Westminster Sermons

But were they wise in so doing?  We may judge of a man’s wisdom, my friends, by his success.  We English are very apt to do so.  We like practical men.  We say—I will tell you what a man is, by what he can do.

Now, judged by that rule, surely the apostles’ method of winning men by love proved itself a wise method.  What did the apostles do?  They had the most enormous practical success that men ever had.  They, twelve poor men, set out to convert mankind by loving them: and they succeeded.

Remember, moreover, that the text speaks of this Spirit of the Lord being given to One who was to be a King, a Ruler, a Guide, and a Judge of men; who was to exercise influence over men for their good.  This prophecy was fulfilled first in the King of kings, our Lord Jesus Christ: but it was fulfilled also in His apostles, who were, in their own way and measure, kings of men, exercising a vast influence over them.  And how?  By the royal Spirit of love.  In the apostles the Spirit of love and charity proved Himself to be also the Spirit of wisdom and understanding.  He gave them such a converting, subduing, alluring power over men’s hearts, as no men have had, before or since.  And He will prove Himself to have the same power in us.  Our own experience will be the same as the apostles’ experience.

I say this deliberately.  The older we grow, the more we understand our own lives and histories, the more we shall see that the spirit of wisdom is the spirit of love; that the true way to gain influence over our fellow-men, is to have charity towards them.

That is a hard lesson to learn; and those who learn it at all, generally learn it late; almost—God forgive us—too late.

Our reason, if we would let the Spirit of God enlighten it, would teach us this beforehand.  But we do not usually listen to our reason, or to God’s Spirit speaking to it.  And therefore we have to learn the lesson by experience, often by very sad and shameful experience.  And even that very experience we cannot understand, unless the Spirit of God interpret it to us: and blessed are they who, having been chastised, hearken to His interpretation.

Our reason, I say, should teach us that the spirit of wisdom is none other than the spirit of love.  For consider—how does the text describe this Spirit?

As the spirit of wisdom and understanding; that is, as the knowledge of human nature, the understanding of men and their ways.  If we do not understand our fellow-creatures, we shall never love them.

But it is equally true that if we do not love them, we shall never understand them.  Want of charity, want of sympathy, want of good-feeling and fellow-feeling—what does it, what can it breed, but endless mistakes and ignorances, both of men’s characters and men’s circumstances?

Be sure that no one knows so little of his fellow-men, as the cynical, misanthropic man, who walks in darkness, because he hates his brother.  Be sure that the truly wise and understanding man is he who by sympathy puts himself in his neighbours’ place; feels with them and for them; sees with their eyes, hears with their ears; and therefore understands them, makes allowances for them, and is merciful to them, even as his Father in heaven is merciful.

And next; this royal Spirit is described as “the spirit of counsel and might,” that is, the spirit of prudence and practical power; the spirit which sees how to deal with human beings, and has the practical power of making them obey.

Now that power, again, can only be got by loving human beings.  There is nothing so blind as hardness, nothing so weak as violence.  I, of course, can only speak from my own experience; and my experience is this: that whensoever in my past life I have been angry and scornful, I have said or done an unwise thing; I have more or less injured my own cause; weakened my own influence on my fellow-men; repelled them instead of attracting them; made them rebel against me, rather than obey me.  By patience, courtesy, and gentleness, we not only make ourselves stronger; we not only attract our fellow-men, and make them help us and follow us willingly and joyfully: but we make ourselves wiser; we give ourselves time and light to see what we ought to do, and how to do it.

And next; this Spirit is also “the spirit of knowledge, and of the fear of the Lord.”  Ay, they, indeed, both begin in love, and end in love.  If you wish for knowledge, you must begin by loving knowledge for its own sake.  And the more knowledge you gain, the more you will long to know, and more, and yet more for ever.  You cannot succeed in a study, unless you love that study.  Men of science must begin with an interest in, a love for, an enthusiasm, in the very deepest sense of the word, for the phænomena which they study.  But the more they learn of them, the more their love increases; as they see more and more of their wonder, of their beauty, of the unspeakable wisdom and power of God, shewn forth in every blade of grass which grows in the sunshine and the rain.

