TEMPORARY

"They are they, which, when they hear, receive the word with joy; and

have no root, which for a while believe, and in time of temptation

fall away."--_Our Lord_.

"Well, then, did you not know about ten years ago one Temporary in your

parts who was a forward man in religion? Know him! replied the other.

Yes. For my house not being above three miles from his house he would

ofttimes come to me, and that with many tears. Truly I pitied the man,

and was not altogether without hope of him; but one may see that it is

not every one who cries Lord, Lord. And now, since we are talking about

him, let us a little inquire into the reason of the sudden backsliding of

him and such others. It may be very profitable, said Christian, but do

you begin. Well, then, there are in my judgment several reasons for it."

And then, with the older man's entire approval, Hopeful sets forth

several reasons, taken from his own observation of backsliders, why so

many men's religion is such a temporary thing; why so many run well for a

time, and then stand still, and then turn back.

1. The fear of man bringeth a snare, said Hopeful, moralising over his

old acquaintance Temporary. And how true that observation is every

evangelical minister knows to his deep disappointment. A young man comes

to his minister at some time of distress in his life, or at some time of

revival of religion in the community, or at an ordinary communion season,

and gives every sign that he is early and fairly embarked on an

honourable Christian life. He takes his place in the Church of Christ,

and he puts out his hand to her work, till we begin to look forward with

boastfulness to a life of great stability and great attainment for that

man. Our Lord, as we see from so many of His parables, must have had

many such cases among His first followers. Our Lord might be speaking

prophetically, as well as out of His own experience, so well do His

regretful and lamenting words fit into so many of our own cases to-day.

For, look at that young business man. He has been born and brought up in

the Church of Christ. He has gladdened more hearts than he knows by the

noble promise of his early days. Many admiring and loving eyes have been

turned on him as he took so hopefully the upward way. But a sifting-time

soon comes. A time of temptation comes. A time comes when sides must be

taken in some moral, religious, ecclesiastical controversy. This young

man is at that moment a candidate for a post that will bring distinction,

wealth, and social influence to him who holds it. And the candidate we

are so much interested in is admittedly a man of such outstanding talents

that he would at once get the post were it not that the holder of that

post must not have his name so much associated with such and such a

church, such and such political and religious opinions, and such and such

public men. He is told that. Indeed, he is not so dull as to need to be

told that. He has seen that all along. And at first it is a dreadful

wrench to him. He feels how far he is falling from his high ideals in

life; and, at first, and for a long time, it is a dreadful humiliation to

him. But, then, there are splendid compensations. And, better than

that, there are some good, and indeed compelling, reasons that begin to

rise up in our minds when we need them and begin to look for them, till

what at first seemed so mean and so contemptible, and so ungrateful, and

so dishonourable, as well as so spiritually perilous, comes to be faced

and gone through with positively on a ground of high principle, and,

indeed, of stern moral necessity. So deceitful is the human heart that

you could not believe what compelling reasons such a mean-spirited man

will face you with as to why he should leave all the ways he once so

delighted in for a piece of bread, and for the smile of the open enemies

of his church, and his faith, not to say his Saviour. You will meet with

several such men any afternoon coming home from their business. Sometimes

they have still some honest shame on their faces when they meet you; but

still oftener they pass you with a sullen hatred and a fierce defiance.

This is he who heard the word, and anon with joy received it. Yet had he

not root in himself, but dured for a while; for when tribulation or

persecution arose because of the word by and by he was offended. They

went out from us, says John, but they were not of us; for if they had

been of us they would no doubt have continued with us; but they went out

that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us.

2. Guilt, again, Hopeful went on, and to meditate terror, are so

grievous to most men, that they rather choose such ways as will but

harden their hearts still more and more. You all know what it is to

meditate terror? "Thine heart shall meditate terror," says the prophet,

"when thou sayest to thyself, who among us shall dwell with the devouring

fire? who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings?" The fifty-

first Psalm is perhaps the best meditation both of guilt and of terror

that we have in the whole Bible. But there are many other psalms and

passages of psalms only second to the fifty-first Psalm, such as the

twenty-second, the thirty-eighth, the sixty-ninth, and the hundred-and-

thirtieth. Our Lord Himself also was meditating terror in the garden of

Gethsemane, and Paul both guilt and terror when he imagined himself both

an apostate preacher and a castaway soul. And John's meditations of

terror in the Revelation rose into those magnificent pictures of the Last

Judgment with which he has to all time covered the walls of the Seven

Churches. In his own _Grace Abounding_ there are meditations of terror

quite worthy to stand beside the most terrible things of that kind that

ever were written, as also in many others of our author's dramatical and

homiletical books. I read to you the other Sabbath morning a meditation

of terror that was found among Bishop Andrewes' private papers after his

death. You will not all have forgotten that meditation, but I will read

it to you to-night again. "How fearful," says Andrewes, in his terror,

"will Thy judgment be, O Lord, when the thrones are set, and the angels

stand around, and men are brought in, and the books are opened, and all

our works are inquired into, and all our thoughts are examined, and all

the hidden things of darkness! What, O God, shall Thy judgment that day

be upon me? Who shall quench my flame, who shall lighten my darkness, if

Thou pity me not? Lord, as Thou art loving, give me tears, give me

floods of tears, and give me all that this day, before it be too late.

