Town and Country Sermons

The hearts of little children; the hearts which begin by faith and love toward God himself; the hearts which know God; the hearts to whom God has revealed himself, and taught them, they know not how, that he is love.  They are so sure of God’s goodness, so sure of his power, so sure of his love, his willingness to have mercy, and to deliver poor creatures, that they find nothing strange, nothing difficult, in the mysteries of faith.  To them it is not a thing incredible, that God should have come down and died upon the cross.  When they hear the good news of him who gave his own life for them, it seems a natural thing to them, a reasonable thing: not of course a thing which they could have expected; but yet not a thing to doubt of or to be astonished at.  For they know that God is love.

And now some of you may say, ‘Then are we more blessed than Thomas?  We have not seen, and yet we have believed.  We never doubted.  We never wanted any arguments, or learned books, or special inward assurances.  From the moment that we began to learn our catechisms at school we believed it, of course, every word of it.  Do we not say the Creed every Sunday; I believe in—and so forth?’  O my friends, do you believe indeed?  If you do, blessed are you.  But are you sure that you speak truth?

You may believe it.  But do you believe in it?  Have you faith in it?  Do you put your trust in it?  Is your heart in it?  Is it in your heart?  Do you love it, rejoice in it, delight to think over it; to look forward to it, to make yourselves ready and fit for it.  Do you believe in it, in short, or do you only believe it, as you believe that there is an Emperor of China, or that there is a country called America, or any other matter with which you have nothing to do, for which you care nothing, and which would make no difference at all to you, if you found out to-morrow that it was not so.  That is mere dead belief; faith without works, which is dead, the belief of the brains, not the faith of the heart and spirit.

Oh, do you really believe the good news of this text, in which the Son of God himself said to mortal men like ourselves, ‘Handle me and see that it is I, indeed; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see me have.’  Do you believe that there is a Man evermore on the right hand of God?  That now as we speak a man is offering up before the Father his perfect and all-cleansing sacrifice?  That, in the midst of the throne of God, is he himself who was born of the Virgin Mary, and crucified under Pontius Pilate?  Do you wish to find out whether you believe that or not?  Then look at your own hearts.  Look at your own prayers.  Do you think of the Lord Jesus Christ, do you pray to the Lord Jesus Christ, as a man, very man, born of woman?  Do you pray to him as to one who can be touched with the feeling of your infirmities, because he has been tempted in all things like as you are, yet without sin?  When you are sad, perplexed, do you take all your sorrows and doubts and troubles to the Lord Jesus, and speak them all out to him honestly and frankly, however reverently, as a man speaketh to his friend?  Do you really cast all your care on him, because you believe that he careth for you?  If you do, then indeed you believe in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ; and you will surely have your reward in a peace of mind, amid all the chances and changes of this mortal life, which passes man’s understanding.  That blessed knowledge that the Lord knows all, cares for all, condescends to all—That thought of a loving human face smiling upon your joys, sorrowing over your sorrows, watching you, educating you from youth to manhood, from manhood to the grave, from the grave to eternities of eternities—Whosoever has felt that, has indeed found the pearl of great price, for which, if need be, he would give up all else in earth or heaven.

Or do you say to yourselves at times, I must not think too much about the Lord Jesus’s being man, lest I should forget that he is God?  Do you shrink from opening your heart to him?  Do you say within yourself, He is too great, too awful, to condescend to listen to my little mean troubles and anxieties?  Besides, how can I expect him to feel for them; I, a mean, sinful man, and he the Almighty God?  How do I know that he will not despise my meanness and paltriness?  How do I know that he will not be angry with me?  I must be more reverent to him, than to trouble him with very petty matters.  He was a man once when he was upon earth: but now that he is ascended up on high, Very God of Very God, in the glory which he had with the Father before the worlds were made, I must have more awful and solemn thoughts about him, and keep at a more humble distance from him.

