All Saints' Day and Other Sermons

This was what the apostles taught the heathen, and their words were true.  You may see them come true round you every day.  For, my friends, just as far as people pray for Christ’s grace, and give themselves up to be led by God’s Spirit, they become full of grace themselves, courteous and civil, loving and amiable, true and honourable—a pleasure to themselves and to all round them.  While, on the other hand; all rudeness, all ill-temper, all selfishness, all greediness are just so many sins against the grace of Christ, which grieve the Spirit of God, at the same time that they grieve our neighbours for whom Christ died, and cut us off, as long as we give way to them, from the communion of saints.

Well would it be for married people, if they would but remember this.  Well for them, for their own sake and for their children’s.  “Heirs together,” St Peter says they are, “of the grace of life.”  Think of those words; for in them lies the true secret of happiness.  Not in the mere grace of youth, which pleases the fancy at first; that must soon fade; and then comes, too often, coldness between man and wife; neglect, rudeness, ill-temper, because the grace of life is not there—the grace of the inner life, of the immortal soul, which alone makes life pleasant, even tolerable, to two people who are bound together for better or for worse.  But yet, unless St Peter be mistaken, the fault in such sad case is on the man’s side.  Yes, we must face that truth, we men; and face it like men.  If we are unhappy in our marriage it is our own fault.  It is the woman who is the weaker, says St Peter, and selfish men are apt to say, “Then it is the woman’s fault, if we are not happy.”  St Peter says exactly the opposite.  He says,—Because she is the weaker you are the stronger; and therefore it is your fault if she is not what she should be; for you are able to help her, and lead her; you took her to your heart for that very purpose, you swore to cherish her.  Because she is the weaker, you can teach her, help her, improve her character, if you will.  You have more knowledge of life and the world than she has.  Dwell with her according to knowledge, says St Peter; use your experience to set her right if she be wrong; and use your experience and your strength, too, to keep down your own temper and your own selfishness toward her, to bear and forbear, to give and forgive, live and let live.  Remember that you are heirs together of the grace of life; and if the grace of life is not in you, you cannot expect it to be in her.  And what is the grace of life?  It must be the grace of Christ.  St John says that Christ is the Life.  And what is the grace of Christ?  Christ’s grace, Christ’s gracefulness, Christ’s beautiful and noble and loving character—the grace of Christ is Christ’s likeness.  Do you ask what will Christ give me?  He will give you Himself.  He will make you like Himself, partaker of His grace; and what is that?  It is this—to be loving, gentle, temperate, courteous, condescending, self-sacrificing.  Giving honour to those who are weaker than yourself, just because they are weaker; ready and willing, ay, and counting it an honour to take trouble for other people, to be of use to other people, to give way to other people; and, above all, to the woman who has given herself to you, body and soul.  That is the grace of Christ; that is the grace of life; that is what makes life worth having: ay, makes it a foretaste of heaven upon earth; when man and wife are heirs together of the grace of life, of all those tempers which make life graceful and pleasant, giving way to each other in everything which is not wrong; studying each other’s comfort, taking each other’s advice, shutting their eyes to each other’s little failings, and correcting each other’s great failings, not by harsh words, but silently and kindly, by example.  And if the man will do that, there is little fear but that the woman will do it also.  And so, their prayers are not hindered.

