the conception of their nature's perfectness which has been previously
realized, is the difference between man seen in himself and seen in
Christ. We are feeble, dwarfish, stunted specimens of Humanity. Our
best resolves are but withered branches, our holiest deeds unripe and
blighted fruit; but to the Infinite Eye, who sees in the perfect One
the type and assurance of that which shall be, this dwindled Humanity
of ours is divine and glorious. Such are we in the sight of God the
Father as is the very Son of God Himself. This is what theologians, at
least the wisest of them, meant by "imputed righteousness." I do not
mean that all who have written or spoken on the subject had this
conception of it, but I believe they who thought truly meant this;
they did not suppose that in imputing righteousness there was a kind
of figment, a self-deception in the mind of God; they did not mean
that by an act of will He chose to consider that every act which
Christ did was done by us; that He imputed or reckoned to us the
baptism in Jordan and the victory in the wilderness, and the agony in
the garden, or that He believed, or acted as if He believed, that when
Christ died, each one of us died: but He saw Humanity submitted to the
law of self-sacrifice; in the light of that idea He beholds us as
perfect, and is satisfied. In this sense the apostle speaks of those
that are imperfect, yet "by one offering He hath perfected for ever
them that are sanctified." It is true again, that He died for us, in
that we present His sacrifice as ours. The value of the death of
Christ consisted in the surrender of self-will. In the fortieth Psalm,
the value of every other kind of sacrifice being first denied, the
words follow, "then said I, Lo, I come to do thy will, O God." The
profound idea contained, therefore, in the death of Christ is the duty
of self-surrender.
But in _us_ that surrender scarcely deserves the name; even to use the
word self-sacrifice covers us with a kind of shame. Then it is that
there is an almost boundless joy in acquiescing in the life and death
of Christ, recognizing it as ours, and representing it to ourselves
and God as what we aim at. If we cannot understand how in this sense
it can be a sacrifice for us, we may partly realize it by remembering
the joy of feeling how art and nature realize for us what we cannot
realize for ourselves. It is recorded of one of the world's gifted
painters that he stood before the master-piece of the great genius of
his age--one which he could never hope to equal, nor even rival--and
yet the infinite superiority, so far from crushing him, only elevated
his feeling, for he saw realized those conceptions which had floated
before him, dim and unsubstantial; in every line and touch he felt a
spirit immeasurably superior yet kindred, and he is reported to have
exclaimed, with dignified humility, "And I too am a painter!"
We must all have felt, when certain effects in nature, combinations of
form and colour, have been presented to us, our own idea speaking in
intelligible and yet celestial language; when for instance, the long
bars of purple, "edged with intolerable radiance," seemed to float in
a sea of pale pure green, when the whole sky seemed to reel with
thunder, when the night wind moaned. It is wonderful how the most
commonplace men and women, beings who, as you would have thought, had
no conception that rose beyond a commercial speculation, or a
fashionable entertainment, are elevated by such scenes; how the
slumbering grandeur of their nature wakes and acknowledges kindred
with the sky and storm. "I cannot speak," they would say, "the
feelings which are in me; I have had emotions, aspirations, thoughts;
I cannot put them into words. Look there! listen now to the storm!
That is what I meant, only I never could say it out till now." Thus do
art and nature speak for us, and thus do we adopt them as our own.
This is the way in which His righteousness becomes righteousness for
us. This is the way in which the heart presents to God the sacrifice
of Christ; gazing on that perfect Life we, as it were, say, "There,
that is my religion--that is my righteousness--what I want to be,
which I am not--that is my offering, my life as I would wish to give
it, freely and not checked, entire and perfect." So the old prophets,
their hearts big with unutterable thoughts, searched "what or what
manner of time the spirit of Christ which was in them did signify,
when it testified beforehand of the sufferings of Christ, and of the
glory which should follow;" and so with us, until it passes into
prayer: "My Saviour, fill up the blurred and blotted sketch which my
clumsy hand has drawn of a divine life, with the fullness of Thy
perfect picture. I feel the beauty which I cannot realize:--robe me in
Thine unutterable purity:--
"Rock of ages cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee."
