faith. Faith is the conviction that God is a rewarder of them who
diligently seek Him; and there is a moment in human progress when the
anticipated rewards and punishments must be of a Mahometan
character--the happiness of the senses. It was thus that the Jews were
disciplined; out of a coarse, rude, infantine state, they were
educated by rewards and punishments to abstain from present sinful
gratification: at first, the promise of the life which now is,
afterwards the promise of that which is to come; but even then the
rewards and punishments of a future state were spoken of, by
inspiration itself, as of an arbitrary character; and some of the best
of the Israelites, in looking to the recompense of reward, seemed to
have anticipated, coarsely, recompense in exchange for duties
performed.
The last step is that which alone deserves to be called Christian
Faith--"Who is he that overcometh but he that believeth that Jesus is
the Christ?" The difference between the faith of the Christian and
that of the man of the world, or the mere ordinary religionist, is not
a difference in mental operation, but in the object of the faith--to
believe that Jesus is the Christ is the peculiarity of Christian
faith.
The anticipated heaven of the Christian differs from the anticipated
heaven of any other man, not in the distinctness with which its
imagery is perceived, but in the kind of objects which are hoped for.
The apostle has told us the character of heaven. "Eye hath not seen,
nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to
conceive the things which God hath prepared for them that love
Him"--which glorious words are sometimes strangely misinterpreted, as
if the apostle merely meant rhetorically to exalt the conception of
the heavenly world, as of something beyond all power to imagine or to
paint. The apostle meant something infinitely deeper: the heaven of
God is not only that which "eye hath not seen," but that which eye can
_never_ see; its glories are not of that kind at all which can ever
stream in forms of beauty on the eye, or pour in melody upon the
enraptured ear--not such joys as genius in its most gifted hour (here
called "the heart of man") can invent or imagine: it is something
which these sensuous organs of ours never can appreciate--bliss of
another kind altogether, revealed to the spirit of man by the Spirit
of God--joys such as spirit alone can receive.
Do you ask what these are? "The fruits of the Spirit are love, joy,
peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness,
temperance." That is heaven, and therefore the Apostle tells us that
he alone who "believeth that Jesus is the Christ," and only he, feels
that. What is it to believe that Jesus is the Christ?--That He is the
Anointed One, that His life is the anointed life, the only blessed
life, the blessed life divine for thirty years?--Yes, but if so, the
blessed Life still, continued throughout all eternity: unless you
believe that, you do not believe that Jesus is the Christ.
What is the blessedness that you expect?--to have the joys of earth
with the addition of the element of eternity? Men think that heaven is
to be a compensation for earthly loss: the saints are earthly-wretched
here, the children of this world are earthly-happy; but _that_, they
think, shall be all reversed--Lazarus, beyond the grave, shall have
the purple and the fine linen, and the splendour, and the houses, and
the lands which Dives had on earth: the one had them for time, the
other shall have them for eternity. That is the heaven that men
expect--this earth sacrificed _now_, in order that it may be
re-granted for _ever_.
Nor will this expectation be reversed except by a reversal of the
nature. None can anticipate such a heaven as God has revealed, except
they that are born of the Spirit; therefore to believe that Jesus is
the Christ, a man must be born of God. You will observe that no other
victory overcomes the world: for this is what St. John means by
saying, "Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth
that Jesus is the Christ?" For then it comes to pass that a man begins
to feel, that to do wrong is hell; and that to love God, to be like
God, to have the mind of Christ, is the only heaven. Until this
victory is gained, the world retains its stronghold in the heart.
Do you think that the temperate man has overcome the world, who,
instead of the short-lived rapture of intoxication, chooses regular
employment, health, and prosperity? Is it not the world in another
form, which has his homage? Or do you suppose that the so-called
religious man is really the world's conqueror by being content to give
up seventy years of enjoyment in order to win innumerable ages of the
very same species of enjoyment? Has he not only made earth a hell, in
order that earthly things may be his heaven for ever?
