Part 12

You see, my brethren, that the apostolic work was missionary work--that the Church, as constituted by these heroic and holy men under the leadership of their divine Lord, was a missionary society--the primitive propaganda of the Christian faith. They were sent forth by the Captain of their salvation to conquer the nations for Christ, and gather captives from all countries into his triumphal procession. For this work St. Paul was added to the original number, and from his peculiar fitness by education and spiritual endowment became the most successful of them all. And the constitution of the Church is still unchanged; and our high calling in Christ Jesus has never been revoked; and your bishops and clergy to-day are but heralds and incense-bearers in the train of Immanuel's triumph; and every faithful communicant, and every baptized believer, and every humble neophyte, are triumphing with the heavenly Conqueror. Surely here is a demand for all our faith, for all our zeal, for all our moral heroism; and for an embassy like ours, "more than twelve legions of angels" might have been commissioned from the skies. Alas! where sleep our energies? where slumber the holy fires within our hearts? Calm and secure, here we sit in our Christian assemblies. With something of the Spirit we pray, with something of the Spirit we sing, and with much of the understanding we do both. With reverent delight we hear the word of grace, and with unspeakable gladness welcome its revelations of the unseen and the eternal. With our best faculties we inquire into its meaning, seek elucidations of it in ancient literature and modern criticism, and rejoice in its accumulating confirmations from history and from science. We worship with a comely ritual derived from the fathers, and celebrate the sacramental mysteries of our redemption in words that have warmed the hearts of martyrs. But while thus occupied, how little think we of the millions around us who for the same mercies are constantly invoking Heaven with the voice of all their sins and sorrows! For us, Christ "hath abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light by his gospel;" they follow their friends to the burial, and mourn for them without hope, no star gleaming over the grave, nor seraph beckoning out of the darkness beyond; they lie down to die, but above the pallid day no halo gathers, no seraph wings are hovering, no sweet familiar voices inviting to an eternal fellowship of joy. Have we no loving compassions for them, no desire to rescue and save their souls alive? Oh! look at the heathen world, where Satan holds undisputed empire, and man has never felt the power of Christian civilization. Look at the dark places of the earth, full of the habitations of cruelty; where Belial reigns supreme, and Moloch revels in fire and blood. Look at the countries that languish under the curse of the Crescent, where sense misnamed faith triumphs over reason, and strong delusion has quenched the last beam of divine knowledge, and obscured every ray of intellectual truth. Look at Jacob's heritage of milk, and honey, "destroyed by the wickedness of them that dwell therein"--the most beautiful of lands, the very garden of God, by ignorance and barbarism turned into a sterile waste and delivered up to the tenantry of noisome and noxious creatures. Look at the exiled children of Abraham, a vagabond race, roaming everywhere, and nowhere finding rest; the curse of their rejection branded on every brow, and reprobation written in every feature of an unmistakable physiognomy; their synagogues little better than Mohammedan mosques and pagan temples, their worship an empty and abrogated ceremonial, and Mammon substituted for the Messiah. Look at the villanous impostures of the Vatican, and the notorious corruptions of faith and worship wherever the Roman mystagogue holds sway; the habitual invocation of saints and martyrs; the adoration of images, pictures, and relics; the monstrous abuses and manifold abominations of the confessional; the doctrines of indulgence, purgatory, and human merit; the blasphemous dogmas of papal supremacy and infallibility, and the immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin; with the legitimate and lamentable fruits--an abject and atheistic priesthood, and a thriftless and degraded people. Look at your own country, Christian though it is called--your own city, highly as it is favored of heaven; and see how far the masses lie from the living God; how his name is profaned, his altars abandoned, while every place of amusement is thronged with merry votaries of pleasure, and drunken men reel athwart the path of church-going people, and the house of her whose steps take hold on hell stands in the very shadow of the sanctuary, and libidinous songs and blasphemous oaths form the horrible counterpart to your sacred psalmody; on all sides temples of Bacchus and Beelzebub, with scenes of revelry and riot, debauchery and blood, where dissipation discards all disguise, impurity all shame, and impiety all fear. Look at your Western States and Territories--fields demanding a hundred missionaries where you have one; a numerous and constantly increasing population scattered over a vast extent of country, with only here and there a church and a school, like solitary torches a thousand miles apart struggling to dispel the deeper than Egyptian darkness of half a world; while Rome is rearing her temples and convents everywhere, everywhere establishing her brotherhoods and sisterhoods, founding orphan-asylums and educational institutes, exercising a powerful influence over the development of the youthful mind, and poisoning the wells whence the people are to draw the water of their salvation; and heresy and schism are setting up their tabernacles, and agnostic infidelity is travelling _pari passu_ with population, and myriads of redeemed immortals are perishing for lack of knowledge. Look at your fair and sunny South-land, lately devastated by contending armies; churches in ashes, cities in ruins, fenceless plantations growing up to forests; bishops and clergymen wofully impoverished, and forced to resort to secular occupations for subsistence; earnest and anxious spirits, shipwrecked in the collision of sectarian crafts, struggling desperately in the dark waters of doubt, and longing to see the life-boats of the Church upon the billows; four million slaves in a state of semi-barbarism suddenly set at liberty like so many unfledged cagelings turned out to the wintry tempest, amidst hawks, and owls, and eagles, and every beast of prey; many of them already relapsing into their ancestral superstitions, suspecting one another as wizards and witches, practising hideous rites and abominable incantations, worshipping some exceptionally ugly old hag as a new incarnation of the Divinity, and dancing with demoniac noises over the graves of their dead. No fancy pictures are these which I present, nor overwrought descriptions of realities. Impossible were it to find language or figures to exaggerate the wretchedness of humanity unrelieved by the gracious revelations of God. In comparison of the moral ruin around us, what was the late catastrophe of a hundred South-American cities, whelming in a common destruction men, women and children to the number of forty or fifty thousand? Should some pilgrim from a distant sphere, traversing the ethereal space with wings of light, chance to cross the orbit of our fallen planet, and cast a momentary glance down at our condition, might he not hurry past with a shudder, suspecting that hell had emptied itself upon earth, and the unhappy race had been given over unredeemed to the dominion of the Devil?

