The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in
his field: but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among
the wheat, and went his way. But when the blade was sprung up, and
brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also. So the servants
of the household came and said unto him, Sir, didst not thou sow good
seed in thy field? from whence then hath it tares? He said unto
them, An enemy hath done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou
then that we go and gather them up? But he said, Nay; lest while ye
gather up the tares, ye toot up also the wheat with them. Let both
grow together until the harvest and in the time of harvest: I will
say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them
in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.
THE thoughtful man who wishes well to the Gospel of Christ will hardly
hear this parable without a feeling of humiliation. None of our Lord’s
parables are more clear and simple in their meaning; none have a more
direct and practical command appended to them; none have been less
regarded during the last fifteen hundred years. Toleration, solemnly
enjoined, has been the exception. Persecution, solemnly forbidden, has
been the rule. Men, as usual, have fancied themselves wiser than God;
for they have believed themselves wise enough to do what he had told them
that they were not wise enough to do, and so have tried to root the tares
from among the wheat. Men have, as usual, lacked faith in Christ; they
did not believe that he was actually governing the earth which belonged
to him; that he was actually cultivating his field, the world: they
therefore believed themselves bound to do for him what he neglected, or
at least did not see fit, to do for himself; and they tried to root up
the tares from among the wheat. They have tried to repress free thought,
and to silence novel opinions, forgetful that Christ must have been right
after all, and that in silencing opinions which startled them, they might
be quenching the Spirit, and despising prophecies. But they found it
more difficult to quench the Spirit than they fancied, when they began
the policy of repression. They have found that the Spirit blew where it
listed, and they heard the sound of it, but knew not whence it came, or
whither it went; that the utterances which startled them, the tones of
feeling and thought which terrified them, reappeared, though crushed in
one place, suddenly in another; that the whole atmosphere was charged
with them, as with electricity; and that it was impossible to say where
the unseen force might not concentrate itself at any moment, and flash
out in a lightning stroke. Then their fear has turned to a rage. They
have thought no more of putting down opinions: but of putting down men.
They have found it more difficult than they fancied to separate the man
from his opinions; to hate the sin and love the sinner: and so they have
begun to persecute; and, finding brute force, or at least the chichane of
law, far more easy than either convincing their opponents or allowing
themselves to be convinced by them, they have fined, imprisoned,
tortured, burnt, exterminated; and, like the Roman conquerors of old,
‘made a desert, and called that peace.’
And all the while the words stood written in the Scriptures which they
professed to believe: ‘Nay: lest while ye root up the tares, ye root up
the wheat also.’
They had been told, if ever men were told, that the work was beyond their
powers of discernment: that, whatever the tares were, or however they
came into God’s field the world, they were either too like the wheat, or
too intimately entangled with them, for any mortal man to part them. God
would part them in his own good time. If they trusted God, they would
let them be; certain that he hated what was false, what was hurtful,
infinitely more than they; certain that he would some day cast out of his
kingdom all things which offend, and all that work injustice, and
whatsoever loveth and maketh a lie; and that, therefore, if he suffered
such things to abide awhile, it was for them to submit, and to believe
that God loved the world better than they, and knew better how to govern
it. But if, on the contrary, they did not believe God, then they would
set to work, in their disobedient self-conceit, to do that which he had
forbidden them; and the certain result would be that, with the tares,
they would root up the wheat likewise.
Note here two things. First, it is not said that there were no tares
among the wheat; nor that the servants would fail in rooting some of them
up. They would succeed probably in doing some good: but they would
succeed certainly in doing more harm. In their short-sighted, blind,
erring, hasty zeal, they would destroy the good with the evil. Their
knowledge of this complex and miraculous universe was too shallow, their
canons of criticism were too narrow, to decide on what ought, or ought
not, to grow in the field of him whose ways and thoughts were as much
higher than theirs as the heaven is higher than the earth.