Thus the victory of Faith proceeds from stage to stage: the first
victory is, when the Present is conquered by the Future; the last,
when the Visible and Sensual is despised in comparison of the
Invisible and Eternal. Then earth has lost its power for ever; for if
_all_ that it has to give be lost eternally, the gain of faith is
still infinite.
III.
_Preached Whitsunday, May 19, 1850._
THE DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT.
"Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit."--1
Corinthians xii, 4.
According to a view which contains in it a profound truth, the ages of
the world are divisible into three dispensations, presided over by the
Father, the Son, and the Spirit.
In the dispensation of the Father, God was known as a Creator;
creation manifested His eternal power and Godhead, and the religion of
mankind was the religion of Nature.
In the dispensation of the Son, God manifested Himself to Humanity
through man; the Eternal Word spoke, through the inspired and gifted
of the human race, to those that were uninspired and ungifted. This
was the dispensation of the prophets--its climax was the advent of the
Redeemer; it was completed when _perfect_ Humanity manifested God to
man. The characteristic of this dispensation was, that God revealed
Himself by an authoritative Voice, speaking from without, and the
highest manifestation of God whereof man was capable, was a Divine
Humanity.
The age in which we at present live is the dispensation of the Spirit,
in which God has communicated Himself by the highest revelation, and
in the most intimate communion, of which man is capable; no longer
through Creation, no more as an authoritative Voice from without, but
as a Law within--as a Spirit mingling with a spirit. This is the
dispensation of which the prophet said of old, that the time should
come when they should no longer teach every man his brother and every
man his neighbour, saying, "Know the Lord"--that is, by a will
revealed by external authority from other human minds--"for they shall
all know him, from the least of them to the greatest." This is the
dispensation, too, of whose close the Apostle Paul speaks thus: "Then
shall the Son also be subject to Him that hath put all things under
Him, that God may be all in all."
The outward humanity is to disappear, that the inward union may be
complete. To the same effect, he speaks in another place, "Yea, though
we have known Christ after the flesh, yet henceforth know we Him no
more." For this reason, the Ascension was necessary before Pentecost
could come: the Spirit was not given, we are told, because Jesus was
not yet glorified. It was necessary for the Son to disappear as an
outward authority, in order that he might re-appear as an inward
principle of life. Our salvation is no longer God manifested in a
Christ _without_ us, but as a Christ _within_ us, the hope of glory.
To-day is the selected anniversary of that memorable day when the
first proof was given to the senses, in the gift of Pentecost, that
that spiritual dispensation had begun.
There is a twofold way in which the operations of the Spirit on
mankind may be considered--His influence on the Church as a whole, and
His influence on individuals; both of these are brought together in
the text. It branches, therefore, into a twofold division.
I. Spiritual gifts conferred on individuals.
II. Spiritual union of the Church.
Let us distinguish between the Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit: by
the Spirit, the apostle meant the vital principle of new life from
God, common to all believers--the animating Spirit of the Church of
God; by the gifts of the Spirit, he meant the diversities of form in
which He operates on individuals; its influence varied according to
their respective peculiarities and characteristics. In the
twenty-eighth verse of this chapter a full catalogue of gifts is
found; looking at them generally, we discover two classes into which
they may be divided--the first are natural, the second are
supernatural: the first are those capacities which are originally
found in human nature--personal endowments of mind, a character
elevated and enlarged by the gift of the Spirit; the second are those
which were created and called into existence by the sudden approach of
the same influence.
Just as if the temperature of this Northern hemisphere were raised
suddenly, and a mighty tropical river were to pour its fertilizing
inundation over the country, the result would be the impartation of a
vigorous and gigantic growth to the vegetation already in existence,
and at the same time the development of life in seeds and germs which
had long lain latent in the soil, incapable of vegetation in the
unkindly climate of their birth. Exactly in the same way, the flood of
a Divine life, poured suddenly into the souls of men, enlarged and
ennobled qualities which had been used already, and at the same time
_developed_ powers which never could have become apparent in the cold,
low temperature of natural life.
