But you will say, perhaps, it is presumptuous to say that Englishmen have

brought the cholera on themselves, that it is God’s judgment, and that we

cannot explain His inscrutable Providence. Ah! my friends, that is a

poor excuse and a common one, for leaving a great many sins as they are!

When people do not wish to do God’s will, it is a very pleasant thing to

talk about God’s will as something so very deep and unfathomable, that

poor human beings cannot be expected to find it out. It is an old

excuse, and a great favourite with Satan, I have no doubt. Why cannot

people find out God’s will?—Because they do not _like_ to find it out,

lest it should shame them and condemn them, and cost them pleasure or

money—because their eyes are blinded with covetousness and selfishness,

so that they cannot see God’s will, even when they _do_ look for it, and

then they go and cant about God’s judgments; while those judgments, as

the text says, are far above out of their mammon-blinded and

prejudice-blinded sight. What do they mean by that word? Come now, my

friends! let us face the question like men. What do you mean really when

you call the cholera, or fever, or affliction at all, God’s judgment? Do

you merely mean that God is punishing you, you don’t know for what, and

you can’t find out for what? but that all which He expects of you is to

bear it patiently, and then go and do afterwards just what you did

before? Dare anyone say that who believes that God is a God of justice,

much less a God of love? What would you think of a father who punished

his children, and then left them to find out as they could what they were

punished for? And yet that is the way people talk of pestilence and of

great afflictions, public and private. They are not ashamed to accuse

God of a cruelty and an injustice which they would be ashamed to confess

themselves! How can men, even religious men often, be so blasphemous?

Mainly, I think, because they do not really believe in God at all, they

only believe about Him—they believe that they ought to believe in Him.

They have no living personal faith in God or Christ; they do not know

God; they do not know God’s character, and what to believe of Him, and

what to expect of Him; or what they ought to say of Him; because they do

not know, they have not studied, they have not loved the character of

Christ, who is the express image and likeness of God. Therefore God’s

judgments are far away out of their sight; therefore they make themselves

a God in their own image and after their own likeness, lazy, capricious,

revengeful; therefore they are not afraid or ashamed to say that God

sends pestilence into a country without showing that country why it is

sent. But another great reason, I believe, why God’s judgments in this

and other matters are far above out of our sight, is the careless,

insincere way of using words which we English have got into, even on the

most holy and awful matters. I suppose there never was a nation in the

world so diseased through and through with the spirit of cant, as we

English are now: except perhaps the old Jews, at the time of our Lord’s

coming. You hear men talking as if they thought God did not understand

English, because they cling superstitiously to the letter of the Bible in

proportion as they lose its spirit. You hear men taking words into their

mouths which might make angels weep and devils tremble, with a coolness

and oily, smooth carelessness which shows you that they do not feel the

force of what they are saying. You hear them using the words of

Scripture, which are in themselves stricter and deeper than all the books

of philosophy in the world, in such a loose unscriptural way, that they

make them mean anything or nothing. They use the words like parrots, by

rote, just because their forefathers used them before them. They will

tell you that cholera is a judgment for our sins, “in a sense,” but if

you ask them for what sins, or in what sense, they fly off from that

_home_ question, and begin mumbling commonplaces about the inscrutable

decrees of Providence, and so on. It is most sad, all this; and most

fearful also.

Therefore, I asked you, my friends, what is the meaning of that word

judgment? In common talk, people use it rightly enough, but when they

begin to talk of God’s judgments, they speak as if it merely meant

punishments. Now judgment and punishment are two things. When a judge

gives judgment, he either acquits or condemns the accused person; he

gives the case for the plaintiff, or for the defendant: the punishment of

the guilty person, if he be guilty, is a separate thing, pronounced and

inflicted afterwards. His judgment, I say, is his _opinion_ about the

person’s guilt, and even so God’s judgments are the expression of His

opinion about our guilt. But there is this difference between man and

God in this matter—a human judge gives his opinion in words, God gives

His in events: therefore there is no harm for a human judge when he has

told a person why he must punish, to punish him in some way that has

nothing to do with his crime—for instance, to send a man to prison

because he steals, though it would be far better if criminals could be

punished in kind, and if the man who stole could be forced either to make

restitution, or work out the price of what he stole in hard labour. For

this is God’s plan—God always pays sinners back in kind, that He may not

merely punish them, but _correct_ them; so that by the kind of their

punishment, they may know the kind of their sin. God punishes us, as I

have often told you, not by His caprice, but by His laws. He does not

_break His laws_ to harm us; the laws themselves harm us, when we break

them and get in their way. It is always so, you will find, with great

national afflictions. I believe, when we know more of God and His laws,

we shall find it true even in our smallest private sorrows. God is

unchangeable; He does not lose His temper, as heathens and superstitious

men fancy, to punish us. He does not change His order to punish us.

_We_ break His order, and the order goes on in spite of us and crushes

us: and so we get God’s judgment, God’s opinion of our breaking His laws.

You will find it so almost always in history. If a nation is laid waste

by war, it is generally their own fault. They have sinned against the

law which God has appointed for nations. They have lost courage and

prudence, and trust in God, and fellow-feeling and unity, and they have

become cowardly and selfish and split up into parties, and so they are

easily conquered by their own fault, as the Bible tells us the Jews were

by the Chaldeans; and their ruin is God’s judgment, God’s opinion plainly

expressed of what He thinks of them for having become cowardly and

selfish, and factious and disinterested. So it is with famine again.

Famines come by a nation’s own fault—they are God’s plainly spoken

opinion of what _He_ thinks of breaking His laws of industry and thrift,

by improvidence and bad farming. So when a nation becomes poor and

bankrupt, it is its own fault; that nation has broken the laws of

political economy which God has appointed for nations, and its ruin is

God’s judgment, God’s plain-spoken opinion again of the sins of

extravagance, idleness, and reckless speculation.

So with pestilence and cholera. They come only because we break God’s

laws; as the wise poet well says:

Voices from the depths _of Nature_ borne

Which vengeance on the guilty head proclaim.

—“Of nature;” of the order and constitution which God has made for this

world we live in, and which if we break them, though God in his mercy so

orders the world that punishment comes but seldom even to our worst

offences, yet surely do bring punishment sooner or later if broken, in

the common course of nature. Yes, my friends, as surely and naturally as

drunkenness punishes itself by a shaking hand and a bloated body, so does

filth avenge itself by pestilence. Fever and cholera, as you would

expect them to be, are the expression of God’s judgment, God’s opinion,

God’s handwriting on the wall against us for our sins of filth and

laziness, foul air, foul food, foul drains, foul bedrooms. Where they

are, there is cholera. Where they are not, there is none, and will be

none, because they who do not break God’s laws, God’s laws will not break

them. Oh! do not think me harsh, my friends; God knows it is no pleasant

thing to have to speak bitter and upbraiding words; but when one travels

about this noble land of England, and sees what a blessed place it might

be, if we would only do God’s will, and what a miserable place it is just

because we will not do God’s will, it is enough to make one’s soul boil

over with sorrow and indignation; and then when one considers that other

men’s faults are one’s own fault too, that one has been adding to the

heap of sins by one’s own laziness, cowardice, ignorance, it is enough to

break one’s heart—to make one cry with St. Paul, “Oh wretched man that I

am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” Ay, my friends,

the state of things in England now is enough to drive an earnest man to

despair, if one did not know that all our distresses, and this cholera,

like the rest, are indeed _God’s_ judgments; the judgments and expressed

opinions, not of a capricious tyrant, but of a righteous and loving

Father, who chastens us just because He loves us, and afflicts us only to

teach us His will, which alone is life and happiness. Therefore we may

believe that this very cholera is meant to be a blessing; that if we will

take the lesson it brings, it will be a blessing to England. God grant

that all ranks may take the lesson—that the rich may amend their idleness

and neglect, and the poor amend their dirt and stupid ignorance; then our

children will have cause to thank God for the cholera, if it teaches us

that cleanliness is indeed next to holiness, if it teaches us, rich and

poor, to make the workman’s home what it ought to be. And believe me, my

friends, that day will surely come; and these distresses, sad as they are

for the time, are only helping to hasten it—the day when the words of the

Hebrew prophets shall be fulfilled, where they speak of a state of

comfort and prosperity, and civilisation, such as men had never reached

in their time—how the wilderness shall blossom like the rose, and there

shall be heaps of corn high on the mountain-tops, and the cities shall be

green as grass on the earth, instead of being the smoky, stifling

hot-beds of disease which they are now—and how from the city of God

streams shall flow for the healing of the nations: strange words, those,

and dim; too deep to be explained by any one meaning, or many meanings,

such as our small minds can give them; but full of blessed cheering hope.

For of whatever they speak, they speak at least of this—of a time when

all sorrow and sighing shall be done away, when science and civilisation

shall go hand in hand with godliness—when God shall indeed dwell in the

hearts of men, and His kingdom shall be fulfilled among them, when “His

ways shall be known upon earth at last, and His saving health among all

nations”—of a time when all shall know Him, from the least unto the

greatest, and be indeed His children, doing no sin, because they will

have given up themselves, their selfishness and cruelty and covetousness,

and stupidity and laziness, to be changed and renewed into God’s

likeness. Then all these distresses and pestilences, which, as I have

shown you, come from breaking the will of God, will have passed away like

ugly dreams, and all the earth shall be blessed, because all the earth

shall at last be fulfilling the words of the Lord’s Prayer, and God’s

will shall be done on earth, even as it is done in heaven. Oh! my

friends, have hope. Do you think Christ would have bid us pray for what

would never happen? Would He have bid us all to pray that God’s will

might be done unless He had known surely that God’s will would one day be

done by men on earth below even as it is done in heaven?

XIV.

SECOND SERMON ON THE CHOLERA.

Visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children.—EXODUS xx. 5.

IN my sermon last Sunday I said plainly that cholera, fever, and many

more diseases were man’s own fault, and that they were God’s judgments

just because they were man’s own fault, because they were God’s

plainspoken opinion of the sin of filth and of habits of living unfit for

civilised Christian men.

But there is an objection which may arise in some of your minds, and if

it has not risen in _your_ minds, still it has in other people’s often

enough; and therefore I will state it plainly, and answer it as far as

God shall give me wisdom. For it is well to get to the root of all

matters, and of this matter of Pestilence among others; for if we do

believe this Pestilence to be God’s judgment, then it is a spiritual

matter most proper to be spoken of in a place like this church, where men

come as spiritual beings to hear that which is profitable for their

souls. And it _is_ profitable for their souls to consider this matter;

for it has to do, as I see more and more daily, with the very deepest

truths of the Gospel; and accordingly as we believe the Gospel, and

believe really that Jesus Christ is our Saviour and our King, the New

Adam, the firstborn among many brethren, who has come down to proclaim to

us that we are all brothers in Him—in proportion as we believe _that_, I

say, shall we act upon this very matter of public cleanliness.

The objection which I mean is this: people say it is very hard and unfair

to talk of cholera or fever being people’s own fault, when you see

persons who are not themselves dirty, and innocent little children, who

if they are dirty are only so because they are brought up so, catch the

infection and die of it. You cannot say it is their fault. Very true.