For then will be the incorruptible Judge, the horrible judgment-seat, the

answer without excuse, the inevitable charge, the shameful punishment,

the endless Gehenna, the pitiless angels, the yawning hell, the roaring

stream of fire, the unquenchable flame, the dark prison, the rayless

darkness, the bed of live coals, the unwearied worm, the indissoluble

chains, the bottomless chaos, the impassable wall, the inconsolable cry.

And none to stand by me; none to plead for me; none to snatch me out."

Now, no Temporary ever possessed anything like that in his own

handwriting among his private papers. A meditation like that, written

out with his own hand, and hidden away under lock and key, will secure

any man from it, even if he had been appointed to backsliding and

reprobation. Bishop Andrewes, as any one will see who reads his _Private

Devotions_, was the chief of sinners; but his discovered and deciphered

papers will all speak for him when they are spread out before the great

white throne, "glorious in their deformity, being slubbered," as his

editors say, "with his pious hands, and watered with his penitential

tears."

Thomas Shepard's _Ten Virgins_ is the most terrible book upon Temporaries

that ever was written. Temporaries never once saw their true vileness,

he keeps on saying. Temporaries are, no doubt, wounded for sin

sometimes, but never in the right place nor to the right depth. And

again, sin, and especially heart-sin, is never really bitter to

Temporaries. In an "exhortation to all new beginners, and so to all

others," "Be sure," Shepard says, "your wound for sin at first is deep

enough. For all the error in a man's faith and sanctification springs

from his first error in his humiliation. If a man's humiliation be

false, or even weak or little, then his faith and his hold of Christ are

weak and little, and his sanctification counterfeit. But if a man's

wound be right, and his humiliation deep enough, that man's faith will be

right and his sanctification will be glorious. The esteem of Christ is

always little where sin lies light." And Hopeful himself says a thing at

this point that is quite worthy of Shepard himself, such is its depth and

insight. He speaks of the righteous actually _loving_ the sight of their

misery. He does not explain what he means by that startling language

because he is talking all the time, as he knows quite well, to one who

understood all that before he was born. Nor will I attempt to explain or

to vindicate what he says. Those of you who love the sight of your own

misery as sinners will understand what Hopeful says without any

explanation; while those who do not understand him would only be the more

stumbled by any explanation of him. The love of the sight of their

misery, and the unearthly sweetness of their sorrow for sin, are only

another two of those provoking paradoxes of which the lives of God's true

saints are full--paradoxes and impossibilities and incoherencies that

make the literature of experimental religion to be positively hateful and

unbearable to Temporary and to all his self-seeking and apostate kindred.

3. But even where the consciences of such men are occasionally awakened,

proceeds Hopeful, in his so searching discovery of Temporaries, yet their

minds are not changed. There you are pretty near the business, replied

his fellow; for the bottom of all is, for want of a change of their mind

and will. Now, one would have been afraid and ashamed for one moment to

suspect that Temporary's mind was not completely changed, so "forward"

was he at first in his religion. But, no: forward before all his

neighbours as Temporary was, to begin with, yet all the time his mind was

not really changed. His forwardness did not properly spring out of his

true mind at all, but only out of his momentarily awakened conscience and

his momentarily excited heart. A sinner with a truly changed mind is

never forward. His mind is so changed that forwardness in anything is

utterly alien to it, and especially all forwardness in the profession of

religion. The change that had taken place in Temporary, whatever was the

seat of it, only led him to bully men like Christian and Hopeful, who

would not go fast enough for him. "Come," said Pliable, in the beginning

of the book, "come on and let us mend our pace." "I cannot go so fast as

I would," humbly replied Christian, "because of this burden on my back."