Married people cannot pray, they have no heart to pray, while they are discontented with each other.  They feel themselves wrong, and because they are parted from each other, they feel parted from God too; and their selfishness or anger rises as a black wall, not merely between them, but between each of them and God.  And so the grace of life is indeed gone away from them, and the whole world looks dark and ugly to them, because it is not bright and cheerful in the light of Christ’s grace, which makes all the world full of sunshine and joy.  But it need not be so, friends.  It would not be so, if married people would take the advice which the Prayer Book gives them, and come to Holy communion.  Would to God, my friends, that all married people would understand what that Holy communion says to them; and come together Sunday after Sunday to that throne of grace, there to receive of Christ’s fulness, and grace upon grace.  For that Table says to you: You are heirs together of the grace of life; you are not meant merely to feed together for a few short years, at the same table, on the bread which perishes, but to feed for ever together on the bread which comes down from heaven, even on Christ Himself, the life of the world; to receive life from His life, that you may live together such a life as He lived, and lives still; to receive grace from the fulness of His grace, that you may be full of grace as He is.  That Table tells you that because you both must live by the same life of Christ, you must live the same life as each other, and grow more and more like each other year by year; that as you both receive the same grace of Christ, you will become more and more gracious to each other year by year, and both grow together, nearer and dearer to each other, more worthy of each other’s respect, more worthy of each other’s trust, more worthy of each other’s love.  And then “till death us do part” may mean what it will.  Let death part what of them he can part, the perishing mortal body; he has no power over the soul, or over the body which shall rise to life eternal.  Let death do his worst.  They belong to Christ who conquered death, and they live by His everlasting life, and their life is hid with Christ in God, where death cannot reach it or find it; and therefore their life and their love, and the grace of it, will last as long as Christ’s life and Christ’s love, and Christ’s grace last—and that will be for ever and ever.

SERMON XXI.  FATHER AND CHILD

Eversley. 1861.

1 Cor. i. 4, 5, 7.  “I thank my God always on your behalf, for the grace of God which is given you by Jesus Christ.  That in every thing ye are enriched by Him, in all utterance, and in all knowledge . . .  So that ye come behind in no gift; waiting for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.  Who shall also confirm you unto the end, that ye may be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

This text is a very important one.  It ought to teach me how I should treat you.  It ought to teach you how you should treat your children.  It ought to teach you how God, your heavenly Father, treats you.  You see at the first glance how cheerful and hopeful St Paul is about these Corinthians.  He is always thanking God, he says, about them, for the grace of God which was given them by Jesus Christ, that in everything they were enriched by Him, in all utterance and in all knowledge.  And he has good hope for them.  Nay, he seems to be certain about them, that they will persevere, and conquer, and be saved; for Christ Himself will confirm them (that is strengthen them) to the end, that they may be blameless in the way of our Lord Jesus Christ.

If we knew no more of these Corinthians than what these words tell us, we should suppose that they were very great saints, leading holy and irreproachable lives before God and man.  But we know that it was not so.  That they were going on very ill.  That this is the beginning of an epistle in which St Paul is going to rebuke them very severely; and to tell them, that unless they mend, they will surely become reprobates, and be lost after all.  He is going to rebuke them for having heresies among them, that is religious parties and religious quarrels—very much as we have now; for being puffed up with spiritual self-conceit; for despising and disparaging him; for loose lives, allowing (in one case) such a crime among them as even the heathen did not allow; for profaning the Lord’s Supper, to such an extent that some seem even to have got drunk at it; for want of charity to each other; for indulging in fanatical excitement; for denying, some of them, the resurrection of the dead; on the whole, for being in so unwholesome a state of mind that he has to warn them solemnly of the fearful example of the old Israelites, who perished in the wilderness for their sins—as they will perish, he hints, unless they mend.

And yet he begins by thanking God for them, by speaking of them, and to them, in this cheerful and hopeful tone.

Does that seem strange?  Why should it seem strange, my friends, to us, if we are in the habit of training our children, and rebuking our children, as we ought?  If we have to rebuke our children for doing wrong, do we begin by trying to break their hearts? by raking up old offences, by reproaching them with all the wrong they ever did in their lives, and giving them to understand that they are thoroughly bad, and have altogether lost our love, so that we will have nothing more to do with them unless they mend?  Or do we begin by making them feel that however grieved we are with them, we love them still; that however wrong they have been, there is right feeling left in them still; and by giving them credit for whatever good there is in them—by appealing to that; calling on them to act up to that; to be true to themselves, and to their better nature; saying, You can do right in one thing—then do right in another—and do right in all?  If we do not do this we do wrong; we destroy our children’s self-respect, we make them despair of improving, we make them fancy themselves bad children: that is the very surest plan we can take to make them bad children, by making them reckless.