Among the natural gifts, we may instance these: teaching--healing--the
power of government. Teaching is a gift, natural or acquired. To know,
is one thing; to have the capacity of imparting knowledge, is another.
The physician's art again is no supernatural mystery; long and
careful study of physical laws capacitate him for his task. To govern,
again, is a natural faculty: it may be acquired by habit, but there
are some who never could acquire it. Some men seem born to command:
place them in what sphere you will, others acknowledge their secret
influence, and subordinate themselves to their will. The faculty of
organization, the secret of rule, need no supernatural power. They
exist among the uninspired. Now the doctrine of the apostle was, that
all these are transformed and renovated by the spirit of a new life in
such a way as to become almost new powers, or, as he calls them, gifts
of the Spirit. A remarkable illustration of this is his view of the
human body. If there be anything common to us by nature, it is the
members of our corporeal frame; yet the apostle taught that these,
guided by the Spirit as its instruments and obeying a holy will,
became transfigured; so that, in his language, the body becomes a
temple of the Holy Ghost, and the meanest faculties, the lowest
appetites, the humblest organs, are ennobled by the Spirit mind which
guides them. Thus he bids the Romans yield themselves "unto God as
those that are alive from the dead, and their members as instruments
of righteousness unto God."
The second class of gifts are supernatural: of these we find two
pre-eminent--the gift of tongues, and the gift of prophecy.
It does not appear that the gift of tongues was merely the imparted
faculty of speaking foreign languages--it could not be that the
highest gift of God to His Church merely made them rivals of the
linguist; it would rather seem that the Spirit of God, mingling with
the soul of man, supernaturally elevated its aspirations and glorified
its conceptions, so that an entranced state of ecstasy was
produced, and feelings called into energy, for the expression of which
the ordinary forms of speech were found inadequate. Even in a far
lower department, when a man becomes possessed of ideas for which his
ordinary vocabulary supplies no sufficient expression, his language
becomes broken, incoherent, struggling, and almost unnaturally
elevated; much more was it to be expected that when divine and new
feelings rushed like a flood upon the soul, the language of men would
have become strange and extraordinary; but in that supposed case, wild
as the expressions might appear to one coldly looking on and not
participating in the feelings of the speaker, they would be quite
sufficient to convey intelligible meaning to any one affected by the
same emotions.
Where perfect sympathy exists, incoherent utterance--a word--a
syllable--is quite as efficient as elaborate sentences. Now this is
precisely the account given of the phenomenon which attended the gift
of tongues. On the day of Pentecost, all who were in the same state of
spiritual emotion as those who spoke, understood the speakers; each
was as intelligible to all as if he spoke in their several tongues: to
those who were coolly and sceptically watching, the effects appeared
like those of intoxication. A similar account is given by the Apostle
Paul: the voice appeared to unsympathetic ears as that of a barbarian;
the uninitiated and unbelieving coming in, heard nothing that was
articulate to them, but only what seemed to them the ravings of
insanity.
The next was the gift of prophecy. Prophecy has several meanings in
Scripture; sometimes it means the power of predicting future events,
sometimes an entranced state accompanied with ravings, sometimes it
appears to mean only exposition; but prophecy, as the miraculous
spiritual gift granted to the early Church, seems to have been a state
of communion with the mind of God lower than that which was called the
gift of tongues, at least less ecstatic, less rapt into the world to
come, more under the guidance of the reason, more within the control
of calm consciousness--as we might say, less supernatural.