I did not say it was their fault. I did not say that each particular

person takes the infection by his own fault, though I do say that nine

out of ten do. And as for little children, of course it is not their

fault. But, my friends, it must be someone’s fault. No one will say

that the world is so ill made that these horrible diseases must come in

spite of all man’s care. If it was so, plagues, pestilences, and

infectious fevers would be just as common now in England, and just as

deadly as they were in old times; whereas there is not one infectious

fever now in England for ten that there used to be five hundred years

ago. In ancient times fevers, agues, plague, smallpox, and other

diseases, whose very names we cannot now understand, so completely are

they passed away, swept England from one end to the other every few

years, killing five people where they now kill one. Those diseases, as I

said, have many of them now died out entirely; and those which remain are

becoming less and less dangerous every year. And why? Simply because

people are becoming more cleanly and civilised in their habits of living;

because they are tilling and draining the land every year more and more,

instead of leaving it to breed disease, as all uncultivated land does.

It is not merely that doctors are becoming wiser: we ourselves are

becoming more reasonable in our way of living. For instance, in large

districts both of Scotland and of the English fens, where fever and ague

filled the country and swept off hundreds every spring and fall thirty

years ago, fever and ague are now almost unknown, simply because the

marshes have all been drained in the meantime. So you see that people

can prevent these disorders, and therefore it must be someone’s fault if

they come. Now, whose fault is it? You dare not lay the blame on God.

And yet you do lay the fault on God if you say that it is no _man’s_

fault that children die of fever. But I know what the answer to that

will be: “We do not accuse God—it is the fault of the fall, Adam’s curse

which brought death and disease into the world.” That is a common

answer, and the very one I want to hear. What? is it just to say, as

many do, that all the diseases which ever tormented poor little innocent

children all over the world, came from Adam’s sinning six thousand years

ago, and yet that it is unfair to say that one little child’s fever came

from his parents’ keeping a filthy house a month ago? That is swallowing

a camel and straining at a gnat—that God should be just in punishing all

mankind for Adam’s sin, and yet unjust in punishing one little child for

its parents’ sin. If the one is just the other must be just too, I

think. If you believe the one, why not believe the other? Why? Because

Adam’s curse and “original” sin, as people call it, is a good and

pleasant excuse for laying our sins and miseries at Adam’s door; but the

same rule is not so pleasant in the case of filth and fever, when it lays

other people’s miseries at our door.

I believe that all the misery in the world sprung from Adam’s

disobedience and falling from God. “By one man sin entered the world,

and death by sin, and so death passed on all men, even on those who had

not sinned after the likeness of Adam’s transgression.” So says the

Bible, and I believe it says so truly. For this is the law of the earth,

God’s law which He proclaimed in the text. He does visit the sins of the

fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of those

who hate Him. It is so. You see it around you daily. No one can deny

it. Just as death and misery entered into the world by one man, so we

see death and misery entering into many a family. A man or woman is a

drunkard, or a rogue, or a swearer: how often their children grow up like

them! We have all seen that, God knows, in this very parish. How much

more in great cities, where boys and girls by thousands—oh, shame that it

should be so in a Christian land!—grow up thieves from the breast, and

harlots from the cradle. And why? Why are there, as they say, and I am

afraid say too truly, in London alone upwards of 10,000 children under

sixteen who live by theft and harlotry? Because the parents of these

children are as bad as themselves—drunkards, thieves, and worse—and they

bring up their children to follow their crimes. If that is not the

fathers’ sins being visited on the children, what is?

How often, again, when we see a wild young man, we say, and justly: “Poor

fellow! there are great excuses for him, he has been so badly brought

up.” True, but his wildness will ruin him all the same, whether it be

his father’s fault or his own that he became wild. If he drinks he will

ruin his health; if he squanders his money he will grow poor. God’s laws

cannot stop for him; he is breaking them, and they will avenge themselves

on him. You see the same thing everywhere. A man fools away his money,

and his innocent children suffer for it. A man ruins his health by

debauchery, or a woman hers by laziness or vanity or self-indulgence, and

her children grow up weakly and inherit their parents’ unhealthiness.

How often again, do we see passionate parents have passionate children,

stupid parents stupid children, mean and lying parents mean and lying

children; above all, ignorant and dirty parents have ignorant and dirty

children. How can they help being so? They cannot keep themselves clean

by instinct; they cannot learn without being taught: and so they suffer

for their parents’ faults. But what is all this except God’s visiting

the sins of the fathers upon the children? Look again at a whole parish;

how far the neglect or the wickedness of one man may make a whole estate

miserable. There is one parish in this very union, and the curse of the

whole union it is, which will show us that fearfully enough. See, too,

how often when a good and generous young man comes into his estate, he

finds it so crippled with debts and mortgages by his forefathers’

extravagance, that he cannot do the good he would to his tenants, he

cannot fulfil his duty as landlord where God has placed him, and so he

and the whole estate must suffer for the follies of generations past. If

that is not God visiting the sins of the fathers on the children, what is

it?

Look again at a whole nation; the rulers of two countries quarrel, or

pretend to quarrel, and go to war—and some here know what war is—just

because there is some old grudge of a hundred years standing between two

countries, or because rulers of whose names the country people, perhaps,

never heard, have chosen to fall out, or because their forefathers by

cowardice, or laziness, or division, or some other sin, have made the

country too weak to defend itself; and for that poor people’s property is

destroyed, and little infants butchered, and innocent women suffer

unspeakable shame. If that is not God visiting the sins of the fathers

on the children, what is it?

It is very awful, but so it is. It is the law of this earth, the law of

human kind, that the innocent often suffer for other’s faults, just as

you see them doing in cholera, fever, ague, smallpox, and other diseases

which man can prevent if he chooses to take the trouble. There it is.

We cannot alter it. Those who will may call God unjust for it. Let them

first see, whether He is not only most just, but most merciful in making

the world so, and no other way. I do not merely mean that whatever God

does must be right. That is true, but it is a poor way of getting over

the difficulty. God has taught us what is right and wrong, and He will

be judged by His own rules. As Abraham said to Him when Sodom was to be

destroyed: “That be far from Thee, to punish the righteous with the

wicked. Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” Abraham knew

what was right, and he expected God not to break that law of right. And

we may expect the same of God. And I may be able, I hope, in my sermon

next Sunday, to show you that in this matter God does break the law of

right. Nevertheless, in the meantime, this is His way of dealing with

men. When Sodom was destroyed He brought righteous Lot out of it. But

Sodom was destroyed, and in it many a little infant who had never known

sin. And just so when Lisbon was swallowed up by an earthquake, ninety

years ago, the little children perished as well as the grown people—just

as in the Irish famine fever last year, many a doctor and Roman Catholic

priest, and Protestant clergyman, caught the fever and died while they

were piously attending on the sick. They were acting like righteous men

doing their duty at their posts; but God’s laws could not turn aside for

them. Improvidence, and misrule, which had been working and growing for

hundreds of years, had at last brought the famine fever, and even the

righteous must perish by it. They had their sins, no doubt, as we all

have; but then they were doing God’s work bravely and honestly enough,

yet the fever could not spare them any more than it could spare the

children of the filthy parents, though they had not kept pigsties under

their windows, nor cesspools at their doors. It could not spare them any

more than it can spare the tenants of the negligent or covetous

house-owner, because it is his fault and not theirs that his houses are

undrained, overcrowded, destitute—as whole streets in many large towns

are—of the commonest decencies of life. It may be the landlord’s fault,

but the tenants suffer. God visits the sins of the fathers upon the

children, and landlords ought to be fathers to their tenants, and must

become fathers to them some day, and that soon, unless they intend that

the Lord should visit on them all their sins, and their forefathers’

also, even unto the third and fourth generation.

For do not fancy that because the innocent suffer with the guilty that

therefore the guilty escape. Seldom do they escape in this world, and in

the world to come never. The landlord who, as too many do, neglects his

cottages till they become man-sties, to breed pauperism and disease—the

parents whose carelessness and dirt poison their children and neighbours

into typhus and cholera—their brother’s blood will cry against them out

of the ground. It will be required at their hands sooner or later, by

Him who beholds iniquity and wrong, and who will not be satisfied in the

day of His vengeance by Cain’s old answer, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

We are every one of us our brother’s keeper; and if we do not choose to

confess that, God will prove it to us in a way that we cannot mistake. A

wise man tells a story of a poor Irish widow who came to Liverpool and no

one would take her in or have mercy on her, till, from starvation and bad

lodging, as the doctor said, she caught typhus fever, and not only died

herself, but gave the infection to the whole street, and seventeen

persons died of it. “See,” says the wise man, “the poor Irish widow was

the Liverpool people’s sister after all. She was of the same flesh and

blood as they. The fever that killed her killed them, but they would not

confess that they were her brothers. They shut their doors upon her, and

so there was no way left for her to prove her relationship, but by

killing seventeen of them with fever.” A grim jest that, but a true one,

like Elijah’s jest to the Baal priests on Carmel. A true one, I say, and

one that we have all need to lay to heart.

And I do earnestly trust in you that you will lay it to heart. We have

had our fair warning here. We have had God’s judgment about our

cleanliness; His plain spoken opinion about the sanitary state of this

parish. We deserve the fever, I am afraid; not a house in which it has

appeared but has had some glaring neglect of common cleanliness about it;

and if we do not take the warning God will surely some day repeat it. It

will repeat itself by the necessary laws of nature; and we shall have the

fever among us again, just as the cholera has reappeared in the very

towns, and the very streets, where it was seventeen years ago, wherever

they have not repented of and amended their filth and negligence. And I

say openly, that those who have escaped this time may not escape next.

God has made examples, and by no means always of the worst cottages.

God’s plan is to take one and leave another by way of warning. “It is

expedient that one man should die for the people, and that the whole

nation perish not” is a great and a sound law, and we must profit by it.

So let not those who have escaped the fever fancy that they must needs be

without fault. “Think ye that those sixteen on whom the tower of Siloam

fell and slew them, were sinners above all those that dwelt at Jerusalem?

I say unto you, Nay, but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.”

And I say again, as I said last Sunday, that this is a spiritual

question, a Gospel sermon; for by your conduct in this matter will your

faith in the Gospel be proved. If you really believe that Jesus Christ

came down from heaven and sacrificed Himself for you, you will be ready

to sacrifice yourselves in this matter for those for whom He died; to

sacrifice, without stint, your thought, your time, your money, and your

labour. If you really believe that He is the sworn enemy of all misery

and disease, you will show yourselves too the sworn enemies of everything

that causes misery and disease, and work together like men to put all

pestilential filth and damp out of this parish. If you really believe

that you are all brothers, equal in the sight of God and Christ, you will

do all you can to save your brothers from sickness and the miseries which

follow it. If you really believe that your children are God’s children,

that at baptism God declares your little ones to be His, you will be

ready to take any care or trouble, however new or strange it may seem, to

keep your children safe from all foul smells, foul food, foul water, and

foul air, that they may grow up healthy, hearty, and cleanly, fit to

serve God as christened, free, and civilised Englishmen should in this

great and awful time, the most wonderful time that the earth has ever

seen, into which it has pleased God of His great mercy to let us all be

born.

XV.

THIRD SERMON ON THE CHOLERA.