And if this be true of things earthly and temporary, how much more of things heavenly and eternal?  We must begin by loving whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, honest, and of good report.  We must begin, I say, by loving them with a sort of child’s love, without understanding them; by that simple instinct and longing after what is good and beautiful and true, which is indeed the inspiration of the Spirit of God.  But as we go on, as St Paul bids us, to meditate on them; and “if there be any virtue and if there be any praise, to think on such things,” and feed our minds daily with purifying, elevating, sobering, humanizing, enlightening thoughts: then we shall get to love goodness with a reasonable and manly love; to see the beauty of holiness; the strength of self-sacrifice; the glory of justice; the divineness of love; and in a word—To love God for His own sake, and to give Him thanks for His great glory, which is: That He is a good God.

This thought—remember it, I pray—brings me to the last point.  This Spirit is also the spirit of the fear of the Lord.  And that too, my friends, must be a spirit of love not only to God, but to our fellow-creatures.  For if we but consider that God the Father loves all; that His mercy is over all His works; and that He hateth nothing that He has made: then how dare we hate anything that He has made, as long as we have any rational fear of Him, awe and respect for Him, true faith in His infinite majesty and power?  If we but consider that God the Son actually came down on earth to die, and to die too on the cross, for all mankind: then how dare we hate a human being for whom He died: at least if we have true honour, gratitude, loyalty, reverence, and godly fear in our hearts toward Him, our risen Lord?

Oh let us open our eyes this Whitsuntide to the experience of our past lives.  Let us see now—what we shall certainly see at the day of judgment—that whenever we have failed to be loving, we have also failed to be wise; that whenever we have been blind to our neighbours’ interests, we have also been blind to our own; whenever we have hurt others, we have hurt ourselves still more.  Let us, at this blessed Whitsuntide, ask forgiveness of God for all acts of malice and uncharitableness, blindness and hardness of heart; and pray for the spirit of true charity, which alone is true wisdom.  And let us come to Holy Communion in charity with each other and with all; determined henceforth to feel for each other and with each other; to put ourselves in our neighbours’ places; to see with their eyes, and feel with their hearts, as far as God shall give us that great grace; determined to make allowances for their mistakes and failings; to give and forgive, live and let live, even as God gives and forgives, lives and lets live for ever: that so we may be indeed the children of our Father in heaven, whose name is Love.  Then we shall indeed discern the Lord’s body—that it is a body of union, sympathy, mutual trust, help, affection.  Then we shall, with all contrition and humility, but still in spirit and in truth, claim and obtain our share in the body and the blood, in the spirit and in the mind, of Him Who sacrificed Himself for a rebellious world.

SERMON IV.  PRAYER

Psalm lxv. 2

Thou that hearest prayer, unto Thee shall all flesh come.

Next Friday, the 20th of December, 1871, will be marked in most churches of this province of Canterbury by a special ceremony.  Prayers will be offered to God for the increase of missionary labourers in the Church of England.  To many persons—I hope I may say, to all in this congregation—this ceremony will seem eminently rational.  We shall not ask God to suspend the laws of nature, nor alter the courses of the seasons, for any wants, real or fancied, of our own.  We shall ask Him to make us and our countrymen wiser and better, in order that we may make other human beings wiser and better: and an eminently rational request I assert that to be.

For no one will deny that it is good for heathens and savages, even if there were no life after death, to be wiser and better than they are.  It is good, I presume, that they should give up cannibalism, slave-trading, witchcraft, child-murder, and a host of other abominations; and that they should be made to give them up not from mere fear of European cannon, but of their own wills and consciences, seeing that such habits are wrong and ruinous, and loathing them accordingly; in a word, that instead of living as they do, and finding in a hundred ways that the wages of sin are death, they should be converted—that is, change their ways—and live.