II. The influence of that Sacrifice on man is the introduction of the
principle of self-sacrifice into his nature,--"then were all dead."
Observe again, not He died that we might not die, but that in His
death we might be dead, and that in His sacrifice we might become each
a sacrifice to God. Moreover, this death is identical with life. They
who in the first sentence, are called dead, are in the second
denominated "they who live." So in another place, "I am crucified with
Christ, nevertheless I live;" death, therefore--that is the sacrifice
of self--is equivalent to life. Now, this rests upon a profound truth.
The death of Christ was a representation of the life of God. To me
this is the profoundest of all truths, that the whole of the life of
God is the sacrifice of self. God is Love; love is sacrifice--to give
rather than to receive--the blessedness of self-giving. If the life of
God were not such it would be a falsehood, to say that God is Love;
for even in our human nature, that which seeks to enjoy all instead of
giving all, is known by a very different name from that of love. All
the life of God is a flow of this divine self-giving charity. Creation
itself is sacrifice--the self-impartation of the divine Being.
Redemption too, is sacrifice, else it could not be love; for which
reason we will not surrender one iota of the truth that the death of
Christ was the sacrifice of God--the manifestation once in time of
that which is the eternal law of His life.
If man therefore, is to rise into the life of God, he must be absorbed
into the spirit of that sacrifice--he must die with Christ if he would
enter into his proper life. For sin is the withdrawing into self and
egotism, out of the vivifying life of God, which alone is our true
life. The moment the man sins he dies. Know we not how awfully true
that sentence is, "Sin revived, and I died?" The vivid life of sin is
the death of the man. Have we never felt that our true existence has
absolutely in that moment disappeared, and that _we_ are not?
I say therefore, that real human life is a perpetual completion and
repetition of the sacrifice of Christ--"all are dead;" the explanation
of which follows, "to live not to themselves, but to Him who died for
them and rose again." This is the truth which lies at the bottom of
the Romish doctrine of the mass. Rome asserts that in the mass a true
and proper sacrifice is offered up for the sins of all--that the
offering of Christ is for ever repeated. To this Protestantism has
objected vehemently, that there is but one offering once offered--an
objection in itself entirely true; yet the Romish doctrine contains a
truth which it is of importance to disengage from the gross and
material form with which it has been overlaid. Let us hear St. Paul,
"I fill up that which is behindhand of the sufferings of Christ, in my
flesh, for His body's sake, which is the Church." Was there then,
something behindhand of Christ's sufferings remaining uncompleted, of
which the sufferings of Paul could be in any sense the complement? He
says there was. Could the sufferings of Paul for the Church in any
form of correct expression be said to eke out the sufferings that were
complete? In one sense it is true to say that there is one offering
once offered _for_ all. But it is equally true to say that that one
offering is valueless, except so far as it is completed and repeated
in the life and self-offering _of_ all. This is the Christian's
sacrifice. Not mechanically completed in the miserable materialism of
the mass, but spiritually in the life of all in whom the Crucified
lives. The sacrifice of Christ is done over again in every life which
is lived, not to self but, to God.
Let one concluding observation be made--self-denial, self-sacrifice,
self-surrender! Hard doctrines, and impossible! Whereupon, in silent
hours, we sceptically ask, Is this possible? is it natural? Let
preacher and moralist say what they will, I am not here to sacrifice
myself for others. God sent me here for happiness, not misery. Now
introduce one sentence of this text of which we have as yet said
nothing, and the dark doctrine becomes illuminated--"the _love_ of
Christ constraineth us." Self-denial, for the sake of self-denial,
does no good; self-sacrifice for its own sake is no religious act at
all. If you give up a meal for the sake of showing power over self, or
for the sake of self-discipline, it is the most miserable of all
delusions. You are not more religious in doing this than before. This
is mere self-culture, and self-culture being occupied for ever about
self, leaves you only in that circle of self from which religion is to
free you; but to give up a meal that one you love may have it, is
properly a religious act--no hard and dismal duty, because made easy
by affection. To bear pain for the sake of bearing it has in it no
moral quality at all, but to bear it rather than surrender truth, or
in order to save another, is positive enjoyment as well as ennobling
to the soul. Did you ever receive even a blow meant for another in
order to shield that other? Do you not know that there was actual
pleasure in the keen pain far beyond the most rapturous thrill of
nerve which could be gained from pleasure in the midst of
painlessness? Is not the mystic yearning of love expressed in words
most purely thus, Let me suffer for him?