I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the

Fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation of

them that hate me.—EXODUS xx. 6.

MANY of you were perhaps surprised and puzzled by my saying in my last

sermon that God’s visiting the sins of the fathers on the children, and

letting the innocent suffer for the guilty, was a blessing and not a

curse—a sign of man’s honour and redemption, not of his shame and ruin.

But the more I have thought of those words, the more glad I am that I

spoke them boldly, the more true I find them to be.

I say that there is in them the very deepest and surest ground for hope.

“Yes,” some of you may say, “to be sure when we see the innocent

suffering for the guilty, it is a plain proof that another world must

come some day, in which all that unfairness shall be set right.” Well,

my friends, it does prove that, but I should be very sorry if it did not

prove a great deal more than that—this suffering of the innocent for the

guilty. I have no heart to talk to you about the next life, unless I can

give you some comfort, some reason for trusting in God in this life. I

never saw much good come of it. I never found it do my own soul any

good, to be told: “_This_ life and _this_ world in which you now live are

given up irremediably to misrule and deceit, poverty and pestilence,

death and the devil. You cannot expect to set this world right—you must

look to the next world. Everything will be set right there.” That

sounds fine and resigned; and there seems to be a great deal of trust in

God in it; but, as I think, there is little or none; and I say so from

the fruits I see it bear. If people believe that this world is the

devil’s world, and only the next world God’s, they are easily tempted to

say: “Very well, then, we must serve the devil in this world, and God in

the next. We must, of course, take great care to get our souls saved

when we die, that we may go to heaven and live for ever and ever; but as

to this world and this life, why, we must follow the ways of the world.

It is not our fault that they have nothing to do with God. It is not our

fault that society and the world are all rotten and accursed; we found

them so when we were born, and we must make the best of a bad matter and

sail as the world does, and be covetous and mean and anxious—how can we

help it?—and stand on our own rights, and take care of number one; and

even do what is not quite right now and then—for how can we help it?—or

how else shall we get on in this poor lost, fallen, sinful world!”

And so it comes, my friends, that you see people professing—ay, and

believing, Gospel doctrines, and struggling and reading, and, as they

fancy, praying, morning, noon, and night, to get their own souls

saved—who yet, if you are to judge by their conduct, are little better

than rogues and heathens; whose only law of life seems to be the fear of

what people will say of them; who, like Balaam the son of Bosor, are

trying daily to serve the devil without God finding it out, worshipping

the evil spirit, as that evil spirit wanted our blessed Lord to do,

because they believed his lie, which Christ denied—that the glory of this

world belongs to the evil one; and then comforting themselves like Balaam

their father, in the hope that they shall die the death of the righteous,

and their last end be like his.

Now I say my friends that this is a lie, and comes from the father of

lies, who tempts every man, as he tempted our Lord, to believe that the

power and glory of this world are his, that man’s flesh and body, if not

his soul, belongs to him. I say, it is no such thing. The world is

God’s world. Man is God’s creature, made in God’s image, and not in that

of a beast or a devil. The kingdom, the power, and the glory, _are_

God’s now. You say so every day in the Lord’s Prayer—believe it. St.

James tells you not to curse men, because they are made in the likeness

of God now—not _will_ be made in God’s likeness after they die. Believe

that; do not be afraid of it, strange as it may seem to understand. It

is in the Bible, and you profess to believe that what is in the Bible is

true. And I say that this suffering of the innocent for the guilty is a

proof of that. If man was not made so that the innocent could suffer for

the guilty, he could not have been redeemed at all, for there would have

been no use or meaning in Christ’s dying for us, the just for the unjust.

And more, if the innocent could not suffer for the guilty we should be

like the beasts that perish.

Now, why? Because just in proportion as any creature is low—I mean in

the scale of life—just in that proportion it does without its

fellow-creatures, it lives by itself and cares for no other of its kind.

A vegetable is a meaner thing than an animal, and one great sign of its

being meaner is, that vegetables cannot do each other any good—cannot

help each other—cannot even hurt each other, except in a mere mechanical

way, by overgrowing each other or robbing each other’s roots; but what

would it matter to a tree if all the other trees in the world were to

die? So with wild animals. What matters it to a bird or a beast,

whether other birds and beasts are ill off or well off, wise or stupid?

Each one takes care of itself—each one shifts for itself. But you will

say “Bees help each other and depend upon each other for life and death.”

True, and for that very reason we look upon bees as being more wise and

more wonderful than almost any animals, just because they are so much

like us human beings in depending on each other. You will say again,

that among dogs, a riotous hound will lead a whole pack wrong—a staunch

and well-broken hound will keep a whole pack right; and that dogs do

depend upon each other in very wonderful ways. Most true, but that only

proves more completely what I want to get at. It is the _tame_ dog,

which man has taken and broken in, and made to partake more or less of

man’s wisdom and cunning, who depends on his fellow-dogs. The wild dogs

in foreign countries, on the other hand, are just as selfish, living

every one for himself, as so many foxes might be. And you find this same

rule holding as you rise. The more a man is like a wild animal, the more

of a _savage_ he is, so much more he depends on himself, and not on

others—in short, the less civilised he is; for civilised means being a

citizen, and learning to live in cities, and to help and depend upon each

other. And our common English word “civil” comes from the same root. A

man is “civil” who feels that he depends upon his neighbours, and his

neighbours on him; that they are his fellow-citizens, and that he owes

them a duty and a friendship. And, therefore, a man is truly and

sincerely civil, just in proportion as he is civilised; in proportion as

he is a good citizen, a good Christian—in one word, a _good man_.

Ay, that is what I want to come to, my friends—that word _man_, and what

it means. The law of man’s life, the constitution and order on which,

and on no other, God has made man, is _this_—to depend upon his

fellow-men, to be their brothers, in flesh and in spirit; for we are

brothers to each other. God made of one blood all nations to dwell on

the face of the earth. The same food will feed us all alike. The same

cholera will kill us all alike. And we can give the cholera to each

other; we can give each other the infection, not merely by our touch and

breath, for diseased beasts can do that, but by housing our families and

our tenants badly, feeding them badly, draining the land around them

badly. This is the secret of the innocent suffering for the guilty, in

pestilences, and famines, and disorders, which are handed down from

father to child, that we are all of the same blood. This is the reason

why Adam’s sin infected our whole race. Adam died, and through him all

his children have received a certain property of sinfulness and of dying,

just as one bee transmits to all his children and future generations the

property of making honey, or a lion transmits to all its future

generations the property of being a beast of prey. For by sinning and

cutting himself off from God Adam gave way to the lower part of him, his

flesh, his animal nature, and therefore he died as other animals do. And

we his children, who all of us give way to our flesh, to our animal

nature, every hour, alas! we die too. And in proportion as we give way

to our animal natures we are liable to die; and the less we give way to

our animal natures, the less we are liable to die. We have all sinned;

we have all become fleshly animal creatures more or less; and therefore

we must all die sooner or later. But in proportion as we become

Christians, in proportion as we become civilised, in short, in proportion

as we become true men, and conquer and keep in order this flesh of ours,

and this earth around us, by the teaching of God’s spirit, as we were

meant to do, just so far will length of life increase and population

increase. For while people are savages, that is, while they give

themselves up utterly to their own fleshly lusts, and become mere animals

like the wild Indians, they cannot increase in number. They are exposed,

by their own lusts and ignorance and laziness, to every sort of disease;

they turn themselves into beasts of prey, and are continually fighting

and destroying each other, so that they, seldom or never increase in

numbers, and by war, drunkenness, smallpox, fevers, and other diseases

too horrible to mention, the fruit of their own lusts, whole tribes of

them are swept utterly off the face of the earth. And why? They are

like the beasts, and like the beasts they perish. Whereas, just in

proportion as any nation lives according to the spirit and not according

to the flesh; in proportion as it conquers its own fleshly appetites

which tempt it to mere laziness, pleasure, and ignorance, and lives

according to the spirit in industry, cleanliness, chaste marriage, and

knowledge, earthly and heavenly, the length of life and the number of the

population begin to increase at once, just as they are doing, thank God!

in England now; because Englishmen are learning more and more that this

earth is God’s earth, and that He works it by righteous and infallible

laws, and has put them on it to till it and subdue it; that civilisation

and industry are the cause of Christ and of God; and that without them

His kingdom will not come, neither will His will be done on earth.

But now comes a very important question. The beasts are none the worse

for giving way to their flesh and being mere animals. They increase and

multiply and are happy enough; whereas men, if they give way to their

flesh and become animals, become fewer and weaker, and stupider, and

viler, and more miserable, generation after generation. Why? Because

the animals are meant to be animals, and men are not. Men are meant to

be men, and conquer their animal nature by the strength which God gives

to their spirits. And as long as they do not do so; as long as they

remain savage, sottish, ignorant, they are living in a lie, in a diseased

wrong state, just as God did _not_ mean them to live; and therefore they

perish; therefore these fevers, and agues, and choleras, war, starvation,

tyranny, and all the ills which flesh is heir to, crush them down.

Therefore they are at the mercy of the earth beneath their feet, and the

skies above their head; at the mercy of rain and cold; at the mercy of

each other’s selfishness, laziness, stupidity, cruelty; in short, at the

mercy of the brute material earth, and their own fleshly lusts and the

fleshly lusts of others, because they love to walk after the flesh and

not after the spirit—because they like the likeness of the old Adam who

is of the earth earthy, better than that of the new Adam who is the Lord

from heaven—because they like to be animals, when Christ has made them in

his own image, and redeemed them with His own blood, and taught them with

His own example, and made them men. He who will be a man, let him

believe that he is redeemed by Christ, and must be like Christ in

everything he says and does. If he would carry that out, if he would

live perfectly by faith in God, if he would do God’s will utterly and in

all things he would soon find that those glorious old words still stood

true: “Thou shalt not be afraid of the arrow by night, nor of the

pestilence which walketh in the noonday; a thousand shall fall at thy

side, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh

thee.” For such a man would know how to defend himself against evil; God

would teach him not only to defend himself, but to defend those around

him. He would be like his Lord and Master, a fountain of wisdom and

healing and safety to all his neighbours. We might any one of us be

that. It is everyone’s fault more or less that he is not. Each of us

who is educated, civilised, converted to the knowledge and love of God,

it is his sin and shame that he is _not_ that. Above all, it is the

clergyman’s sin and shame that he is not. Ay, believe me, when I blame

you, I blame myself ten thousand times more. I believe there is many a

sin and sorrow from which I might have saved you here, if I had dealt

with you more as a man should deal who believes that you and I are

brothers, made in the same image of God, redeemed by the same blood of

Christ. And I believe that I shall be punished for every neglect of you

for which I have been ever guilty. I believe it, and I thank God for it;

for I do not see how a clergyman, or anyone else, can learn his duty,

except by God’s judging him, and punishing him, and setting his sins

before his face.

Yes, my friends, it is good for us to be afflicted, good for us to suffer

anything that will teach us this great truth, that we are our brother’s

keepers; that we are all one family, and that where one of the members

suffers, all the other members suffer with it; and that if one of the

members has cause to rejoice, all the others will have cause to rejoice

with it. A blessed thing to know, is that—though whether we know it or

not, we shall find it true. If we give way to our animal nature, and try

to live as the beasts do, each one caring for his own selfish

pleasure—still we shall find out that we cannot do it. We shall find

out, as those Liverpool people did with the Irish widow, that our

fellow-men _are_ our brothers—that what hurts them will be sure in some

strange indirect way to hurt us. Our brothers here have had the fever,

and we have escaped; but we have felt the fruits of it, in our purses—in

fear, and anxiety, and distress, and trouble—we have found out that they

could not have the fever without our suffering for it, more or less. You

see we are one family, we men and women; and our relationship will assert

itself in spite of our forgetfulness and our selfishness. How much

better to claim our brotherhood with each other, and to act upon it—to

live as brothers indeed. That would be to make it a blessing, and not a

curse; for as I said before, just because it is in our power to injure

each other, therefore it is in our power to help each other. God has

bound us together for good and for evil, for better for worse. Oh! let

it be henceforward in this parish for better, and not for worse. Oh!

every one of you, whether you be rich or poor, farmer or labourer, man or

woman, do not be ashamed to own yourselves to be brothers and sisters,

members of one family, which as it all fell together in the old Adam, so

it has all risen together in the new Adam, Jesus Christ. There is no

respect of persons with God. We are all equal in His sight. He knows no

difference among men, except the difference which God’s Spirit gives, in

proportion as a man listens to the teaching of that Spirit—rank in

godliness and true manhood. Oh! believe that—believe that because you

owe an infinite debt to Christ and to God—His Father and your

Father—therefore you owe an infinite debt to your neighbours, members of

Christ and children of God just as you are—a debt of love, help, care,

which you _can_, pay, just because you are members of one family; for

because you are members of one family, for that very reason every good

deed you do for a neighbour does not stop with that neighbour, but goes

on breeding and spreading, and growing and growing, for aught we know,

for ever. Just as each selfish act we do, each bitter word we speak,

each foul example we set, may go on spreading from mouth to mouth, from

heart to heart, from parent to child, till we may injure generations yet

unborn; so each noble and self-sacrificing deed we do, each wise and

loving word we speak, each example we set of industry and courage, of

faith in God and care for men, may and will spread on from heart to

heart, and mouth to mouth, and teach others to do and be the like; till

people miles away, who never heard of our names, may have cause to bless

us for ever and ever. This is one and only one of the glorious fruits of

our being one family. This is one and only one of the reasons which make

me say that it was a good thing mankind was so made that the innocent

suffer for the guilty. For just as the innocent are injured by the

guilty in this world, even so are the guilty preserved, and converted,

and brought back again by the innocent. Just as the sins of the fathers

are visited on the children, so is the righteousness of the fathers a

blessing to the children; else, says St. Paul, our children would be

unclean, but now they are holy. For the promises of God are not only to

us, but to our children, even to as many as the Lord our God shall call.

And thus each generation, by growing in virtue and wisdom and the

knowledge of God, will help forward all the generations which follow it

to fuller light and peace and safety; and each parent in trying to live

like a Christian man himself, will make it easier for his children to

live like Christians after him. And this rule applies even in the things

which we are too apt to fancy unimportant—every house kept really clean,

every family brought up in habits of neatness and order, every acre of

foul land drained, every new improvement in agriculture and manufactures

or medicine, is a clear gain to all mankind, a good example set which is

sure sooner or later to find followers, perhaps among generations yet

unborn, and in countries of which we never heard the name.

Was I not right then in saying that this earth is not the devil’s earth

at all, but a right good earth, of God’s making and ruling, wherein no

good deed will perish fruitless, but every man’s works will follow him—a

right good earth, governed by a righteous Father, who, as the psalm says

“is merciful,” just “because He rewards every man according to his work.”

XVI.

ON THE DAY OF THANKSGIVING.

(Nov. 15th, 1849.)

God hath visited his people.—LUKE vii. 16.

WE are assembled this day to thank God solemnly for the passing away of

the cholera from England; and we must surely not forget to thank Him at

the same time for the passing away of the fever, which has caused so much

expense, sorrow, and death among us. Now I wish to say a very few words

to you on this same matter, to show you not only how to be thankful to

God, but what to be thankful for. You may say: It is easy enough for us

to know what to thank God for in this case. We come to thank Him, as we

have just said in the public prayers, for having withdrawn this heavy

visitation from us. If so, my friends, what we shall thank Him for

depends on what we mean by talking of a visitation from God.

Now I do not know what people may think in this parish, but I suspect

that very many all over England do _not_ know what to thank God for just

now; and are altogether thanking him for the wrong thing—for a thing

which, very happily for them, He has _not_ done for them, and which, if

He had done it for them, would have been worse for them than all the evil

which ever happened to them from their youth up until now. To be plain

then, many, I am afraid, are thanking God for having gone away and left

them. While the cholera was here, they said that God was visiting them;

and now that the cholera is over, they consider that God’s visit is over

too, and are joyful and light of heart thereat. If God’s visit is over,

my friends, and He is gone away from us; if He is not just as near us now

as He was in the height of the cholera, the best thing we can do is to

turn to Him with fasting, and weeping, and mourning, and roll ourselves

in the dust, and instead of thanking our Father for going away, pray to

Him, of his infinite mercy, to condescend to come back again and visit

us, even though, as superstitious and ignorant men believe, God’s

visiting us were sure to bring cholera, or plague, or pestilence, or

famine, or some other misery. For I read, that in His presence is life

and not death—at His right hand is fulness of joy, and not tribulation

and mourning and woe; but if not, it were better to be with God in

everlasting agony, than to be in everlasting happiness without God.

Here is a strange confusion—people talking one moment like St. Paul

himself, desiring to be with Christ and God for ever, and then in the

same breath talking like the Gadarenes of old, when, after Christ had

visited them, and judged their sins by driving their unlawful herd of

swine into the sea, they answered by beseeching Him to depart out of

their coasts.

Why is this confusion?—Because people do not take the trouble to read

their Bibles; because they bring their own loose, careless, cant notions

with them when they open their Bibles, and settle beforehand what the

Bible is to tell them, and then pick and twist texts till they make them

mean just what they like and no more. There is no folly, or filth, or

tyranny, or blasphemy, which men have not defended out of the Bible by

twisting it in this way. The Bible is better written than that, my

friends. He that runs may read, if he has sense to read. The wayfaring

man, though simple, shall make no such mistake therein, if he has God’s

Spirit in him—the spirit of faith, which believes that the Bible is God’s

message to men—the humble spirit, which is willing to listen to that

message, however strange or new it may seem to him—the earnest spirit,

which reads the Bible really to know what a man shall do to be saved.

Look at your Bibles thus, my friends, about this matter. Read all the

texts which speak of God’s visiting and God’s visitation, and you will

find all the confusion and strangeness vanish away. For see! The Bible

talks of the Lord visiting people in His wrath—visiting them for their

sins—visiting them with sore plagues and punishments, about forty times.

But the Bible speaks very nearly as often of God’s visiting people to

bring them blessings and not punishments. The Bible says God visited

Sarah and Hannah to give them what they most desired—children. God

visited the people of Israel in Egypt to deliver them out of slavery. In

the book of Ruth we read how the Lord visited His people in giving them

bread. The Psalmist, in the captivity at Babylon, _prays_ God to visit

him with His salvation. The prophet Jeremiah says that it was a sign of

God’s anger against the Jews that He had not visited them; and the

prophets promised again and again to their countrymen, how, after their

seventy years’ captivity in Babylon, the Lord would visit them, and what

for?—To bring them back into their own land with joy, and heap them with

every blessing—peace and wealth, freedom and righteousness. So it is in

the New Testament too. Zacharias praised God: “Blessed be the Lord God

of Israel, for He hath visited and redeemed His people; through the

tender mercy of our God, whereby the day-spring from on high hath visited

us.” And that was the reason why I chose Luke vii. 16, for my text—only

because it is an example of the same thing. The people, it says, praised

God, saying: “A great Prophet is risen up among us, and God hath visited

His people.” And in the 14th of Acts we read how God visited the

Gentiles, not to punish them, but to take out of them a people for His

name, namely, Cornelius and his household. And lastly, St. Peter tells

Christian people to glorify God in the day of visitation, as I tell you

now—whether His visitation comes in the shape of cholera, or fever, or

agricultural distress; or whether it comes in the shape of sanitary

reform, and plenty of work, and activity in commerce; whether it seems to

you good or evil, glorify God for it. Thank Him for it. Bless Him for

it. Whether His visitation brings joy or sorrow, it surely brings a

blessing with it. Whether God visits in wrath or in love, still God

visits. God shows that He lives; God shows us that He has not forgotten

us; God shows us that He is near us. Christ shows us that His words are

true: “Lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of the world.”

That is a hard lesson to learn and practise, though not a very difficult

one to understand. I will try now to make you understand it—God alone

can teach you to practise it. I pray and hope, and I believe too, that

He will—that these very hard times are meant to teach people _really_ to

believe in God and Jesus Christ, and that they _will_ teach people. God

knows we need, and thanks be to Him that He _does_ know that we need, to

be taught to believe in Him. Nothing shows it to me more plainly than

the way we talk about God’s visitations, as if God was usually away from

us, and came to us only just now and then—only on extraordinary

occasions. People have gross, heathen, fleshly, materialist notions of

God’s visitations, as if He was some great earthly king who now and then

made a journey about his dominions from place to place, rewarding some

and punishing others. God is not in any place, my friends. God is a

Spirit. The heaven and the heaven of heavens could not contain Him if He

wanted a place to be in, as, glory be to His name, He does not. If He is

near us or far from us, it is not that He is near or far from our bodies,

as the Queen might be nearer to us in London than in Scotland, which is

most people’s notion of God’s nearness. He is near, not our bodies, but

our spirits, our souls, our hearts, our thoughts—as it is written, “The

kingdom of God is _within_ you.” Do not fancy that when the cholera was

in India, God was nearer India than He was to England, and that as the

cholera crawled nearer and nearer, God came nearer and nearer too; and

that now the cholera is gone away somewhere or other, God is gone away

somewhere or other too, to leave us to our own inventions. God forbid a

thousand times! As St. Paul says: “He is not far from any one of us.”

“In Him we live and move and have our being,” cholera or none. Do you

think Christ, the King of the earth, is gone away either—that while

things go on rightly, and governments, and clergy, and people do right,

Christ is there then, filling them all with His Spirit and guiding them

all to their duty; but that when evil times come, and rulers are idle,

and clergy dumb dogs, and the rich tyrannous, and the poor profligate,

and men are crying for work and cannot get it, and every man’s hand is

against his fellow, and no one knows what to do or think; and on earth is

distress of nations with perplexity, men’s hearts failing them for fear,

and for dread of those things which are coming on the earth—do you think

that in such times as those, Christ is the least farther off from us than

He was at the best of times?—The least farther off from us now than He

was from the apostles at the first Whitsuntide? God forbid!—God forbid a

thousand times! He has promised Himself, He that is faithful and true,

He that will never deny Himself, though men deny Him, and say He is not

here, because their eyes are blinded with love of the world, and

covetousness and bigotry, and dread lest He, their Master, should come

and find them beating the men-servants and maid-servants, and eating and

drinking with the drunken in the high places of the earth, and saying:

“Tush! God hath forgotten it”—ay, though men have forgotten Him thus,

and—worse than thus, yet He hath said it—“Lo, I am with you alway, even

unto the end of the world.” Why, evil times are the very times of which

Christ used to speak as the “days of the Lord,” and the “days of the Son

of man.” Times when we hear of wars and rumours of wars, and on earth

distress of nations with perplexity—what does He tell men to do in them?

To go whining about, and say that Christ has left His Church? No!

“Then,” He says, “when all these things come to pass, then rejoice and

lift up your heads, for your redemption draweth nigh.”

And yet the Scripture does most certainly speak of the Lord’s coming out

of His place to visit—of the Son of Man coming, and not coming to men—of

His visiting us at one time and not at another. How does that agree with

what I have just said? My dear friends, we shall see that it agrees

perfectly with what I have said, if we will only just remember that we

are not beasts, but men. It may seem a strange thing to have to remind

people of, but it is just what they are always forgetting. My friends,

we are not animals, we are not spiders to do nothing but spin, or birds

only to build nests for ourselves, much less swine to do nothing but dig

after roots and fruits, and get what we can out of the clods of the

ground. We are the children of the Most High God; we have immortal souls

within us; nay, more, we are our souls: our bodies are our husk—our

shell—our clothes—our house—changing day by day, and year by year upon

us, one day to drop off us till the Resurrection. But _we_ are our

_souls_, and when God visits, it is our souls He visits, not merely our

bodies. There is the whole secret. People forget God, and therefore

they are glad to fancy that He has forgotten them, and has nothing to do

with this world of His which they are misusing for their own selfish

ends; and then God in His mercy visits them. He knocks at the door of

their hearts, saying: “See! I was close to you all the while.” He

forces them to see Him and to confess that He is there whether they

choose or not. God is not away from the world. He is away from people’s

hearts, because He has given people free wills, and with free wills the

power of keeping Him out of their hearts or letting Him in. And when God

visits He forces Himself on our attention. He knocks at the door of our

hard hearts so loudly and sharply that He forces all to confess that He

is there—all who are not utterly reprobate and spiritually dead. In

blessings as well as in curses, God knocks at our hearts. By sudden good

fortune, as well as by sudden mishap; by a great deliverance from

enemies, by an abundant harvest, as well as by famine and pestilence.

Therefore this cholera has been a true visitation of God. The poor had

fancied that they might be as dirty, the rich had fancied that they might

be as careless, as they chose; in short, that they might break God’s laws

of cleanliness and brotherly care without His troubling Himself about the

matter. And lo! He has visited us; and shown us that He does care about

the matter by taking it into His own hands with a vengeance. He who

cannot see God’s hand in the cholera must be as blind—as blind as who?—as

blind as he that cannot see God’s hand when there is no cholera; as blind

as he who cannot see God’s hand in every meal he eats, and every breath

he draws; for that man is stone blind—he can be no blinder. The cholera

came; everyone ought to see that it did not come by blind chance, but by

the will of some wise and righteous Person; for in the first place God

gave us fair warning. The cholera came from India at a steady pace. We

knew to a month when it would arrive here. And it came, too, by no blind

necessity, as if it was forced to take people whether it liked or not.

Just as it was in the fever here, so it was in the cholera, “One shall be

taken and another left.” It took one of a street and left another; took

one person in a family and left another: it took the rich man who fancied

he was safe, as well as the poor man who did not care whether he was safe

or not. The respectable man walking home to his comfortable house,

passed by some untrapped drain, and then poisonous gas struck him and he

died. The rich physician who had been curing others, could not save

himself from the poison of the crowded graveyard which had been allowed

to remain at the back of his house. By all sorts of strange and

unfathomable judgments the cholera showed itself to be working, not by a

blind necessity, but at the will of a thinking Person, of a living God,

whose ways are not as our own ways, and His paths are in the great deep.

And yet the cholera showed—and this is what I want to make you feel—that

it was working at the will of the same God in whom we live and move and

have our being, who sends the food we eat, the water in which we wash,

the air we breathe, and who has ordained for all these things natural

laws, according to which they work, and which He never breaks, nor allows

us to break them. For every case of cholera could be traced to some

breaking of these laws—foul air—foul food—foul water, or careless and

dirty contact with infected persons; so that by this God showed that He

and not chance ruled the world, and that he was indeed the living and

willing God. He showed at the same time that He was the wise God of

order and of law; and that gas and earth, wind and vapour, fulfil His

word, without His having to break His laws, or visit us by moving, as

people fancy, out of a Heaven where He was, down to an earth, where He

was not.

But, lastly, remember what I told you before, that the cholera being a

visitation means that God, by it, has been visiting our hearts, knocking

loudly at them that He may awaken us, and teach us a lesson. And be sure

that in the cholera, and this our own parish fever, there is a lesson for

each and every one of us if we will learn it. To the simple poor man,

first and foremost, God means by the cholera to teach the simple lesson

of cleanliness; to the house-owner He means to teach that each man is his

brother’s keeper, and responsible for his property not being a nest of

disease; to rulers it is intended to teach the lesson that God’s laws

cannot be put off to suit their laziness, cowardice, or party squabbles.

But beside that, to each person, be sure such a visitation as this brings

some private lesson. Perhaps it has taught many a widow that she has a

Friend stronger and more loving than even the husband whom she has lost

by the pestilence—the God of the widow and the fatherless. Perhaps it

has taught many a strong man not to trust in his strength and his youth,

but in the God who gave them to him. Perhaps it has taught many a man,

too, who has expected public authorities to do everything for him, “not

to put his trust in princes, nor in any child of man, for there is no

help in them,” but to hear God’s advice, “Help thyself and God will help

thee.” Perhaps it has stirred up many a benevolent man to find out fresh

means for rooting out the miseries of society. Perhaps it has taught

many a philosopher new deep truths about the laws of God’s world, which

may enable him to enlighten and comfort ages yet unborn. Perhaps it has

awakened many a slumbering heart, and brought many a careless sinner (for

the first time in his life) face to face with God and his own sins.

God’s judgments are manifold; they are meant to work in different ways on

different hearts. But oh! believe and be sure that they are meant to

work upon all hearts—that they are not the punishments of a capricious

tyrant, but the rod of a loving Father, who is trying to drive us home

into His fold, when gentle entreaties and kind deeds have failed to

allure us home. Oh my friends! if you wish really to thank God for

having preserved you from these pestilences, show your thankfulness by

learning the lesson which they bring. God’s love has spoken of each and

every one of us in the cholera. Be sure He has spoken so harshly only

because a gentler tone of voice would have had no effect upon us. Thank

Him for His severity. Thank Him for the cholera, the fever. Thank Him

for anything which will awaken us to hear the Word of the Lord. But till

you have learnt the lessons which these visitations are meant to teach

you, there is no use thanking Him for taking them away. And therefore I

beseech you solemnly, each and all, before you leave this church, now to

pray to God to show you what lesson He means to teach you by this past

awful visitation, and also by sparing you and me who are here present,

not merely from cholera and fever, but from a thousand mishaps and evils,

which we have deserved, and from which only His goodness has kept us. Oh

may God stir up your hearts to ask advice of Him this day! and may He in

His great mercy so teach us all His will on this day of joy, that we may

not need to have it taught us hereafter on some day of sorrow.

XVII.

THE COVENANT.

The Lord hath chosen Jacob unto himself, and Israel for his own

possession. For I know that the Lord is great, and that our Lord is

above all gods. Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that did he in heaven

and earth, and in the sea, and in all deep places.—PSALM cxxxv. 4, 5,

6.

WERE you ever puzzled to find out why the Psalms are read every Sunday in

Church, more read, indeed, than any other part of the Bible? If any of

you say, No, I shall not think you the wiser. It is very easy not to be

puzzled with a deep matter, if one never thinks about it at all. But

when a man sets his mind to work seriously, to try to understand what he

hears and sees around him, then he will be puzzled, and no shame to him;

for he will find things every day of his life which will require years of

thought to understand, ay, things which, though we see and know that they

are true, and can use and profit by them, we can never understand at all,

at least in this life.

But I do not think that God meant it to be so with these Psalms. He

meant the Bible for a poor man’s book: and therefore the men who wrote

the Bible were almost all of them poor men, at least at one time or other

of their life; and therefore we may expect that they would write as poor

men would write, and such things as poor men may understand, if they are

fairly and simply explained. Therefore I do not think you need be

puzzled long to find out why these Psalms are read every Sunday. For the

men who wrote them had God’s spirit with them; and God’s spirit is the

spirit in which God made and governs this world, and just as God cannot

change, so God’s spirit cannot change; and therefore the rules and laws

according to which the world runs on cannot change; and therefore these

rules about God’s government of the world, which God’s spirit taught the

old Hebrew Psalmists, are the very same rules by which He governs it now;

and therefore all the rules in these Psalms, making allowance for the

difference of circumstances, have just as much to do with France, and

Germany, and England now, as they had with the Jews, and the Canaanites,

and the Babylonians then.

St. Paul tells us so. He tells us that all that happened to the old Jews

was written as an example to Christians, to the intent that they might

not sin as the Jews did, and so (God’s laws and ways being the same now

as then) be punished as the Jews were. Moreover, St. Paul says, that

Christians now are just as much God’s chosen people as the Jews were.

God told the Jews that they were to be a nation of kings and priests to

Him. And St. John opens the Revelations by saying: “Unto Him that loved

us and washed us from our sins in His own blood, and hath made us kings

and priests unto God and His Father, to Him be glory.” St. Paul tells

the Ephesians, who had not a drop of Jewish blood in their veins, that

through Jesus Christ both Jews and Gentiles had “access by one Spirit

unto the Father. Now, therefore,” he goes on, “ye are no more strangers

and foreigners, but fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household

of God.” In fact, he tells the Christians of every country to which he

writes, that all the promises which God made to the Jews belonged to them

just as much, that there was no more any difference between Jew and

Gentile, that the Lord Jesus Christ was just as really among them, and

with them, ruling and helping each people in their own country, as He was

in Jerusalem when Isaiah saw His glory filling the Temple, and when Zion

was called the place of His inheritance. Indeed, the Lord Jesus said the

same thing Himself, for He said that all power was given to Him in heaven

and earth; that He was with His churches (that is, with all companies of

Christian people, such as England) even to the end of the world; that

wherever two or three were gathered together in His name, He would be in

the midst of them; and if those blessed words and good news be true, we

Englishmen have a right to believe firmly that we belong to Him just as

much as the old Jews did; and when we read these Psalms, to take every

word of their good news—and their warnings also—to ourselves, and to our

own land of England. And when we read in the text, that the Lord chose

Jacob unto Himself and Israel for His own possession, we have a right to

say: “And the Lord has chosen also England unto himself, and this

favoured land of Britain for his own possession.” When we say in the

Psalm: “The Lord did what He pleased in heaven, and earth, and sea,” to

educate and deliver the people of the Jews, we have a right to say just

as boldly: “And so He has done for England, for us, and for our

forefathers.”

