' . . . the promise made of none effect.'--_Paul_
Toward the end of the thirteenth century Edward the First, the English
Justinian, brought a select colony of artists from Italy to England and
gave them a commission to execute their best coinage for the English
Mint. Deft and skilful as those artists were, the work they turned out
was but rude and clumsy compared with some of the gold and silver and
copper coins of our day. The Florentine artists took a sheet of gold or
of silver and divided the sheet up with great scissors, and then they
hammered the cut-out pieces as only a Florentine hammerman could hammer
them. But, working with such tools, and working on such methods, those
goldsmiths and silversmiths, with all their art, found it impossible to
give an absolutely equal weight and worth to every piece of money that
they turned out. For one thing, their cut and hammered coins had no
carved rims round their edges as all our gold and silver and even copper
coinage now has. And, accordingly, the clever rogues of that day soon
discovered that it was far easier for them to take up a pair of shears
and to clip a sliver of silver off the rough rim of a shilling, or a
shaving of gold off a sovereign, than it was to take of their coats and
work a hard day's work. Till to clip the coin of the realm soon became
one of the easiest and most profitable kinds of crime. In the time of
Elizabeth a great improvement was made in the way of coining the public
money; but it was soon found that this had only made matters worse. For
now, side by side with a pure and unimpaired and full-valued currency,
and mingled up everywhere with it, there was the old, clipped, debased,
and far too light gold and silver money; till troubles arose in
connection with the coinage and circulation of the country that can only
be told by Macaulay's extraordinarily graphic pen. 'It may well be
doubted,' Macaulay says, in the twenty-first chapter of his _History of
England_, 'whether all the misery which has been inflicted on the English
nation in a quarter of a century by bad Kings, bad Ministers, bad
Parliaments, and bad Judges was equal to the misery caused in a single
year by bad crowns and bad shillings. Whether Whigs or Tories,
Protestants or Papists were uppermost, the grazier drove his beasts to
market, the grocer weighed out his currants, the draper measured out his
broadcloth, the hum of buyers and sellers was as loud as ever in the
towns; the cream overflowed the pails of Cheshire; the apple juice foamed
in the presses of Herefordshire; the piles of crockery glowed in the
furnaces of the Trent, and the barrows of coal rolled fast along the
timber railways of the Tyne. But when the great instrument of exchange
became thoroughly deranged all trade and all industry were smitten as
with a palsy. Nothing could be purchased without a dispute. Over every
counter there was wrangling from morning to night. The employer and his
workmen had a quarrel as regularly as Saturday night came round. On a
fair day or a market day the clamours, the disputes, the reproaches, the
taunts, the curses, were incessant. No merchant would contract to
deliver goods without making some stipulation about the quality of the
coin in which he was to be paid. The price of the necessaries of life,
of shoes, of ale, of oatmeal, rose fast. The bit of metal called a
shilling the labourer found would not go so far as sixpence. One day
Tonson sends forty brass shillings to Dryden, to say nothing of clipped
money. The great poet sends them all back and demands in their place
good guineas. "I expect," he says, "good silver, not such as I had
formerly." Meanwhile, at every session of the Old Bailey the most
terrible example of coiners and clippers was made. Hurdles, with four,
five, six wretches convicted of counterfeiting or mutilating the money of
the realm, were dragged month after month up Holborn Hill.' But I cannot
copy the whole chapter, wonderful as the writing is. Suffice it to say
that before the clippers could be rooted out, and confidence restored
between buyer and seller, the greatest statesmen, the greatest
financiers, and the greatest philosophers were all at their wits' end.
Kings' speeches, cabinet councils, bills of Parliament, and showers of
pamphlets were all full in those days of the clipper and the coiner. All
John Locke's great intellect came short of grappling successfully with
the terrible crisis the clipper of the coin had brought upon England.
Carry all that, then, over into the life of personal religion, after the
manner of our Lord's parables, and after the manner of the _Pilgrim's
Progress_ and the _Holy War_, and you will see what an able and
impressive use John Bunyan will make of the shears of the coin-clippers
of his day. Macaulay has but made us ready to open and understand
Bunyan. 'After this, my Lord apprehended Clip-Promise. Now, because he
was a notorious villain, for by his doings much of the king's coin was
abused, therefore he was made a public example. He was arraigned and
judged to be set first in the pillory, then to be whipped by all the
children and servants in Mansoul, and then to be hanged till he was dead.
Some may wonder at the severity of this man's punishment, but those that
are honest traders in Mansoul they are sensible of the great abuse that
one clipper of promises in little time may do in the town of Mansoul;
and, truly, my judgment is that all those of his name and life should be
served out even as he.'