Upon these gifts we make two observations:
1. Even the highest were not accompanied with spiritual faultlessness.
Inspiration was one thing, infallibility another. The gifts of the
Spirit were, like the gifts of Nature, subordinated to the
will--capable of being used for good or evil, sometimes pure,
sometimes mixed with human infirmity. The supernaturally gifted man
was no mere machine, no automaton ruled in spite of himself by a
superior spirit. Disorder, vanity, over-weening self-estimation, might
accompany these gifts, and the prophetic utterance itself might be
degraded to a mere brawling in the Church; therefore St. Paul
established laws of control, declared the need of subjection and rule
over spiritual gifts: the spirits of the prophets were to be subject
to the prophets; if those in the ecstatic state were tempted to break
out into utterance and unable to interpret what it meant, those so
gifted were to hold their peace.
The prophet poured out the truths supernaturally imparted to his
highest spirit, in an inspired and impassioned eloquence which was
intelligible even to the unspiritual, and was one of the appointed
means of convincing the unconverted. The lesson derivable from this is
not obsolete even in the present day. There is nothing perhaps
precisely identical in our own day with those gifts of the early
Church; but genius and talent are uncommon gifts, which stand in a
somewhat analogous relation--in a closer one certainly--than more
ordinary endowments. The flights of genius, we know, appear like
maniac ravings to minds not elevated to the same spiritual level. Now
these are perfectly compatible with mis-use, abuse, and moral
disorder. The most gifted of our countrymen has left this behind him
as his epitaph, "The greatest, wisest, _meanest_ of mankind." The most
glorious gift of poetic insight--itself in a way divine--having
something akin to Deity--is too often associated with degraded life
and vicious character. Those gifts which elevate us above the rest of
our species, whereby we stand aloof and separate from the crowd,
convey no moral--nor even mental--infallibility: nay, they have in
themselves a peculiar danger, whereas that gift which is common to us
all as brethren, the animating spirit of a divine life, in whose soil
the spiritual being of all is rooted, cannot make us vain; we _cannot_
pride ourselves on _that_, for it is common to us all.
2. Again, the gifts which were higher in one sense were lower in
another; as supernatural gifts they would rank thus--the gift of
tongues before prophecy, and prophecy before teaching; but as
blessings to be desired, this order is reversed: rather than the gift
of tongues St. Paul bids the Corinthians desire that they might
prophecy. Inferior again to prophecy was the quite simple, and as we
should say, lower faculty of explaining truth. Now the principle upon
which that was tried was that of utility--not utility in the low sense
of the utilitarian, who measures the value of a thing by its
susceptibility of application to the purpose of this present life, but
a utility whose measure was love, charity. The apostle considered
_that_ gift most desirable by which men might most edify one another.
And hence that noble declaration of one of the most gifted of
mankind--"I had rather speak five words with my understanding, that I
might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an unknown
tongue."
Our estimate is almost the reverse of this: we value a gift in
proportion to its rarity, its distinctive character, separating its
possessor from the rest of his fellow-men; whereas, in truth, those
gifts which leave us in lonely majesty apart from our species, useless
to them, benefiting ourselves alone, are not the most godlike, but the
least so; because they are dissevered from that beneficent charity
which is the very being of God. Your lofty incommunicable thoughts,
your ecstasies, and aspirations, and contemplative raptures--in virtue
of which you have estimated yourself as the porcelain of the earth, of
another nature altogether than the clay of common spirits--tried by
the test of Charity, what is there grand in these if they cannot be
applied as blessings to those that are beneath you? One of our
countrymen has achieved for himself extraordinary scientific renown;
he pierced the mysteries of nature, he analysed her processes, he gave
new elements to the world. The same man applied his rare intellect to
the construction of a simple and very common instrument--that
well-known lamp which has been the guardian of the miner's life from
the explosion of fire. His discoveries are his nobility in this world,
his trifling invention gives him rank in the world to come. By the
former he shines as one of the brightest luminaries in the firmament
of science, by the latter evincing a spirit animated and directed by
Christian love, he takes his place as one of the Church of God.
