O Lord God of my salvation, I have cried day and night unto Thee. Oh!
let my prayer enter into Thy presence. For my soul is full of trouble
and my life draweth nigh unto Hell. Thou hast laid me in the lowest
pit, in a place of darkness, and in the deep.--Ps. lxxxviii. 1, 2.
If I go down to Hell, Thou art there also. Yea, the darkness is no
darkness with Thee; but the night is as clear as the day.--Ps. cxxxix.
7, 11.
I waited patiently for the Lord; and He inclined unto me, and heard my
calling. He brought me also out of the horrible pit, out of the miry
clay, and set my feet upon the rock. And He hath put a new song into
my mouth, even a thanksgiving unto our God.--Ps. xl. 2, 3.
God hath delivered my soul from the place of Hell. He shall receive
me.--Ps. xlix. 15.
It is sometimes true, that sunshine comes after storm. Sometimes true--or
who could live?--but not always. Equally true that in most human lives
there are periods of trouble, blow following blow, wave following wave,
from opposite and unexpected quarters, till all God's billows have gone
over the soul. How paltry and helpless in such dark times are all proud
attempts to hang self-poised in the centre of the abyss, and there
organise for oneself a character by means of circumstances. Easy enough
it seems for a man to educate himself without God while he lies
comfortably in idleness on a sofa. But what if he found himself hurled
perforce among the real universal experiences of humanity; and made free
in spite of himself, by doubt and fear and horror of great darkness, of
the brotherhood of woe, common alike to the simplest peasant woman, and
to every great soul, who has left his impress upon the hearts of after
generations? Jew, Heathen, or Christian; men of the most opposite creeds
and aims--whether it be Moses or Socrates, Isaiah or Epictetus, Augustine
or Mohammed, Dante or Bernard, Shakespeare or Bacon--each and all of them
have this one fact in common--that once in their lives, at least, they
have gone down into the bottomless pit, and there out of the utter
darkness have asked the question of all questions--"Is there a God? and
if there be, what is He doing with me?" What refuge then--when a man
feels himself powerless in the gripe of some unseen and inevitable power,
and knows not whether it be chance or necessity, or a devouring fiend--to
wrap himself sternly in himself and cry, "I will endure though all the
universe be against me"? How fine it sounds! But who has done it? No,
there is but one escape, one chink through which we may see light, one
rock on which our feet may find standing-place, even in the abyss; and
that is the belief, intuitive, inspired, due neither to reasoning nor to
study, that the billows are God's billows; and that though we go down
into Hell, He is there also; the belief that not we, but He, is educating
us; that these seemingly incoherent miseries, storm following earthquake,
and earthquake fire, as if the caprice of all the demons were let loose
against us, have in His mind a spiritual coherence, an organic unity and
purpose, though we see it not; that these sorrows do not come singly,
only because He is making short work with our spirits; and because the
more effect He sees produced by one blow, the more swiftly He follows it
up by another; till in one great and varied crisis, seemingly long to us,
but short compared with immortality, our spirits may be--
"Heated hot with burning fears,
And bathed in baths of hissing tears,
And battered with the strokes of doom,
To shape and use."
_Two Years Ago_.
There is no darker temptation than that which comes over a man when the
devil whispers to him such thoughts as these, "God does not care for
me--God hates me. Luck, and everything else is against me. There seems
some curse upon me. Why should I change? Let God first change to me and
then will I change towards Him. But God will not change; He has
determined to have no mercy on me. I can see that; for everything goes
wrong with me. Then what is the use of my repenting. I will go my own
way--and what must be must." Have you ever had such thoughts? Then hear
the word of the Lord to you: "When, whensoever, wheresoever, the wicked
man turneth away from his wickedness which he has committed, and doeth
that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive. Have I any
pleasure in the death of him that dieth saith the Lord, and not rather
that he should be converted and live?" Never believe the devil when he
tells you that God hates you. Never believe him when he tells you that
God has been too hard upon you, and placed you in such circumstances of
temptation, ignorance, poverty or anything else, that you cannot mend.