Note also, that the Lord does not blame them for their purpose. He
merely points out to them its danger; and forbids it because it is
dangerous; for their wish to root out the tares was not ‘natural.’ We
shall libel it by calling it that. It was distinctly spiritual, the
first impulse of spiritual men, who love right, and hate wrong, and
desire to cultivate the one, and exterminate the other. To root out the
tares; to put down bad men and wrong thoughts by force, is one of the
earliest religious instincts. It is the child’s instinct—pardonable
though mistaken. The natural man—whether the heathen savage at one end
of the scale, or the epicurean man of the world at the other—has no such
instinct. He will feel no anger against falsehood, because he has no
love for truth; he will be liberal enough, tolerant enough, of all which
does not touch his own self-interest; but that once threatened, he too
may join the ranks of the bigots, and persecute, not like them, in the
name of God and truth, but in those of society and order; and so the
chief priests and Pontius Pilate may make common cause. And yet the
chief priests, with their sense of duty, of truth, and of right, however
blundering, concealed, perverted, may be a whole moral heaven higher than
Pilate with no sense of aught beyond present expediency. But
nevertheless what have been the consequences to both? That the chief
priests have failed as utterly as the Pilates. As God forewarned them,
they have rooted up the wheat with the tares; they have made the blood of
martyrs the seed of the Church; and more, they have made martyrs of those
who never deserved to be martyrs, by wholesale and indiscriminate
condemnation. They have forgotten that the wheat and the tares grow
together, not merely in separate men, but in each man’s own heart and
thoughts; that light and darkness, wisdom and folly, duty and ambition,
self-sacrifice and self-conceit, are fighting in every soul of man in
whom there is even the germ of spiritual life. Therefore they have made
men offenders for a word. They have despised noble aspirations, ignored
deep and sound insights, because they came in questionable shapes,
mingled with errors or eccentricities. They have cried in their haste,
‘Here are tares, and tares alone.’
Again and again have religious men done this, for many a hundred years;
and again and again the Nemesis has fallen on them. A generation or two
has passed, and the world has revolted from their unjust judgments. It
has perceived, among the evil, good which it had overlooked in an
indignant haste and passionateness, learnt from those who should have
taught it wisdom, patience, and charity. It has made heroes of those who
had been branded as heretics; and has cried, ‘There was wheat, and wheat
alone;’ and so religious men have hindered the very cause for which they
fancied that they were fighting; and have gained nothing by disobeying
God’s command, save to weaken their own moral influence, to increase the
divisions of the Church, and to put a fresh stumbling-block in the path
of the ignorant and the young.
And what have been the consequences to Christ’s Church? Have not her
enemies—and her friends too—for centuries past, cried in vain:—
‘For forms of faith let graceless zealots fight,
His can’t he wrong, whose life is in the right.’
Of Christian morals her enemies have not complained: but that these
morals have been postponed, neglected, forgotten, in the disputes over
abstruse doctrines, over ceremonies, and over no-ceremonies; that men who
were all fully agreed in their definition of goodness, and what a good
man should be and do, have denounced each other concerning matters which
had no influence whatsoever to practical morality, till the ungodly
cried, ‘See how these Christians hate one another! See how they waste
their time in disputing concerning the accidents of the bread of life,
forgetful that thousands were perishing round them for want of any bread
of life at all!’
My friends, these things are true; and have been true for centuries. Let
us not try to forget them by denouncing them as the utterances of the
malevolent and the unbelieving. Let us rather imitate the wise man who
said, that he was always grateful to his critics, for, however unjust
their attacks, they were certain to attack, and therefore to show him,
his weakest points. And here is our weakest point; namely, in our
unhappy divisions—which are the fruits of self-will and self-conceit, and
of the vain attempt to do that which God incarnate has told us we cannot
do—to part the wheat from the tares.
We cannot part them. Man could never do it, even in the simpler Middle
Age. Far less can he do it now in an age full of such strange, such
complex influences; at once so progressive and conservative; an age in
which the same man is often craving after some new prospect of the
future, and craving at the same moment after the seemingly obsolete past;
longing for fresh truth, and yet dreading to lose the old; with hope
struggling against fear, courage against modesty, scorn of imbecility
against reverence for authority in the same man’s heart, while the
mystery of the new world around him strives with the mystery of the old
world which lies behind him; while the belief that man is the same being
now as he was five thousand years ago strives with the plain fact that he
is assuming round us utterly novel habits, opinions, politics; while the
belief that Christ is the same now as he was in Judæa of old—yea, the
same yesterday, to-day, and for ever—strives with the plain fact that his
field, the world, is in a state in which it never has been since the
making of the world; while it is often most difficult, though (as I
believe) certainly possible, to see those divine laws at work with which
God governed the nations in old time. May God forgive us all, both laity
and clergy, every cruel word, every uncharitable thought, every hasty
judgment. Have we not need, in such a time as this, of that divine
humility which is the elder sister of divine charity? Have we not need
of some of that God-inspired modesty of St. Paul’s: ‘I think as a child,
I speak as a child. I see through a glass darkly’? Have we not need to
listen to his warning: ‘he that regardeth the day, to the Lord he
regardeth it; and he that regardeth it not, to the Lord he regardeth it
not. Who art thou that judgest another? To his own master he standeth
or falleth. Yea, and he shall stand; for God is able to make him stand’?
