The Water of Life, and Other Sermons

My friends, if we could believe those blessed words—I do not say in all their fulness—we shall never do that, I believe, in this mortal life—but if we could only believe them a little, and know and believe even a little of the love that God has to us, then love to Him would spring up in our hearts, and we should feel for Him all that child ever felt for father.  If we really believed that God who made heaven and earth was even now calling to each and every one of us, and beseeching us, by the sacrifice of His well-beloved Son, crucified for us, ‘My son, give Me thy heart,’ we could not help giving up our hearts to Him.

Provided—and there is that second reason why people do not love God, for which I said there was no excuse—provided only that we wish to be good, and to obey God.  If we do not wish to do what God commands, we shall never love God.  It must be so.  There can be no real love of God which is not based upon a love of virtue and goodness, upon what our Lord calls a hunger and thirst after righteousness.  ‘If ye love Me, keep My commandments,’ is our Lord’s own rule and test.  And it is the only one possible.  If we habitually disobey any person, we shall cease to love that person.  If a child is in the habit of disobeying its parents, dark and angry feelings towards those parents are sure to arise in its heart.  The child tries to forget its parents, to keep out of their way.  It tries to justify itself, to excuse itself by fancying that its parents are hard upon it, unjust, grudge it pleasure, or what not.  If its parents’ commandments are grievous to a child, it will try to make out that those commandments are unfair and unkind.  And so shall we do by God’s commandments.  If God’s commandments seem too grievous for us to obey, then we shall begin to fancy them unjust and unkind.  And then, farewell to any real love to God.  If we do not openly rebel against God, we shall still try to forget Him.  The thought of God will seem dark, unpleasant, and forbidding to us; and we shall try, in our short-sighted folly, to live as far as we can without God in the world, and, like Adam after his fall, hide ourselves from the loving God, just because we know we have disobeyed Him.

But if, in spite of many bad habits, we desire to get rid of our bad habits; if, in spite of many faults, we still desire to be faultless and perfect; if, in spite of many weaknesses, we still desire to be strong; if, in one word, we still hunger and thirst after righteousness, and long to be good men; then, in due time, the love of God will be shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

For that will happen to us which happens to all those who have the pure, true, and heroical love.  If we really love a person, we shall first desire to please them, and therefore the thought of disobeying and paining them will seem more and more grievous unto us.

But more.  We shall soon rise a step higher.  The more we love them, and the more we see in them, in their characters, things worthy to be loved, the more we shall desire to be like them, to copy those parts of their characters which most delight us; and we shall copy them: though insensibly, perhaps, and unawares.

For no one can look up for any length of time with love and respect towards a person better, wiser, greater than themselves, without becoming more or less like that person in character and in habit of thought and feeling; and so it will be with us towards God.

If we really long to be good, it will grow more and more easy to us to love God.  The more pure our hearts are, the more pleasant the thought of God will be to us; even as it is said, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God,’—in this life as well as in the life to come.  We shall not shrink from God, because we shall know that we are not wilfully offending Him.

But more.  The more we think of God, the more we shall long to be like Him.  How admirable in our eyes will seem His goodness, how admirable His purity, His justice, and His bounty, His long-suffering, His magnanimity and greatness of heart.  For how great must be that heart of God, of which it is written, that ‘He hateth nothing that He hath made, but His mercy is over all His works;’ ‘that He willeth that none should perish, but that all should be saved, and come to the knowledge of the truth.’  Although He be infinitely high and far off and we cannot attain to Him, yet we shall feel it our duty and our joy to copy Him, however faintly, and however humbly; and our highest hope will be that we may behold, as in a glass, the glory of the Lord, and be changed into His image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord; that so, whether in this world or in the world to come, we may at last be perfect, even as our Father in heaven is perfect, and, like Him, cause the sunlight of our love to slime upon the evil and on the good; the kindly showers of our good deeds to fall upon the just and on the unjust; and—like Him who sent His only begotten Son to save the world—be good to the unthankful and to the evil.

SERMON XV

THE EARTHQUAKE

(Preached October 11, 1863.)Psalm xlvi. 1, 2

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.  Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.