But if we be wise parents—such parents to our children as St Paul was to his spiritual children, the Corinthians—we shall do by them just what St Paul did by these Corinthians.  Before he says one harsh word to them, he will awaken in them faith and love.  He will make them trust him and love him, all the more because he knows that through false teaching they do not trust and love him as they used to do.  But till they do, he knows that there is no use in rebuking them.  Till they trust him and love him, they will not listen to him.  And how does he try to bring them round to him?  By praising them:—by telling them that he trusts them and loves them, because in spite of all their faults there is something in them worthy to be loved and trusted.  He begins by giving them credit for whatever good there is in them.  They are rich in all utterance and all knowledge; that is, they are very brilliant and eloquent talkers about spiritual things, and also very deep and subtle thinkers about spiritual things.  So far so good.  These are great gifts—gifts of Christ, too,—tokens that God’s spirit is with them, and that all they need is to be true to His gracious inspirations.  Then, when he has told them that, or rather made them understand that he knows that, and is delighted at it, then he can go on safely and boldly to tell them of their sins also in the plainest and sternest and yet the most tender and fatherly language.

This is very important, my friends.  I cannot tell you fully how important I think it, in more ways than one.  I am sure that if we took St Paul’s method with our children we should succeed with them far better than we do.  And I think, I have thought long, that if we could see that St Paul’s method with those Corinthians was actually the same as God’s method with us, we should have far truer notions of God, and God’s dealings with us; and should reverence and value far more that Holy Catholic Church into which we have been, by God’s infinite mercy, baptized, and wherein we have been educated.

For, and now I entreat you to listen to me carefully, you who have sound heads and earnest hearts, ready and willing to know the truth about God and yourselves, if St Paul looked at the Corinthians in this light, may not God have looked at them in the same light?  If St Paul accepted them for the sake of the good which was in them, in spite of all their faults, may not God have accepted them for the sake of the good which was in them, in spite of all their faults? and may not He accept us likewise?  I think it must be so.  For was not St Paul an inspired apostle? and are not these words of his inspired by the Holy Spirit of God?  But if so, then the Spirit of God must have looked at these Corinthians in the same light as St Paul, and therefore God must do likewise, because the Holy Spirit is God.  Must it not be so?  Can we suppose that God would take one view of these Corinthians, and then inspire St Paul to take another view?  What does being inspired mean at all, save having the mind of Christ and of God,—being taught to see men and things as God sees them, to feel for them and think of them as God does?  If inspiration does not mean that, what does it mean?  Therefore, I think, we have a right to believe that St Paul’s words express the mind of God concerning these Corinthians; that God was pleased with their utterance and their knowledge, and accepted them for that; and that in the same way God is pleased with whatsoever He sees good in us, and accepts us for that.  But, remember, not for our own works or deservings any more than these Corinthians.  They were, and we are accepted in Christ, and for the merits of Christ.  And any good points in us, or in these Corinthians, as St Paul says expressly (here and elsewhere), are not our own, but come from Christ, by the inspiration of His Holy Spirit.

I know many people do not think thus.  They think of God as looking only at our faults; as extreme to mark what is done amiss; as never content with us; as always crying to men, Yes, you have done this and that well, and yet not quite well, for even in what you have done there are blots and mistakes; but this and that you have not done, and therefore you are still guilty, still under infinite displeasure.  And they think that they exalt God’s holiness by such thoughts, and magnify His hatred of sin thereby.  And they invent arguments to prove themselves right, such as this: That because God is an infinite being, every sin committed against Him is infinite; and therefore deserves an infinite punishment; which is a juggle of words of which any educated man ought to be ashamed.