This then is the reason, the chief reason, why these Psalms are appointed

to be read every Sunday in church, and every morning and evening where

there is daily service—to teach us that the Lord takes care not only of

one man’s soul here, and another woman’s soul there, but of the whole

country of England; of its wars and its peace; of its laws and

government, its progress and its afflictions; of all, in short, that

happens to it as a nation, as one body of men, which it is. It must be

so, my good friends, else we should be worse off than the old Jews, and

not better off, as all the New Testament solemnly assures us a thousand

times over that we are.

For in the covenant which God made with the Jews, and in the strange

events, good and bad, which He caused to happen to their nation, not only

the great saints among them were taken care of, but all classes, and all

characters, good and bad, even those who had not wisdom or spiritual life

enough to seek God for themselves, still had their share in the good

laws, in the teaching and guiding, and in the national blessings which He

sent on the whole nation. They had a chance given them of rising, and

improving, and prospering, as the rest of their countrymen rose, and

improved, and prospered. And when the Lord came to visit Judæa in flesh

and blood, we find that He went on the same method. He did not merely go

to such men as Philip and Nathaniel, to the holy and elect ones among the

Jews, but to the whole people; to the _lost_ sheep, as well as to those

who were not lost. He did not part the good from the bad before he

healed their sicknesses, and fed them with the loaves and fishes. It was

enough for Him that they were Jews, citizens of the Jewish nation. God’s

promises belonged not to one Jew or another, but to the Jewish nation;

and even the ignorant and the sinful had a share in the blessings of the

covenant, great or small in proportion as they chose to live as Jews

ought, or to forget and deny that they belonged to God’s people.

Now, surely the Lord cannot be less merciful now than He was then. He

cannot care less for poor orphans, and paupers, and wild untaught

creatures, in England now, than he cared for them in Judæa of old. And

we see that in fact He does not. For as the wealth of England improves,

and the laws improve, and the knowledge of God improves, the condition of

all sorts of poor creatures improves too, though they had no share in

bringing about the good change. But we are all members of one body, from

the Queen on her throne to the tramper under the hedge; and as St. Paul

says: “If one member suffers, all the members suffer with it, and if one

member rejoices, all the others” sooner or later “rejoice with it.” For

we, too, are one of the Lord’s nations. He has made us one body, with

one common language, common laws, common interest, common religion for

all; and what He does for one of us He does for all. He orders all that

happens to us; whether it be war or peace, prosperity or dearth, He

orders it all; and He orders things so that they shall work for the good,

not merely of a few, but of as many as possible—not merely for His elect,

but for those who know Him not. As He has been from the beginning, when

He heaped blessings on the stiff-necked and backsliding Israelites—as He

was when He endured the cross for a world lying not in obedience, but in

wickedness; so is He now; the perfect likeness of His father, who is no

respecter of persons, but causes “His sun to shine alike on the evil on

the good, and His rain to fall on the just and on the unjust.”

But now, there is one thing against which I have to warn you most

solemnly, and especially in such days as these. You may believe my words

to your own ruin, or to your own salvation. They are “the Gospel,” “the

good news of the Kingdom of God”—that is, the good news that God has

condescended to become our King, to govern and guide us, to order all

things for our good. But as St. Paul says, the Gospel may be a savour of

death unto death, as well as a savour of life unto life. And I will tell

you now; that you have only to do what the Jews just before the coming of

our Lord did, and give way to the same thoughts as they, and then, like

them, it were better for you that you had never heard of God, and been

like the savages, to whom little or no sin is imputed, because they are

all but without law. How is this?

As I said before—take your covenant privileges as the Pharisees took

theirs, and they will turn you into devils while you are fancying

yourselves God’s especial favourites. Now this was what happened to the

Pharisees: they could not help knowing that God had shown especial favour

to them; and that He had taught them more about God than He had taught

the heathen. But instead of feeling all the more humble and thankful for

this, and of remembering day and night that because much had been given

to them much would be required of them, they thought more about the

honour and glory which God had put on them. They forgot what God had

declared, namely, that it was not for their own goodness that He had

taught them, for that they were in themselves not a whit better than the

heathen around them. They forgot that the reason why He taught them was,

that they were to do His work on earth, by witnessing for His name, and

telling the heathen that God was their Lord, as well as Lord of the Jews.

Now David, and the old Psalmists and Prophets, did not forget this.

Their cry is: “Tell it out among the heathen that the Lord is King.”

“Worship the Son of God, ye kings of the earth, and make your peace with

Him lest He be angry.” “It was in vain,” he told the heathen kings, “to

try to cast away God’s government from them, and break His bonds from off

them,” for “the Lord was King, let the nations be never so unquiet.”

But the Jews gradually forgot this, and their daily boast was, that God

had nothing to do with the heathen; that He did not care for them, and

actually hated them; that they, as it were, had the true God all to

themselves for their own private property; and that He had neither love

nor mercy, except for them and their proselytes, that is, the few

heathens whom they could persuade and entice not to worship the true God

after the customs of their own country—that would not have suited the

Jews’ bigotry and pride—but to turn Jews, and forget their own people

among whom they were born, and ape them in everything. And so, as our

Lord told them, after compassing sea and land to make one of these

proselytes, they only made him after all twice as much the child of hell

as themselves. For they could not teach the heathen anything worth

knowing about God, when they had forgotten themselves what God was like.

They could tell them that there was one God, and not two—but what was the

use of that? As St. James says, the devils believe as much as that, and

yet the knowledge does not make them holy, but only increases their fear

and despair. And so with these Pharisees. They had forgotten that God

was love. They had forgotten that God was merciful. They had forgotten

that God was just. And therefore, while they were talking of God and

pretending to worship God, they knew nothing of God, and they did not do

God’s will, and act like God; for (as we find from the Gospels) they were

unjust, tyrannous, proud, conceited, covetous themselves; and while they

were looking down on the poor heathens, these very heathens, the Lord

told them, would rise up in judgment against them: for they, knowing

little, acted up to the light which they had, better than the Pharisees

who knew so much. And so it will be with us, my friends, if we fancy

that God’s great favours to us are a reason for our priding ourselves on

them, and despising papists and foreigners instead of remembering that

just because God has given us so much, He will require more of us. It is

true, we do know more of the Gospel than the papists, how, though they

believe in Jesus Christ, worship the Virgin Mary and the Saints, and

idols of wood and stone. But if they, who know so little of God’s will,

yet act faithfully up to what they do know, will they not rise up in

judgment against us, who know so much more, if we act worse than they?

Instead of despising them, we had better despise ourselves. Instead of

fancying that God’s love is not over them, and so sinning against God’s

Holy Spirit by denying and despising the fruits of God’s Holy Spirit in

them, we had much better, we Protestants, be repenting of our own sins.

We had better pray God to open our eyes to our own want of faith, and

want of love, and want of honesty, and want of cleanly and chaste lives;

lest God in His anger should let us go on in our evil path, till we fall

into the deep darkness of mind of the Pharisees of old. For then while

we were boasting of England as the most Christian nation in the world, we

might become the most unchristian, because the most unlike Christ; the

most wanting in love and fellow-feeling, and self-sacrifice, and honour,

and justice, and honesty; wanting, in short, in the fruits of the Spirit.

And without them there is no use crying: “We are God’s chosen people, He

Has put His name among us, we alone hate idols, we alone have the pure

word of God, and the pure sacraments, and the pure doctrine;” for God may

answer us, as he answered the Jews of old: “Think not to say within

yourselves, We have Abraham for our father: Verily, I say unto you, God

is able of these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” . . . “The

Kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing

forth the fruits thereof.” Oh! my friends, let us pray, one and all,

that God will come and help us, and with great might succour us, “that

whereas through our sins and wickedness we are sore let and hindered in

running the race set before us, God’s bountiful grace and mercy may

speedily help and deliver us,” and enable us to live faithfully up to the

glorious privileges which He has bestowed on us, in calling us “members

of Christ, children of God, and inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven;” in

giving us His Bible, in allowing us to be born into this favoured land of

England, in preserving us to this day, in spite of all that we have

thought, and said, and done, unworthy of the name of Christians and

Englishmen.

And then we may be certain that God will also fulfil to us the glorious

promises which we find in another Psalm: “If thy children will keep my

covenant and my testimonies, which I shall learn them, this land shall be

my rest for ever. Here will I dwell, for I have a delight therein. I

will bless her victuals with increase, and satisfy her poor with bread.

I will deck her priests with health, and her holy people shall rejoice

and sing.”

XVIII.

NATIONAL REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS.

And that which cometh into your mind shall not be at all; that ye

say, We will be as the heathen, as the families of the countries, to

serve wood and stone. As I live, saith the Lord God, surely with a

mighty hand, and with a stretched out arm, and with fury poured out,

will I rule over you. . . . And ye shall know that I am the

Lord.—EZEKIEL xx. 32, 33, 38.

A FATHER has two ways of showing his love to his child—by caressing it

and by punishing it. His very anger may be a sign of his love, and ought

to be. Just because he loves his child, just because the thing he longs

most to see is that his child should grow up good, therefore he must be,

and ought to be, angry with it when it does wrong. Therefore anger

against sin is a part of God’s likeness in us; and he who does not hate

sin is not like God. For if sin is the worst evil—perhaps the only real

evil in the world—and the end of all sin is death and misery, then to

indulge people in sin is to show them the very worst of cruelty.

To sit by and see iniquity going on without trying to stop it, is mere

laziness. The parent, when his child does wrong, does not show his love

to the child by indulging it, all he shows is, that he himself is carnal

and fleshly; that he does not like to take the trouble of punishing it,

or does not like to give himself the pain of punishing it; that, in

short, he had sooner let his child grow up in bad habits, which must lead

to its misery and ruin for years and years, if not for ever, than make

himself uncomfortable by seeing it uncomfortable for a few minutes. That

is not love, but selfishness. True love is as determined to punish the

sin as it is to forgive the sinner. Therefore, St. Paul tells us, that

we can be angry without sinning; that is that there is an anger which

comes from hatred of sin and love to the sinner. Therefore, Solomon

tells us to punish our children when they do wrong, and not to hold our

hands for their crying. It is better for them that they should cry a

little now, than have long years of shame and sorrow hereafter.

Therefore, in all countries which are properly governed, the law punishes

in the name of God those who break the laws of God, and punishes them

even with death, for certain crimes; because it is expedient that one man

die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.

And this is God’s way of dealing with each and every one of us. This is

God’s way of dealing with Christian nations, just as it was His way of

dealing with the Jews of old. He never allowed the Jews to prosper in

sin. He punished them at once, and sternly, whenever they rebelled

against Him; not because He hated them, but because He loved them. His

love to them showed itself whenever they went well with Him, in triumphs

and blessings; and when they rebelled against Him, and broke His laws, He

showed that very same love to them in plague, and war, and famine, and a

mighty hand, and fury poured out. His love had not changed—they had

changed; and now the best and only way of showing His love to them, was

by making them feel His anger; and the best and only way of being

merciful to them, was to show them no indulgence.

Now the wish of the Jews all along, and especially in Ezekiel’s time, was

to be like the heathen—like the nations round them. They said to

themselves: “These heathen worship idols, and yet prosper very well.

