'Whosoever shall be ashamed of Me, and of My words, of him shall the
Son of Man be ashamed, when He shall come in His own glory, and in His
Father's, and of the holy angels.'--Our Lord.
Shame has not got the attention that it deserves either from our moral
philosophers or from our practical and experimental divines. And yet it
would well repay both classes of students to attend far more to shame.
For, what really is shame? Shame is an original instinct planted in our
souls by our Maker, and intended by Him to act as a powerful and pungent
check to our doing of any act that is mean or dishonourable in the eyes
of our fellow-men. Shame is a kind of social conscience. Shame is a
secondary sense of sin. In shame, our imagination becomes a kind of
moral sense. Shame sets up in our bosom a not undivine tribunal, which
judges us and sentences us in the absence or the silence of nobler and
more awful sanctions and sentences. But then, as things now are with us,
like all the rest of the machinery of the soul, shame has gone sadly
astray both in its objects and in its operations, till it demands a long,
a severe, and a very noble discipline over himself before any man can
keep shame in its proper place and directed in upon its proper objects.
In the present disorder of our souls, we are all acutely ashamed of many
things that are not the proper objects of shame at all; while, on the
other hand, we feel no shame at all at multitudes of things that are
really most blameworthy, dishonourable, and contemptible. We are ashamed
of things in our lot and in our circumstances that, if we only knew it,
are our opportunity and our honour; we are ashamed of things that are the
clear will and the immediate dispensation of Almighty God. And, then, we
feel no shame at all at the most dishonourable things, and that simply
because the men around us are too coarse in their morals and too dull in
their sensibilities to see any shame in such things. And thus it comes
about that, in the very best of men, their still perverted sense of shame
remains in them a constant snare and a source of temptation. A man of a
fine nature feels keenly the temptation to shrink from those paths of
truth and duty that expose him to the cruel judgments and the coarse and
scandalising attacks of public and private enemies. It was in the Valley
of Humiliation that Shame set upon Faithful, and it is a real humiliation
to any man of anything of this pilgrim's fine character and feeling to be
attacked, scoffed at, and held up to blame and opprobrium. And the finer
and the more affectionate any man's heart and character are, the more he
feels and shrinks from the coarse treatment this world gives to those
whom it has its own reasons to hate and assail. They had the stocks and
the pillory and the shears in Bunyan's rude and uncivilised day, by means
of which many of the best men of that day were exposed to the insults and
brutalities of the mob. The newspapers would be the pillory of our day,
were it not that, on the whole, the newspaper press is conducted with
such scrupulous fairness and with a love of truth and justice such that
no man need shrink from the path of duty through fear of insult and
injury.
But it is time to come to the encounter between Shame and Faithful in the
Valley of Humiliation. Shame, properly speaking, is not one of our
Bunyan gallery of portraits at all. Shame, at best, is but a kind of
secondary character in this dramatic book. We do not meet with Shame
directly; we only hear about him through the report of Faithful. That
first-class pilgrim was almost overcome of Shame, so hot was their
encounter; and it is the extraordinarily feeling, graphic, and realistic
account of their encounter that Faithful gives us that has led me to take
up Shame for our reproof and correction to-night.
