(Preached at the Chapel Royal, Whitehall, Ash Wednesday, 1860.)
Deuteronomy xxviii. 15. It shall come to pass, if thou wilt not
hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all his
commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day; that
all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee.
Many good people are pained by the Commination Service which we have
just heard read. They dislike to listen to it. They cannot say
'Amen' to its awful words. It seems to them to curse men; and their
conscience forbids them to join in curses. To imprecate evil on any
living being seems to them unchristian, barbarous, a relic of dark
ages and dark superstitions.
But does the Commination Service curse men? Are these good people
(who are certainly right in their horror of cursing) right in the
accusations which they bring against it? Or have they fallen into a
mistake as to the meaning of the service, owing, it may be supposed,
to that carelessness about the exact use of words, that want of
accurate and critical habits of mind, which is but too common among
religious people at the present day?
I cannot but think that they mistake, when they say that the
Commination Service curses men. For to curse a man, is to pray and
wish that God may become angry with him, and may vent his anger on
the man by punishing him. But I find no such prayer and wish in any
word of the Commination Service. Its form is not, 'Cursed _be_ he
that doeth such and such things,' but 'Cursed _is_ he that doeth
them.'
Does this seem to you a small difference? A fine-drawn question of
words? Is it, then, a small difference whether I say to my fellow-
man, I hope and pray that you may be stricken with disease, or
whether I say, You are stricken with disease, whether you know it or
not. I warn you of it, and I warn you to go to the physician? For
so great, and no less, is the difference.
And if any one shall say, that it is very probable that the authors
of the Liturgy were not conscious of this distinction; but that they
meant by cursing what priests in most ages have meant by it; I must
answer, that it is dealing them most hard and unfair measure, to
take for granted that they were as careless about words as we are;
that they were (like some of us) so ignorant of grammar as not to
know the difference between the indicative and the imperative mood;
and to assume this, in order to make them say exactly what they do
_not_ say, and to impute to them a ferocity of which no hint is
given in their Commination Service.
But some will say, Granted that the authors of the Commination
Service did not wish evil to sinners--granted that they did not long
to pray, with bell, book, and candle, that they might be tormented
for ever in Gehenna--granted that they did not desire to burn their
bodies on earth; those words are still dark and unchristian. They
could only be written by men who believed that God hates sinners,
that his will is to destroy them on earth, and torture them for ever
after death.
We may impute, alas! what motives and thoughts we choose, in the
face of our Lord's own words, Judge not, and ye shall not be judged.
But we shall not be fair and honest in imputing, unless we first
settle what these men meant, in the words which they have actually
written. What did they mean by 'cursed' is the question. And that
we can only answer by the context of the Commination Service. And
that again we can only answer by seeing what it means in the Bible,
which the Reformers profess to follow in all their writings.
Now, what does the Bible mean by a curse, and cursing?--For we are
bound to believe, in all fairness, that the Reformers meant the
same, and neither more nor less. The text, I think, tells us
plainly enough. We know that its words came true. We know that the
Jews _did_ perish out of their native land, as the Author of this
book foretold, in consequence of doing that against which Moses
warned them. We know also that they did not perish by any
miraculous intervention of Providence: but simply as any other
nation would have perished; by profligacy, internal weakness, civil
war, and, at last, by foreign conquest.
We know that their destruction was the natural consequence of their
own folly. Why are we to suppose that the prophet meant anything
but that? He foretells the result. Why are we to suppose that he
did not foresee the means by which that result would happen? Why
are we, in the name of all justice, to impute to him an expectation
of miraculous interferences, about which he says no word? The curse
which he foretold was the natural consequence of the sins of the
nation. Why are we not to believe that he considered it as such?
Why are we not to believe that the Bible meaning of a curse, is
simply the natural ill-consequence of men's own ill-actions? I
believe that if you will apply the same rule to other places of
Scripture, you will have reason to reverence the letter and the
Spirit of Scripture more and more, and will free your minds from
many a superstitious and magical fancy, which will prevent you alike
from understanding the Bible and the Commination Service.
The Book of Deuteronomy, like the rest of Moses' laws, says nothing
whatever about the life to come. It says, that sin is to be
punished, and virtue rewarded, in this life; and the Commination
Service, when it quotes the Book of Deuteronomy, means so, so I
presume, likewise. Indeed, if we look at the very remarkable, and
most invaluable address which the Commination Service contains, we
shall find its author saying the same thing, in the very passages
which are to some minds most offensive.
For even in this life the door of mercy may be shut, and we may cry
in vain for mercy, when it is the time for justice. This is not
merely a doctrine: it is a fact; a common, patent fact. Men do
wrong, and escape, again and again, the just punishment of their
deeds; but how often there are cases in which a man does not escape;
when he is filled with the fruit of his own devices, and left to the
misery which he has earned; when the covetous and dishonest man
ruins himself past all recovery; when the profligate is left in a
shameful old age, with worn-out body and defiled mind, to rot into
an unhonoured grave; when the hypocrite who has tampered with his
conscience is left without any conscience at all.
They have chosen the curse, and the curse is come upon them to the
uttermost. So it is. Is the Commination service uncharitable, is
the preacher uncharitable, when they tell men so? No more so, than
the physician is uncharitable, when he says,--'If you go on misusing
thus your lungs, or your digestion, you will ruin them past all
cure.' Is God to be blamed because this is a fact? Why then
because the other is a fact likewise?
Now if this be, as I believe, the doctrine of the commination
service; if this be, as I believe, the message of Ash-Wednesday, it
is one which is quite free from superstition or cruelty: but it is
a message more disagreeable, and more terrible too, than any magical
imprecations of harm to the sinner could bring. More disagreeable.