Their having gods of wood and stone, and their indulging their passions,

and being profligate and filthy, covetous, unjust, and tyrannical, does

not prevent their being just as happy as we are—ay, and a great deal

happier. They have no strict law of Moses, as we have threatening us and

keeping us in awe, and making us uncomfortable, and telling us at every

turn, ‘Thou shalt not do this pleasant thing, and thou shalt not do that

pleasant thing.’ And yet God does not punish them, as Moses’ law says He

will punish us. These Assyrians and Babylonians above all—they are

stronger than we, and richer, and better clothed, and cleverer; they have

horses and chariots, and all sorts of luxuries and comforts which we Jews

cannot get. Instead of being like us, in continual trouble from

earthquakes, and drought, and famine, and war, attacked, plundered by all

the nations round us, one after another, they go on conquering, and

spreading, and succeeding in all they lay their hand to. Look at

Babylon,” said these foolish Jews, perhaps, to themselves; “a few

generations ago it was nothing of a city, and now it is the greatest,

richest, and strongest nation in the whole world. God has not punished

it for worshipping gods of wood and stone, why should He punish us?

These Babylonians have prospered well enough with their gods, why should

not we? Perhaps it is these very gods of wood and stone who have helped

them to become so great. Why should they not help us? We will worship

them, then, and pray to them. We will not give up worshipping our own

God, of course, lest we should offend Him; but we will worship Him and

the Babylonian idols at the same time; then we shall be sure to be right

if we have Jehovah and the idols both on our side.” So said the Jews to

themselves. But what did Ezekiel answer them? “Not so, my foolish

countrymen,” said he, “God will not have it so. He has taught you that

these Babylonian idols are nothing and cannot help you; He has taught you

that He can and will help you, that He can and will be everything to you;

He has taught you that He alone is God, who made heaven and earth, who

orders all things therein, who alone gives any people power to get

wealth; and He will not have you go back and fall from that for any

appearances or arguments whatsoever, because it is true. He has chosen

you to witness to these heathen about Him, to declare His name to them,

that they may give up their idols and serve the true God, in whom alone

is strength. He chose you to be these heathens’ teachers, and He will

not let you become their scholars. He meant the heathen to copy you, and

He will not let you copy them. If He does, in His love and mercy, let

these poor heathen prosper in spite of their idols, what is that to you?

It is still the Lord who makes them prosper, and not the idols, whether

they know it or not. They know no better, and He will not impute sin to

them where He has given them no law. But you do know better; by a

thousand mighty signs and wonders and deliverances, the Lord has been

teaching you ever since you came up through the Red Sea, that He is

all-sufficient for you, that all power is His in heaven and earth. He

has promised to you, and sworn to you by Himself, that if you keep His

law and walk in His commandments, you shall want no manner of good thing;

that you shall have no cause to envy these heathen their riches and

prosperity, for the Lord will bless you in house and land, by day and

night, at home and abroad, with every blessing that a nation can desire.

Moses’ law tells you this, God’s prophets have been telling you this,

God’s wonderful dealings with you have been telling you this, that the

Lord God is enough for you. And if you, who are meant to be a nation of

kings and priests to God, to teach all nations and serve solely Him,

fancy that you will be allowed to throw away the high honour which God

has put upon you, and lower yourselves to the follies and sins of these

heathen round you, you are mistaken. You were meant to be above such

folly, you can be above it; and you shall not prosper by serving God and

idols at once; you shall not even prosper by serving idols alone. God

will visit you with a mighty hand, and with fury poured out, and you

shall know that He is the Lord.”

Well, my friends, and what has this to do with us? This it has to do

with us—that if God taught the Jews about Himself, He has taught us still

more. If he has shown signs and wonders of His love, and wrought

mightily for the Jews, He has wrought far more mightily for us; for He

spared not His own Son, but gave Him freely for us. If He promised to

teach the Jews, He has promised still more to teach us; for He has

promised His Holy Spirit freely to young and old, rich and poor, to as

many as ask Him, to guide us into all truth. If he expected the Jews to

set an example to all the nations around, He expects us to do so still

more. And if He punished the Jews, and drove them back again by shame,

and affliction, and disappointment, whenever they went after other gods,

and tried to be like the heathen around, and despised their high calling,

and their high privileges, He will punish us, and drive us back again

still more fiercely, and still more swiftly. God has called us to be a

nation of Christians, and He will not let us be a nation of heathens. We

are longing to do in these days very much as the Jews did of old; we are

all too apt to say to ourselves: “Of course we must love God, or He might

be angry with us; and besides, how else should we get our souls saved?

But the old heathen nations, and a great many nations now, and a great

many rich and comfortable people in England now, too, get on very well

without God, by just worshipping selfishness, and money, and worldly

cunning, and why should not we do the same?—why should we not worship God

and Mammon at once, and serve God on Sundays, and the selfish ways of the

world all the week? Surely then we should be doubly safe; we should have

God and the world on our side both at once.”

Now, my friends, God will not allow us to succeed on that plan. We are

members of His Church, whose head is Jesus, who gave Himself for sinners;

whose members are all brothers of His Church, which is held together by

self-sacrifice and fellow-help. If we try to be like the heathens, and

fancy that we can succeed by selfishness, and cunning, and covetousness,

God will not let us fall from the honour which He has put on us, and

trample our blessings under foot. He will bring our plans to nought.

Whomsoever he may let prosper in sin, He will not let those who have

heard the message prosper in it. Whatever nation He may let become great

by covetousness, and selfish competing and struggling of man against man,

He will not let England grow great by it. He loves her too well to let

her fall so, and cast away her high honour of being a Christian nation.

By great and sore afflictions, by bringing our cleverest plans to

nothing, He will teach us that we cannot worship God and Mammon at once;

that the sure riches, either for a man or for a nation, are not money,

but righteousness love, justice, wisdom; that this new idol of selfish

competition which men worship nowadays, and fancy that it is the secret

cause of all plenty, and cheapness, and civilisation, has no place in the

church of Jesus Christ, who gave up His own life for those who hated Him,

and came not to do His own will, but the will of His Father; not to

enable men to go to heaven after a life of selfishness here; but by the

power of His Spirit—the spirit of love and fellowship to sweep all

selfishness off the face of God’s good earth. By sore trials and

afflictions will God in His mercy teach this to England, and to every man

in England who is deluded into fancying that he can serve God, and

selfishness at once, till we learn once more, as our forefathers did of

old, that He is the Lord. Because we are His children God will chasten

us; because He receives us, He will scourge us back to Him; because He

has prepared for us things such as eye hath not seen, He will not let us

fill our bellies with the husks which the swine eat, and like the dumb

beasts, snarl and struggle one against the other for a place at His

table, as if it were not wide enough for all His creatures, and for ten

times as many more, forgetting that He is the giver, and fancying that we

are to be the takers, and spoiling the gift itself in our hurry to snatch

it out of our neighbours’ hands. In one word, God will not give us false

prosperity, as the children of the world, the flesh, and the devil,

because he wishes to give us real prosperity as the sons of God, in the

kingdom of his Son Jesus Christ, who died on the cross for us.

XIX.

THE DELIVERANCE OF JERUSALEM.

And it came to pass that the angel of the Lord went out, and smote in

the camp of the Assyrians an hundred and eighty five thousand: and

when they arose in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.—2

KINGS xix. 35.

YOU heard read in the first lesson last Sunday afternoon, the threats of

the king of Assyria against Jerusalem, and his defiance of the true Lord

whose temple stood there. In the first lesson for this morning’s

service, you heard of king Hezekiah’s fear and perplexity; of the Lord’s

answer to him by Isaiah, and of the great and wonderful destruction of

the Assyrian army, of which my text tells you. Of course you have a

right to ask: “This which happened in a foreign country more than two

thousand years ago, what has it to do with us?” And, of course, my

preaching about it will be of no use whatsoever, unless I can show you

what it has to do with us; what lesson we English here, in the year 1851,

are to draw, from the help which God sent the Jews.

But to find out that, we must hear the whole story. Before we can find

out why God drove the Assyrians out of Judæa, we must find out, it seems

to me, why He sent them, or allowed them to come into Judæa; and to find

out that, we must first see how the Jews were behaving in those times,

and what sort of state their country was in; and we must find out, too,

what sort of a man this great king of Assyria was, and what sort of

thoughts were in his heart.

Now, by the favour of God, we can find out this. You will see, in the

first thirty-seven chapters of Isaiah’s prophecies, a full account of the

ways of the Jews in that time, and the reasons why God allowed so fearful

a danger to come upon them. The whole first thirty-five chapters belong

to each other, and are, so to speak, a spiritual history of the Jews, and

the Assyrians, and all the nations round them, for many years. A

spiritual history—that is, not merely a history of what they did, but of

what they were, what was in their inmost hearts, and thoughts, and

spirits; a spiritual history—that is, not merely of what they thought

they were doing, but of what God saw that they were doing—a history of

God’s mind about them all. Isaiah had God’s spirit on him; and so he saw

what was going on round him in the same light in which God saw it, and

hated it, or praised it, only according as it was good, and according to

the good Spirit of God, or bad, and contrary to that Spirit. So Isaiah’s

history of his own nation, and the nations around him, was very unlike

what they would have written for themselves; just as I am afraid he would

write a very different history of England now, from what we should write,

if we were set to do it. Now what Isaiah thought of the doings of his

countrymen, the Jews, I must tell you in another sermon, next Sunday. It

will be enough this morning to speak of the king of Assyria.

These kings of Assyria thought themselves the greatest and strongest

beings in the world; they thought that their might was right, and that

they might conquer, and ravage, and plunder and oppress every country

round them for thousands of miles, without being punished. They thought

that they could overcome the true God of Judæa, as they had conquered the

empty idols and false gods of Sepharvaim, Hena, and Iva. But Isaiah saw

that they were wrong. He told his countrymen: “These Assyrian kings are

strong, but there is a stronger King than they, Jehovah the Lord of all

the earth. It is He who sent them to punish nation after nation,

Sennacherib is the rod of Jehovah’s anger; but he is a fool after all;

for all his cunning, for all his armies, he is a fool rushing on his

ruin. He may take Tyre, Damascus, Babylon, Egypt itself, and cast their

gods into the fire, for they are no gods, but the work of men’s hands,

wood and stone; but let him once try his strength against the real living

God; let the axe once begin to boast itself against Him that hews

therewith; and he will find out that there is one stronger than he, one

who has been using him as a ‘tool, and who will crush him like a moth the

moment he rebels. His father destroyed Samaria and her idols, but he

shall not destroy Jerusalem. He may ravage Ephraim, and punish the

gluttony and drunkenness, and oppression of the great landlords of

Bashan; he may bring misery and desolation through the length and breadth

of the land: there is reason, and reason but too good for that: but

Jerusalem, the place where God’s honour dwells, the temple without idols,

which is the sign that Jehovah is a living God, against it he shall not

cast up a bank, or shoot an arrow into it.” “I know,” said Isaiah, “what

he is saying of himself, this proud king of Assyria: but this is what God

says of him, that he is only a puppet, a tool in the hand of God, to

punish these wicked nations whom he is conquering one by one, and us Jews

among the rest. He, this proud king of Assyria, thinks that he is the

chosen favourite of the sun, and the moon, and the stars, whom, in his

folly, he worships as gods. He will find out who is the real Lord of the

earth; he will find out that this great world is ruled by that very God

of Israel whom he despises. He will find that there is something in this

earth, of which he fancies himself lord and master, which is too strong

for him, which will obey God, and not him. God rules the earth, and God

rules Tophet, and the great fire-kingdoms which boil and blaze for ever

in the bowels of the earth, and burst up from time to time in earthquakes

and burning mountains; and God has ordained that they shall conquer this

proud king of Assyria, though we Jews are too weak and cowardly, and

split up into parties by our wickedness, to make a stand against him.” . . .