Have we not need to hear our Lord’s solemn rebuke, when St. John boasted
how he saw one casting out devils in Christ’s name, and he forbade him,
because he followed not them—‘Forbid him not’? Have we not need to
believe St. James, when he tells us that every good gift and every
perfect gift cometh from above, from the Father of lights, and not (as we
have too often fancied) sometimes from below, from darkness and the pit?
Have we not need to keep in mind the canon of the wise Gamaliel?—‘If this
counsel or this work be of man, it will come to nought: but if it be of
God, we cannot overthrow it, lest haply we too be found fighting even
against God.’ Have we not need to keep in mind that ‘every spirit which
confesses that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God;’ and ‘no man
saith that Jesus is the Christ, save by the Spirit of God;’ lest haply
we, too, be found more fastidious than Almighty God himself? Have we not
need to beware lest we, like the Scribes and Pharisees, should be found
keeping the key of knowledge, and yet not entering in ourselves, and
hindering those who would enter in? Have we not need to beware lest,
while we are settling which is the right gate to the kingdom of heaven,
the publicans and harlots should press into it before us; and lest, while
we are boasting that we are the children of Abraham, God should, without
our help, raise up children to Abraham of those stones outside; those
hard hearts, dull brains, natures ground down by the drudgery of daily
life till they are as the pavement of the streets; those so-called
‘heathen masses’ of whom we are bid to think this day.
If there be any truth, any reason, in what I have said—or rather in what
Christ and his apostles have said—let us lay it to heart upon this day,
on which the clergy of this great metropolis have found a common cause
for which to plead, whatever may be their minor differences of opinion.
Let us wish success to every argument by which this great cause may be
enforced, to every scheme of good which may be built up by its funds.
Let us remember that, however much the sermons preached this day differ
in details, they will all agree, thank God, in the root and ground of
their pleading—duty to Christ, and to those for whom Christ died. Let us
remember that, to whatever outwardly different purposes the money
collected may be applied, it will after all be applied to one purpose—to
Christian civilization, Christian teaching, Christian discipline; and
that any Christianity, any Christian civilization, any Christian
discipline, is infinitely better than none; that, though all man’s
systems and methods must be imperfect, faulty, yet they are infinitely
better than anarchy and heathendom, just as the wheat, however much mixed
with weeds, is infinitely better than the weeds alone. But above all,
let us wish well to all schemes of education, of whatever kind, certain
that any education is better than none. And, therefore, let me entreat
you to subscribe bountifully to that scheme for which I specially plead
this day.
Let me remind you, very solemnly, that the present dearth of education in
these realms is owing mainly to our unhappy religious dissensions; that
it is the disputes, not of unbelievers, but of Christians, which have
made it impossible for our government to fulfil one of the first rights,
one of the first duties, of any government in a civilized country;
namely, to command, and to compel, every child in the realm to receive a
proper education. Strange and sad that so it should be: yet so it is.
We have been letting, we are letting still, year by year, thousands sink
and drown in the slough of heathendom and brutality, while we are
debating learnedly whether a raft, or a boat, or a rope, or a life-buoy,
is the legitimate instrument for saving them; and future historians will
record with sorrow and wonder a fact which will be patent to them, though
the dust of controversy hides it from our eyes—even the fact that the
hinderers of education in these realms were to be found, not among the
so-called sceptics, not among the so-called infidels; but among those who
believed that God came down from heaven, and became man, and died on the
cross, for every savage child in London streets. Compulsory government
education is, by our own choice and determination, impossible. The more
solemn is the duty laid on us, on laity and clergy alike, to supply that
want by voluntary education. The clergy will do their duty, each in his
own way. Let the laity do theirs likewise, in fear and trembling, as men
who have voluntarily and deliberately undertaken to educate the lower
classes; and who must do it, or bear the shame for ever. For in the last
day, when we shall all appear before Him whose ways are not as our ways,
or his thoughts as our thoughts—in that day, the question will not be,
whether the compulsory system, or the denominational system, or any other
system, satisfied best our sectarian ways and our narrow thoughts: but
whether they satisfied the ways of that Father in heaven who willeth not
that one little child should perish.
SERMON XXIII.
THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST.