freely cured the
sick of Judæa in old time. Prove to them that they are children of God
by treating them as such—as children of Him without whom not a sparrow
falls to the ground, children of Him whose love is over all His works,
children of Him who defends the widow and the fatherless, and sees that
those who are in need or necessity have right, and who maketh inquiry for
the blood of the innocent. Prove to them that they are inheritors of the
Kingdom of Heaven, by proving to them first of all that the Kingdom of
Heaven exists, that all, rich and poor alike, are brothers, and One their
Master, He who ascended up on high and led captivity captive, and
received gifts for men, the gifts of healing, the gifts of science, the
gifts of civilisation, the gifts of law, the gifts of order, the gifts of
liberty, the gifts of the spirit of love and brotherhood, of
fellow-feeling and self-sacrifice, of justice and humility, a spirit fit
for a world of redeemed and pardoned men, in which mercy is but justice,
and self-sacrifice the truest self-interest; a world, the King and Master
of which is One who poured out his own life-blood for the sake of those
who hated him, that men should henceforth live not for themselves, but
for Him who died and rose again, and ascended up on high and received
gifts for men, that the Lord God might dwell among them.
And because all general truths can only be verified in particular
instances, verify your general faith in that Christianity which you
profess in this particular instance, by doing the duty which lies nearest
to you, and _giving_, _as it is called_, to this hospital for which I now
plead.
Thanks to the spirit and the attainments of the average of English
medical men and chaplains, to praise the management of any hospital which
is under their care, is a needless impertinence. Do you find funds,
there will be no fear as to their being well employed; and no fear, alas!
either of their services being in full demand, while the sanitary state
of vast streets of South London, lying close to this hospital, are in a
state in which they are, and in which private cupidity and neglect seem
willing to compel them to remain. It is on account of its contiguity to
these neglected, destitute, and poisonous localities, that this hospital
seems to me especially valuable. But though situated in a part of London
where its presence is especially needed, it has not, from various causes
which have arisen from no fault of its own, attracted as much public
notice as some other more magnificent foundations; while it possesses one
feature, peculiar I believe to it, among our London hospitals, which
seems to me to render it especially deserving of support: I speak of the
ward for incurable patients, in which, instead of ending their days in
the melancholy wards of a workhouse, or amid those pestilential and
crowded dwellings which have perhaps produced their maladies, and which
certainly will aggravate them, they may have their heavy years of
hopeless suffering softened by a continued supply of constant comforts,
and constant medical solicitude, such as the best-conducted workhouse, or
the most laborious staff of parish surgeons, and district visitors, ay,
not even the benevolence and self-sacrifice of friends and relations, can
possibly provide. I beseech you, picture to yourselves the amount of
mere physical comfort, not to mention the higher blessings of spiritual
teaching and consolation, accruing to some poor tortured cripple, in the
wards of this hospital; compare it with the very brightest lot possible
for him in the dwellings of the lower, or even of the middle classes of
the metropolis; then recollect that these hospital luxuries, which would
be unattainable by him elsewhere, are but a tithe of those which you, in
his situation, would consider absolute necessaries, without which a life
of suffering, ay, even of health, were intolerable—and do unto others
this day, as you would that others should do unto you!
I might have taken some other and more popular method of drawing your
attention to this institution.
I might have tried to excite your feelings and sympathies by attempts at
pathetic or picturesque descriptions of suffering. But the minister of a
just God is bound to proclaim that God demands not _sentiment_, but
_justice_. The Bible knows nothing of the “religious sentiments and
emotions,” whereof we hear so much talk nowadays. It speaks of _duty_.
“Beloved, if God so loved us, we _ought_ to love one another.”
I might also have attempted to flatter you into giving, by representing
this as a “_good work_,” a work of charity and piety, well pleasing to
God; a sort of work of Protestant supererogation, fruits of faith which
we may show, if we like, up to a certain not very clearly defined point
of benevolence, but the absence of which probably will not seriously
affect our eternal salvation, still less our right to call ourselves
orthodox, Protestants, churchmen, worthy, kind-hearted, respectable,
blameless. The Bible knows nothing of such a religion; it neither coaxes
nor flatters, it _commands_. It demands mercy, because mercy is justice;
and declares with what measure we mete to others, it shall be surely
measured to us again. If therefore my words shall seem to some here, to
be not so much a humble request as a peremptory demand, I cannot help it.
I have pleaded the cause of this hospital on the only solid ground of
which I am aware, for doing anything but evil to everyone around us who
is not a private friend, or a member of one’s own family. I ask you to
help the poor to their share in the gifts which Christ received for men,
because they are His gifts, and neither ours nor any man’s. Among these
venerable buildings, the signs and witnesses of the Kingdom of God, and
the blessings of that Kingdom which for a thousand years have been
spreading and growing among us—I ask it of you as citizens of that
Kingdom. Prove your brotherhood to the poor by restoring to them a
portion of that wealth which, without their labour, you could never have
possessed. Prove your brotherhood to them in a thousand ways—in every
way—in this way, because at this moment it happens to be the nearest and
the most immediate, and because the necessity for it is nearer, more
immediate, to judge by the signs of the times, and most of all by their
self-satisfied unconsciousness of danger, their loud and shallow
self-glorification, than ever it was before. Work while it is called
to-day, lest the night come wherein no man can work, but only take his
wages.