It is a common observation among mountaineers that he who takes the hill

at the greatest spurt is the last climber to come to the top, and that

many who so ostentatiously make spurts at the bottom of the hill never

come within sight of the top at all. And this is one of the constant

dangers that wait on all revivals, religious retreats, conferences, and

even communion seasons. Our hot fits, the hotter they are, are only the

more likely, unless we take the greatest care, to cast us down into all

the more deadly a chill. It is this danger that our Lord points out so

plainly in His parable of apostasy. The same is he, says our Lord, that

heareth the word, and anon with joy receiveth it; yet hath he not root in

himself, but dureth for a while. In Hopeful's words, his mind and will

were never changed with all his joy, only his passing moods and his

momentary emotions.

Multitudes of men who are as forward at first as Pliable and Temporary

were turn out at last to have no root in themselves; but here and there

you will discover a man who is all root together. There are some men

whose whole mind and heart and will, whose whole inward man, has gone to

root. All the strength and all the fatness of their religious life

retreat into its root. They have no leaves at all, and they have too

little fruit as yet; but you should see their roots. Only, no eye but

the eye of God can see sorrow for sin--secret and sore humiliation on

account of secret sin--the incessant agony that goes on within between

the flesh and the spirit, between sin and grace, between very hell and

heaven itself. To know your own evil hearts, my brethren, say to you on

that subject what any Temporary will, is the very root of the whole

matter to you. Whatever Dr. Newman's mistakes as to outward churches may

have been, he was a master of the human heart, the most difficult of all

matters to master. Listen, then, to what he says on the matter now in

hand. "Now, unless we have some just idea of our hearts and of sin, we

can have no right idea of a Moral Governor, a Saviour, or a Sanctifier;

that is, in professing to believe in them we shall be using words without

attaching any distinct meaning to them. Thus self-knowledge is at the

root of all real religious knowledge; and it is vain,--it is worse than

vain,--it is a deceit and a mischief, to think to understand the

Christian doctrines as a matter of course, merely by being taught by

books, or by attending sermons, or by any outward means, however

excellent, taken by themselves. For it is in proportion as we search our

hearts and understand our own nature that we understand what is meant by

an Infinite Governor and Judge; it is in proportion as we comprehend the

nature of disobedience and our actual sinfulness that we feel what is the

blessing of the removal of sin, redemption, pardon, sanctification, which

otherwise are mere words. God speaks to us primarily in our hearts. Self-

knowledge is the key to the precepts and doctrines of Scripture. The

very utmost that any outward notices of religion can do is to startle us

and make us turn inward and search our hearts; and then, when we have

experienced what it is to read ourselves, we shall profit by the doctrine

of the Church and the Bible." My brethren, the temper in which you

receive that passage, and receive it from its author, may be safely taken

by you as a sure presage whether you are to turn out a Temporary and a

Castaway or no.

Now, to conclude with a word of admission, and, bound up with it, a word

of encouragement. After all that has been said, I fully admit that we

are all Temporaries to begin with. We all cool down from our first heat

in religion. We all halt from our first spurt. We all turn back from

faith and from duty and from privilege through our fear of men, or

through our corrupt love of ourselves, or through our coarse-minded love

of this present world. Only, those who are appointed to perseverance,

and through that to eternal life, always kindle again; they are kindled

again, and they love the return of their lost warmth. They recover

themselves and address themselves again and again to the race that is

still set before them. They prove themselves not to be of those who draw

back unto perdition, but of those that believe to the saving of the soul.

Now, if you have only too good ground to suspect that you are but a

temporary believer, what are you to do to make your sure escape out of

that perilous state? What, but to keep on believing? You must cry

constantly, Lord, I believe, help Thou mine unbelief! When at any time

you are under any temptation or corruption, and you feel that your faith

and your love are letting slip their hold of Christ and of eternal life,

then knot your weak heart all the faster to the throne of grace, to the

cross of Christ, and to the gate of heaven. Give up all your mind and

heart, and all that is within you, to the one thing needful. Labour

night and day in your own heart at believing on Christ, at loving your

neighbour, and at discovering, denying, and crucifying yourself. It will

all pay you in the long run. For if you do all these things, and

persistently do them, then, though you are at this moment all but dead to

all divine things, and all but a reprobate, it will be found at last that

all the time your name was written among the elect in heaven.

The perseverance of the saints, the "five points" notwithstanding, is not

a foregone conclusion. The final perseverance of the ripest and surest

saint is all made up of ever-new beginnings in repentance, in faith, in

love, and in obedience. Begin, then, every new day to repent anew, to

return anew, to believe and to love anew. And if all your New-Year

repentances and returnings and reformations are all already proved to be

but temporary--even if they lie all around you already a bitter mockery

of all your professions--still, begin again. Begin to-night, and begin

again to-morrow morning. Spend all the remainder of your days on earth

beginning. And, ere ever you are aware, the final perseverance of

another predestinated saint will be found accomplished in you.