The grace of God is like a bullion mass of purest gold, and then Jesus
Christ is the great ingot of that gold, and then Moses, and David, and
Isaiah, and Hosea, and Paul, and Peter, and John are the inspired artists
who have commission to take both bullion and ingot, and out of them to
cut, and beat, and smelt, and shape, and stamp, and superscribe the
promises, and then to issue the promises to pass current in the market of
salvation like so many shekels, and pounds, and pence, and farthings, and
mites, as the case may be. And it was just these royal coins, imaged and
superscribed so richly and so beautifully, that Clip-Promise so
mutilated, abused, and debased, till for doing so he was hanged by the
neck till he was dead.
1. The very house of Israel herself, the very Mint-house, Tower Hill,
and Lombard Street of Israel herself, was full of false coiners and
clippers of the promises; as full as ever England was at her very worst.
Israel clipped her Messianic promises and lived upon the clippings
instead of upon the coin. Her coming Christ, and His salvation already
begun, were the true spiritual currency of Old Testament times; while
round that central Image of her great promise there ran an outside rim of
lesser promises that all took their true and their only value from Him
whose image and superscription stood within. But those besotted and
infatuated men of Israel, instead of entering into and living by the
great spiritual promises given to them in their Messiah, made lands, and
houses, and meat, and drink, all the Messiah they cared for. Matthew
Henry says that when we go to the merchant to buy goods, he gives us the
paper and the pack-thread to the bargain. Well, those children and fools
in Israel actually threw away the goods and hoarded and boasted over the
paper and the pack-thread. Our old Scottish lawyers have made us
familiar with the distinction in the church between _spiritualia_ and
_temporalia_. Well, the Jews let the _spiritualia_ go to those who cared
to take such things, while they held fast to the _temporalia_. And all
that went on till His disciples had the effrontery to clip and coin under
our Lord's very eyes, and even to ask Him to hold the coin while they
sharpened their shears. 'O faithless and perverse generation! How long
shall I be with you? How long shall I suffer you? Have I been so long
with you, and yet hast thou not known Me, Philip? O fools, and slow of
heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! And beginning at
Moses and all the prophets He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the
things concerning Himself.'
2. But those who live in glass houses must take care not to throw
stones. And thus the greatest fool in Israel is safe from you and me.
For, like them, and just as if we had never read one word about them, we
bend our hearts and our children's hearts to things seen and temporal,
and then, after things seen and temporal have all cast us off, we begin
to ask if there is any solace or sweetness for a cast-off heart in things
unseen and eternal. There are great gaps clipt out of our Bibles that
not God Himself can ever print or paste in again. Look and see if half
the Book of Proverbs, for instance, with all its noble promises to a
godly youth, is not clipt clean out of your dismembered Bible. That fine
leaf also, 'My son, give Me thine heart,' is clean gone out of the twenty-
third chapter of the Proverbs years and years ago. As is the best part
of the noble Book of Daniel, and almost the whole of Second Timothy.
'Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and meat and
drink, and wife and child shall be added unto you.' Your suicidal shears
have cut that golden promise for ever out of your Sermon on the Mount. So
much so that if any or all of these temporal mercies ever come to you,
they will come of pure and undeserved mercy, for the time has long passed
when you could plead any promise for them. Still, there are two most
excellent uses left to which you can even yet put your mangled and
dismembered Bible. You can make a splendid use of its gaps and of its
gashes, and of those waste places where great promises at one time stood.
You can make a grand use even of those gaps if you will descend into them
and draw out of them humiliation and repentance, compunction, contrition,
and resignation. And this use also: When you are moved to take some man
who is still young into your confidence, ask him to let you see his Bible
and then let him see yours, and point out to him the rents and wounds and
wilderness places in yours. And thus, by these two uses of a clipped-up
and half-empty Bible, you may make gains that shall yet set you above
those whose Bibles of promises are still as fresh as when they came from
God's own hand. And Samson said, I will now put forth a riddle unto you:
Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth
sweetness.
3. 'Go out,' said the Lord of Mansoul, 'and apprehend Clip-Promise and
bring him before me.' And they did so. 'Go down to Edinburgh to-night,
and go to the door of such and such a church, and, as he comes out arrest
Clip-the-Commandments, for he has heard My word all this day again but
will not do it.' Where would you be by midnight if God rose up in anger
and swore at this moment that your disobedient time should be no longer?
You would be speechless before such a charge, for the shears are in your
pocket at this moment with which you have clipped to pieces this Sabbath-
day: shears red with the blood of the Fourth Commandment. For, when did
you rise off your bed this resurrection morning? And what did you do
when you did rise? What has your reading and your conversation been this
whole Lord's day? How full your heart would have been of faith and love
and holiness by this time of night had you not despised the Lord of the
Sabbath, and cast all His commandments and opportunities to you behind
your back? What private exercise have you had all day with your Father
who sees in secret? How often have you been on your knees, and where,
and how long, and for what, and for whom? What work of mercy have you
done to-day, or determined to do to-morrow? And so with all the divine
commandments: Mosaic and Christian, legal and evangelical. Such as: A
tenth of all I have given to thee; a covenant with a wandering eye; a
mouth once speaking evil, is it now well watched? not one vessel only,
but all the vessels of thy body sanctified till every thought and
imagination is well under the obedience of Christ. Lest His anger for
all that begin to burn to-night, make your bed with Eli and Samuel in His
sanctuary to-night, lest the avenger of the blood of the commandments
leap out on you in your sleep!