Now that this is the will of God—assuming that there is a God, and a good God—is plain at least to our reason, and to our common sense; and it is equally plain to our reason and to our common sense that, as God has not taught these poor wretches to improve themselves, or sent superior beings to improve them from some other world, He therefore means their improvement to be brought about, as moral improvements are usually brought about, by the influence of their fellow-men, and specially by us who have put ourselves in contact with them in our world-wide search for wealth; and who are certain, as we know by sad experience, to make the heathen worse, if we do not make them better.  And as we find from experience that our missionaries, wherever they are brought in contact with these savages, do make them wiser and happier, we ask God to inspire more persons with the desire of improving the heathen, and to teach them how to improve them.  I say, how to improve them.  All sneers, whether at the failure of missionary labours, or at the small results in return for the vast sums spent on missions—all such sneers, I say, instead of deterring us from praying to God on this matter, ought to make us pray the more earnestly in proportion as they are deserved.  For they ought to remind us that we possibly may not have gone to work as yet altogether in the right way; that there may be mistakes and deficiencies in our method of dealing with the heathen.  And if so, it seems all the more reason for asking God to set us and others right, in case we should be wrong; and to make us and others strong, in case we should be weak.

We thus commit the matter to God.  We do not ask God to raise up such missionary labourers as we think fit: but such as He thinks fit.  We do not pray Him to alter His will concerning the heathen: but to enable us to do what we know already to be His will.  And this course seems to me eminently rational; provided always, of course, that it is rational to believe that there is a God who answers prayer; and that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.

Now the older I grow, and the more I see of the chances and changes of this mortal life, and of the needs and longings of the human heart, the more important seems this question, and all words concerning it, whether in the Bible or out of the Bible—

Is there anywhere in the universe any being who can hear our prayers?  Is prayer a superfluous folly, or the highest prudence?

I say—Is there a being who can even hear our prayers?  I do not say, a being who will always answer them, and give us all we ask: but one who will at least hear, who will listen; consider whether what we ask is fit to be granted or not; and grant or refuse accordingly.

You say—What is the need of asking such a question?  Of course we believe that.  Of course we pray, else why are we in church to-day?

Well, my friends, God grant that you may all believe it in spirit and in truth.  But you must remember that if so, you are in the minority; that the majority of civilized men, like the majority of mere savages, do not pray, whatever the women may do; and that prayer among thinking and civilized white men has been becoming, for the last 100 years at least, more and more unfashionable; and is likely, to judge from the signs of the times, to become more unfashionable still: after which reign of degrading ungodliness, I presume—from the experience of all history—that our children or grandchildren will see a revulsion to some degrading superstition, and the latter end be worse than the beginning.  But it is notorious that men are doubting more and more of the efficacy of prayer; that philosophers so-called, for true philosophers they are not—even though they may be true, able, and worthy students of merely physical science—are getting a hearing more and more readily, when they tell men they need not pray.

They say; and here they say rightly—The world is ruled by laws.  But some say further; and there they say wrongly;—For that reason prayer is of no use; the laws will not be altered to please you.  You yourself are but tiny parts of a great machine, which will grind on in spite of you, though it grind you to powder; and there is no use in asking the machine to stop.  So, they say, prayer is an impertinence.  I would that they stopped there.  For then we who deny that the world is a machine, or anything like a machine, might argue fairly with them on the common ground of a common belief in God.

But some go further still, and say—A God?  We do not deny that there may be a God: but we do not deny that there may not be one.  This we say—If He exists, we know nothing of Him: and what is more, you know nothing of Him.  No man can know aught of Him.  No man can know whether there be a God or not.  A living God, an acting God, a God of providence, a God who hears prayer, a God such as your Bible tells you of, is an inconceivable Being; and what you cannot conceive, that you must not believe: and therefore prayer is not merely an impertinence, it is a mistake; for it is speaking to a Being who only exists in your own imagination.  I need not say, my friends, that all this, to my mind, is only a train of sophistry and false reasoning, which—so I at least hold—has been answered and refuted again and again.  And I trust in God and in Christ sufficiently to believe that He will raise up sound divines and true philosophers in His Church, who will refute it once more.  But meanwhile I can only appeal to your common sense; to the true and higher reason, which lies in men’s hearts, not in their heads; and ask—And is it come to this?  Is this the last outcome of civilization, the last discovery of the human intellect, the last good news for man?  That the soundest thinkers—they who have the truest and clearest notion of the universe are the savage who knows nothing but what his five senses teach him, and the ungodly who makes boast of his own desire, and speaks good of the covetous whom God abhorreth, while he says, “Tush, God hath forgotten.  He hideth away his face, and God will never see it”?