I do not know where, in the Bible, they find all this.  Certainly not in the writings of St Paul.  They seem to me to find it, not in the Bible at all, but in their own hearts, judging that God must be as hard upon His children as they are apt to be upon their own.  I know that God is never content with us, or with any man.  How can He be?  But in what sense is He not content?  In the sense in which a hard task-master is not content with his slave, when he flogs him cruelly for the slightest fault?  Or in the sense in which a loving father is not content with his child, grieving over him, counselling him, as long as he sees him, even in the slightest matter, doing less well than he might do?  Think of that, and when you have thought of it, believe that in this grand text St Paul speaks really by the Spirit of God, and according to the mind of God, and teaches not these old Corinthians merely, but you and your children after you, what is the mind of God concerning you, what is the light in which God looks upon you.  For, if you will but think over your own lives, and over the Catechism which you learned in your youth, has not God’s way of dealing with you been just the same as St Paul’s with those Corinthians, teaching you to love and trust Him almost before He taught you the difference between right and wrong?  I know that some think otherwise.  Many who do not belong to the Church, and many, alas! who profess to belong to the Church, will tell you that God’s method is, first to terrify men by the threats of the law and the sight of their sins and the fear of damnation, and afterwards to reveal to them the gospel and His mercy and salvation in Christ.  Now I can only answer that it is not so.  Not so in fact.  These preachers themselves may do it; but that is no proof that God does it.  What God’s plan is can only be known from facts, from experience, from what actually happens; first in God’s kingdom of nature, and next in God’s kingdom of grace, which is the Church.  And in the kingdom of nature how does God begin with mankind?  What are a child’s first impressions of this life?  Does he hear voices from heaven telling little children that they are lost sinners?  Does he see lightning come from heaven to strike sinners dead, or earthquakes rise and swallow them up?  Nothing of the kind.  A child’s first impressions of this life, what are they but pleasure?  His mother’s breast, warmth, light, food, play, flowers, and all pleasant things,—by these God educates the child, even of the heathen and the savage:—and why?  If haply he may feel after God and find Him, and find that He is a God of love and mercy, a giver of good things, who knows men’s necessities before they ask,—a good and loving God, and not a being such as I will not, I dare not speak of.

I say with the very heathen God deals thus.  We have plain Scripture for that.  For we have, and thanks be to God that we have, in such times as these, a missionary sermon preached by St Paul to the heathen at Lystra.  And in that is not one word concerning these terrors of the law.  He says, I preach to you God, whom you ought to have known of yourselves, because He has not left Himself without witness.  And what is this witness of which the apostle speaks?  Wrath and terror and destruction?  Not so, says St Paul.  This is His witness, that He has sent you rain and fruitful seasons, filling your heart with food and gladness.  His goodness, His bounty,—it is the witness of God and of the character of God.  There is wrath and terror enough, says St Paul elsewhere, awaiting those who go on in sin.  But then what does he say is their sin?  Despising the goodness of God, by which He has been trying to win mankind to love and trust Him, before He threatens and before He punishes at all.  So much for the terrors of the law coming before the good news of the gospel in God’s kingdom of nature.

And still less do the terrors of the law come first in God’s kingdom of grace, which is the Church.  They did not come first to you or to me, or to any one in His Church who has been taught, as churchmen should be, their Catechism.  If any have been, unhappily for them, brought up to learn Catechisms and hymns which do not belong to the Church, and which terrify little children with horrible notions of God’s wrath, and the torments prepared not merely for wicked men, but for unconverted children, and then teach them to say,—

“Can such a wretch as IEscape this dreadful end?”

so much the worse for them.s  We, who are Church people, are bound to believe that God speaks to us through the Church books, and that it was His will that we should have been brought up to believe the Catechism.  And in that Catechism we heard not one word of these terrors of the law or of God’s wrath hanging over us.  We were taught that before we even knew right from wrong, God adopted us freely as His children, freely forgave us our original sin for the sake of Christ’s blood, freely renewed us by His Holy Spirit, freely placed us in His Church;—that we might love Him, because He first loved us; trust Him because He has done all that even God could do to win our trust; and obey Him, because we are boundlessly in debt to Him for boundless mercies.  This is God’s method with us in His Church, and what is it but St Paul’s method with these Corinthians?

