visited us? That would surely be evil news for us, according to Holy
Scripture. For if God do not visit us, then He must be far from us. But
the Psalmist cries, ‘Go not far from me, O Lord.’ His fear is, again and
again, not that God should visit him, but that God should desert him.
And more, the word which is translated ‘to visit,’ in Scripture has the
sense of seeing to a man, overseeing him, being his bishop. If God do
not see to, oversee us, and be our bishop, then He must turn His face
from us, which is what the Psalmist beseeches Him again and again not to
do; praying, ‘Hide not Thy face from me, O Lord,’ and crying out of the
depths of anxiety and trouble, ‘Put thy trust in God, for I shall yet
give Him thanks for the light of His countenance;’ and again, ‘In Thy
presence is’—not death, but—‘life; at Thy right hand is fulness of days
for evermore.’ And again, the Psalmist prays to God to visit him, and
visit his thoughts,—‘Search me, O Lord, and try the ground of my heart.
Search me, and examine my thoughts. Look well if there be any wickedness
in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.’ Shall we pray that prayer,
my friends? Shall we, with the Psalmist, pray God to visit, and, if need
be, chasten and correct what He sees wrong in us? Or shall we, with the
superstitious, pray to God not to visit us? to keep away from us? to
leave its alone? to forget us? If He did answer that foolish prayer,
there would be an end of us and all created things; for in God they live
and move and have their being—as it is written, ‘When Thou hidest thy
face, they are troubled; when Thou takest away their breath, they die,
and are turned again to their dust.’ But, happily for us, God will not
answer that foolish prayer. For it is written, ‘If I go up to heaven,
Thou art there; if I go down to hell, Thou art there also.’ Nowhither
can we go from God’s presence: nowhither can we flee from His Spirit.
This is the Scripture language. Is ours like it? Have we not got to
think of a visitation of God as a simple calamity? If a man die suddenly
and strangely, he has died by the visitation of God. But if he be saved
from death strangely and suddenly, it does not occur to us to call that a
visitation, and to say with Scripture, ‘The Lord has visited the man with
His salvation.’ If the cholera comes, or the crops fail, we say,—God is
visiting us. If we have an especially healthy year, or a glorious
harvest, we never say with Scripture, ‘The Lord has visited His people in
giving them bread.’ Yet Scripture, if it says, ‘I will visit their
transgressions,’ says also that the Lord visited the children of Israel
to deliver them out of Egypt. If it talks of death as the visitation of
all men, it speaks of God visiting Sarah and Hannah to give them
children. If it says, ‘I will visit the blood shed in Jezreel,’ it says
also, ‘Thy visitation hath preserved my spirit.’ If it says, ‘At the
time they are visited they shall be cast down,’ it says also, ‘The Lord
shall visit them, and turn away their captivity.’
If we look through Scripture, we find that the words ‘visit’ and
‘visitation’ are used about ninety times: that in about fifty of them the
meaning of the words is chastisement of some kind or other: in about
forty it is mercy and blessing: and that in the New Testament the words
never mean anything but mercy and blessing, though we have begun of late
years to use them only in the sense of punishment and a curse.
Now, how is this, my friends? How is it that we, who are not under the
terrors of the Law, but under the Gospel of grace, have quite lost the
Gospel meaning of this word ‘visitation,’ and take a darker view of it
than did even the old Jews under the Law? Have we, whom God hath
visited, indeed, in the person of His only-begotten Son Jesus Christ, any
right or reason to think worse of a visitation of God than had the Jews
of old? God forbid. And yet we do so, I fear; and show daily that we do
so by our use of the word: for out of the abundance of the heart man’s
mouth speaketh. By his words he is justified, and by his words he is
condemned; and there is no surer sign of what a man’s real belief is,
than the sense in which lie naturally, as it were by instinct, uses
certain words.
And what is the cause?
Shall I say it? If I do, I blame not you more than I blame myself, more
than I blame this generation. But it seems to me that there is a
little—or not a little—atheism among us now-a-days; that we are growing
to be ‘without God in the world.’ We are ready enough to believe that
God has to do with the next world: but we are not ready to believe that
He has to do with this world. We, in this generation, do not believe
that in God we live, and move, and have our being. Nay, some object to
capital punishment, because (so they say) ‘it hurries men into the
presence of their Maker;’ as if a human being could be in any better or
safer place than the presence of his Maker; and as if his being there
depended on us, or on any man, and not on God Almighty alone, who is
surely not so much less powerful than an earthly monarch, that He cannot
keep out of His presence or in it whomsoever He chooses. When we talk of
being ‘ushered into the presence of God,’ we mean dying; as if we were
not all in the presence of God at this moment, and all day long. When we
say, ‘Prepare to meet thy God,’ we mean ‘Prepare to die;’ as if we did
not meet our God every time we had the choice between doing a right thing
and doing a wrong one—between yielding to our own lusts and tempers, and
yielding to the Holy Spirit of God. For if the Holy Spirit of God be, as
the Christian faith tells us, God indeed, do we not meet God every time a
right, and true, and gracious thought arises in our hearts? But we have
all forgotten this, and much more connected with this; and our notion of
this world is not that of Holy Scripture—of that grand 104th Psalm, for
instance, which sets forth the Spirit of God as the Lord and Giver of
life to all creation: but our notion is this—that this world is a
machine, which would go on very well by itself, if God would but leave it
alone; that if the course of nature, as we atheistically call it, is not
interfered with, then suns shine, crops grow, trade flourishes, and all
is well, because God does not visit the earth. Ah! blind that we are;
blind to the power and glory of God which is around us, giving life and
breath to all things,—God, without whom not a sparrow falls to the
ground,—God, who visiteth the earth, and maketh it very plenteous,—God,
who giveth to all liberally, and upbraideth not,—God, whose ever-creating
and ever-sustaining Spirit is the source, not only of all goodness,
virtue, knowledge, but of all life, health, order, fertility. We see not
God’s witness in His sending rain and fruitful seasons, filling our
hearts with food and gladness. And then comes the punishment. Because
we will not keep up a wholesome and trustful belief in God in prosperity,
we are awakened out of our dream of unbelief, to an unwholesome and
mistrustful belief in Him in adversity. Because we will not believe in a
God of love and order, we grow to believe in a God of anger and disorder.
Because we will not fear a God who sends fruitful seasons, we are grown
to dread a God who sends famine and pestilence. Because we will not
believe in the Father in heaven, we grow to believe in a destroyer who
visits from heaven. But we believe in Him only as the destroyer. We
have forgotten that He is the Giver, the Creator, the Redeemer. We look
on His visitations as something dark and ugly, instead of rejoicing in
the thought of God’s presence, as we should, if we had remembered that He
was about our path and about our bed, and spying out all our ways,
whether for joy or for sorrow. We shrink at the thought of His presence.
We look on His visitations as things not to be understood; not to be
searched out in childlike humility—and yet in childlike confidence—that
we may understand why they are sent, and what useful lesson our Father
means us to learn from them: but we look on them as things to be merely
prayed against, if by any means God will, as soon as possible, cease to
visit us, and leave us to ourselves, for we can earn our own bread
comfortably enough, if it were not for His interference and visitations.
We are too like the Gadarenes of old, to whom it mattered little that the
Lord had restored the madman to health and reason, if He caused their
swine to perish in the lake. They were uneasy and terrified at such
visitations of God incarnate. He seemed to them a terrible and dangerous
Being, and they besought Him to depart out of their coasts.
It would have been wiser, surely, in those Gadarenes, and better for
them, had they cried—‘Lord, what wilt Thou have us to do? We see that
Thou art a Being of infinite power, for mercy, and for punishment
likewise. And Thou art the very Being whom we want, to teach us our
duty, and to make us do it. Tell us what we ought to do, and help us,
and, if need be, compel us to do it, and so to prosper indeed.’ And so
should we pray in the case of this cholera. We may ask God to take it
away: but we are bound to ask God also, why He has sent it. Till then we
have no reason to suppose that He will take it away; we have no reason to
suppose that it will be merciful in Him to take it away, till He has
taught us why it was sent. This question of cholera has come now to a
crisis, in which we must either learn why cholera comes, or incur, I
hold, lasting disgrace and guilt. And—if I may dare to hint at the
counsels of God—it seems as if the Almighty Lord had no mind to relieve
us of that disgrace and guilt.
