Part 2

I have more than once remarked that the apparent moral contradictions of the Bible are often its most valuable moral lessons. A similar remark will apply to its apparent historical contradictions. Underlying these is very frequently a subtle harmony, which eluded us at our first hasty search. The two accounts are after all not contradictory, but supplementary, the one to the other. So it is here. Read St. Luke's narrative carefully, and it will be apparent that this cannot have been the first meeting of St. Peter with our Lord. I say nothing of the healing of his wife's mother, for, though this is related earlier in St. Luke's Gospel, yet it is plain from the narrative in the other evangelists that it is not related here in chronological order.

But what are the facts? These fishermen have been toiling throughout the night; their labour has been wholly unrewarded, though night is the proper season for plying their craft; and now in the bright glare of the morning sun--now when, after the ill-success of the night, it would be perfect madness to expect a haul--now they are suddenly, imperiously bidden to put out again into the deep sea, and to let down their nets. And the command is obeyed. There is the lurking misgiving, there is the tacit remonstrance; but there is prompt obedience notwithstanding. "Master, we have toiled all the night; nevertheless, at Thy word I will let down the net." "_At Thy word._" Who is this, that this most unreasonable demand meets with such ready acquiescence? Is it possible that He can have been a mere passing stranger, or a mere casual acquaintance? How could His advice have been entertained for a moment when He told an experienced fisherman to do what a fisherman knew to be utterly foolish and futile? The narrative itself, I say, implies some previous knowledge of our Lord on St. Peter's part. He would never have acted as he is represented here as acting unless he had believed, or, at least, had suspected, that there was a more than human power and intelligence in our Lord. In short, the narrative of St. Luke presupposes the narrative of St. John. Jesus speaks to Peter now as one who has a right to command. The incident in St. John gives the personal call of Peter; the incident in St. Luke gives his official call. On the one occasion he is represented as a disciple and a follower; on the other occasion he is declared an apostle and a teacher. "From henceforth thou shalt catch men."

But I did not select this text with any special purpose of discussing historical difficulties. Such discussions, indeed, are necessary when they are forced upon us, but they only distract the mind from the moral and spiritual lessons of the Scripture. Nor, I think, is the lesson in the text difficult to extricate. All history teaches by example, and the Scriptural narrative is the intensification of history. The miracles of our Lord are not miracles only. They are most frequently acted parables also. And have we not here a parable of the most intense pathos and of the widest application?

"Master, we have toiled all the night, and we have taken nothing." What is this but a true, painfully true, image of the efforts, the struggles, the futilities, the despairs of humanity; not in isolated cases, here and there only, of disappointed hopes and unrealised aim, but with thousands of men and women who are born into this world, and live and labour, and suffer and die, without securing any substantial and enduring good, simply because they have lived and died apart from God, who alone survives the decay of time, and alone can give satisfaction to the immortal spirit of man?

"We have toiled all the night." Yes; we see it now--now when the morning light of eternity has burst upon our aching eyeballs. We have toiled all the night. There was darkness above and around us; there was toil of hands and toil of heart; there was the struggle for subsistence; there was the race after wealth and honour; there was the eager pursuit of phantom goods. We had our pleasures and we had our pains. We had our failures and we had our successes. Yes, our splendid successes as men counted them--as we were half tempted to count them ourselves. But we have taken nothing. Our successes are as our failures; our pains are as our pleasures, now. In the all-absorbing abyss of time we have taken nothing, absolutely nothing--nothing which can escape the jaws of the grave, nothing which will pass the portals of death. We stand alone, stripped of everything, alone with God, alone with eternity.

You pursued wealth, and you pursued it not in vain; you determined that your career should be a success, and a success you made it. You surrounded yourself with every material comfort; you added to these substantial appliances all the embellishments and all the refinements of life. What then? Did they give you the satisfaction you hoped for? Could you feel that there was any finality in such aims and acquisitions as these? No. The hope was better after all than the realisation; the prospect was brighter than the attainment. You were restless, discontented, craving still. There was a hunger of soul, though you would not confess it--a hunger of soul, which rejected and loathed these husks. And now where are they, and what are they? Or you pursued honour and fame, and men lavishly bestowed upon you that which you so eagerly sought, till you seemed at length to have all, and more than all, that you had set your heart upon. But still there was no contentment, because there was no finality. Dropsy-like your craving only grew with the gratification. Each fresh draught of applause created a fresh thirst. Every imagined slight, every unintentional neglect, every trivial rebuff, was a keen agony to you. You had only increased your sensitiveness; you had not secured your satisfaction. Or, again, you had set your heart on human love, God's greatest boon if you use it without misusing it, if you subordinate it to his Divine love. Your human affections, your human friendships, were everything to you. In the buoyant hopefulness of youth, in the solid security of middle age, it seemed as though these must last for ever. But soon enough the painful truth dawned upon you. The march of life began to tell on your comrades in the journey. One dropped at your side, and then another. The ranks were visibly thinning, and there was no one to step in and take the vacant places. First the mother at whose knees you had lisped your earliest faltering prayer; then the friend who shared all your counsels, who was more than a brother to you; then the wife whom you cherished as another self; then the little daughter whose innocent childish talk had solaced you in many a grievous hour: so, one by one, they fell away, and you are left gradually alone and more alone; they leave you when you need them most, and at length in the vacancy of your solitude you make the bitter discovery that though you have toiled all night you have taken nothing--you have taken nothing at all.

