Apparently, there was little, if any, interval between the two.
Sin came, perhaps, with the noontide rest. "In the cool of the
day"--that same day, most likely--the offended Lord came walking
in the garden. The colloquy had a sharp beginning, but a mellow
ending. The bitten heel would finally crush the biting head. And
the struggle at once began. The Lord came down very close to His
erring, guilty, frightened children. And they clung very closely to
Him. We are in great danger of underrating that primitive economy of
grace. The record is very brief, and the Oriental genius of it seems
strange to us. But we see an altar there; and it can have but one
meaning. Ages after, in all the nobler ethnic religions--Egyptian,
Indian, Persian, and Pelasgic--we encounter echoes and survivals
of that first vouchsafement of revelation. In all the great
religions, we find one God; in all of them, personal immortality,
with retribution; in most of them, divine triads; in two of them
at least, the resurrection of the body. If it be true, as we may
well believe, that Socrates is now in Heaven, singing the new song,
it is because he sacrificed; and he sacrificed, whether he fully
understood it or not, because of that colloquy in the garden. And if
that sufficed for him, the Providence of God is justified. Historic
sin is fairly matched, and overmatched, by historic redemption.
But the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, suggests a far
sublimer theodicy. We are taken back behind the human ages, behind
all time, into awful infinite depths, into the very bosom of the
triune God. Theological science recognizes two trinities, which
it calls economic and essential. The former began with historic
redemption, and kept pace with it. Father, Son, and Spirit stood
for law, redemption, and regeneration. It was economic trinity
that suggested essential trinity. But for the historic process,
the question might not have seemed worth asking, whether God is
one only, or three also, and the three in one. The Hebrew mind, as
represented by Philo, was only just beginning to be trinitarian,
when Christ's life in the flesh compelled the Hebrew mind, as
represented by Peter, Paul, and John, to a new theology. After
Pentecost, bald Unitarianism was anachronous. Christian experience
logically required three divine persons, of one and the same divine
essence. Economic trinity required essential trinity.
Essential trinity is anything but an arbitrary conception of
God. Wyclif taught it at Oxford as a necessary doctrine of
reason. Trinity is another name for the self-consciousness, and
self-communion, of God. Father, Son, and Spirit are vastly more
than the revelation of God to man; they are the revelation of God
to Himself, and the intercourse of God with Himself. They suggest
infinite fulness and richness of being. Our scientific definitions
of God do not amount to much. At best, they formulate only very
inadequate conceptions of Him. It is assumed that these scientific
definitions of God take us farther than the Biblical descriptions of
God. We had better not feel too sure of that. Attributes in action
may impart a better knowledge than attributes abstractedly defined.
Pictures for children may be better than creeds and catechisms.
What we need is to see God in the life both of nature, and of man.
This the Hebrew prophets enable us to do by their anthropomorphic
and anthropopathic pictures of God. If you say the pictures are
childish, then I must say that we are children, all of us, and had
better be children. It is no real scandal to science to be told,
that "the eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil
and the good"; that "the eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous,
and his ears are open unto their cry"; that the Lord "smelled a
sweet savor" from Noah's altar; while wicked men are consumed by
"the breath of his nostrils"; that "the voice of the Lord breaketh
the cedars of Lebanon"; and He "walketh upon the wings of the
wind"; and that at last, in the Messianic time, "the Lord will make
bare his holy arm in the eyes of all the nations." God is not a
mere aggregate of attributes. He has a personality as distinct and
positive as yours and mine. But the personality is infinite in all
its outgoings. God's being is a vast abyss which no plummet has
ever sounded. Imagine all you can of boundless power, constantly at
work; of boundless intelligence, constantly at work; of boundless
passion, constantly at work: God is all that, and immeasurably more
than that. What right has any one to say that God is passionless?
God Himself has never said it. He is not passionless. Like the sun,
He is all aflame; He rejoices in the truth; He hates a lie. He is
pleased with what is right, and displeased with what is wrong. Good
men are the apple of His eye; bad men His abomination and His scorn.
Rendered literally, "God is a righteous Judge, and a God who is
angry every day."