No one, my friends, wishes less than I, to frighten you, or to take a dark and gloomy view of this world, or of God’s dealings with men.  But when God Himself speaks, men are bound to take heed, even though the message be an awful one.  And last week’s earthquake was an awful message, reminding all reasonable souls how frail man is, how frail his strongest works, how frail this seemingly solid earth on which we stand; what a thin crust there is between us and the nether fires, how utterly it depends on God’s mercy that we do not, like Korah, Dathan, and Abiram of old, go down alive into the pit.

What do we know of earthquakes?  We know that they are connected with burning mountains; that the eruption of a burning mountain is generally preceded by, and accompanied with, violent earthquakes.  Indeed, the burning mountains seem to be outlets, by which the earthquake force is carried off.  We know that these burning mountains give out immense volumes of steam.  We know that the expanding power of steam is by far the strongest force in the world; and, therefore, it is supposed reasonably, that earthquakes are caused by steam underground.

We know concerning earthquakes two things: first, that they are quite uncertain in their effects; secondly, quite uncertain in their occurrence.

No one can tell what harm an earthquake will, or will not, do.  There are three kinds.  One which raises the ground up perpendicularly, and sets it down again—which is the least hurtful; one which sets it rolling in waves, like the waves of the sea—which is more hurtful; and one, the most terrible of all, which gives the ground a spinning motion, so that things thrown down by it fall twisted from right to left, or left to right.  But what kind of earthquake will take place, no one can tell.

Moreover, a very slight earthquake may do fearful damage.  People who only read of them, fancy that an earthquake, to destroy man and his works, must literally turn the earth upside down; that the ground must open, swallowing up houses, vomiting fire and water; that rocks must be cast into the sea, and hills rise where valleys were before.  Such awful things have happened, and will happen again: but it does not need them to lay a land utterly waste.  A very slight shock—a shock only a little stronger than was felt last Wednesday morning, might have—one hardly dare think of what it might have done in a country like this, where houses are thinly built because we have no fear of earthquakes.  Every manufactory and mill throughout the iron districts (where the shock was felt most) might have toppled to the earth in a moment.  Whole rows of houses, hastily and thinly built, might have crumbled down like packs of cards; and hundreds of thousands of sleeping human beings might have been buried in the ruins, without time for a prayer or a cry.

A little more—a very little more—and all that or more might have happened; millions’ worth of property might have been destroyed in a few seconds, and the prosperity and civilization of England have been thrown back for a whole generation.  There is absolutely no reason whatever, I tell you, save the mercy of God, why that, or worse, should not have happened; and it is only of the Lord’s mercies that we were not consumed.

Next, earthquakes are utterly uncertain as to time.  No one knows when they are coming.  They give no warning.  Even in those unhappy countries in which they are most common there may not be a shock for months or years; and then a sudden shock may hurl down whole towns.  Or there may be many, thirty or forty a-day for weeks, as there happened in a part of South America a few years ago, when day after day, week after week, terrible shocks went on with a perpetual underground roar, as if brass and iron were crashing and clanging under the feet, till the people were half mad with the continual noise and continual anxiety, expecting every moment one shock, stronger than the rest, to swallow them up.  It is impossible, I say, to calculate when they will come.  They are altogether in the hand of God,—His messengers, whose time and place He alone knows, and He alone directs.

Our having had one last week is no reason for our not having another this week, or any day this week; and no reason, happily, against our having no more for one hundred years.  It is in God’s hands, and in God’s hands we must leave it.

All we can say is, that when one comes, it is likely to be least severe in this part of England, and most severe (like this last) in the coal and iron districts of the west and north-west, where it is easy to see that earthquakes were once common, by the cracks, twists and settlements in the rocks, and the lava streams, poured out from fiery vents (probably under water) which pierce the rocks in many places.  Beyond that we know nothing, and can only say,—It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed.

