Chapter 5
It bids us recognise and keep always before us that in every common life, of child or man, even in the most worldly or the hardest, the most frivolous, the most cynical, the most sensual, or the most degraded, there is latent, it may be altogether unfelt and disregarded through long years, giving no sign of its presence, it may be, it often is, overlaid, trodden down, even at the point of death, but still there, this living soul with all its possibilities. It is within every one of us, stamped with the image of God, and charged with unimagined possibilities.
And it must be obvious that the whole difference between any two lives, between your life and your neighbour's life, may depend on this awakening of the soul in one of you and its not awakening in the other.
Of the two brothers, Esau and Jacob, I suppose we are all drawn at the outset to Esau; our heart goes out to him, as we read, the impulsive, the impetuous, the affectionate, and we feel a corresponding dislike of Jacob's craft and cunning, and selfish calculations. There can be no doubt, we say, which was the meaner character to begin with.
But neither is there any doubt why it was that it came to be written, "Jacob I have loved, but Esau have I hated." The one was just the child of the world around him, yielding to its temptations, living by its standards. The soul in him never awoke, so as to transfigure his thoughts and purposes. The other is a man of Divine visions, inspired with the sense of a Divine presence and a Divine purpose directing him.
Nowhere do we see more clearly than in this narrative how great a change may come to any of us, if the unawakened capacities of our soul are touched by the breath of some uplifting inspiration.
As we read of this contrast between Esau and Jacob, and their destinies, we feel--and we feel it all the more because Jacob to begin with seems to be made of such common clay--we feel what a transforming power in a man's life this awaking of the soul may be.
A life which is without the inspiration that takes possession of us in the moments of this awakening, and is consequently without these visions that flash before the soul as it awakens, a life that is not deeply stirred by spiritual hopes or Divine thought, or the call to new duty, remains in one man a selfish and worldly life, in another a frivolous, in a third a sensual life. But the very same life--and here is the practical value to us, here is the hopefulness of such considerations--the very same life, when the breath of God's spirit or His penetrating voice has stirred and roused the soul in it, is felt to be transformed. The man is born anew.
"There is nothing finer," some one has said, "than to see a soul rise up in men, which amazes the very men in whom it rises." They are surprised to find that these new capacities were in them, unnoticed through their careless days, yet in them all the time. This birth of the new life, with all its promise of new tastes, new ambitions, new thoughts, new purposes, may indeed come to you without your feeling all at once how great a thing it is. At first it may be nothing more than some vision of the possibilities of your life, or some electric flash of new consciousness that runs through you, or the sharp pang of remorse for some sin or some neglect, or the flush of shame or repulsion as you think of something or other in your life, or the glow of some good resolution to begin some new life or new duty, or take some new turn, or pursue some new aim. You hardly think perhaps of this as the awakening of your soul. It may never have occurred to you to think of it as being just as sacred a thing as was Jacob's vision at Bethel, as being indeed the work of the same Divine spirit.
But let us consider it a little further. Whatever it is that is thus stirring in your heart, it comes and it comes again; it lingers in your thoughts and feelings; it haunts, it impresses and awes you; it rises before you suddenly and stops you from some sin, or, if it fails to stop you, it turns the pleasure for which you craved into wretchedness; or it encourages and consoles you in some hour of weakness or sorrow. I suppose there is hardly one of you who has not had some such experience as this. And if you ask. What is it? It is, I repeat, the awakening of the soul in you--nothing less than this--and happy is it for you, if you recognise that it is the soul striving to win its proper place in the regulation of your life.
When Moses saw the vision of the burning bush, and suddenly felt himself on holy ground; when Elijah heard the still, small voice calling, "What doest thou here, Elijah?" when Saul, on his way to Damascus, fell to the ground conscience-smitten, crushed, blinded, rebuked; when the child Samuel heard the Divine voice calling to him in the darkness of the night;--in each case it was the awakening or the reawakening of the soul--the uprising of the spiritual capacities, the vision of the higher life--and so exactly with all of _you_. Are you not sometimes conscious of the uprisings in you of a spirit calling upon you to recognise the angels' ladder that connects _your_ life also with the heaven above us?
If so, there is this further thing to note about such moments of experience.
This feeling of some spiritual capacity in you, this call to some higher view of life and duty, this uprising of the moral sense and the repulsion towards the lower forms of life which comes with it--this is God's personal gift to us, and we pray that you may possess it early; for it is not only a new consciousness, it is itself a new power in your life.
You cannot have it, feeling its presence and hearing its suggestions, and debase your life in any way, as you might have done, but for its presence. It is so very true that, in the life of the Spirit, looking up means lifting up. As the plant turns to the sun, it grows towards the sun; as it looks up to the light, it grows towards the light; so it is with us. We feel that we are sons of God, and we tend to become so. Through some influence or other, we awake to a vivid consciousness that God has created us in His image, endowed us with Divine capacities, and this consciousness becomes a purifying and inspiring force in our life, and it is a new life in consequence.
Pray that such influences may prevail around you here, and that you may hold them fast until they have blessed your life.
XI. "MEMBERS ONE OF ANOTHER."
"So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another."--ROMANS xii. 5.
There are some moral and spiritual truths which it seems to be almost impossible to impress upon the practical life of the world, although they meet with a sort of universal acceptance.
Men agree with them, they re-echo them, they applaud them; they do everything, in fact, but exhibit them as the moving, inspiring, and guiding truths of their daily practice.
And among these I fear we must still class that one which is expressed in the text I have just read, a text which sets forth the fundamental fact that whatever else Christianity may teach, it teaches as one of its first and principal lessons that a Christian man has to live in Christ for his neighbours.