For months past we have been praying that this cholera should not enter
England, and our prayers have not been heard. In spite of them the
cholera has come; and has slain thousands, and seems likely to slay
thousands more. What plainer proof can there be to those who believe in
the providence of God, and the rule of Jesus Christ our Lord, than that
we are meant to learn some wholesome lesson from it, which we have not
learnt yet? It cannot be that God means us to learn the physical cause
of cholera, for that we have known these twenty years. Foul lodging,
foul food, and, above all, natural and physical, foul water; there is no
doubt of the cause. But why cannot we save English people from the curse
and destruction which all this foulness brings? That is the question.
That is our national scandal, shame, and sin at this moment. Perhaps the
Lord wills that we should learn that; learn what is the moral and
spiritual cause of our own miserable weakness, negligence, hardness of
heart, which, sinning against light and knowledge, has caused the death
of thousands of innocent souls. God grant that we may learn that lesson.
God grant that He may put into the hearts and minds of some man or men,
the wisdom and courage to deliver us from such scandals for the future.
But I have little hope that that will happen, till we get rid of our
secret atheism; till we give up the notion that God only visits now and
then, to disorder and destroy His own handiwork, and take back the old
scriptural notion, that God is visiting all day long for ever, to give
order and life to His own work, to set it right whenever it goes wrong,
and re-create it whenever it decays. Till then we can expect only
explanations of cholera and of God’s other visitations of affliction,
which are so superstitious, so irrational, so little connected with the
matter in hand, that they would be ridiculous, were they not somewhat
blasphemous. But when men arise in this land who believe truly in an
ever-present God of order, revealed in His Son Jesus Christ; when men
shall arise in this land, who will believe that faith with their whole
hearts, and will live and die for it and by it; acting as if they really
believed that in God we live, and move, and have our being; as if they
really believed that they were in the kingdom and rule of Christ,—a rule
of awful severity, and yet of perfect love,—a rule, meanwhile, which men
can understand, and are meant to understand, that they may not only obey
the laws of God, but know the mind of God, and copy the dealings of God,
and do the will of God; and when men arise in this land, who have that
holy faith in their hearts, and courage to act upon it, then cholera will
vanish away, and the physical and moral causes of a hundred other evils
which torment poor human beings through no anger of God, but simply
through their own folly, and greediness, and ignorance.
All these shall vanish away, in the day when the knowledge of the Lord
shall cover the land, and men shall say, in spirit and in truth, as
Christ their Lord has said before,—‘Sacrifice and burnt-offering thou
wouldest not. Then said I, Lo, I come. In the volume of the book it is
written of Me, that I should do the will of God.’ And in those days
shall be fulfilled once more, the text which says,—‘That the people
glorified God, saying, A great Prophet, even Christ the Lord Himself,
hath risen up among us, and God hath visited His people.’
SERMON XVIII.
THE WICKED SERVANT.
ST. MATTHEW xviii. 23.
The kingdom of heaven is likened to a certain king, which would take
account of his servants.
THIS parable, which you heard in the Gospel for this day, you all know.
And I doubt not that all you who know it, understand it well enough. It
is so human and so humane; it is told with such simplicity, and yet with
such force and brilliancy that—if one dare praise our Lord’s words as we
praise the words of men—all must see its meaning at once, though it
speaks of a state of society different from anything which we have ever
seen, or, thank God, ever shall see.
The Eastern despotic king who has no law but his own will; who puts his
servant—literally his slave—into a post of such trust and honour, that
the slave can misappropriate and make away with the enormous sum of ten
thousand talents; who commands, not only him, but his wife and children
to be sold to pay the debt; who then forgives him all out of a sudden
burst of pity, and again, when the wretched man has shown himself base
and cruel, unworthy of that pity, revokes his pardon, and delivers him to
the tormentors till he shall pay all—all this is a state of things
impossible in a free country, though it is possible enough still in many
countries of the East, which are governed in this very despotic fashion;
and justice, and very often injustice likewise, is done in this rough,
uncertain way, by the will of the king alone.