Why do I say these things?  To frighten you?  No, but to warn you.  When you say to yourselves,—Earthquakes are so uncommon and so harmless in England that there is no need to think of them, you say on the whole what is true.  It has been, as yet, God’s will that earthquakes should be uncommon and slight in England; and therefore we have a reasonable ground of belief that such will be His will for the future.  Certainly He does not wish us to fold our hands, and say, there is no use in building or improving the country, if an earthquake may come and destroy it at any moment.  If there be an evil which man can neither prevent or foresee, then, if he be a wise man, he will go on as if that evil would never happen.  We ever must work on in hope and in faith in God’s goodness, without tormenting and weakening ourselves by fears about what may happen.

But when God gives to a whole country a distinct and solemn warning, especially after giving that country an enormous bounty in an abundant harvest, He surely means that country to take the warning.  And, if I dare so judge, He means us perhaps to think of the earthquake, and somewhat in this way.

There is hardly any country in the world in which man’s labour has been so successful as in England.  Owing to our having no earthquakes, no really destructive storms,—and, thank God, no foreign invading armies,—the wealth of England has gone on increasing steadily and surely for centuries past, to a degree unexampled.  We have never had to rebuild whole towns after an earthquake.  We have never seen (except in small patches) whole districts of fertile land ruined by the sea or by floods.  We have never seen every mill and house in a country blown down by a hurricane, and the crops mown off the ground by the mere force of the wind, as has happened again and again in our West India Islands.  Most blessed of all, we have never seen a foreign army burning our villages, sacking our towns, carrying off our corn and cattle, and driving us into the woods to starve.  From all these horrors, which have, one or other of them, fallen on almost every nation upon earth, God has of His great mercy preserved us.  Ours is not the common lot of humanity.  We English do not know the sorrows which average men and women go through, and have been going through, alas! ever since Adam fell.  We have been an exception, a favoured and peculiar people, allowed to thrive and fatten quietly and safely for hundreds of years.

But what if that very security tempts us to forget God?  Is it not so?  Are we not—I am sure I am—too apt to take God’s blessings for granted, without thanking Him for them, or remembering really that He gave them, and that He can take them away?  Do we not take good fortune for granted?  Do we not take for granted that if we build a house it will endure for ever; that if we buy a piece of land it will be called by our name long years hence; that if we amass wealth we shall hand it down safely to our children?  Of course we think we shall prosper.  We say to ourselves, To-morrow shall be as to-day, and yet more abundant.

Nothing can happen to England, is, I fear, the feeling of Englishmen.  Carnal security is the national sin to which we are tempted, because we have not now for forty years felt anything like national distress; and Britain says, like Babylon of old, the lady of kingdoms to whom foreigners so often compare her,—‘I shall be a lady for ever; I am, there is none beside me.  I shall never sit as a widow, nor know the loss of children.’

What, too, if that same security and prosperity tempts us—as foreigners justly complain of us—to set our hearts on material wealth; to believe that our life, and the life of Britain, depends on the abundance of the things which she possesses?  To say—Corn and cattle, coal and iron, house and land, shipping and rail-roads, these make up Great Britain.  While she has these she will endure for ever.

Ah, my friends—to people in such a temptation, is it wonderful that a good God should send a warning unmistakeable, though only a warning; most terrible, though mercifully harmless; a warning which says, in a voice which the dullest can hear—Endure for ever?  The solid ground on which you stand cannot do that.  Safe?  Nothing on earth is safe for a moment, save in the long-suffering and tender mercy of Him of whom are all things, and by whom are all things, without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground.  Is the wealth of Britain, then, what she can see and handle?  The towns she builds, the roads she makes, the manufactures and goods she produces?  One touch of the finger of God, and that might be all rolled into a heap of ruins, and the labour of years scattered in the dust.  You trust in the sure solid earth?  You shall feel it, if but for once, reel and quiver under your feet, and learn that it is not solid at all, or sure at all; that there is nothing solid, sure, or to be depended on, but the mercy of the living God; and that your solid-seeming earth on which you build is nothing less than a mine, which may bubble, and heave, and burst beneath your feet, charged for ever with an explosive force, as much more terrible than that gunpowder which you have invented to kill each other withal, as the works of God are greater than the works of man.  Safe, truly!  It is of God’s mercy from day to day and hour to hour that we are not consumed.