A short time ago we laid in the vaults of this cathedral the last mortal remains of one[4] who has achieved for himself a foremost place among the masters of his art in our own age. It was fit that his bones should lie here, side by side with more than one famous brother sculptor who has gone before him--side by side with the most illustrious names in the sister art of painting; with Reynolds, whose easy grace in the delineation of human portraiture stands quite without a rival; with Turner, who has succeeded as no other painter has succeeded, in any age or country, in reproducing on canvas the subtle play of light and shade, the ever-varying aspect, the depth, the infinity, of external nature; with Landseer, too, our most recent guest in this our artists' resting-place, whose genial and vigorous representations of the lower animal life have invested it with almost a human interest, and, so doing, have taught us many a suggestive lesson of humanity and kindliness. Side by side, too, with England's greatest architects, and Wren, their prince, whose genius needs no word of eulogy here, for his monument is above and around us. Such a place of sepulture well befitted such a man. It is our tribute of respect for noble gifts nobly used. It is our expression of thanksgiving to God, who thus endows His servants that they may employ their endowments to exalt and to embellish human life.

But one thought cannot fail to strike us here. We may remember that the great conqueror of modern time, when it was suggested to him to perpetuate some signal incident in his triumphant career by an historical picture, asked how long the work would last. He was told two or three centuries--perhaps, under favourable circumstances, five centuries. This would not satisfy his devouring ambition. This was not the immortality of fame which he had designed for himself. He must have a more enduring memorial than this. Compared with the canvas of the painter, the marble of the sculptor is long-lived indeed. The most enduring of human works are the works of the sculptor's chisel. The stern granite features of the Pharaoh who befriended Joseph and the Pharaoh who persecuted Israel may still look down on the land which they ruled with an iron rule between three and four thousand years ago. The winged lions and winged bulls on which the contemporaries of Shalmanezer and Sennacherib may have gazed in awe, in the royal palaces of Assyria, still confront us in our national museum with the same weird look, unchanged though all else has changed, surviving still, though a hundred generations of men have been born, and lived, and died, meanwhile. And it may be that in the centuries to come, some curious explorer will exhume, from the grass-grown mounds of this ruined city, a work of art bearing the name of him whom on Friday last we bore to an honoured resting-place--perhaps the effigy of a prince who flourished in a remote epoch of the past, when England was still a nation, and who sank into an untimely grave amidst a people's mourning. And thus the sculptor's fame will have a second lease of life.

But after all, thirty centuries are but as three--are but as three years or three days--compared with eternity. Napoleon's ambition was a perverted instinct, but it was an instinct, nevertheless. Man feels that he was not made to die; he will not consent to die. This thirst for enduring fame, what is it but an echo, a mocking echo, of an eternal verity? Yes, he will live. The materialist may tell him that, when the eye and the ear are dissolved into gases and decomposed into dust, it matters nothing to him with what honours men may adorn his memory, with what praises they may celebrate his name. He, too--his personality, or what he was pleased to call his personality--is dissolved, is dissipated, is gone; but the materialist never yet has been able, never will be able, to persuade mankind. The natural instinct of man revolts against the assumption; and the ambition of the Christian, the ambition for eternity alone, expresses truly this general instinct of man. To labour for the good things of this world, to labour for fame in the coming centuries, what is it, after all, if our views are bounded by this narrow horizon? Why, then, like the disappointed fishermen of the Galilean lake, we have toiled all the night long, and, for our pains, we have taken nothing.

And this change--this conversion, if you will--comes sometimes, it may be, despite ourselves, but comes--remember this--comes most often in answer to some act of obedience, to some surrender of self-will on our part. We may complain; we may demur; we may distrust. We have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing; but we recognise the authority of the Divine voice, and we force ourselves into compliance--"nevertheless, at Thy word." The command is general: it has come to all alike,--"Let ye down your nets." But, like Peter, we specialise it, we adopt it, we appropriate it to ourselves: "I will let down the net." And so we do what seems hard and unreasonable; we do what we have never done before.

And the response--the response to this obedience--is a light flashed in upon our soul, a double revelation, a revelation of mixed pleasure and pain, for it is a revelation at once of the sin within and of God without. The marvellous bounty of God's grace dazzles and astounds our vision, and, in our perplexity of heart, the despairing, craving, forbidding, yearning cry is wrung from our lips, "Depart from me! Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man!"