Religion altogether, but especially all personal religion, said Shame to
Faithful, is an unmanly business. There is a certain touch of smallness
and pitifulness, he said, in all religion, but especially in experimental
religion. It brings a man into junctures and into companionships, and it
puts offices and endurances upon one such as try a man if he has any
greatness of spirit about him at all. This life on which you are
entering, said Shame, will cost you many a blush before you are done with
it. You will lay yourself open to many a scoff. The Puritan religion,
and all the ways of that religious fraternity, are peculiarly open to the
shafts of ridicule. Now, all that was quite true. There was no denying
the truth of what Shame said. And Faithful felt the truth of it all, and
felt it most keenly, as he confessed to Christian. The blood came into
my face as the fellow spake, and what he said for a time almost beat me
out of the upward way altogether. But in this dilemma also all true
Christians can fall back, as Faithful fell back, upon the example of
their Master. In this as in every other experience of temptation and
endurance, our Lord is the forerunner and the example of His people. Our
Lord was in all points tempted like as we are, and among all His other
temptations He was tempted to be ashamed of His work on earth and of the
life and the death His work led Him into. He must have often felt
ashamed at the treatment He received during His life of humiliation, as
it is well called; and He must often have felt ashamed of His disciples:
but all that is blotted out by the crowning shame of the cross. We hang
our worst criminals rather than behead or shoot them, in order to heap up
the utmost possible shame and disgrace upon them, as well as to execute
justice upon them. And what the hangman's rope is in our day, all that
the cross was in our Lord's day. And, then, as if the cross itself was
not shame enough, all the circumstances connected with His cross were
planned and carried out so as to heap the utmost possible shame and
humiliation upon His head. Our prison warders have to watch the
murderers in their cells night and day, lest they should take their own
life in order to escape the hangman's rope; but our Lord, keenly as He
felt His coming shame, said to His horrified disciples, Behold, we go up
to Jerusalem, when the Son of Man shall be mocked, and spitefully
entreated, and spitted on; and they shall scourge Him and put Him to
death. Do you ever think of your Lord in His shame? How they made a
fool of Him, as we say. How they took off His own clothes and put on Him
now a red cloak and now a white; how they put a sword of lath in His
hand, and a crown of thorns on His head; how they bowed the knee before
Him, and asked royal favours from Him; and then how they spat in His
face, and struck Him on the cheek, while the whole house rang with shouts
of laughter. And, then, the last indignity of man, how they stripped Him
naked and lashed His naked and bleeding body to a whipping-post. And how
they wagged their heads and put out their tongues at Him when He was on
the tree, and invited Him to come down and preach to them now, and they
would all become His disciples. Did not Shame say the simple truth when
he warned Faithful that religion had always and from the beginning made
its followers the ridicule of their times?
If you are really going to be a religious man, Shame went on, you will
have to carry about with you a very tender conscience, and a more unmanly
and miserable thing than a tender conscience I cannot conceive. A tender
conscience will cost you something, let me tell you, to keep it. If
nothing else, a tender conscience will all your life long expose you to
the mockery and the contempt of all the brave spirits of the time. That
also is true. At any rate, a tender conscience will undoubtedly compel
its possessor to face the brave spirits of the time. There is a good
story told to this present point about Sir Robert Peel, a Prime Minister
of our Queen. When a young man, Peel was one of the guests at a select
dinner-party in the West-end of London. And after the ladies had left
the table the conversation of the gentlemen took a turn such that it
could not have taken as long as the ladies were present. Peel took no
share in the stories or the merriment that went on, and, at last, he rose
up and ordered his carriage, and, with a burning face, left the room.
When he was challenged as to why he had broken up the pleasant party so
soon, he could only reply that his conscience would not let him stay any
longer. No doubt Peel felt the mocking laughter that he left behind him,
but, as Shame said to Faithful, the tenderness of the young statesman's
conscience compelled him to do as he did. But we are not all Peels. And
there are plenty of workshops and offices and dinner-tables in our own
city, where young men who would walk up to the cannon's mouth without
flinching have not had Peel's courage to protest against indecency or to
confess that they belonged to an evangelical church. If a church is only
sufficiently unevangelical there is no trial of conscience or of courage
in confessing that you belong to it. But as Shame so ably and honestly
said, that type of religion that creates a tender conscience in its
followers, and sets them to watch their words and their ways, and makes
them tie themselves up from all hectoring liberty--to choose that
religion, and to cleave to it to the end, will make a young man the
ridicule still of all the brave spirits round about him. Ambitious young
men get promotion and reward every day among us for desertions and
apostasies in religion, for which, if they had been guilty of the like in
war, they would have been shot. 'And so you are a Free Churchman, I am
told.' That was all that was said. But the sharp youth understood
without any more words, and he made his choice accordingly; till it is
becoming a positive surprise to find the rising members of certain
professions in certain churches. The Quakers have a proverb in England
that a family carriage never drives for two generations past the parish
church door. Of which state of matters Shame showed himself a shrewd
prophet two hundred years ago when he said that but few of the rich and
the mighty and the wise remained long of Faithful's Puritan opinion
unless they were first persuaded to be fools, and to be of a voluntary
fondness to venture the loss of all.