This, surely, or something like this, is what the earthquake says to us.  It speaks to us most gently, and yet most awfully, of a day in which the heavens may pass away with a great noise, and the elements may melt with fervent heat, and the earth and the works which are therein may be burnt up.  It tells us that this is no impossible fancy: that the fires imprisoned below our feet can, and may, burst up and destroy mankind and the works of man in one great catastrophe, to which the earthquake of Lisbon in 1755—when 60,000 persons were killed, crushed, drowned, or swallowed up in a few minutes—would be a merely paltry accident.

And it bids us think, as St. Peter bids us: ‘When therefore all these things are dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in holy conversation and godliness?’

What manner of persons?

Remember, that if an earthquake destroyed all England, or the whole world; if this earth on which we live crumbled to dust, and were blotted out of the number of the stars, there is one thing which earthquake, and fire, and all the forces of nature cannot destroy, and that is—the human race.

We should still be.  We should still endure.  Not, indeed, in flesh and blood: but in some state or other; each of us the same as now, our characters, our feelings, our goodness or our badness; our immortal spirits and very selves, unchanged, ready to receive, and certain to receive, the reward of the deeds done in the body, whether they be good or evil.  Yes, we should still endure, and God and Christ would still endure.  But as our Saviour, or as our Judge?  That is a very awful thought.

One day or other, sooner or later, each of us shall stand before the judgment-seat of Christ, stripped of all we ever had, ever saw, ever touched, ever even imagined to ourselves, alone with our own consciences, alone with our own deserts.  What shall we be saying to ourselves then?

Shall we be saying—I have lost all: The world is gone—the world, in which were set all my hopes, all my wishes; the world in which were all my pleasures, all my treasures; the world, which was the only thing I cared for, though it warned me not to trust in it, as it trembled beneath my feet?  But the world is gone, and now I have nothing left!

Or, shall we be saying,—The world is gone?  Then let it go.  It was not a home.  I took its good things as thankfully as I could.  I took its sorrows and troubles as patiently as I could.  But I have not set my heart on the world.  My treasure, my riches, were not of the world.  My peace was a peace which the world did not give, and could not take away.  And now the world is gone, I keep my peace, I keep my treasure still.  My peace is where it was, in my own heart.  My peace is what it was: my faith in God,—faith that my sins are forgiven me for Christ’s sake: my faith that God my Father loves me, and cares for me; and that nothing,—height or depth, or time or space, or life or death, can part me from His love: my faith that I have not been quite useless in the world; that I have tried to do my duty in my place; and that the good which I have done, little as it has been, will not go forgotten by that merciful God, by whose help it was done, who rewards all men according to the works which He gives them heart to perform.  And my treasure is where it was—in my heart; and what it was,—the Holy Spirit of God, the spirit of goodness, of faith and truth, of mercy and justice, of love to God and love to man, which is everlasting life itself.  That I have.  That time cannot abate, nor death abolish, nor the world, nor the destruction of the world, nor of all worlds, can take away.

Choose, my friends, which of these two frames of mind would you rather be in when the great day of the Lord comes, foretold by that earthquake, and by all earthquakes that ever were.

Will you be then like those whom St. John saw calling on the mountains to fall on them, and the hills to hide them from the wrath of Him that sat on the throne, and from the anger of the Lamb?

Or will you be like him who saith—God is my hope and strength, my present help in trouble.  Therefore will I not fear, though the earth be shaken, and though the mountains be carried into the depth of the sea?

SERMON XVI

THE METEOR SHOWER

(Preached at the Chapel Royal, St. James’s, Nov. 26, 1866.)St. Matthew x. 29, 30

Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.  But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.

It will be well for us to recollect, once for all, who spoke these words; even Jesus Christ, who declared that He was one with God the Father; Jesus Christ, whom His apostles declared to be the Creator of the universe.  If we believe this, as Christian men, it will be well for us to take our Lord’s account of a universe which He Himself created; and to believe that in the most minute occurrence of nature, there is a special providence, by which not a sparrow falls to the ground without our Father.

I confess that it is difficult to believe this heartily.  It was never anything but difficult.  In the earliest ages, those who first thought about the universe found it so difficult that they took refuge in the fancy of special providence which was administered by the planets above their heads, and believed that the affairs of men, and of the world on which they lived, were ruled by the aspects of the sun and moon, and the host of heaven.