But God is love. So says John in that famous passage, over which the
theologians are still disputing, whether the meaning be that love
is only one of the divine attributes, or is that very essence of
God, into which every other attribute may be resolved. Some of the
profoundest thinkers of our day accept these three words of John,
"God is love," as the final definition of God. Sunshine striking a
teardrop may give us the seven colors of the rainbow; but the seven
colors are all one blessed light. God creates, governs, judges,
punishes, pities, redeems, and saves; but love is the root of all.
It was love that created this wonderous universe, to which science
can set no bounds. It was love that created angels, tho some of them
rebelled, and were "delivered into chains of darkness." It was love
that created this human brotherhood, all of whom have rebelled and
gone astray. This rebellion was permitted; but was rebellion all the
same. God feels it; and has always felt it. Absalom has broken his
father's heart; and we are Absalom. The grand old King goes up over
Olivet weeping, with his head covered, and his feet bare; and that
King is God. Only He is the King Eternal, and His agony over sin is
also eternal. This agony of God over human sin is the Lamb slain
from the foundation of the world. God Himself atones, to Himself
atones; and so atonement is both eternal and divine.
In that matchless epitome of the gospel--that parable of the
Prodigal Son, reported only by Luke--not a word is said, not a
glimpse is given, of the father of the prodigal during all that
interval between the departure and return. A veil is drawn over all
those bitter, weary years. So has God yearned and suffered in the
silent depths of His own eternity, waiting and watching for the
repentant prodigal. This yearning, grieved, and suffering God is
the God and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ; Son of God,
Son of Mary. This sinless Child should have had no griefs of His
own. His sorrows could have been only those old eternal shadows of
permitted sin. The cross on which He died, flinging out its arms as
if to embrace the world, lifted up its head toward the Lamb slain
from the foundation of the world. Our hearts now go back to Calvary;
and from Calvary they go up to God.
One word more. This stupendous idea of eternal atonement carries
with it the idea of universal atonement. Whatever it was, and is,
must needs have been infinite. No magnitude of sin, no multitude
of sinners, can bankrupt its treasury of grace. "God so loved the
world," is its everlasting refrain. "He that will, let him take of
the water of life freely." "Take" is the word, my hearers. Let us
remember this. There is something for us to do. God Himself can not
pardon an impenitent offender. If pardon were offered, it could not
be accepted. It is a law of our own being, that we must repent. O
Lamb of God, slain so long ago, save us at last, when Thou comest in
the clouds; and save us here to-day.
It is one of the revelations of Scripture that we are to judge the
angels, sitting above them on the shining heights. It may well be
so. Those angels are the imperial guard, doing easy duty at home.
We are the "tenth legion," marching in from the swamps and forests
of the far-off frontier; scarred and battered, but victorious over
death and sin.[3]
[3] The following stanza from Dean Alford's grand hymn appears upon
the last page of this, the last sermon written by Dr. Hitchcock.
By a singular coincidence it was the stanza especially selected to
be sung in the burial service at Dr. Hitchcock's funeral, altho in
entire ignorance of its existence in the manuscript.
Ten thousand times ten thousand
In sparkling raiment bright,
The armies of the ransom'd saints
Throng up the steps of light;
'Tis finish'd, all is finish'd,
Their fight with death and sin:
Fling open wide the golden gates,
And let the victors in.
KINGSLEY
THE SHAKING OF THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
CHARLES KINGSLEY was born at Holne Vicarage, Devonshire, in 1819.
He was by temperament enthusiastic, impetuous, and great-hearted.
His utterances were notable for their unusual earnestness. "I go at
what I am about," he said, "as if there were nothing else in the
world for the time being." In this way he completely lost himself
in the work in hand. His favorite motto was "Be strong!" He had a
poetic spirit, and was both vigorous and brilliant. He is known not
only for his sermons and addresses, but also for his novels and some
verse. He died in 1875.
KINGSLEY
1819-1875
THE SHAKING OF THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH
_Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven.
And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those
things that are shaken, as of things that are made, that
those things which can not be shaken may remain. Wherefore we
receiving a kingdom which can not be moved, let us have grace,
whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly
fear: for our God is a consuming fire._--Hebrews xii., 26-29.