What does the promise of your Baptism say? "Be you poor, tempted,
ignorant, stupid, be you what you will, you are God's child--your
Father's love is over you, His mercy ready for you." You feel too weak
to change. Ask God's Spirit to give you a strength of will you never
felt before. You feel too proud to change. Ask God's Spirit to humble
your proud heart, to soften your hard heart; and you will find to your
surprise that when your pride is gone, when you are utterly ashamed of
yourself, and see your sins in their true blackness, and feel unworthy to
look up to God, that then will come a nobler, holier, manlier
feeling--self-respect, and a clear conscience, and the thought that, weak
and simple as you are, you are in the right way; that God and the Angels
of God are smiling on you; that you are in tune again with all earth and
heaven, because you are what God wills you to be. Not His proud,
peevish, self-willed child, fancying yourself strong enough to go alone,
when you are really the slave of your own passions and appetites and the
playthings of the devil; but His loving, loyal son through the strength
of God, and able to do what you will, because what you will God wills
also.
_National Sermons_.
To escape atheism and despair, let us remember that the Creator and
Ordainer of the circumstances of life is not chance or Nature, but the
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and of us.
When you feel you are in the deepest and gloomiest doubt, pray the prayer
of desperation; cry out, "Lord, if Thou dost exist, let me know that Thou
dost exist! Guide my mind by a way that I know not into Thy truth," and
God will deliver you.
_Letters and Memories_.
Sad as your letter was, it gave me pleasure; for it is always a pleasure
to see life springing out of death, health returning after disease,
though, as doctors know, the recovery from asphyxia or drowning is always
as painful as the temporary death itself was painless. Faith is born of
doubt. "It is not life, but death, where nothing stirs." Take all these
doubts and struggles of yours as simply so many signs that your Father in
heaven is treating you as a father, that He has not forsaken you, is not
offended with you, but is teaching you in the way best suited to your own
idiosyncracy, the great lesson of lessons, "Empty thyself and God will
fill thee." Take your sorrows to your Father in heaven. If that name
Father mean anything, it must mean that He will not turn away from His
wandering child in a way that you would he ashamed to turn away from
yours. If there be pity, lasting affection, patience in man, they must
have come from God. They above all things must be His likeness. Believe
that He possesses them a million times more fully than any human being.
St. Paul knew well at least the state of mind in which you are. He said
that he had found a panacea for it. And his words, to judge from the way
in which they have taken root and spread and conquered, must have some
depth and life in them. Why not try them? Just read the first nine
chapters of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, taking for granted that
they mean the simplest and most obvious sense which can be put upon them.
_Letters and Memories_.
When the hour of temptation comes, go back, go back if you would escape,
to what you were taught at your mother's knee concerning the grace of
God; for that alone will keep you safe, or angel, or archangel, or any
created being safe, in this life, and in all lives to come.
_Sermons on David_.
What does it all mean? I cry. Night and day the heavens have been black
to me. You may think it sinful to have such thoughts. My experience is
that when they come, one must do battle with them; one must face them; do
battle with them deliberately; be patient if they worst one for a while.
By all such things men live; in these is the life of the spirit. Only by
going down into hell can one rise the third day. I have been in hell
many times in my life, therefore, perhaps, I have had some small power of
influencing human hearts. But I never have looked hell so close in the
face as I have been doing of late. Wherefore, I hope thereby to get
fresh power to rise and to lift others heavenward.
I can only cry--"O Lord, in Thee have I trusted, let me never be
confounded. Wherefore should the wicked say--Where is now his God?" But
while I fret most there comes to me an inner voice, saying--"What matter
if _thou_ art confounded. _God is not_. Only believe firmly that God is
as good as thou with thy finite reason canst conceive; and He will make
thee at last able to conceive how good He is, and thou shalt have the
perfect blessing of seeing God." You will say I am inconsistent. So I
am; and so, if read honestly, are David's Psalms. Yet, that very
inconsistency is what brings them home to every human heart for ever. The
words of a man in real doubt and real darkness, crying for light, and not
crying in vain, as I trust I shall not.
. . . I only know that I know nothing, but hope that Christ, who is the
Son of Man, will tell me piecemeal, if I be patient and watchful, what I
am and what man is.