4. The Old Serpent took with him the great shears of hell, and clipped
'Thou shalt surely die' out of the second chapter of Genesis. And the
same enemy of mankind will clip all the terror of the Lord out of your
heart to-night again, if he can. And he will do it in this way, if he
can. He will have some one at the church door ready and waiting for you.
As soon as the blessing is pronounced, some one will take you by the arm
and will entertain you with the talk you love, or that you once loved,
till you will be ashamed to confess that there is any terror or turning
to God in your heart. No! Thou shalt not surely die, says the serpent
still. Why, hast thou not trampled Sabbaths and sermons past counting
under thy feet? What commandment, laid on body or soul, hast thou not
broken, and thou art still adding drunkenness to thirst, and God doth not
know! 'The woman said unto the serpent, We may not eat of it, neither
may we touch it, lest we die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye
shall not surely die.'
5. You must all have heard of Clito, who used to say that he desired no
more time for rising and dressing and saying his prayers than about a
quarter of an hour. Well, that was clipping the thing pretty close,
wasn't it? At the same time it must be admitted that a good deal of
prayer may be got through in a quarter of an hour if you do not lose any
moment of it. Especially in the first quarter of the day, if you are
expeditious enough to begin to pray before you even begin to dress. And
prayer is really a very strange experience. There are things about
prayer that no man has yet fully found out or told to any. For one
thing, once well began it grows upon a man in a most extraordinary and
unheard-of way. This same Clito for instance, some time after we find
him at his prayers before his eyes are open; and then he keeps all
morning making his bath, his soap, his towels, his brushes, and his
clothes all one long artifice of prayer. And that till there is not a
single piece of his dressing-room furniture that is not ready to swear at
the last day that its master long before he died had become a man full of
secret prayer. There is a fountain filled with blood! he exclaims, as he
throws himself into his bath; and Jeremiah second and twenty-second he
uses regularly to repeat to himself half a dozen times a day as he washes
the smoke and dust of the city off his hands and face. And then
Revelation third and eighteenth till his toilet is completed. Nay, this
same Clito has come to be such a devotee to that he had at one time been
so expeditious with, that I have seen him forget himself on the street
and think that his door was shut. But there is really no use telling you
all that about Clito. For, till you try closet-prayer for yourself, all
that God or man can say to you on that subject will be water spilt on the
ground. All we can say is, Try it. Begin it. Some desperate day try
it. Stop when you are on the way to the pond and try it. Stop when you
are fastening up the rope and try it. When the poison is moving in the
cup, stop, shut your door first. Try God first. See if He is still
waiting. And, always after, when the steel shears of a too early, too
crowded, and far too exacting day are clipping you out of all time for
prayer, then what should you do? What do you do when you simply cannot
get your proper fresh air and exercise everyday? Do you not fall back on
the plasticity and pliability of nature and take your air and exercise in
large parcels? You take a ride into the country two or three times a
week. Or, two afternoons a week you have ten miles alone if you cannot
get a godly friend. And then two or three times a year, if you can
afford it, you climb an Alp or a Grampian every day for a week or a
month; and, so gracious and so adaptable is human nature, that, what
others get daily, you get weekly, or monthly, or quarterly, or yearly.
And, though a soul is not to be too much presumed upon, Clito came to
tell his friends that his soul could on occasion take in prayer and
praise enough for a week in a single morning or afternoon, and, almost,
for a whole year in a good holiday. As Christ Himself did when He said:
Come away apart into a desert place and rest a while; for there are so
many people coming and going here that we have no time so much as to eat.
6. But I see I must clip off my last point with you, which was to tell
you what you already know only too well, and that is, what terrible
shears a bad conscience is armed with, and what havoc she makes at all
ages of a poor sinner's Bible. But you can spare that head. You can
preach on that text to yourselves far better than all your ministers.
Only, take home with you these two lines I have clipped out of Fraser of
Brea for you. Nothing in man, he says to us, is to be a ground of
despair, since the whole ground of all our hope is in Christ alone.
Christ's relation is always to men as they are sinners and not as they
are righteous. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to
repentance. 'Tis with sinners, then, Christ has to do. Nothing damns
but unbelief; and unbelief is just holding back from pressing God with
this promise, that Christ came to save sinners. This is a faithful
saying, and worthy of all acceptation, and it is still to be found
standing in the most clipped-up Bible, that Christ Jesus came into the
world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.