This is one of the royal texts of Scripture. It is inexhaustible,
like the God who inspired it. It has fulfilled itself again and
again, at different epochs. It fulfilled itself specially and
notoriously in the first century. But it fulfilled itself again
in the fifth century; and again at the Crusades; and again at the
Reformation in the sixteenth century. And it may be that it is
fulfilling itself at this very day; that in this century, both in
the time of our fathers and in our own, the Lord has been shaking
the heavens and the earth, that those things which can be shaken may
be removed, as things that are made, while those things which can
not be shaken remain.
All confess this to be true, each in his own words. They talk of
this age as one of change; of rapid progress, for good or evil;
of unexpected discoveries; of revolutions, intellectual, moral,
social, as well as political. Our notions of the physical universe
are rapidly altering, with the new discoveries of science; and our
notions of ethics and theology are altering as rapidly. The era
assumes a different aspect to different minds, just as it did the
first century after Christ, according as men look forward to the
future with hope, or back to the past with regret. Some glory in
the nineteenth century as one of rapid progress for good; as the
commencement of a new era for humanity; as the inauguration of a
Reformation as grand as that of the sixteenth century. Others bewail
it as an age of rapid decay; in which the old landmarks are being
removed, the old paths lost; in which we are rushing headlong into
skepticism and atheism; in which the world and the Church are both
in danger, and the last day is at hand.
Both parties may be right; and yet both may be wrong. Men have
always talked thus, at great crises in the world's life. They talked
thus in the first century; and in the fifth, and in the eleventh;
and again in the sixteenth; and then both parties were partially
right and partially wrong; and so they may be now. What they meant
to say, what they wanted to say, what we mean and want to say, has
been said already for us in far deeper, wider, and more accurate
words, by him who wrote this wonderful Epistle to the Hebrews, when
he told the Jews of his time that the Lord was shaking the heavens
and the earth, that those things which were shaken might be removed,
as things that are made--cosmogonies, systems, theories, prejudices,
fashions, of man's invention: while those things which could not be
shaken might remain, because they were according to the mind and
will of God, eternal as that source from whence they came forth,
even the bosom of God the Father.
"Yet once more I shake, not the earth only, but also heaven."
How has the earth been shaken in our days; and the heaven likewise.
How rapidly have our conceptions of both altered. How easy, simple,
certain, it all looked to our forefathers in the middle age. How
difficult, complex, uncertain, it all looks to us. With increased
knowledge has come--not increased doubt: that I deny utterly. I
deny, once and for all, that this age is an irreverent age. I say
that an irreverent age is one like the age of the Schoolmen; when
men defined and explained all heaven and earth by à priori theories,
and cosmogonies invented in the cloister; and dared, poor, simple,
ignorant mortals, to fancy that they could comprehend and gauge
the ways of Him whom the heaven and the heaven of heavens could not
contain. This, this is irreverence: but it is neither irreverence
nor want of faith, if a man, awed by the mystery which encompasses
him from the cradle to the grave, shall lay his hand upon his mouth,
with Job, and obey the Voice which cries to him from earth and
heaven--"Be still, and know that as the heavens are higher than the
earth, so are my ways higher than thy ways, and my thoughts higher
than thine."
But it was all easy, and simple, and certain enough to our
forefathers. The earth, according to the popular notion, was a flat
plane; or, if it were, as the wiser held, a sphere, yet antipodes
were an unscriptural heresy. Above it were the heavens, in which the
stars were fixed, or wandered; and above them heaven after heaven,
each tenanted by its own orders of beings, up to that heaven of
heavens in which Deity--and by Him, be it always remembered, the
mother of Deity--was enthroned.
And if above the earth was the kingdom of light, and purity, and
holiness, what could be more plain, than that below it was the
kingdom of darkness, and impurity, and sin? That was no theory to
our forefathers: it was a physical fact. Had not even the heathens
believed as much, and said so, by the mouth of the poet Virgil? He
had declared that the mouth of Tartarus lay in Italy, hard by the
volcanic lake Avernus; and after the unexpected eruption of Vesuvius
in the first century, nothing seemed more clear than that Virgil was
right; and that men were justified in talking of Tartarus, Styx,
and Phlegethon as indisputable Christian entities. Etna, Stromboli,
Hecla, were (according to this cosmogony) likewise mouths of hell;
and there were not wanting holy hermits, who had heard from within
those craters, shrieks, and clanking chains, and the howls of demons
tormenting the souls of the endlessly lost.