Do you ever have such thoughts as those come over you, my friends, when you are thinking of the Lord Jesus, and praying to him?  If you do, shall I tell you what to say to them when they arise in your minds, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’  Get thee away, thou accusing devil, who art accusing my Lord to me, and trying to make me fancy him less loving, less condescending, less tender, less understanding, than he was when he wept over the grave of Lazarus.  Get thee away, thou lying hypocritical devil, who pretendest to be so very humble and reverent to the godhead of the Lord Jesus, in order that thou mayest make me forget what his godhead is like, forget what God’s likeness is, forget that it was in his manhood, in his man’s words, his man’s thoughts, his man’s actions, that he shewed forth the glory of God, the express image of his person, and fulfilled the blessed words, ‘And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’  Get thee behind me, Satan.  I believe in the good news of Easter Day, and thou shall not rob me of it.  I believe that he who died upon the Cross, rose again the third day, as very and perfect man then and now, as he was when he bled and groaned on Calvary, and shuddered at the fear of death, in the garden of Gethsemane.  Thou shalt not make my Lord’s incarnation, his birth, his passion, his resurrection, all that he did and suffered in those thirty-three years, of none effect to me.  Thou shalt not take from me the blessed message of my Bible, that there is a man in heaven in the midst of the throne of God.  Thou shalt not take from me the blessed message of the Athanasian Creed, that in Christ the manhood is taken into God.  Thou shalt not take from me the blessed message of Holy Communion, which declares that the very human flesh and blood of him who died on the Cross is now eternal in the heavens, and nourishes my body and soul to everlasting life.  Thou shalt not, under pretence of voluntary humility and will-worship, tempt me to go and pray to angels or to saints, or to the Blessed Virgin, because I choose to fancy them more tender, more loving and condescending, more loving, more human, than the Lord himself, who gave himself to death for me.  If the Lord God, the Son of the Father, is not ashamed to be man for ever and ever, I will not be ashamed to think of him as man; to pray to him as man; to believe and be sure that he can be touched with the feeling of my infirmities; to entreat him, by all that he did and suffered as a man, to deliver me from those temptations which he himself has conquered for himself; and to cry to him in the smallest, as well as in the most important matters—‘By the mystery of thy holy incarnation; by thine agony and bloody sweat; by thy cross and passion; by thy precious death and burial; by thy glorious resurrection and ascension;’ by all which thou hast done, and suffered, and conquered, as a man upon this earth of ours, good Lord, deliver us!

SERMON XXXVI. THE BATTLE WITHIN

(Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity, 1858.)

Galatians, v. 16, 17.  This I say then, Walk in the spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.  For the flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.

Does this text seem to any of you difficult to understand?  It need not be difficult to you; for it does not speak of anything which you do not know.  It speaks of something which you have all felt, which goes on in you every day of your lives.  It speaks of something, certainly, which is very curious, mysterious, difficult to put into words: but what is not curious and mysterious?  The commonest things are usually the most curious?  What is more wonderful than the beating of your heart; your pulse which beats all day long, without your thinking of it?

Just so this battle, this struggle, which St. Paul speaks of in this text, is going on in us all day long, and yet we hardly think of it.  Now what is this battle?  What are these things which are fighting continually in your mind and in mine?  St. Paul calls them the flesh and the spirit.  ‘The flesh,’ he says, ‘lusts against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh.’  They pull opposite ways.  One wants to do one thing, and the other the other.  But if so, one of them must be in the right, and the other in the wrong.  Now, St. Paul says, when these two fall out with each other, the spirit is in the right, and the flesh in the wrong.  And therefore, the secret of life is, to walk in the spirit, and so not to fulfil the lusts of the flesh.

But if so, it must be worth our while to find out which is flesh, and which is spirit in us, that we may know the foolish part of us from the wise.  What the flesh is, we may see by looking at a dumb beast, which is all flesh, and has no immortal soul.  It may be very cunning, brave, curiously formed, beautiful, but one thing you will always see, that a beast does what it likes, and only what it likes.  And this is the mark of the flesh, that it does what it likes.  It is selfish, and self-indulgent, cares for nothing but itself, and what it can get for itself.