True: these so-called philosophers would say that the savage makes a mistake in his sensuality, and the worldling in his covetousness and his tyranny; that from an imperfect conception of their own true self-interest, they carry their philosophy to conclusions which the philosopher in his study must regret.  But as to their philosophy being correct: there can be no question that if providence, and prayer, and the living God, be phantoms of man’s imagination, then the cynical worldling at one end of the social scale, and the brutal savage at the other, are wiser than apostles and prophets, and sages and divines.

These men talk of facts, the facts of human nature.  Why do they ask us to ignore the most striking fact of human nature, that man, even if he were a mere animal, is alone of all animals—a praying animal?  Is that strange instinct of worship, which rises in the heart of man as soon as he begins to think, to become a civilized being and not a savage, to be disregarded as a childish dream when he rises to a higher civilization still?  Is the experience of men, heathen as well as Christian, for all these ages to go for nought?  Has it mattered nought whether men cried to Baal or to God; for with both alike there has been neither sound nor voice, nor any that answered?  Has every utterance that has ever gone up from suffering and doubting humanity, gone up in vain?  Have the prayers of saints, the hymns of psalmists, the agonies of martyrs, the aspirations of poets, the thoughts of sages, the cries of the oppressed, the pleadings of the mother for her child, the maiden praying in her chamber for her lover upon the distant battle-field, the soldier answering her prayer from afar off with, “Sleep quiet, I am in God’s hands”—those very utterances of humanity which seemed to us most noble, most pure, most beautiful, most divine, been all in vain?—impertinences; the babblings of fair dreams, poured forth into nowhere, to no thing, and in vain?  Has every suffering, searching soul which ever gazed up into the darkness of the unknown, in hopes of catching even a glimpse of a divine eye, beholding all, and ordering all, and pitying all, gazed up in vain?  For at the ground of the universe is “not a divine eye, but only a blank bottomless eye-socket;” 2 and man has no Father in heaven; and Christ revealed Him not, because He was not there to reveal; and there was no hope, no remedy, no deliverance, for the miserable among the sons of men?

Oh, my friends, those who believe, or fancy that they believe such things, must be able to do so only through some peculiar conformation either of brain or heart.  Only want of imagination to conceive the consequences of such doctrines can enable them, if they have any love and pity for their fellow-men, to preach those doctrines without pity and horror.  They know not, they know not, of what they rob a mankind already but too miserable by its own folly and its own sin; a mankind which, if it have not hope in God and in Christ, is truly—as Homer said of old—more miserable than the beasts of the field.  If their unconscious conceit did not make them unintentionally cruel, they would surely be silent for pity’s sake; they would let men go on in the pleasant delusion that there is a living God, and a Word of God who has revealed Him to men; and would hide from their fellow-creatures the dreadful secret which they think they have discovered—That there is none that heareth prayer, and therefore to Him need no flesh come.

Men take up with such notions, I believe, most generally in days of comfort, ease, safety.  They find the world so well ordered outwardly, that it seems able enough to go on its way without a God.  They have themselves so few sorrows, struggles, doubts, that they never feel that sense of helplessness, of danger, of ignorance, which has made the hearts of men, in every age, yearn for an unseen helper, an unseen deliverer, an unseen teacher.

And so it is—and shameful it is that so it should be—that the more God gives to men, the less they thank Him, the less they fancy that they need Him: but take His bounties, as they take the air they breathe, unconsciously, and as a matter of course.

And therefore adversity is wholesome, danger is wholesome; so wholesome, that in all ages, as far as I can find, the godliest, the most moral, the most manful, and therefore the really happiest and most successful nations or communities of men, have been those who were in perpetual danger, difficulty, struggle; and who have thereby had their faith in God called out; who have learned in the depth, to cry out of the depth to God; to lift up their eyes unto the Lord, and know that their help comes from Him.