Our forefathers were not aware that, centuries before the
incarnation of our Lord, the Buddhist priests had held exactly the
same theory of moral retribution; and that painted on the walls of
Buddhist temples might be seen horrors identical with those which
adorned the walls of many a Christian church, in the days when men
believed in this Tartarology as firmly as they now believe in the
results of chemistry or of astronomy.
And now--How is the earth shaken, and the heavens likewise, in that
very sense in which the expression is used by him who wrote to
the Hebrews? Our conceptions of them are shaken. How much of that
medieval cosmogony do educated men believe, in the sense in which
they believe that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two
right angles, or that if they steal their neighbor's goods they
commit a sin?
The earth has been shaken for us, more and more violently, as the
years have rolled on. It was shaken when astronomy told us that
the earth was not the center of the universe, but a tiny planet
revolving round a sun in a remote region thereof.
It was shaken, when geology told us that the earth had endured
for countless ages, during which continents had become oceans,
and oceans continents, again and again. And even now, it is being
shaken by researches into the antiquity of man, into the origin and
permanence of species, which, let the result be what it will, must
in the meanwhile shake for us theories and dogmas which have been
undisputed for 1500 years.
And with the rest of our cosmogony, that conception of a physical
Tartarus below the earth has been shaken likewise, till good men
have been fain to find a fresh place for it in the sun, or in a
comet; or to patronize the probable, but as yet unproved theory of
a central fire within the earth; not on any scientific grounds, but
simply if by any means they can assign a region in space, wherein
material torment can be inflicted on the spirits of the lost.
And meanwhile the heavens, the spiritual world, is being shaken
no less. More and more frequently, more and more loudly, men are
asking, not skeptics merely, but pious men, men who wish to be,
and who believe themselves to be, orthodox Christians, more and
more loudly are such men asking questions which demand an answer,
with a learning and an eloquence, as well as with a devoutness
and a reverence for Scripture, which--whether rightly or wrongly
employed--is certain to command attention.
Rightly or wrongly, these men are asking, whether the actual and
literal words of Scripture really involve the medieval theory of an
endless Tartarus.
They are saying, "It is not we who deny, but you who assert,
endless torments, who are playing fast and loose with the letter of
Scripture. You are reading into it conceptions borrowed from Virgil,
Dante, Milton, when you translate into the formula 'endless torment'
such phrases as 'the outer darkness,' 'the fire of Gehenna,'
the 'worm that dieth not'; which, according to all just laws of
interpretation, refer not to the next life, but to this life, and
specially to the approaching catastrophe of the Jewish nation; or
when you say that eternal death really means eternal life--only life
in torture."
Rightly or wrongly, they are saying this; and then they add, "We do
not yield to you in love and esteem for Scripture. We demand not a
looser, but a stricter; not a more metaphoric, but a more literal;
not a more contemptuous, but a more reverent interpretation thereof."
So these men speak, rightly or wrongly. And for good or for evil,
they will be heard.
And with these questions others have arisen, not new at all,
say these men, but to be found amid many contradictions, in the
writings of all the best divines, when they have given up for a
moment systems and theories, and listened to the voice of their own
hearts; questions natural enough to an age which abhors cruelty,
has abolished torture, labors for the reformation of criminals, and
debates, rightly or wrongly, about abolishing capital punishment.
Men are asking questions about the heaven, the spiritual world, and
saying, "The spiritual world? Is it only another material world
which happens to be invisible now, but which may become visible
hereafter: or is it not rather the moral world--the world of right
and wrong? Heaven? Is not the true and real heaven the kingdom of
love, justice, purity, beneficence? Is not that the eternal heaven
wherein God abides for ever, and with Him those who are like God?
And hell? Is it not rather the anarchy of hate, injustice, impurity,
uselessness; wherein abides all that is opposed to God?"