_Letters and Memories_.
Some things I see clearly, and hold with desperate clutch--a Father in
Heaven for all; a Son of God incarnate for all (that incarnation is the
one fact which is to me worth all, because it makes all others possible
and rational, and without it I should go mad); and a Spirit of the Father
and the Son, the fountain of all good on earth--who works to will and to
do of His own good pleasure--in whom? In every human being in whom there
is one spark of active good, the least desire to do right, or to be of
use. Beyond that I see little save that Right is divine and
all-conquering--Wrong utterly infernal, and yet weak, foolish, a mere
bullying phantom, which will flee at each brave blow, had we courage to
strike at it in God's name.
_Letters and Memories_.
There is not a sorrow which man can taste which Jesus Christ has not
fulfilled. He filled the cup of misery to the brim, and drained it to
the dregs. He tasted death for every man, and went down into the lowest
depths of terror and shame and agony and death, and, worst of all, into
the feeling that God had forsaken Him; that there was no help or hope for
Him in heaven, as well as earth; in a word, He went down into hell; even
into that lowest darkness where, for one moment, a man feels, that God is
nothing to him, and he is nothing to God. Even into that depth Jesus
condescended to go down for us. That worst of all temptations, of which
David only tasted a drop, when he cried out, "My God, my God, why hast
thou forsaken me?"--Jesus drained to the very dregs for us. He went down
into hell for us, and conquered hell and death, and the darkness of the
unknown world, and rose again glorious from them, that He might teach us
not to fear death and hell; that He might know how to comfort us in the
hour of death, and in the day of judgment, when on our sick-bed, or in
some bitter shame and trouble, the lying devil is telling us that we are
damned and lost, and forsaken by God, and every sin we ever did rises up
and stares us in the face.
_National Sermons_.
Whatever may be the mysteries of life and death, there is one mystery
which the Cross of Christ reveals to us, and that is the infinite and
absolute goodness of God. Let all the rest remain a mystery so long as
the mystery of the Cross of Christ gives us faith for all the rest.
Faith, I say. The mystery of evil, of terror, of death, the gospel does
not pretend to solve, but it tells us that the mystery is proved to be
soluble; for God Himself has taken upon Himself the task of solving it;
and Christ has proved by His own act, that if there be evil in the world,
it is none of His, for He hates it, fights against it, and He fought
against it to the death. The Cross says, Have faith in God. Ask no more
of Him, "Why hast thou made me thus?" Ask no more, "Why do the wicked
prosper on the earth?" Ask no more, "Whence pain and death, war and
famine, earthquake and tempest, and all the ills to which flesh is heir?"
All fruitless questioning, all peevish repinings are precluded henceforth
by the death and passion of Christ.
Dost thou suffer? Thou canst not suffer more than the Son of God. Dost
thou sympathise with thy fellow-sufferers? Thou canst not sympathise
more than the Son of God. Dost thou long to right them, to deliver them,
even at the price of thine own blood? Thou canst not long more ardently
than the Son of God, who carried His longing into act, and died for them
and thee. What if the end be not yet? What if evil still endure? What
if the medicine have not yet conquered the disease? Have patience, have
faith, have hope, as thou standest at the foot of Christ's Cross, and
holdest fast to it, as the Anchor of thy soul and reason, as well as of
thy heart. For however ill the world may go, or seem to go, the Cross is
the everlasting token that God so loved the world, that He spared not His
only begotten Son, but freely gave Him for it. Whatsoever else is
doubtful this at least is sure, that God must conquer, because God is
good; that Evil must perish, because God hates Evil, even to the death.
_Westminster Sermons_.
How shall the bottomless pit, if we fall into it, be a pathway to the
everlasting rock? David tells us, "Out of the deep have I cried unto
Thee, O God." He cried to God--not to himself, his own learning,
prudence, talents--to pull him out of that pit. Not to doctrines, books,
church-goings--not to the dearest earthly friend--not to his own
experiences, faith's assurances, frames and feelings. The matter was too
terrible to be plastered over in that way, or in any way. He was face to
face with God alone, and in utter weakness, in utter nakedness of soul,
_he cried to God Himself_. There was the lesson. God took away from him
all things, that he might have no one to cry to but to God.