"Depart from me, O Lord." I know it all now. I see my sin, because I see Thy goodness. Yes, I have beheld Thy holiness, Thy purity, Thy truth, Thy grace, Thy love, and I have been stunned with the contrast to self. The brightness of the light has intensified the blackness of the shade. Depart from me, O Lord! what can I have in common with Thee?--I, so selfish, so vile, so sin-laden, with Thee, so merciful, so righteous, so holy. In very deed, Thy ways are not as my ways, and Thy thoughts are not as my thoughts. Depart from me, O Lord! This "fear of the Lord" is, indeed, the "beginning of wisdom." This consciousness of sin is the true pathway to heaven. The saintliest of men have ever felt and spoken most strongly of their own sinfulness. The intensity of their language has provoked the sneer of the worldling--has been an evidence here of their own conviction that, despite their pretensions to holiness, they are no better than he, perhaps somewhat worse. But they know, and he doth not know, what sin means and what God means, and so the despairing cry is wrung from their agony, "Depart from me, O Lord."

"Depart from me, O Lord! And yet not so, Lord." Even while Peter is speaking his gestures belie his words. His lips implore Jesus despairingly to depart, but his eyes and his hands entreat Him passionately to stay. "Not so, Lord, for how can I endure to part with Thee? In Thy presence is hope, is light, is joy. Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. Depart from me? No; it is for the godless to say, 'Depart from us, for we desire not the knowledge of God.' It is for the unclean spirits to rave against Thee--'Let us alone, Thou Jesus of Nazareth! What have we to do with Thee?' But I, I have everything to do with Thee. I am created in the image of God. I have a ray of the Divine light, a seed of the Divine word, within me. And like seeks like; therefore I yearn after Thee, therefore I am drawn towards Thee, therefore I stretch out my hands to Thee over the wide chasm of sin which yawns between us. Depart from me? Nay, rather abide with me. Teach me, absolve me, purify me, strengthen me. Take me to Thyself, that I may be Thine and Thine only. Abide with me, for the day of this life is far spent, and the night cometh when no man can work. Stay with me now and evermore, and so fulfil Thy gracious promise: 'If a man love Me and will keep My word, My Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.'"

THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL AN ARGUMENT IN FAVOUR OF CHRISTIANITY.[5]

"They are Thy people and Thine inheritance."--DEUT. ix. 29.

It is related of a certain royal chaplain that, being asked often by his sovereign to give a concise and convincing argument in favour of Christianity, he replied in two words--"The Jews." It is this subject which I offer for your consideration this afternoon--the history and character of the Israelite race as a witness to Christianity. The subject is certainly not inappropriate at this season, when the commemoration of the great Pentecostal Day is fast approaching, to which all the previous history of the nation had tended, which substituted the dispensation of the Spirit for the dispensation of the Law, and expanded the religion of a tribe into the religion of mankind. It is, moreover, forced upon our notice by that remarkable chapter in Deuteronomy which we have heard this afternoon, and which, by prophetic insight, brings out with singular distinctness the prominent character and subsequent career of the race. Only reflect upon such expressions as these:--"Go in to possess nations greater and mightier than thyself, cities great and fenced up to heaven"; "Understand, therefore, this day that the Lord thy God is He which goeth over before thee"; "The Lord thy God giveth thee not this good land to possess it for thy righteousness; for thou art a stiffnecked people"; "Ye have been rebellious against the Lord from the day that I knew you."

Read these passages in the full light which thirty centuries of the nation's history have thrown upon them. Study this contrast between their character and their achievements as it unfolds itself in all their subsequent history. Consider, on the one hand, not only the first conquest of Canaan to which the words more immediately refer, but the succession of far more brilliant victories over the great nations of the world, culminating in that most magnificent triumph of all--the triumph of Christianity. Consider, on the other hand, not only those early murmurings and idolatries in the wilderness to which the language more directly points, but that long catalogue of rebellions of which the subsequent history of Israel is made up, and which reached its climax in the martyrdom of the Lord of Life. Set these one against the other, and you will confess that the utterances of Deuteronomy are wonderful anticipations of the future, succinct epitomes of centuries yet to come. You may question, if you will, every single prophecy in the Old Testament, but the whole history of the Jews is one continuous prophecy, more distinct and articulate than all. You may deny if you will every successive miracle which is recorded therein, but again the history of the Jews is, from first to last, one stupendous miracle, more wonderful and convincing than all. _Here_ you have a small, insignificant people--stiff-necked, rebellious, worthless; _there_ you have the most magnificent spiritual achievements--the most signal moral victories. What conclusion can you draw, except that which is drawn for you in the words which I have read: "The Lord thy God is He that goeth before you"?--"They are Thy people and Thine inheritance, which Thou broughtest out by Thy mighty power and Thy stretched out arm."