But why dwell on this dismal theme? Oh! I could tell you of victories demanding another David to sing them or another Isaiah to record them, till every loving heart should leap for joy and exult in hope of millennial triumph. But I would fain stir your compassion. I am feeling for your purse-strings among your heart-strings. I want to play a tune upon your spirits which shall echo in Colorado, and make music in New Mexico, and reverberate from the heights of the Himalaya, and gladden the hills round about Jerusalem. Can we survey the valley of vision, and not prophesy to all the winds of God? Can we see millions of immortal beings crushed by the dominion of Satan, and not cry amain to the Prince of peace to come and unseat the great usurper, and establish his own universal and everlasting empire? And how shall we pray successfully, if we answer not our own prayers by pouring our offerings into the Lord's treasury? How shall we arrest the long carnival of crime, and error, and delusion, and infidelity, if we bestir not all our Christian energies, occupying every available position, evoking every beneficent agency of the Church, barricading with Bibles and Prayer-Books the teeming way to ruin, and bridging with the blessed cross the mouth of the flaming pit? Thus, my brethren! may we save souls from death, and give new joy to benevolence in other worlds, and gladden the heart that eighteen hundred years ago quivered for us upon the point of the Roman spear, and fill the reverberant universe with the shout of the apostle--"Now thanks be unto God, which always causeth us to triumph in Christ, and maketh manifest the savor of his knowledge by us in every place!"

[1] Preached at a missionary meeting in New York, 1868.

XVI.

FRATERNAL FORGIVENESS.[1]

So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses.--Matt. xviii. 35.

When John Wesley was in Georgia, he was dining one day with Gov. Oglethorpe. A negro waiter at the table committing a careless blunder, the governor said to his guest: "See this good-for-nothing servant; he is always doing wrong, though he knows that I never forgive." "Does your Excellency never forgive?" replied Mr. Wesley; "then it is to be hoped that your Excellency never does wrong." A beautiful reproof; and the more effectual, no doubt, from its gentleness. Those who need forgiveness for their own faults, certainly ought to forgive the faults of others. "Forgive, and ye shall be forgiven;" but "he shall have judgment without mercy, who hath showed no mercy." This is the lesson taught us in the gospel for the day,[2] which I shall endeavor to unfold and apply. For moral elevation, the passage is very remarkable. Found in some old Greek or Roman volume--in some parchment dug up from Herculaneum or Pompeii--on some tablet or cylinder discovered amidst the _débris_ of Nineveh or Babylon--it would have awakened the wonder of the world, and men would never have been weary of praising its transcendent charity.