But, however different the circumstances, yet there is a lesson in this
story which is universal and eternal, true for all men, and true for
ever. The same human nature, for good and for evil, is in us, as was in
that Eastern king and his slave. The same kingdom of heaven is over us
as was over them, its laws punishing sinners by their own sins; the same
Spirit of God which strove with their hearts is striving with ours. If
it was not so, the parable would mean nothing to us. It would be a story
of men who belonged to another moral world, and were under another moral
law, not to be judged by our rules of right and wrong; and therefore a
story of men whom we need not copy.
But it is not so. If the parable be—as I take for granted it is—a true
story; then it was Christ, the Light who lights every man who cometh into
the world, who put into that king’s heart the divine feeling of mercy,
and inspired him to forgive, freely and utterly, the wretched slave who
worshipped him, kneeling with his forehead to the ground, and promising,
in his terror, what he probably knew he could not perform—‘Lord, have
patience with me, and I will pay thee all.’
And it was Christ, the Light of men, who inspired that king with the
feeling, not of mere revenge, but of just retribution; who taught him
that, when the slave was unworthy of his mercy, he had a right, in a
noble and divine indignation, to withdraw his mercy; and not to waste his
favours on a bad man, who would only turn them to fresh bad account, but
to keep them for those who had justice and honour enough in their hearts
to forgive others, when their Lord had forgiven them.
We must bear in mind, that the king must have been right, and acting
(whether he knew it or not) by the Spirit of God; else his conduct would
never have been likened to the kingdom of heaven: that is, to the laws by
which God governs both this world and the world to come.
The kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of God—Would that men would believe
in them a little more! It seems, at times, as if all belief in them was
dying out; as if men, throughout all civilized and Christian countries,
had made up their minds to say—There is no kingdom of God or of heaven.
There will be one hereafter, in the next world. This world is the
kingdom of men, and of what they can do for themselves without God’s
help, and without God’s laws.
My friends, the Jewish rulers of old said so, and cried, ‘We have no king
but Cæsar.’ And they remain an example to all time, of what happens to
those who deny the kingdom of God. Christ came to tell them that the
kingdom of heaven was at hand, and the kingdom of God was among them.
But they would have none of it. And what said our Lord of them and their
notion? ‘The prince of this world,’ said He, ‘cometh, and hath nothing
in me. This is your hour and the power of darkness.’ Yes; the hour in
which men had determined to manage the world in their way, and not in
Christ’s, was also the hour of the power of darkness. That was what they
had gained by having their own way; by saying—The kingdom is ours, and
not God’s. They had fallen under the power of darkness, not of light.
The very light within them was darkness. They utterly mistook their road
on earth. At the very moment that they were trying to make peace with
the Roman governor, by denying that Christ was their King, and demanding
that He should be crucified,—at that very moment the things which
belonged to their peace were hid from their eyes. Never men made so
fatal a mistake, when they thought themselves most politic and prudent.
They said among themselves—‘Unless we put down this man, the Romans will
come and take away our place,’ _i.e._ our privileges, and power, and our
nation. And what followed? That the Romans did come and take away their
place and nation, with horrible massacre and ruin: and so they lost both
the kingdom of this world, and the kingdom of God likewise. Never, I
say, did men make a more fatal mistake in the things of this world than
those Jews to whom the kingdom of God came, and they rejected it.
And so shall we, my friends, if we forget that, whether we like it or
not, the kingdom of God is within us, and we within it likewise.
1. The kingdom of God is within us. Every gracious motive, every noble,
just, and merciful instinct within us, is a sign to us that the kingdom
of God is come to us; that we are not as the brutes which perish; not as
the heathen who are too often past feeling, being alienated from the life
of God by reason of the ignorance which is in them: but, that we are
God’s children, inheritors of the kingdom of heaven; and that God’s
Spirit is teaching us the laws of that kingdom; so that in every child
who is baptized, educated, and civilized, is fulfilled the promise, ‘I
will write my laws upon their hearts, and I will be to them a Father.’
God’s Spirit is teaching our hearts as He taught the heart of that old
Eastern king. It may be, it ought to be, that He is teaching us far
deeper lessons than He ever taught that king.
2. We are in the kingdom of God. It is worth our while to remember that
steadfastly just now. Many people are ready to agree that the kingdom of
God is within them. They will readily confess that religion is a
spiritual matter, and a matter of the heart: but their fancy is that
therefore religion, and all just and noble and beautiful instincts and
aspirations, are very good things for those who have them: but that, if
any one has them not, it does not much matter.