And I will tell you two other things, said sharp-sighted and plain-spoken
Shame, that your present religion will compel you to do if you adhere to
it. It will compel you from time to time to ask your neighbour's
forgiveness even for petty faults, and it will insist with you that you
make restitution when you have done the weak and the friendless any hurt
or any wrong. And every manly mind will tell you that life is not worth
having on such humbling terms as those are. Whatever may be thought
about Shame in other respects, it cannot be denied that he had a sharp
eye for the facts of life, and a shrewd tongue in setting those facts
forth. He has hit the blot exactly in the matter of our first duty to
our neighbour; he has put his finger on one of the matters where so many
of us, through a false shame, come short. It costs us a tremendous
struggle with our pride to go to our neighbour and to ask his forgiveness
for a fault, petty fault or other. Did you ever do it? When did you do
it last, to whom, and for what? One Sabbath morning, now many years ago,
I had occasion to urge this elementary evangelical duty on my people
here, and I did it as plainly as I could. Next day one of my young men,
who is now a devoted and honoured elder, came to me and told me that he
had done that morning what his conscience yesterday told him in the
church to do. He had gone to a neighbour's place of business, had asked
for an interview, and had begged his neighbour's pardon. I am sure
neither of those two men have forgotten that moment, and the thought of
it has often since nerved me to speak plainly about some of their most
unwelcome duties to my people. Shame, no doubt, pulled back my noble
friend's hand when it was on the office bell, but, like Faithful in the
text, he shook him out of his company and went in. I spoke of the
remarkable justice of the newspaper press in the opening of these
remarks. And it so happens that, as I lay down my pen to rest my hand
after writing this sentence and lift a London evening paper, I read this
editorial note, set within the well-known brackets at the end of an
indignant and expostulatory letter: ['Our correspondent's complaint is
just. The paragraph imputing bad motives should not have been
admitted.'] I have no doubt that editor felt some shame as he handed
that apologetic note to the printer. But not to speak of any other
recognition and recompense, he has the recompense of the recognition of
all honourable-minded men who have read that honourable admission and
apology.
Shame was quite right in his scoff about restitution also. For
restitution rings like a trumpet tone through the whole of the law of
Moses, and then the New Testament republishes that law if only in the
exquisite story of Zaccheus. And, indeed, take it altogether, I do not
know where to find in the same space a finer vindication of Puritan
pulpit ethics than just in this taunting and terrifying attack on
Faithful. There is no better test of true religion both as it is
preached and practised than just to ask for and to grant forgiveness, and
to offer and accept restitution. Now, does your public and private life
defend and adorn your minister's pulpit in these two so practical
matters? Could your minister point to you as a proof of the ethics of
evangelical teaching? Can any one in this city speak up in defence of
your church and thus protest: 'Say what you like about that church and
its ministers, all I can say is, that its members know how to make an
apology; as, also, how to pay back with interest what they at one time
damaged or defrauded'? Can any old creditor's widow or orphan stand up
for our doctrine and defend our discipline pointing to you? If you go on
to be a Puritan, said Shame to Faithful, you will have to ask your
neighbour's forgiveness even for petty faults, and you will have to make
restitution with usury where you have taken anything from any one, and
how will you like that?
And what did you say to all this, my brother? Say? I could not tell
what to say at the first. I felt my blood coming up into my face at some
of the things that Shame said and threatened. But, at last, I began to
consider that that which is highly esteemed among men is often had in
abomination with God. And I said to myself again, Shame tells me what
men do and what men think, but he has told me nothing about what He
thinks with Whom I shall soon have alone to do. Therefore, thought I,
what God thinks and says is wisest and best, let all the men of the world
say what they will. Let all false shame, then, depart from my heart, for
how else shall I look upon my Lord, and how shall He look upon me at His
coming?