True, you may raise a dumb beast above that, by taming and training it.  You may teach a horse or dog to do what it does not like, and give it a sense of duty, and as it were awaken a soul in it.  That is very wonderful, that we should be able to do so.  It is a sign that man is made in God’s likeness.  But I cannot stay to speak of that now.  I say our flesh, our animal nature, is selfish and self-indulgent.  I do not say, therefore, that it is bad: God forbid.  God made our bodies and brains, as well as our souls; and God makes nothing bad.  It is blasphemous to say that he does.  No, our bodies as bodies are good; the flesh as flesh is good, when it is in its right place; and its right place is to be servant, not master.  We are not to walk after the flesh, says St. Paul: but the flesh is to walk after the spirit—in English, our bodies are to obey our spirits, our souls.  For man has something higher than body in him.  He has a spirit in him; and it is just having this spirit which makes him a man.  For this spirit cares about higher things than mere gain and comfort.  It can feel pity and mercy, love and generosity, justice and honour; and when a man not only feels them, but obeys them, then he is a true man—a Christian man: but, on the other hand, if a man does not; if he be a man in whom there is no mercy or pity, no generosity, no benevolence, no justice or honour; who cares for nothing and no one but himself, and filling his own stomach and his own pulse, and pleasing his own brute appetites in some way, what should you say of that man?  You would say, he is like a brute beast—and you would say right—you would say just what St. Paul says.  St. Paul would say, that man is fulfilling the lusts of the flesh; and you and St. Paul would mean just the same thing.  Now, St. Paul says, ‘The flesh in us lusts against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh.’  And what do we gain by the spirit in us lusting against the flesh, and pulling us the opposite way?  We gain this, St. Paul says, ‘that we cannot do the things that we would.’

Does that seem no great gain to you?  Let me put it a little plainer.  St. Paul means this, and just this, that you may not do whatever you like.  St. Paul thought it the very best thing for a man not to be able to do whatever he liked.  As long, St. Paul says, as a man does whatever he likes, he lives according to the flesh, and is no better than a dumb beast: but as soon as he begins to live according to the spirit, and does not do whatever he likes, but restrains himself, and keeps himself in order, then, and then only, he becomes a true man.

But why not do whatever we like?  Because if we did do so, we should be certain to do wrong.  I do not mean that you and I here like nothing but what is wrong.  God forbid.  I trust the Spirit of God is with our spirits.  But I mean this:—That if you could let a child grow up totally without any control whatsoever, I believe that before that lad was twenty-one he would have qualified himself for the gallows seven times over.  Thank God, that cannot happen in England, because people are better taught, most of them at least; and more, we dare not do what we like, for fear of the law and the policeman.

But, if you knew the lives which savages lead, who have neither law outside them to keep them straight by fear, nor the Spirit of God within them to keep them straight by duty and honour, then you would understand what I mean only too well.

Now St. Paul says,—It is a good thing for a man not to be able to do what he likes.  But there are two ways of keeping him from it.  One is by the law, the other is by the Spirit of God.  The law works on a man from the outside by fear; but the Spirit of God works in a man by honour, by the sense of duty, by making him like and love what is right, and making him see what a beautiful and noble thing right is.

Now St. Paul wants us to restrain ourselves, not from fear of being punished, but because we like to do right.  That is what he means when he says that we are to be led by the Spirit, instead of being under the law.  It is better to be afraid of the law than to do wrong: but it is best of all to do right from the Spirit, and of our own free will.

Am I puzzling you?  I hope not: but, lest I should be, 1 will give you one simple example which ought to make all clear as to the struggle between a man’s flesh and his spirit, and also as to doing right from the Spirit or from law.

Suppose you were a soldier going into battle.  You see your comrades falling around you, disfigured and cut up; you hear their groans and cries; and you are dreadfully afraid: and no shame to you.  It is the common human instinct of self-preservation.  The bravest men have told me that they are afraid at first going into action, and that they cannot get over the feeling.  But what part of you is afraid?  Your flesh, which is afraid of pain, just as a beast is of the whip.  Then your flesh perhaps says, Run away—or at least skulk and hide—take care of yourself.  But next, if you were a coward, the law would come into your mind, and you would say, But I dare not run away; for, if I do, I shall be shot as a deserter, or broke, and drummed out of the army.  So you may go on, even though you are a coward: but that is not courage.  You have not conquered your own fear—you have not conquered yourself—but the law has conquered you.

But, if you are a brave man, as I trust you all are, a higher spirit than your own speaks to your spirit, and makes you say to yourself, I dare not run away; but, more, I cannot run away.  I should like to—but I cannot do the things that I would.  It is my duty to go on; it is right; it is a point of honour with me to my country, my regiment, my Queen, my God, and I must go on.