Believe this, then, you who wish to be Churchmen in spirit and in truth.  Believe that St Paul’s conduct is to you a type and pattern of what God does, and what you ought to do.  That God’s method of winning you to do right is to make you love Him and trust Him; and that your method of winning your children to do right is to make them love and trust you.  Let us remember that if our children are not perfect, they at least inherited their imperfections from us; and if our Father in heaven, from whom we inherit no sin, but only good, have patience with us, shall we not have patience with our children, who owe to us their fallen nature?

Ah! cast thy bread upon the waters,—the bread which even the poorest can give to their children abundantly and without stint,—the bread of charity,—human tenderness, forbearance, hopefulness,—cast that bread upon the waters, and thou shalt find it after many days.

SERMON XXII.  GOD IS OUR REFUGE

Westminster Abbey, 1873.

Psalm xlvi. 1.  “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.”

This is a noble psalm, full of hope and comfort; and it will be more and more full of hope and comfort, the more faithfully we believe in the incarnation, the passion, the resurrection, and the ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ.  For if we are to give credit to His express words, and to those of every book of the New Testament, and to the opinion of that Church into which we are baptised, then Jesus Christ is none other than the same Jehovah, Lord, and God who brought the Jews out of Egypt, who guided them and governed them through all their history—teaching, judging, rewarding, punishing them and all the nations of the earth.  This psalm, therefore, is concerning our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom all power is given in heaven and earth, and who ascended up on high; that He might be as He had been from the beginning, King of kings and Lord of lords, the Master of this world and all the nations in it.  This psalm, therefore, is a hymn concerning the kingdom of Christ and of God.  It tells us something of the government which Christ has been exercising over the world ever since the beginning of it, and which He is exercising over this world now.  It bids us be still, and know that He is God—that He will be exalted among the nations, and will be exalted in the earth, whether men like it or not; but that they ought to like it and rejoice in it, and find comfort in the thought that Christ Jesus is their refuge and their strength—a very present help in trouble—as the old Jew who wrote this psalm found comfort.

When this psalm was written, or what particular events it speaks of, I cannot tell, for I do not think we have any means of finding out.  It may have been written in the time of David, or of Solomon, or of Hezekiah.  It may possibly have been written much later.  It seems to mo probably to refer—but I speak with extreme diffidence—to that Assyrian invasion, and that preservation of Jerusalem, of which we heard in the magnificent first lesson for this morning and this afternoon; when, at the same time that the Assyrians were crushing, one by one, every nation in the East, there was, as the elder Isaiah and Micah tell us plainly, a great volcanic outbreak in the Holy Land.  But all this matters very little to us; because events analogous to those of which it speaks have happened not once only, but many times, and will happen often again.  And this psalm lays down a rule for judging of such startling and terrible events whenever they happen, and for saying of them, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.”  It seems from the beginning of the psalm that there had been earthquakes or hurricanes in Judea—more probably earthquakes, which were and are now frequent there.  It seems as if the land had been shaken, and cliffs thrown into the sea, which had rolled back in a mighty wave, such as only too often accompanies an earthquake.  But the Psalmist knew that that was God’s doing; and therefore he would not fear, though the earth was moved, and though the hills were earned into the very midst of the sea.  It seems, moreover, that Jerusalem itself had, as in Hezekiah’s time, not been shaken, or at least seriously injured, by the earthquake.  But why?  “God is in the midst of her, therefore shall she not be removed.”  It seems, also, as if the earthquake or hurricane had been actually a benefit to Jerusalem—which was often then, and has been often since, in want of water—that either fresh springs had broken out, or abundant rain had fallen, as occurs at times in such convulsions of nature.  But that, too, was God’s doing on behalf of His chosen city.  “The rivers of the flood” had made “glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacle of the most highest.”