Again I say, I may seem to some here to have pleaded the cause of this
hospital in too harsh and peremptory a tone. . . . And yet I have a
ground of hope, in the English love of simple justice, in the noble
instances of benevolence and self-sacrifice among the wealthy and
educated, which are, thank God! increasing in number daily, as the need
of them increases—in these, I say, I have a ground of hope that there are
many here to-day who would sooner hear the language of truth than of
flattery; who will be more strongly moved toward a righteous deed by
being told that it is their duty toward God, their country, and their
fellow-citizens, than by any sentimental baits for personal sympathy, or
for the love of Pharisaic ostentation.
XIII.
FIRST SERMON ON THE CHOLERA.
(_Sunday Morning_, _September_ 27_th_, 1849.)
God’s judgments are from above, out of the sight of the wicked.—PSALM
x. 5.
WE have just been praying to God to remove from us the cholera, which we
call a judgment of God, a chastisement; and God knows we have need enough
to do so. But we can hardly expect God to withdraw His chastisement
unless we correct the sins for which He chastised us, and therefore
unless we find out what particular sins have brought the evil on us. For
it is mere cant and hypocrisy, my friends, to tell God, in a general way,
that we believe He is punishing us for our sins, and then to avoid
carefully confessing any particular sin, and to get angry with anyone who
tells us boldly _which_ sin God is punishing us for. But so goes the
world. Everyone is ready to say, “Oh! yes, we are all great sinners,
miserable sinners!” and then if you charge them with any particular sin,
they bridle up and deny _that_ sin fiercely enough, and all sins one by
one, confessing themselves great sinners, and yet saying that they don’t
know what sins they have committed. No man really believes himself a
sinner, no man really confesses his sins, but the man who can honestly
put his finger on _this_ sin or _that_ sin which he has committed, and is
not afraid to confess to God, “_This_ sin and _that_ sin have I
done—_this_ bad habit and _that_ bad habit have I cherished within me.”
Therefore, I say, it is no use for us Englishmen to dream that we can
flatter and persuade the great God of Heaven and earth into taking away
the cholera from us, unless we find out and confess openly what we have
done to bring on the cholera, and unless we repent and bring forth fruits
worthy of repentance, by amending our habits on that point, and doing
everything for the future which shall not bring on the cholera, but keep
it off.
Do not let us believe this time, my friends, in the pitiable, insincere
way in which all England believed when the cholera was here sixteen years
ago. When they saw human beings dying by thousands, they all got
frightened, and proclaimed a Fast and confessed their sins and promised
repentance in a general way. But did they repent of and confess those
sins which had caused the cholera? Did they repent of and confess the
covetousness, the tyranny, the carelessness, which in most great towns,
and in too many villages also, forces the poor to lodge in undrained
stifling hovels, unfit for hogs, amid vapours and smells which send forth
on every breath the seeds of rickets and consumption, typhus and scarlet
fever, and worse and last of all, the cholera? Did they repent of their
sin in that? Not they. Did they repent of the carelessness and laziness
and covetousness which sends meat and fish up to all our large towns in a
half-putrid state; which fills every corner of London and the great
cities with slaughter-houses, over-crowded graveyards, undrained sewers?
Not they. To confess their sins in a general way cost them a few words;
to confess and repent of the real particular sins in themselves, was a
very different matter; to amend them would have touched vested interests,
would have cost money, the Englishman’s god; it would have required
self-sacrifice of pocket, as well as of time. It would have required
manful fighting against the prejudices, the ignorance, the self-conceit,
the laziness, the covetousness of the wicked world. So they could not
afford to repent and amend of all _that_. And when those great and good
men, the Sanitary Commissioners, proved to all England fifteen years ago,
that cholera always appeared where fever had appeared, and that both
fever and cholera always cling exclusively to those places where there
was bad food, bad air, crowded bedrooms, bad drainage and filth—that such
were the laws of God and Nature, and always had been; they took no notice
of it, because it was the poor rather than the rich who suffered from
those causes. So the filth of our great cities was left to ferment in
poisonous cesspools, foul ditches and marshes and muds, such as those now
killing people by hundreds in the neighbourhood of Plymouth; for one
house or sewer that was improved, a hundred more were left just as they
were in the first cholera; as soon as the panic of superstitious fear was
past, carelessness and indolence returned. Men went back, the covetous
man to his covetousness, and the idler to his idleness. And behold!
sixteen years are past, and the cholera is as bad as ever among us.