The Jewish rabbis taught that a man might forgive an injury a second or even a third time, but never a fourth. When St. Peter asked--"How oft shall my brother trespass against me, and I forgive him? until seven times?" he doubled the rabbinical measure of mercy, doubtless imagining that he had reached the ultimate limit, and that his Divine Master even could require no more. How must he and his brethren have been astonished when Jesus answered: "I say not unto thee, Until seven times; but, until seventy times seven!" What! four hundred and ninety times? But Jesus puts a definite number for an indefinite. "Count not your acts of clemency," he seems to say; "be your forgiveness of a brother as free as the air you breathe or the light you enjoy--your love as unlimited as the illimitable heaven above you." Then he puts the matter strongly before them in a parable:

A certain king calls his servants--the collectors of his taxes and revenues--to account. One of them is found frightfully in arrears--owing his lord ten thousand talents--a debt which he can never pay. The king orders the sale of the delinquent, with his family and all his effects. Falling at the royal feet, he implores patience, and promises the impossible. Touched with pity, the king forgives the debt. But the forgiven goes to a fellow-servant who owes him the small sum of a hundred pence, seizes him by the throat, and demands immediate payment. The helpless debtor falls before him, and pleads with him as he himself had lately pleaded with the king. The creditor, however, is inexorable; and into prison the poor man must go till the debt is paid. The sad matter is reported to the king, who recalls the subject of his clemency, rebukes his cruelty, revokes his own act of forgiveness, and delivers the unmerciful over to the tormentors till the last farthing shall be paid. Finally, in application of the parable, the Divine Teacher adds: "So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses."

God's mercy to man, and man's unmercifulness to his fellow, are the two principal things set forth in the parable. Let us look at them both, and see how the former enhances the latter, and enforces the duty of fraternal forgiveness.

To have any right appreciation of the master's mercy, we must know something of the amount of the servant's debt. Ten thousand talents was an enormous sum. The delinquent was a viceroy, and the amount he owed was the revenue of a province. In those days large debts were not uncommon. Julius Cæsar owed, beyond his assets, $1,425,000; Mark Antony, $2,250,000; Curio, $3,375,000; Milo, $4,125,000. An Attic talent was about $1,080; which, multiplied by 10,000, would make the debt $10,800,000. But if the Jewish talent of silver is meant, it would amount to $16,600,000; if the Jewish talent of gold, to $569,000,000. Now let each talent stand for a sin--10,000 sins! Reduce the talents to dollars, and take every dollar for a sin--569,000,000 sins! Reduce the dollars to dimes, and let every dime represent a sin--5,690,000,000 sins! Reduce the dimes to cents, and let every cent be considered a sin--56,900,000,000 sins! Perhaps, however, our dear Lord never intended by the number of talents to intimate the number of our sins, any more than by the seventy times seven he meant to say how often we should forgive an offending brother. In each case the idea is that of indefinite number, unlimited extent. But if the seventy times seven means mercy without measure, what can the ten thousand talents denote but guilt beyond all human calculation or imagination? Think you any estimate of the number and enormity of our sins can be an exaggeration? "Who can tell how oft he offendeth?" "My sins are more than the hairs of my head, therefore my heart faileth me." "My sins are increased over my head so that I am not able to look up." Far better and holier than the best of us, my brethren, was the man who wrote these statements, and left them for an everlasting testimony against those who are pure in their own eyes. If David had such consciousness of sin, what must our consciousness be if we knew ourselves as well? They are the self-blinded, self-hardened, self-deceived, who fancy themselves innocent and glory in their virtue. Even the great apostle called himself "the chief of sinners," and declared that in himself dwelt "no good thing." There is no danger, then, of extravagance in any estimate of our sins of which our arithmetic is capable. So let us proceed a little farther. Take our Lord's summary of the first table of the law: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength." Here is required the surrender of the whole man as a living sacrifice to his Divine Creator and Sovereign Proprietor. This is his unquestionable claim upon every moment of our existence throughout its immortal duration. A duty this which we cannot omit for a single second without robbing God; and every minute that we neglect it, comprising sixty seconds, we may be said to repeat the sacrilege sixty times; every hour, 3,600 times; every day, 86,400 times; every year, 31,536,000 times; in twenty years, 630,720,000 times; and in forty years, 1,261,440,000 times. But these are sins of omission only, and that in relation to a single phase of duty; add all the other instances, and we must multiply the sum by multiplied millions. Then we must take our positive sins--our violations of the divine law by thought, word and deed--open sins and secret, public and private, personal and social--sins defying all enumeration, and difficult even of classification; and, adding all together, we must multiply the sum by all our faculties, facilities and gracious incentives for doing God's blessed will, and aggravate all by the innumerable mercies and inestimable blessings which he has diffused over our lives as his sunbeams over the earth. And its any thing short of infinite mercy adequate to the forgiveness of such a debt?