And it shall be with every soul of man who, being in the deep, cries out
of the deep to God, as it was with Moses when he went up alone into the
Mount of God, and fasted forty days and forty nights amid the earthquake
and the thunderstorm, and the rocks which melted before the Lord. And
behold, when it was past, he talked face to face with God, as a man
talketh with his friend, and his countenance shone with heavenly light,
when he came down triumphant out of the Mount of God.
_Good News of God_--_Sermons_.
On the torturing cross Christ prayed for His murderers, "Father, forgive
them, for they know not what they do." And this is the character many a
man may get in the dark deep. To feel for all, to feel with all; to
rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep, to
understand people's trials and make allowances for their temptations; to
put oneself in their place till we see with their eyes, and feel with
their hearts, till we judge no man, and have hope for all; to be fair and
patient and tender with everyone we meet; to despise no one, despair of
no one, because Christ despises none and despairs of none; to look on
every one we meet with love, almost with pity, because they too may have
been down into the deep of horror, or may go down into it any day; to see
our own sins in the sins of others, to feel that we might do what they
do, and feel as they feel at any moment, did God desert us; to give and
forgive, live and let live, even as Christ gives to us and forgives us,
and lives for us and lets us live in spite of all our sins.
_Good News of God_.
Rejoice that there is a fire of God the Father whose name is Love,
burning for ever unquenchably, to destroy out of every man's heart and
out of the hearts of all nations, and of the physical and moral world,
all which offends and makes a lie; and that into that fire the Son will
surely cast all shams, lies, hypocrisies, tyrannies, false doctrines. Is
it not good news that _that_ fire is unquenchable, that _that_ worm will
not die? The fire may be kindled for us--the worm may seize our hearts.
God grant that in that day we may have courage to let the fire and the
worm do their work--to say to Christ, "These too are Thine, and out of
Thine infinite love they have come. Thou requirest truth in the inward
parts, and I will thank Thee for any means, however bitter, which Thou
usest to make me true. I want to be an honest man and a right man! And,
O joy! Thou wantest me to be so also. O joy! that though I long
cowardly to quench Thy fire, I cannot do it. Purge me therefore, O Lord,
though it be with fire. Burn up the chaff of vanity and self-indulgence,
of hasty prejudices, second-hand dogmas,--husks which do not feed my
soul, with which I cannot be content, of which I feel ashamed daily--and
if there be any grains of wheat in me, any word or thought or power of
action which may be of use as seed for my nation after me, gather it, O
Lord, into Thy garner." Amen.
_Letters and Memories_.
The Fire of God hardens a man and softens him at the same time. He comes
out of it hardened to that hardness of which it is written, "Do thou
endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ;" and again, "I have
fought a good fight, I have kept the faith, I have finished my
course;"--yet softened to that softness of which it is written, "Be ye
tender-hearted, compassionate, forgiving one another, even as God, for
Christ's sake, has forgiven you;" and again, "We have a High Priest who
can be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, seeing that He has
been tempted in all things like as we are."
Happy, thrice happy, are they who have thus walked through the Valley of
the Shadow of Death, and found it a path that leads to everlasting life.
Happy are they who have writhed awhile in the fierce fire of God, and
have had burned out of them the chaff, and the dross, and all which
offends and makes them vain and light, yet makes them dull, and drags
them down at the same time; till only the pure gold of God's
righteousness is left, seven times tried in the fire, incorruptible,
precious in the sight of God and man. Such need not regret, will not
regret, all that they have gone through. It has made them brave, sober,
patient. It has given them
The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength and skill;
and so shaped them into the likeness of Christ, who was made perfect by
suffering; and though He were a Son, yet in the days of His flesh made
strong supplication, and crying with tears to His Father, and was heard
in that He feared; and so, though He died on the Cross and descended into
Hell, yet triumphed over Death and Hell by dying and descending, and
conquered them by submitting to them.
_Good News of God_--_Sermons_.