They do not see that there are not only such things as feelings about
God; but that there are also such things as laws of God; and that God can
enforce those laws, and does enforce them, sometimes in a very terrible
manner. They do not believe enough in a living God, an acting God, a God
who will not merely write His laws in our hearts, if we will let Him, but
may also destroy us off the face of the earth, if we would not let Him.
They fancy that God either cannot, or will not, enforce His own laws, but
leaves a man free to accept them, or reject as he will. There is no
greater mistake. Be not deceived; God is not mocked. As a man sows, so
shall he reap. God says to us, to all men,—Copy Me. Do as I do, and be
My children, and be blest. But if we will not; if, after all God’s care
and love, the tree brings forth no fruit, then, soon or late, the
sentence goes forth against it in God’s kingdom, ‘Cut it down; why
cumbereth it the ground?’
There is a saying now-a-days, that nations and tribes who will not live
reasonable lives, and behave as men should to their fellow-men, must be
civilized off the face of the earth. The words are false, if they mean
that we, or any other men, have a right to exterminate their
fellow-creatures. But they are true, and more true than the people who
use them fancy, if they are spoken not of man, but of God. For if men
will not obey the laws of God’s kingdom, God does actually civilize them
off the face of the earth. Great nations, learned churches, powerful
aristocracies, ancient institutions, has God civilized off the face of
the earth before now. Because they would not acknowledge God for their
King, and obey the laws of His kingdom, in which alone are life, and
wealth, and health, God has taken His kingdom away from them, and given
it to others who would bring forth the fruits thereof. The Jews are the
most awful and famous example of that terrible judgment of God, but they
are not the only ones. It has happened again and again. It may happen
to you or me, as well as to this whole nation of England, if we forget
that we are in God’s kingdom, and that only by living according to God’s
laws can we keep our place therein.
And this is what the parable teaches us. The king tries to teach the
servant one of the laws of his kingdom—that he rules according to
boundless mercy and generosity. God wishes to teach us the same. The
king does so, not by word, but by deed, by actually forgiving the man his
debt. So does God forgive us freely in Jesus Christ our Lord.
But more than this, he wishes the servant to understand that he is to
copy his king; that if his king has behaved to him like a father to his
child, he must behave as a brother to his fellow-servants. So does God
wish to teach us.
But he does not tell the man so, in so many words. He does not say to
him, I command thee to forgive thy debtors as I have forgiven thee. He
leaves the man to his own sense of honour and good feeling. It is a
question not of the law, but of the heart. So does God with us. He
educates us, not as children or slaves, but as free men, as moral agents.
He leaves us to our own reason and conscience, to reap the fruit which we
ourselves have sown. Therefore, about a thousand matters in life He lays
on us no special command. He leaves us to act according to our good
feeling, to our own sense of honour. It is a matter, I say, of the
heart. If God’s law be written in our hearts, our hearts will lead us to
do the right thing. If God’s law be not in our hearts, then mere outward
commands will not make us do right, for what we do will not be really
right and good, because it will not be done heartily and of our own will.
But the servant does not follow his lord’s example.
Fresh from his lord’s presence, he takes his fellow-servant by the
throat, saying—Pay me that thou owest. His heart has not been touched.
His lord’s example has not softened him. He does not see how beautiful,
how noble, how divine, generosity and mercy are. He is a hard-hearted,
worldly man. The heavenly kingdom, which is justice and love, is not
within him. Then, if the kingdom of heaven is not in him, he shall find
out that he is in it; and that in a very terrible way:—‘Thou wicked
servant, unworthy of my pity, because there is no goodness in thine own
heart. Thou wilt not take into thy heart my law, which tells thee, Be
merciful as I am merciful. Then thou shalt feel another and an equally
universal law of mine. As thou doest so shalt thou be done by. If thou
art merciful, thou shalt find mercy. If thou wilt have nothing but
retribution, then nothing but retribution thou shalt have. If thou must
needs do justice thyself, I will do justice likewise. Because I am
merciful, dost thou think me careless? Because I sit still, that I am
patient? Dost thou think me such a one as thyself?’ And his lord
delivered him to the tormentors till he should pay all that was due unto
him.