And such is ever the true order of rank which graces occupy in
reference to gifts. The most trifling act which is marked by
usefulness to others is nobler in God's sight, than the most brilliant
accomplishment of genius. To teach a few Sunday-school children, week
after week, commonplace simple truths--persevering in spite of
dullness and mean capacities--is a more glorious occupation than the
highest meditations or creations of genius which edify or instruct
only our own solitary soul.
II. The spiritual unity of the Church--"the same Spirit."
Men have formed to themselves two ideas of unity: the first is a
sameness of form--of expression; the second an identity of spirit.
Some of the best of mankind have fondly hoped to realize an unity for
the Church of Christ which should be manifested by uniform expressions
in everything: their imaginations have loved to paint, as the ideal of
a Christian Church, a state in which the same liturgy should be used
throughout the world, the same ecclesiastical government, even the
same vestments, the same canonical hours, the same form of
architecture. They could conceive nothing more entirely one than a
Church so constituted that the same prayers, in the very same
expressions, at the very same moment, should be ascending to the
Eternal Ear.
There are others who have thrown aside entirely this idea as
chimerical; who have not only ceased to hope it, but even to wish it;
who if it could be realized, would consider it a matter of regret; who
feel that the minds of men are various--their modes and habits of
thought, their original capacities and acquired associations,
infinitely diverse; and who, perceiving that the law of the universal
system is manifoldness in unity, have ceased to expect any other
oneness for the Church of Christ than that of a sameness of spirit,
showing itself through diversities of gifts. Among these last was the
Apostle Paul: his large and glorious mind rejoiced in the
contemplation of the countless manifestations of spiritual nature
beneath which he detected one and the same pervading Mind. Now let us
look at this matter somewhat more closely.
1. All real unity is manifold. Feelings in themselves identical find
countless forms of expression: for instance, sorrow is the same
feeling throughout the human race; but the Oriental prostrates himself
upon the ground, throws dust upon his head, tears his garments, is not
ashamed to break out into the most violent lamentations. In the north,
we rule our grief in public; suffer not even a quiver to be seen upon
the lip or brow, and consider calmness as the appropriate expression
of manly grief. Nay, two sisters of different temperament will show
their grief diversely; one will love to dwell upon the theme of the
qualities of the departed, the other feels it a sacred sorrow, on
which the lips are sealed for ever; yet would it not be idle to ask
which of them has the truest affection? Are they not both in their own
way true? In the same East, men take off their sandals in devotion; we
exactly reverse the procedure, and uncover the head. The Oriental
prostrates himself in the dust before his sovereign; even before his
God the Briton only kneels; yet would it not again be idle to ask
which is the essential and proper form of reverence? Is not true
reverence in all cases modified by the individualities of temperament
and education? Should we not say, in all these forms worketh one and
the same spirit of reverence?
Again in the world as God has made it, one law shows itself under
diverse, even opposite manifestations; lead sinks in water, wood
floats upon the surface. In former times men assigned these different
results to different forces, laws, and gods. A knowledge of Nature has
demonstrated that they are expressions of one and the same law; and
the great difference between the educated and the uneducated man is
this--the uneducated sees in this world nothing but an infinite
collection of unconnected facts--a broken, distorted, and fragmentary
system, which his mind can by no means reduce to order. The educated
man, in proportion to his education, sees the number of laws
diminished--beholds in the manifold appearances of Nature the
expression of a few laws, by degrees fewer, till at last it becomes
possible to his conception that they are all reducible to one, and
that that which lies beneath the innumerable phenomena of Nature is
the One Spirit--God.
2. All _living_ unity is spiritual, not formal; not sameness, but
manifoldness. You may have a unity shown in identity of form; but it
is a lifeless unity. There is a sameness on the sea-beach--that unity
which the ocean waves have produced by curling and forcibly destroying
the angularities of individual form, so that every stone presents the
same monotony of aspect, and you must fracture each again in order to
distinguish whether you hold in your hand a mass of flint or fragment
of basalt. There is no life in unity such as this.