This great eruption or breaking out of burning mountains, which would

destroy the king of Assyria’s army, was to happen, Isaiah says, close to

Jerusalem, nay, it was to shake Jerusalem itself. Jerusalem was to be

brought to great misery by everlasting burnings, as well as by being

besieged by the Assyrians; and yet the very shaking of the earth and

eruption of fire which was nearly to destroy it, was to be the cause of

its deliverance. So Isaiah prophesied, and we cannot doubt his words

came true. For this may explain to us the way in which the king of

Assyria’s army was destroyed. The text says, that when they encamped

near Jerusalem the messenger of the Lord went out, and slew in one night

one hundred and eighty thousand of them, who were all found dead in the

morning. How they were killed we cannot exactly tell, most likely by a

stream of poisonous vapour, such as often comes forth out of the ground

during earthquakes and eruptions of burning mountains, and kills all men

and animals who breathe it. That this was the way that this great army

was destroyed, I have little doubt, not only on account of what Isaiah

says in his prophecies of God’s “sending a blast” upon the king of

Assyria, but because it was just like the old lesson which God had been

teaching the Jews all along, that the earth and all in it was His

property, and obeyed Him. For what could teach them that more strongly

than to see that the earthquakes and burning mountains, of all things on

earth the most awful and most murderous, the very things against which

man has no defence, obeyed God; burst forth when He chose, and did His

work as He willed? For man can conquer almost everything in the world

except these burning mountains and earthquakes. He can sail over the

raging sea in his ships; he can till the most barren soils; he can

provide against famine, rain, and cold, ay, against the thunder itself:

but the earthquakes alone are too strong for him. Against them no

cunning or strength of man is of any use. Without warning, they make the

solid ground under his feet heave, and reel, and sink, hurling down whole

towns in a moment, and burying the inhabitants under the ruins, as an

earthquake did in Italy only a month ago. Or they pour forth streams of

fire, clouds of dust, brimstone, and poisonous vapour, destroying for

miles around the woods and crops, farms and cities, and burying them deep

in ashes, as they have done again and again, both in Italy and Iceland,

and in South America, even during the last few years. How can man stand

against them? What greater warning or lesson to him than they, that God

is stronger than man; that the earth is not man’s property, and will not

obey him, but only the God who made it? Now that was just what God

intended to teach the Jews all along; that the earth and heaven belonged

to Him and obeyed Him; that they were not to worship the sun and stars,

as the Assyrians and Canaanites did, nor the earth and the rivers as the

Egyptians did: but to worship the God who made sun and stars, earth and

rivers, and to put their trust in Him to guide all heaven and earth

aright; and to make all things, sun, earth, and weather, ay, and the very

burning mountains and earthquakes, work together for good for them if

they loved God. Therefore it was that God gave His law to Moses on the

burning mountain of Sinai, amid thunders, and lightnings, and

earthquakes, to show them that the lightnings and the mountains obeyed

Him. Therefore it was that the earthquake opened the ground and

swallowed up Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, who rebelled against Moses.

Therefore it was that God once used an earthquake and eruption to

preserve David from his enemies, as we read in the eighteenth Psalm. And

all through David’s Psalms we find how well he had learnt this great

lesson which God had taught him. Again and again we find verses which

show that he knew well enough who was the Lord of all the earth.

In Isaiah’s time, it seems, God taught the Jews once more the same thing.

He taught them, and the proud king of Assyria, once and for all, that He

was indeed the Lord—Lord of all nations, and King of kings, and also Lord

of the earth, and all that therein is. He taught it to the poor

oppressed Jews by that miraculous deliverance. He taught it to the cruel

invading king by that miraculous destruction. Just in the height of his

glory, after he had conquered almost every nation in the east, and

overcome the whole of Judæa, except that one small city of Jerusalem,

Sennacherib’s great army was swept away, he neither knew how nor why, in

a single night, and utterly disheartened and abashed, he returned to his

own land; and even there he found that the God of Israel had followed

him—that the idols whom he worshipped could not save him from the wrath

of that God to whom Assyria, just as much as Jerusalem, belonged. For as

he was worshipping in the house of Nisroch his god, his two sons smote

him with the sword, and there was an end of all his pride and conquests.

. . . Now Nisroch was the name of a star—the star which we call the

planet Saturn; and the Assyrians fancied in their folly, that whosoever

worshipped any particular star, that star would protect and help him. . . .

But, alas for the king of Assyria, there was One above who had made

the stars, and from whose vengeance the stars could not save him; and so

even while he was worshipping, and praying to, this favourite star of his

which could not hear him, he fell dead, a murdered man, and found out too

late how true were the great words of Isaiah when he prophesied against

him.

Yes, my friends, this is the lesson which the Jews had to learn, and

which the king of Assyria had to learn, and which we have to learn also;

and which God will, in His great mercy, teach us over and over again by

bitter trials whensoever we forget it; that The Lord is King; that He is

near us, living for ever, all-wise, all-powerful, all-loving; that those

who really trust in Him shall never be confounded; that those who trust

in themselves are trying their paltry strength against the God who made

heaven and earth, and will surely find out their own weakness, just when

they fancy themselves most successful. So it was in Hezekiah’s time; so

it is now, hard as it may be to us to believe it. The Lord Jehovah,

Jesus Christ, who saved Jerusalem from the Assyrians, He still is King,

let the earth be never so unquiet. And all men, or governments, or

doctrines, or ways of thinking and behaving, which are contrary to His

will, or even pretend that they can do without Him, will as surely come

to nought as that great and terrible king of Assyria. Though man be too

weak to put them down, Christ is not. Though man neglect to put them

down, Christ will not. If man dare not fight on the Lord’s side against

sin and evil, the Lord’s earth will fight for Him. Storm and tempest,

blight and famine, earthquakes and burning mountains, will do His work,

if nothing else will. As He said Himself, if man stops praising Him, the

very stones will cry out, and own Him as their King. Not that the

blessed Lord is proud, or selfish, or revengeful; God forbid! He is

boundless pity, and love, and mercy. But it is just because He is

perfect love and pity that He hates sin, which makes all the misery upon

earth. He hates it, and he fights against it for ever; lovingly at

first, that He may lead sinners to repentance; for He wills the death of

none, but rather that all should come to repentance. But if a man will

not turn, He will whet his sword; and then woe to the sinner. Let him be

as great as the king of Assyria, he must down. For the Lord will have

none guide His world but Himself, because none but He will ever guide it

on the right path. Yes—but what a glorious thought, that He will guide

it, and us, on that right path. Oh blessed news for all who are in

sorrow and perplexity! Whatsoever it is that ails you—and who is there,

young or old, rich or poor, who has not their secret ailments at

heart?—whatsoever ails you, whatsoever terrifies you, whatsoever tempts

you, trust in the same Lord who delivered Jerusalem from the Assyrians,

and He will deliver you. He will never suffer you to be tempted above

that you are able, but will with the temptation also make a way for you

to escape, that you may be able to bear it. This has been His loving way

from the beginning, and this will be His way until the day when He wipes

away tears from all eyes.

XX.

PROFESSION AND PRACTICE.

Though they say, “The Lord liveth,” surely they swear

falsely.—JEREMIAH v. 2.

I SPOKE last Sunday morning of the wonderful way in which the Lord

delivered the Jews from the Assyrian army, and I promised to try and

explain to you this morning, the reason why the Lord allowed the

Assyrians to come into Judæa, and ravage the whole country except the one

small city of Jerusalem.

My text is taken from the first lesson, from the book of the prophet

Jeremiah. And it, I think, will explain the reason to us.

For though Jeremiah lived more than a hundred years after Isaiah, yet he

had much the same message from God to give, and much the same sins round

him to rebuke. For the Jews were always, as the Bible calls them, “a

backsliding people;” and, as the years ran on, and they began to forget

their great deliverance from the Assyrians, they slid back into the very

same wrong state of mind in which they were in Isaiah’s time, and for

which God punished them by that terrible invasion.

Now, what was this?

One very remarkable thing strikes us at once. That when the Assyrians

came into Judæa, the Jews were _not_ given up to worshipping false gods.

On the contrary, we find, both from the book of Kings and the book of

Chronicles, that a great reform in religion had taken place among them a

few years before. Their king Hezekiah, in the very first year of his

reign, removed the high places, and cut down the groves (which are said

to have been carved idols meant to represent the stars of heaven), and

even broke in pieces the brazen serpent which Moses had made, because the

Jews had begun to worship it for an idol. He trusted in the Lord God,

and obeyed Him, more than any king of Judah. He restored the worship of

the true God in the temple, according to the law of Moses, with such pomp

and glory as had never been seen since Solomon’s time. And not only did

he turn to the true God, but his people also. From the account which we

find in Chronicles, they seemed to have joined him in the good work.

They offered sin-offerings as a token of the wickedness of which they

have been guilty, in leaving the true God for idols; and all other kinds

of offerings freely and willingly. “And Hezekiah rejoiced, and all the

people that God had prepared the people. Moreover, Hezekiah called all

the men in Judæa up to Jerusalem, to keep the passover according to the

law of Moses,” which they had neglected to do for many years, and the

people answered his call and “came, and kept the feast at Jerusalem seven

days, with joy and great gladness, offering peace-offerings, and making

confession to the God of their fathers. So there was great joy in

Jerusalem; for since the time of Solomon there was not the like in

Jerusalem. Then the priests and the Levites arose, and blessed the

people, and their voice was heard, and their prayer came up to the Lord’s

holy dwelling, even to heaven.” And when it was all finished, the people

went out of their own accord, and destroyed utterly all the idols, and

high places, and altars throughout the land, and returned to their houses

in peace.

Now does not all this sound very satisfactory and excellent? What better

state of mind could people be in? What a wonderful reform, and spread of

true religion! The only thing like it, that we know, is the wonderful

reform and spread of religion in England in the last sixty years, after

all the ungodliness and wickedness that went on from the year 1660 to the

time of the French war; the building of churches, the founding of

schools, the spread of Bibles, and tracts, and the wonderful increase of

gospel preachers, so that every old man will tell you, that religion is

talked about and written about now, a thousand times more than when he

was a boy. Indeed, unless a man makes a profession of some sort of

religion or other, nowadays, he can hardly hope to rise in the world, so

religious are we English become.

Now let us hear what Isaiah thought of all that wonderful spread of true

religion in his time; and then, perhaps, we may see what he would think

of ours now, if he were alive. His opinion is sure to be the right one.

His rules can never fail, for he was an inspired prophet, and saw things

as they are, as God sees them; and therefore his rules will hold good for

ever. Let us see what they were.