Then you are walking in the Spirit.  You have conquered yourself, and so are a really brave man.  You have obeyed the Spirit, and you have your reward by feeling inspirited, as we say; you can face death with spirit, and fight with spirit.

But the struggle between the Spirit and the flesh is not ended there.  When you got excited, there would probably come over you the lust of fighting; you would get angry, get mad and lose your self-possession.

There is the flesh waking up again, and saying, Be cruel; kill every one you meet.  And to that the Spirit answers, No; be reasonable and merciful.  Do not fulfil the lusts of the flesh, and turn yourself into a raging wild beast.  Your business is not to butcher human beings, but to win a battle.

Well; and even if you have conquered the enemy, you may not have conquered your worst enemy, which is yourself.  For, after having fought bravely, and done your duty, what would the flesh say to you?  I am sure it would say it to me.  What but—Boast: talk of your own valiant deeds and successes; get all the praise and honour you can; and shew how much finer a person you are than any of your comrades.  But what would the Spirit say?—and I trust you would all listen to the Spirit.  The Spirit would say, No; do not boast; do not lower yourself into the likeness of a vain peacock: but be just, and be modest.  Give every man his due; try to praise and recommend every one whom you can; and trust to God to make your doing your duty as clear as the light, and your brave actions as the noonday.

So, you see, all through, a man’s flesh might be lusting, and would be lusting, against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and see, too, how in each case, the flesh is tempting the man to be cowardly, brutal, vain, selfish, and wrong in some way, and the Spirit is striving to make him forget himself, and think of his comrades and his duty.

Now when a man is led by the Spirit, if he is tempted to do wrong, he does not say, I will not do this wrong thing, but I cannot.  I cannot do what you want me.  I like to hear a man say that.  It is a sign that he feels God’s voice in him, which he must obey, whether he likes or not; as Joseph said when he was tempted.  Not, I had rather not, or I dare not: but, How can I do this great wickedness against my master, who has trusted me, and put everything into my hand, and so, by being a treacherous traitor, sin against God?

Now, is this Spirit part of our spirits, or not?  I think we confess ourselves that it is not.  St. Paul says that it is not.  For he says, there is one Spirit—that is, one good Spirit—of whom he speaks as the Spirit; and this, he says, is the Spirit of God, and the Spirit of Christ, and the Spirit which inspires the spirits of all noble, Christ-like, God-like men.

In this Spirit there is nothing proud, spiteful, cruel, nothing selfish, false, and mean; nothing violent, loose, debauched.  But he is an altogether good and noble spirit, whose fruit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.  This, he says, is the Spirit of God; and this Spirit he gives to those spirits,—souls, as we call them now,—who desire it, that they may become righteous with the righteousness of Christ, and good with the goodness of God.

And is not this good news?  I say, my friends, if we will look at it aright, there is no better news, no more inspiriting news for men like us, mixed up in the battle of life, and often pulled downward by our own bad passions, and ashamed of ourselves more or less, every day of our lives;—no better news, I say, than this, that what is good and right in us is not our own, but God’s; that our longings after good, our sense of duty and honour, kindliness and charity, are not merely our own likings or fancies: but the voice of God’s almighty and everlasting Spirit.  Good news, indeed!  For if God be for us who can be against us?  If God’s Spirit be with our spirits, they must surely be stronger than our selfish pleasure-loving flesh.  If God himself be labouring to make us good; if he be putting into our hearts good desires; surely he can enable us to bring those desires to good effect: and all that is wanted of us, is to listen to God’s voice within, and do the right like men, whatever pain it may cost us, sure that we, by God’s help, shall win at last in the hardest battle of all battles, the victory over our own selves.

SERMON XXXVII. HYPOCRISY

Matthew xvi. 3.  Oh ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?

It will need, I think, some careful thought thoroughly to understand this text.  Our Lord in it calls the Pharisees and Sadducees hypocrites; because, though they could use their common sense and experience to judge of the weather they would not use them to judge of the signs of the times; of what was going to happen to the Jewish nation.

But how was their conduct hypocritical?  Stupid we might call it, or unreasonable: but how hypocritical?  That, I think, we may see better, by considering what the word hypocrite means.

We mean now, generally, by a hypocrite, a man who pretends to be one thing, while he is another; who pretends to be pious and good, while he is leading a profligate life in secret; who pretends to believe certain doctrines, while at heart he disbelieves them; a man, in short, who is a scoundrel, and knows it; but who does not intend others to know it: who deceives others, but does not deceive himself.