For which is more galling to human pride, to be told,--Sin is
certainly a clever, and politic, and successful trade, as far as
this world is concerned. It is only in the next world, or in the
case of rare and peculiar visitations and judgments in this world,
that it will harm you? Or to be told,--Sin is no more clever,
politic, or successful here, than hereafter. The wrong-doing which
looks to you so prudent is folly. You, man of the world as you may
think yourself, are simply, as often as you do wrong, blind,
ignorant, suicidal. You are your own curse; your acts are their own
curse. The injury to your own character and spirit, the injury to
your fellow-creatures, which will again re-act on you,--these are
the curses of God, which you will feel some day too heavy to be
borne. And which is more terrible? To tell a man, that God will
judge and curse him by unexpected afflictions, or at least by
casting him into Gehenna in the world to come: or to tell him, 'You
are judged already. The curse is on you already?'
The first threat he may get rid of, by denying the fact; by saying
that God does not generally interfere to punish bad men in this
life; that he does not strike them dead, swallow them up; and he may
even quote Scripture on his side, and call on Solomon to bear
witness how as dieth the fool, so dieth wise man; and that there is
one event to the righteous and the wicked.
As for the fear of Gehenna, again, after he dies: that is too dim
and distant; too unlike anything which he has seen in this life (now
that the tortures and Autos da fe of the middle age have
disappeared) to frighten him very severely, except in rare moments,
when his imagination is highly excited. And even then, he can--in
practice he does--look forward to 'making his peace with God' as it
is called, at last, and fulfilling Baalam's wish of dying the death
of the righteous, after living the life of the wicked. He knows
well, too, that when that day comes, he can find--alas! that it
should be so--priests and preachers in plenty, of some communion or
other, who will give him his viaticum, and bid him depart in peace
to that God, who has said that there is no peace to the wicked.
But terrible, truly terrible and heart searching for the wrongdoer
is the message--God does not curse thee: thou hast cursed thyself.
God will not go out of his way to punish thee: thou hast gone out
of his way, and thereby thou art punishing thyself, just as, by
abusing thy body, thou bringest a curse upon it; so by abusing thy
soul. God does not break his laws to punish drunkenness or
gluttony. The laws themselves, the laws of nature, the beneficent
laws of life, nutrition, growth, and health, they punish thee; and
kill by the very same means by which they make alive. And so with
thy soul, thy character, thy humanity. God does not break his laws
to punish its sins. The laws themselves punish; every fresh wrong
deed, and wrong thought, and wrong desire of thine sets thee more
and more out of tune with those immutable and eternal laws of the
Moral Universe, which have their root in the absolute and necessary
character of God himself. All things that he has ordained; the laws
of the human body, the laws of the human soul, the laws of society,
the laws of all heaven and earth are arrayed against thee; for thou
hast arrayed thyself against them. They have not excommunicated
thee: thou hast, single-handed, excommunicated thyself. In thine
own self-will, thou hast set thyself to try thy strength against God
and his whole universe. Dost thou fancy that he needs to interfere
with the working of that universe, to punish such a worm as thee?
No more than the great mill engine need stop, and the overseer of it
interfere with the machinery, if the drunken or careless workman
should entangle himself among the wheels. The wheels move on, doing
their duty, spinning cloth for the use of man: but the workman who
should have worked with them, is entangled among them. He is out of
his place; and slowly, but irresistibly, they are grinding him to
powder, as the whole universe is grinding thee. Heart-searching,
indeed, is such a message; for it will come home, not merely to that
very rare character, the absolutely wicked man, the ideal sinner, at
whom the preacher too often aims ideal arrows, which vanish in the
air: not to him merely will it come home, but to ourselves, to us
average human beings, inconsistent, half-formed, struggling lamely
and confusedly between good and evil. Oh let us take home with us
to-day this belief, the only belief in this matter possible in an
age of science, which is daily revealing more and more that God is a
God, not of disorder, but of order. Let us take home, I say, the
awful belief, that every wrong act of ours does of itself sow the
seeds of its own punishment; and that those seeds will assuredly
bear fruit, now, here in this life. Let us believe that God's
judgments, though they will culminate, no doubt, hereafter in one
great day, and "one divine far-off event, to which the whole
creation moves," are yet about our path and about our bed, now,
here, in this life. Let us believe, that if we are to prepare to
meet our God, we must do it now, here in this life, yea and all day
long; for he is not far off from any one of us, seeing that in him
we live, and move, and have our being; and can never go from his
presence, never flee from his spirit. Let us believe that God's
good laws, and God's good order, are in themselves and of
themselves, the curse and punishment of every sin of ours; and that
Ash-Wednesday, returning year after year, whether we be glad or
sorry, good or evil, bears witness to that most awful and yet most
blessed fact.
My friends, this is the preacher's Ash-Wednesday's message: but,
thanks be to God, it is not all. It is written--'If thou, Lord,
wilt be extreme to mark what is done amiss: Oh Lord, who may abide
it? For there is mercy with thee; therefore shalt thou be feared.'
It is written--'On whomsoever this stone shall fall, it shall grind
him to powder:' but it is written too--'Whosoever shall fall on this
stone shall be broken;' and again, 'The broken and the contrite
heart, O God, thou shall not despise.' There is such a thing as
pardon; pardon full and free, for the sake of the precious blood of
Christ. Lent may be a time of awe and of shame: but it is not a
time of despair. Meanwhile remember this; that God has set before
you blessing and cursing, and that you may turn your life and God's
whole universe, as you will, either into that blessing or into that
curse.