For all this, however unwilling, we must give account to God; and how terrible the array, when conscience shall summon forth from the secret chambers of memory every sin of which we have been guilty, and every evil act and every neglect of duty shall stand out distinct and clear in the light of eternal judgment! How shall we meet the reckoning? In all the eternity to come, what satisfaction can we offer for our faults? Can we alter the facts, undo the deeds, repair the wrongs, recall the time, or efface the record? Nay, the account remains uncancelled, and the debt can never be paid. Soul and body, with all the capabilities of both, the creature belongs to the Creator; and by an original and perpetual obligation, perfect love and blameless obedience are his constant duty. Beyond this he can never go. Even though he commit no sin, neglect no duty, he can offer to the Creator no service whatever that is not justly required of him as a creature. By his utmost efforts forever, he simply renders to God what is his indisputable due. How, then, can the transgressor hope to pay the new and additional debt which he has incurred by innumerable crimes? Before he can do a single meritorious act, even his original obligation to God as his creature must be cancelled; but to cancel that is more than the Creator himself can do, the obligation being inseparable from the relation. As to human merit, therefore, the case is hopeless. What, then, is to be done? Sell the debtor, with his wife and children? Such procedure on the part of the creditor was allowed by ancient law. But in what slave-mart of the universe shall God sell the sinner? Who will want him but Satan? and Satan has him already, self-sold, and bound by indefeasible indenture. Nay, by this part of the parable our Lord presents justice as ministering to mercy. The menace of punishment opens the way for pardon, and the hopeless condition of the debtor enhances the clemency of the king. See the poor wretch, prostrate at the royal feet, imploring a little indulgence, and promising what is utterly beyond his power. So, on a bed of sickness, stung by conscience and confronted by doom, often has the most incorrigible transgressor vowed reparation for a vicious life, only to augment his guilt by disregarding the vow on the return of health and strength. But if the sinner cannot pay, God can forgive. If neither saints nor angels can wrest the culprit from the grasp of justice, yet Heaven has found a ransom to save his soul from the pit. Jesus interposes with "a price all price beyond;" the debt is overpaid in the blood of the cross; through the compassion of the King the debtor is released from his bonds; and the angels tune their harps to sing "the blessedness of the man whose unrighteousness is forgiven and whose sin is covered!"

So far the parable illustrates God's mercy to man; what remains is a sad picture of man's too frequent unmercifulness to his brother, and the just punishment of his cruelty visited upon the delinquent. Here are five points worthy of our attention; which, duly considered, may serve to impress upon our minds the duty of fraternal forgiveness.

First, we have the two creditors, with their respective claims. The king represents God in his relation to man; the first servant represents man in his relation to mankind. God has his supreme claims, as creator and sovereign lord, upon the love, worship and obedience of the whole human race; while man has his subordinate claims, as an equal and a brother, upon the justice, the kindness, the sympathy and the charity of all other men--sometimes, as patron and official superior, upon the reverence, submission and loyal service of a particular part of them.

Then, we have the two debtors, with the different amounts of debt. Both are servants, holding a like relation to the king. Both are in arrears, the one to the king, the other to his fellow-servant. Ought not a common bond and a common condition to produce in them mutual kindness and sympathy? But how great the disparity of their debts! ten thousand talents, and a hundred pence--the latter less than a millionth part of the former--if the gold talent is intended, less than a hundred millionth. Surely if the king could forgive the greater, it were a small matter with his servant to forgive the less. In comparison of our sins against God, what are our brother's sins against us? "As the small dust of the balance, lighter than vanity itself."

Next, we have the two arrests, with the opposite methods of their making. Calmly and kindly, in his accustomed way, worthy of his royal dignity, and just as he treated others, the king calls his servant to account. This proceeding was to be expected, and involves neither harshness nor severity. But when the man is found so culpably in arrears with nothing to pay--a case which could not happen without great dishonesty and wickedness--the king orders, as he has legal right to do, the sale of the culprit, with his family and effects, to satisfy some small part of the royal claim against him. Now mark the very different conduct of the criminal. No sooner is he released than he goes out--not staying a moment to express his gratitude or admire the mercy shown him--finds the man who owes him fifteen dollars: and, with a violence unprovoked and inexcusable, lays hands on him, takes him by the throat, and exclaims, "Pay me that thou owest!" Could there be a more unlovely contrast to the conduct of the king? Such is the difference between God's dealing with guilty men and man's dealing with his delinquent brother; the former all mildness and forbearance, the latter all harshness and severity.