Men found it so difficult in the Middle Age, that they took refuge in the fancy of a special providence administered by certain demi-gods whom they called ‘The Saints;’ and believed that each special disease, or accident, was warded off from mankind, from their cattle, or from their crops, by a special saint who overlooked their welfare.

Men find it so difficult now-a-days, that the great majority of civilized people believe in no special providence at all, and take refuge in the belief that the universe is ruled by something which they call law.

Therein, doubtless, they have hold of a great truth; but one which will be only half-true, and therefore injurious, unless it be combined with other truths; unless questions are answered which too many do not care to answer: as, for instance,—Can there be a law without a law-giver?  Can a law work without one who administers the law?  Are not the popular phrases of ‘laws impressed on matter,’ ‘laws inherent in matter,’ mere metaphors, dangerous, because inaccurate; confirmed as little by experience and reason, as by Scripture?

Does not all law imply a will?  Does not an Almighty Will imply a special providence?

But these are questions for which most persons have neither time nor inclination.  Indeed, the whole matter is unimportant to them.  They have no special need of a special providence.  Their lives and properties are very safe in this civilized country; and their secret belief is that, whatever influence God may have on the next world, He has little or no influence on this world; neither on the facts of nature, nor on the events of history, nor on the course of their own lives; and that a special providence seems to them—if they dare confess as much—an unnecessary superstition.

Only poor folk in cottages and garrets—and a few more who are, happily, poor in spirit, though not in purse—grinding amid the iron facts of life, and learning there by little sound science, it may be, but much sound theology—still believe that they have a Father in heaven, before whom the very hairs of their head are all numbered; and that if they had not, then this would not only be a bad world, but a mad world likewise; and that it were better for them that they had never been born.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to believe in the special providence of our Father in heaven.  Difficult: though necessary.  Just as it is difficult to believe that the earth moves round the sun.  Contrary, like that fact, to a great deal of our seeming experience.

It is easy enough, of course, to believe that our Father sends what is plainly good.  Not so easy to believe that He sends what at least seems evil.

Easy enough, when we see spring-time and harvest, sunshine and flowers, to say—Here are ‘acts of God’s providence.’  Not so easy, when we see blight and pestilence, storm and earthquake, to say,—Here are ‘acts of God’s providence’ likewise.

For this innumerable multitude of things, of which we now-a-days talk as if it were one thing, and had an organic unity of its own, or even as if it were one person, and had a will of its own, and call it Nature—a word which will one day be forgotten by philosophers, with the ‘four elements,’ and the ‘animal spirits;’—this multitude of things, I say, which we miscall Nature, has its dark and ugly, as well as its bright and fair side.  Nature, says some one, is like the spotted panther—most playful, and yet most treacherous; most beautiful, and yet most cruel.  It acts at times after a fashion most terrible, undistinguishing, wholesale, seemingly pitiless.  It seems to go on its own way, as in a storm or an earthquake, careless of what it crushes.  Terrible enough Nature looks to the savage, who thinks it crushes him from mere caprice.  More terrible still does Science make Nature look, when she tells us that it crushes, not by caprice, but by brute necessity; not by ill-will, but by inevitable law.  Science frees us in many ways (and all thanks to her) from the bodily terror which the savage feels.  But she replaces that, in the minds of many, by a moral terror which is far more overwhelming.  Am I—a man is driven to ask—am I, and all I love, the victims of an organised tyranny, from which there can be no escape—for there is not even a tyrant from whom I may perhaps beg mercy?  Are we only helpless particles, at best separate parts of the wheels of a vast machine, which will use us till it has worn us away, and ground us to powder?  Are our bodies—and if so, why not our souls?—the puppets, yea, the creatures of necessary circumstances, and all our strivings and sorrows only vain beatings against the wires of our cage, cries of ‘Why hast thou made me, then?’ which are addressed to nothing?  Tell us not that the world is governed by universal law; the news is not comfortable, but simply horrible, unless you can tell us, or allow others to tell us, that there is a loving giver, and a just administrator of that law.