This element of love is that which makes this doctrine an intelligible
and blessed truth. So sacrifice alone, bare and unrelieved, is
ghastly, unnatural, and dead; but self-sacrifice, illuminated by love,
is warmth and life; it is the death of Christ, the life of God, the
blessedness, and only proper life of man.
VIII.
_Preached June 30, 1850._
THE POWER OF SORROW.
"Now I rejoice, not that ye were made sorry, but that ye sorrowed
to repentance: for ye were made sorry after a godly manner, that
ye might receive damage by us in nothing. For godly sorrow worketh
repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of
the world worketh death."--2 Corinthians vii. 9, 10.
That which is chiefly insisted on in this verse, is the distinction
between sorrow and repentance. To grieve over sin is one thing, to
repent of it is another.
The apostle rejoiced, not that the Corinthians sorrowed, but that they
sorrowed unto repentance. Sorrow has two results; it may end in
spiritual life, or in spiritual death; and in themselves, one of these
is as natural as the other. Sorrow may produce two kinds of
reformation--a transient, or a permanent one--an alteration in habits,
which originating in emotion, will last so long as that emotion
continues, and then after a few fruitless efforts, be given up,--a
repentance which will be repented of; or again, a permanent change,
which will be reversed by no after thought--a repentance not to be
repented of. Sorrow is in itself, therefore, a thing neither good nor
bad: its value depends on the spirit of the person on whom it falls.
Fire will inflame straw, soften iron, or harden clay; its effects are
determined by the object with which it comes in contact. Warmth
developes the energies of life, or helps the progress of decay. It is
a great power in the hot-house, a great power also in the coffin; it
expands the leaf, matures the fruit, adds precocious vigour to
vegetable life: and warmth too developes, with tenfold rapidity, the
weltering process of dissolution. So too with sorrow. There are
spirits in which it developes the seminal principle of life; there are
others in which it prematurely hastens the consummation of irreparable
decay. Our subject therefore is the twofold power of sorrow.
I. The fatal power of the sorrow of the world.
II. The life-giving power of the sorrow that is after God.
The simplest way in which the sorrow of the world works death, is seen
in the effect of mere regret for worldly loss. There are certain
advantages with which we come into the world. Youth, health, friends,
and sometimes property. So long as these are continued we are happy;
and because happy, fancy ourselves very grateful to God. We bask in
the sunshine of His gifts, and this pleasant sensation of sunning
ourselves in life we call religion; that state in which we all are
before sorrow comes, to test the temper of the metal of which our
souls are made, when the spirits are unbroken and the heart buoyant,
when a fresh morning is to a young heart what it is to the skylark.
The exuberant burst of joy seems a spontaneous hymn to the Father of
all blessing, like the matin carol of the bird; but this is not
religion: it is the instinctive utterance of happy feeling, having as
little of moral character in it, in the happy human being, as in the
happy bird.
Nay more--the religion which is only sunned into being by happiness,
is a suspicious thing: having been warmed by joy, it will become cold
when joy is over; and then when these blessings are removed, we count
ourselves hardly treated, as if we had been defrauded of a right;
rebellious hard feelings come; then it is you see people become
bitter, spiteful, discontented. At every step in the solemn path of
life, something must be mourned which will come back no more; the
temper that was so smooth becomes rugged and uneven; the benevolence
that expanded upon all, narrows into an ever dwindling selfishness--we
are alone; and then that death-like loneliness deepens as life goes
on. The course of man is downwards, and he moves with slow and ever
more solitary steps, down to the dark silence--the silence of the
grave. This is the death of heart; the sorrow of the world has worked
death.