I know a village down in the far West, where the 121st Psalm which I just quoted, was a favourite, and more than a favourite.  Whenever it was given out in church—and the congregation used often to ask for it—all joined in singing it, young and old, men and maidens, with an earnestness, a fervour, a passion, such as I never heard elsewhere; such as shewed how intensely they felt that the psalm was true, and true for them.  Of all congregational singing I ever heard, never have I heard any so touching as those voices, when they joined in the old words they loved so well.

Sheltered beneath the Almighty wingsThou shall securely rest,Where neither sun nor moon shall theeBy day or night molest.At home, abroad, in peace, in war,Thy God shall thee defend;Conduct thee through life’s pilgrimageSafe to thy journey’s end.

Do you fancy these people were specially comfortable, prosperous folk, who had no sorrows, and lived safe from all danger, and therefore knew that God protected them from all ill?

Nothing less, my friends, nothing less.  There was hardly a man who joined in that psalm, but knew that he carried his life in his hand from year to year, that any day might see him a corpse—drowned at sea.  Hardly a woman who sang that psalm but had lost a husband, a father, a brother, a kinsman—drowned at sea.  And yet they believed that God preserved them.  They were fishers and sailors, earning an uncertain livelihood, on a wild and rocky coast.  A sudden shift of wind might make, as I knew it once to make, 60 widows and orphans in a single night.  The fishery for the year might fail, and all the expense of boats and nets be thrown away.  Or in default of work at home, the young men would go out on voyages to foreign parts: and often never came back again, dying far from home, of fever, of wreck, of some of the hundred accidents which befal seafaring men.  And yet they believed that God preserved them.  Surely their faith was tried, if ever faith was tried.  But as surely their faith failed not, for—if I may so say—they dared not let it fail.  If they ceased to trust God, what had they to trust in?  Not in their own skill in seamanship, though it was great: they knew how weak it was, on which to lean.  Not in the so-called laws of nature; the treacherous sea, the wild wind, the uncertain shoals of fish, the chances and changes of a long foreign voyage.  Without trust in God, their lives must have been lives of doubt and of terror, for ever anxious about the morrow: or else of blind recklessness, saying, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.”  Because they kept their faith in God, their lives were for the most part lives of hardy and hopeful enterprise; cheerful always, in bad luck as in good; thankful when their labours were blest with success; and when calamity and failure came, saying with noble resignation—“I have received good from the hand of the Lord, and shall I not receive evil?  Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.”

It is a life like theirs, mixed with danger and uncertainty, which most calls out faith in God.  It is the life of safety and comfort, in which our wants are all supplied ready to our hand, which calls it out least.  And therefore it is that life in cities, just because it is most safe and most comfortable, is so often, alas, most ungodly, at least among the men.  Less common, thank God, is this ungodliness among the women.  The nursing of the sick; the cares of a family, often too sorrows, manifold and bitter, put them continually in mind of human weakness, and of their own weakness likewise.  Yes.  It is sorrow, my friends, sorrow and failure, which forces men to believe that there is One who heareth prayer, forces them to lift up their eyes to One from whom cometh their help.  Before the terrible realities of danger, death, bereavement, disappointment, shame, ruin—and most of all before deserved shame, deserved ruin—all the arguments of the conceited sophist melt away like the maxims of the comfortable worldling; and the man or woman who was but too ready a day before to say, “Tush, God will never see, and will never hear,” begins to hope passionately that God does see, that God does hear.  In the hour of darkness; when there is no comfort in man nor help in man, when he has no place to flee unto, and no man careth for his soul: then the most awful, the most blessed of all questions is: But is there no one higher than man to whom I can flee?  No one higher than man who cares for my soul and for the souls of those who are dearer to me than my own soul?  No friend?  No helper?  No deliverer?  No counsellor?  Even no judge?  No punisher?  No God, even though He be a consuming fire?  Am I and my misery alone together in the universe?  Is my misery without any meaning, and I without hope?  If there be no God: then all that is left for me is despair and death.  But if there be, then I can hope that there is a meaning in my misery; that it comes to me not without cause, even though that cause be my own fault.  I can plead with God like poor Job of old, even though in wild words like Job; and ask—What is the meaning of this sorrow?  What have I done?  What should I do?  “I will say unto God, Do not condemn me; shew me wherefore thou contendest with me.  Surely I would speak unto the Almighty, and desire to reason with God.”