And with these thoughts come others about moral retribution--"What
is its purpose? Can it, can any punishment have any right purpose
save the correction, or the annihilation, of the criminal? Can God,
in this respect, be at once less merciful and less powerful than
men? Is He so controlled by necessity that He is forced to bring
into the world beings whom he knows to be incorrigible, and doomed
to endless misery? And if not so controlled, is not the alternative
as to His character even more fearful? He bids us copy His justice,
His love. Is that His justice, that His love, which if we copied, we
should call each other, and deservedly, utterly unjust and unloving?
Can there be one morality for God, and another for man, made in the
image of God? Are these dark dogmas worthy of a Father who hateth
nothing that He hath made, and is perfect in this, that He makes
His sun shine on the evil and on the good, and His rain fall on
the just and on the unjust, and is good to the unthankful and to
the evil? Are they worthy of a Son who, in the fire of His divine
charity, stooped from heaven to earth, to toil, to suffer, to die on
the cross, that the world by Him might be saved? Are they worthy of
that which proceeds from the Father and the Son, even that Spirit
of boundless charity, and fervent love, by which the Son offered
Himself to the Father, a sacrifice for the sins of the world--and
surely not in vain?"
So men are asking, rightly or wrongly; and they are guarding
themselves, at the same time, from the imputation of disbelief
in moral retribution; of fancying God to be a careless, epicurean
deity, cruelly indulgent to sin, and therefore, in so far, immoral.
They say--"We believe firmly enough in moral retribution. How can
we help believing in it, while we see it working around us, in many
a fearful shape, here, now, in this life? And we believe that it
may work on, in still more fearful shapes, in the life to come.
We believe that as long as a sinner is impenitent, he must be
miserable; that if he goes on impenitent for ever, he must go on
making himself miserable, aye, it may be more and more miserable for
ever. Only do not tell us that he must go on. That his impenitence,
and therefore his punishment, is irremediable, necessary, endless;
and thereby destroy the whole purpose, and we should say, the whole
morality, of his punishment. If that punishment be corrective, our
moral sense is not shocked by any severity, by any duration: but if
it is irremediable, it can not be corrective; and then, what it is,
or why it is, we can not--or rather dare not--say. We, too, believe
in an eternal fire. But because we believe also the Athanasian
Creed, which tells us that there is but one eternal, we believe
that that fire must be the fire of God, and therefore, like all
that is in God and of God, good and not evil, a blessing and not a
curse. We believe that that fire is for ever burning, tho men are
for ever trying to quench it all day long; and that it has been and
will be in every age burning up all the chaff and stubble of man's
inventions; the folly, the falsehood, the ignorance, the vice of
this sinful world; and we praise God for it; and give thanks to
Him for His great glory, that He is the everlasting and triumphant
foe of evil and misery, of whom it is written, that our God is a
consuming fire."
Such words are being spoken, right or wrong. Such words will bear
their fruit, for good or evil. I do not pronounce how much of them
is true or false. It is not my place to dogmatize and define, where
the Church of England, as by law established, has declined to do
so. Neither is it for you to settle these questions. It is rather a
matter for your children. A generation more, it may be, of earnest
thought will be required, ere the true answer has been found. But
it is your duty, if you be educated and thoughtful persons, to face
these questions; to consider whether you are believing the exact
words of the Bible, and the conclusions of your own reason and moral
sense; or whether you are merely believing that cosmogony elaborated
in the cloister, that theory of moral retribution pardonable in the
middle age, which Dante and Milton sang.
But this I do not hesitate to say, That if we of the clergy can find
no other answers to these doubts than those which were reasonable
and popular in an age when men racked women, burned heretics, and
believed that every Mussulman killed in a crusade went straight
to Tartarus, then very serious times are at hand, both for the
Christian clergy and for Christianity itself.
What, then, are we to believe and do? Shall we degenerate into a
lazy skepticism, which believes that everything is a little true,
and everything a little false--in plain words, believes nothing
at all? Or shall we degenerate into faithless fears, and unmanly
wailings that the flood of infidelity is irresistible, and that
Christ has left His Church?