Again there is a sorrow of the world, when sin is grieved for in a
worldly spirit. There are two views of sin: in one it is looked upon
as wrong--in the other, as producing loss--loss for example, of
character. In such cases, if character could be preserved before the
world, grief would not come; but the paroxysms of misery fall upon our
proud spirit when our guilt is made public. The most distinct instance
we have of this is in the life of Saul. In the midst of his apparent
grief, the thing still uppermost was that he had forfeited his kingly
character: almost the only longing was, that Samuel should honour him
before his people. And hence it comes to pass, that often remorse and
anguish only begin with exposure. Suicide takes place, not when the
act of wrong is done, but when the guilt is known, and hence too, many
a one becomes hardened who would otherwise have remained tolerably
happy; in consequence of which we blame the exposure, not the guilt;
we say if it had hushed up, all would have been well; that the servant
who robbed his master was ruined by taking away his character; and
that if the sin had been passed over, repentance might have taken
place, and he might have remained a respectable member of society. Do
not think so. It is quite true that remorse was produced by exposure,
and that the remorse was fatal; the sorrow which worked death arose
from that exposure, and so far exposure may be called the cause: had
it never taken place, respectability, and comparative peace, might
have continued; but outward respectability is not change of heart.
It is well known that the corpse has been preserved for centuries in
the iceberg, or in antiseptic peat; and that when atmospheric air was
introduced to the exposed surface it crumbled into dust. Exposure
worked dissolution, but it only manifested the death which was already
there; so with sorrow, it is not the living heart which drops to
pieces, or crumbles into dust, when it is revealed. Exposure did not
work death in the Corinthian sinner, but life.
There is another form of grief for sin, which the apostle would not
have rejoiced to see; it is when the hot tears come from pride. No two
tones of feeling, apparently similar, are more unlike than that in
which Saul exclaimed, "I have played the fool exceedingly," and that
in which the Publican cried out, "God be merciful to me a sinner."
The charge of folly brought against oneself only proves that we feel
bitterly for having lost our own self-respect. It is a humiliation to
have forfeited the idea which a man had formed of his own
character--to find that the very excellence on which he prided
himself, is the one in which he has failed. If there were a virtue for
which Saul was conspicuous, it was generosity; yet it was exactly in
this point of generosity in which he discovered himself to have
failed, when he was overtaken on the mountain, and his life spared by
the very man whom he was hunting to the death, with feelings of the
meanest jealousy. Yet there was no real repentance there; there was
none of that in which a man is sick of state and pomp. Saul could
still rejoice in regal splendour, go about complaining of himself to
the Ziphites, as if he was the most ill-treated and friendless of
mankind; he was still jealous of his reputation, and anxious to be
well thought of. Quite different is the tone in which the Publican,
who felt himself a sinner, asked for mercy. He heard the contumelious
expression of the Pharisee, "this Publican." With no resentment, he
meekly bore it as a matter naturally to be taken for granted--"he did
not so much as lift up his eyes to heaven;" he was as a worm which
turns in agony, but not revenge, upon the foot which treads it into
the dust.
Now this sorrow of Saul's too, works death: no merit can restore
self-respect; when once a man has found himself out, he cannot be
deceived again. The heart is as a stone: a speck of canker corrodes
and spreads within. What on this earth remains, but endless sorrow,
for him who has ceased to respect himself, and has no God to turn to?
II. The divine power of sorrow.
1. It works repentance. By repentance is meant, in Scripture, change
of life, alteration of habits, renewal of heart. This is the aim and
meaning of all sorrow. The consequences of sin are meant to wean from
sin. The penalty annexed to it is in the first instance, corrective,
not penal. Fire burns the child, to teach it one of the truths of this
universe--the property of fire to burn. The first time it cuts its
hand with a sharp knife, it has gained a lesson which it never will
forget. Now, in the case of pain, this experience is seldom, if ever,
in vain. There is little chance of a child forgetting that fire will
burn, and that sharp steel will cut; but the moral lessons contained
in the penalties annexed to wrong-doing are just as truly intended,
though they are by no means so unerring in enforcing their
application. The fever in the veins and the headache which succeed
intoxication, are meant to warn against excess. On the first occasion
they are simply corrective; in every succeeding one they assume more
and more a penal character in proportion as the conscience carries
with them the sense of ill desert.