My friends, such a man is a hypocrite: but there is another kind of hypocrite, and a more common one by far; and that is, the hypocrite who not only deceives others, but deceives himself likewise; the hypocrite who (as one of the wisest living men puts it) is astonished that you should think him hypocritical.

I do not say which of these two kinds is the worse.  My duty is to judge no man.  I only say that there are such people, and too many of them; that we ourselves are often in danger of becoming such hypocrites; and that this was the sort of people which the Pharisees for the most part were.  Hypocrites who had not only deceived others, but themselves also; who thought themselves perfectly right, honest, and pious; who were therefore astonished and indignant at Christ’s calling them hypocrites.

How did they get into this strange state of mind?  How may we get into it?

Consider first what a hypocrite means.  It means strictly neither more nor less than a play-actor; one who personates different characters on the stage.  That is the one original meaning of the word hypocrite.

Now recollect that a man may personate characters, like a play-actor, and pretend to be what he is not, for two different objects.  He may do it for other people’s sake, or for his own.

1.  For other people’s sake.  As the Pharisees did, when they did all their works to be seen of men; and therefore, naturally, gave their attention as much as possible to outward forms and ceremonies, which could be seen by men.

Now, understand me, before I go a step further, I am not going to speak against forms and ceremonies.  No man less: and, above all, not against the Church forms and ceremonies, which have grown up, gradually and naturally, out of the piety, and experience, and practical common sense of many generations of God’s saints.  Men must have forms and ceremonies to put them in mind of the spiritual truths which they cannot see or handle.  Men cannot get on without them; and those who throw away the Church forms have to invent fresh ones, and less good ones, for themselves.

All, I say, have their forms and ceremonies; and all are in danger, as we churchmen are, of making those forms stand instead of true religion.  In the Church or out of the Church, men are all tempted to have, like the Pharisees, their traditions of the elders, their little rules as to conduct, over and above what the Bible and the Prayer-book have commanded; and all are tempted to be more shocked if those rules are broken, than if really wrong and wicked things are done; and like the Pharisees of old, to be careful in paying tithe of mint, anise, and cummin, the commonest garden herbs, and yet forget the weighty matters of the law, justice, mercy, and judgment.  I have known those who would be really more shocked at seeing a religious man dance or sing, than at hearing him tell a lie.  But I will give no examples, lest I should set you on judging others.  Or rather, the only example which I will give is that of these Pharisees, who have become, by our Lord’s words about them, famous to all time, as hypocrites.

Now you must bear in mind that these Pharisees were not villains and profligates.  Many people, feeling, perhaps, how much of what the Lord had said against the Pharisees would apply to them, have tried to escape from that ugly thought, by making out the Pharisees worse men than our Lord does.  But the fact is, that they cannot be proved to be worse than too many religious people now-a-days.  There were adulterers, secret loose-livers among them.  Are there none now-a-days?  They were covetous.  Are no religious professors covetous now-a-days?  They crept into widows’ houses, and, for a pretence made long prayers.  Does no one do so now?  There would, of course, be among them, as there is among all large religious parties, as there is now, a great deal of inconsistent and bad conduct.  But, on the whole, there is no reason to suppose that the greater number of them were what we should call ill-livers.  In that terrible twenty-third chapter of St. Matthew, in which our Lord denounces the sins of the Scribes and Pharisees, he nowhere accuses them of profligate living; and the Pharisee of whom he tells us in his parable, who went into the Temple to pray, no doubt spoke truth when he boasted of not being as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers.  He trusted in himself that he was righteous.  True.  But whatever that means, it means that he thought that he was righteous, after a fashion, though it proved to be a wrong one.  What our Lord complains of in them is, first, their hardness of heart; their pride in themselves, and their contempt for their fellowmen.  Their very name Pharisee meant that.  It meant separate—they were separate from mankind; a peculiar people; who alone knew the law, with whom alone God was pleased: while the rest of mankind, even of their own countrymen, knew not the law, and were accursed, and doomed to hell.  Ah God, who are we to cast stones at the Pharisees of old, when this is the very thing which you may hear said in England from hundreds of pulpits every Sunday, with the mere difference, that instead of the word law, men put the word gospel.