Sorrow then, has done its work when it deters from evil; in other
words when it works repentance. In the sorrow of the world, the
obliquity of the heart towards evil is not cured; it seems as if
nothing cured it: heartache and trials come in vain; the history of
life at last is what it was at first. The man is found erring where he
erred before. The same course, begun with the certainty of the same
desperate end which has taken place so often before.
They have reaped the whirlwind, but they will again sow the wind.
Hence I believe, that life-giving sorrow is less remorse for that
which is irreparable, than anxiety to save that which remains. The
sorrow that ends in death hangs in funeral weeds over the sepulchres
of the past. Yet the present does not become more wise. Not one
resolution is made more firm, nor one habit more holy. Grief is all.
Whereas sorrow avails _only_ when the past is converted into
experience, and from failure lessons are learned which never are to be
forgotten.
2. Permanence of alteration; for after all, a steady reformation is a
more decisive test of the value of mourning than depth of grief.
The susceptibility of emotion varies with individuals. Some men feel
intensely, others suffer less keenly; but this is constitutional,
belonging to nervous temperament, rather than to moral character.
_This_ is the characteristic of the divine sorrow, that it is a
repentance "not repented of;" no transient, short-lived resolutions,
but sustained resolve.
And the beautiful law is, that in proportion as the, repentance
increases the grief diminishes. "I rejoice," says Paul, that "I made
you sorry, though it were but for a time." Grief for a time,
repentance for ever. And few things more signally prove the wisdom of
this apostle than his way of dealing with this grief of the
Corinthian. He tried no artificial means of intensifying it--did not
urge the duty of dwelling upon it, magnifying it, nor even of gauging
and examining it. So soon as grief had done its work, the apostle was
anxious to dry useless tears--he even feared lest haply such an one
should be swallowed up with overmuch sorrow. "A true penitent," says
Mr. Newman, "never forgives himself." O false estimate of the gospel
of Christ, and of the heart of man! A proud remorse does not forgive
itself the forfeiture of its own dignity; but it is the very beauty of
the penitence which is according to God, that at last the sinner,
realizing God's forgiveness, does learn to forgive himself. For what
other purpose did St. Paul command the Church of Corinth to give
ecclesiastical absolution, but in order to afford a symbol and
assurance of the Divine pardon, in which the guilty man's grief should
not be overwhelming, but that he should become reconciled to himself?
What is meant by the Publican's going _down to his house_ justified,
but that he felt at peace with himself and God?
3. It is sorrow with God--here called godly sorrow; in the margin
sorrowing according to God.
God sees sin not in its consequences but in itself: a thing infinitely
evil, even if the consequences were happiness to the guilty instead of
misery. So sorrow according to God, is to see sin as God sees it. The
grief of Peter was as bitter as that of Judas. He went out and wept
bitterly; how bitterly none can tell but they who have learned to look
on sin as God does. But in Peter's grief there was an element of hope;
and that sprung precisely from this--that he saw God in it all.
Despair of self did not lead to despair of God.
This is the great, peculiar feature of this sorrow: God is there,
accordingly self is less prominent. It is not a microscopic
self-examination, nor a mourning in which self is ever uppermost: _my_
character gone; the greatness of _my_ sin; the forfeiture of _my_
salvation. The thought of God absorbs all that. I believe the feeling
of true penitence would express itself in such words as these:--There
_is_ a righteousness, though I have not attained it. There is a
purity, and a love, and a beauty, though my life exhibits little of
it. In that I can rejoice. Of that I can feel the surpassing
loveliness. My doings? They are worthless, I cannot endure to think of
them. I am not thinking of them. I have something else to think of.
There, there; in that Life I see it. And so the Christian--gazing not
on what he is, but on what he desires to be--dares in penitence to
say, That righteousness is mine: dares, even when the recollection of
his sin is most vivid and most poignant, to say with Peter, thinking
less of himself than of God, and sorrowing as it were with God--"Lord,
Thou knowest all things, Thou knowest that I love Thee."
IX.
_Preached August 4, 1850._
SENSUAL AND SPIRITUAL EXCITEMENT.
"Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of
the Lord is. And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be
filled with the Spirit."--Ephesians v. 17, 18.