If such a text means anything, it means that Christianity is essentially a religion of society, that it sets before us social claims as standing before all other claims; that, starting from the Divine Sacrifice as the central fact of human life, it was intended to root out of our hearts the noxious weed of selfishness by the power of the Divine love, and to build up the organisation of men in their common relationships upon this new basis.
It may sound somewhat strange to speak at this time of day of what Christianity is intended to do, rather than what it has done already.
But it is even more strange to read the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, and all the other words of the Lord; all the lessons of His life and His sacrifice; the history of the first generation of Christians; the descent of the Spirit upon them; and the teaching of the apostolic brotherhood--to remember that all this is our accepted faith; that it has been the faith of one generation after another for eighteen hundred years; that we grow up in this faith, live in it, and die in it; and at the same time to contemplate side by side with it all the elements of the common life, all the rules and customs of society, all the standards of conduct which ordinary men take as their measure of daily duty and purpose.
Thus, whilst on the one hand Christian influences, and all the changes in the world's life which are due to them, fill us with wonder and gratitude, the failures of Christianity are scarcely less impressive.
When we consider the ordinary run of men's lives, so different for the most part in spirit, and in aim and guiding rules, from that type which the New Testament sets before us, it would almost seem as if to the majority their religion was not a ruling and dominating principle, pervading this present life, but only an _ideal_, shedding around us a glow of indefinite hopes and possibilities, an ideal hardly to be realised, laid up somewhere in the heavens--[Greek text]. These contrasts between the revelation of the Gospel and the standards of the Christian world have always troubled the most earnest spirits in every generation. Some of you remember, no doubt, how this contrast between Christian profession and the life of selfish sin and waste flashed into fierce poetry in one such spirit of the last generation, who grew up in this school.
"Through the great, sinful streets of Naples, as I passed, With fiercer heat than flamed above my head My heart was hot within me, till at last My brain was lightened when my tongue had said Christ is not risen."
And men who are truly in earnest about faith and life, and who are perplexed and distressed by the contradictions and insincerities that meet them, must often be moved as he was.
And yet, when we look closer, and consider that the battle of spiritual progress has this peculiarity attached to it, that it has to be fought over again, in every generation, and in every separate individual soul, the result is less surprising. Remembering this, we do not expect the victory of the last generation to save us from defeat or failure.
And this has to be borne in mind equally in regard to the continuous life of societies and to our own separate lives. Thus in such a society as this, if our predecessors uplifted the standards of conduct, inculcated high principles, and inspired their generation with a strong pervading spirit, this should make it easier for us to do likewise; but it does not insure our doing it. All this higher life will die in our hands if the same regenerating spirit is not alive and working in our hearts also. So, again, your individual victory over sin in the power of the Spirit in you, does not save my life from having to fight the battle for itself and win its own victories.
So that, however perplexing the phenomena of life may seem whilst we look at them in the mass or from the outside, if we read the Gospel of Christ as a message to our own souls a great deal of the perplexity disappears. And it was with this personal message that Christ came, and there is no hope of our understanding His mission, or of living in the light of His transforming spirit, if we think of it in any other way than this.
The purpose of His revelation is to crucify the selfish instinct in us, and to rouse us to the life of self-devotion, to the idea of consecrated energies; and this being so, all Christian life is of the nature of a warfare; and a warfare which begins afresh with each generation of men; because selfishness, with all its tribe of attendant appetites and passions, springs afresh in every single soul, and is nurtured, strengthened, cultivated, by so many of the conditions of life.
If, then, the Spirit of Christ is really to prevail in our life, it must be by effecting our emancipation from selfish instincts, and rousing in us the spirit of devotion to the good of other lives.
In proportion as you diminish selfishness in your own life or in any other, by fostering generous affections and cultivating the spirit of social duty and religious aspiration, by walking in the footsteps of Christ and living in the light of His presence, you are laying the only possible foundation of any lasting progress, you are following the one true method by which the mystery of sin is to be overcome.
We may wonder that this should be so difficult; for of selfishness we should say that we all dislike it. In its grosser forms we repudiate it. The very word is one which we articulate with a certain accent of contempt.
But when we come to its refined and subtle workings in our nature, when we think of its Proteus-like changeableness, its power of assuming the various guises even of duty or religion; when we reflect how it can clothe itself in the choicest garb of art, or science, or divine philosophy, we find very likely that we are always in danger of being enslaved by it.
And we do well to pray in all sincerity that grace may expel our selfishness; for indeed the influence of true religion is to be gauged by the extent to which this prayer is being fulfilled in us. The fulfilment of it is what we mean by the regenerate life.
I need not ask you how you feel in the presence of any character which you recognise as cleansed from all taint of selfishness, a character, softened, refined, purified, inspired, consecrated. I would rather ask whether you know of any personal influence to be compared with that of such a character.
And if, as I anticipate, you would answer that there is none like it, I would ask you to bear in mind that this influence may be yours. You are invited by all the highest calls within and around you to make it yours. "What is the aim and purpose of his life?" is a question which men are justified in asking about us; and they are justified in passing their verdict upon us by the answer which our life gives.
Does he live for himself, they will ask, for his own pleasures, his own delights, be they coarse or refined, his own indulgence, his own particular interest? Is there anything of the spirit or enthusiasm of sacrifice visible in the ordinary tenor of his actions?
The world, this Christian world, is full of those concerning whom the answer to such questions can only be a distinct negative; and yet we know that in all such characters, whether in youth or age, Christianity is a failure.
Therefore we shall accept it as our primary duty, the purpose of our existence as a Christian school, to train up men who shall be penetrated by the spirit of unselfishness, possessed by the feeling that their lives are to be consecrated to the common good.
Societies differ very widely in the type of character they impress.
Here and there we see a society, here and there a school, which has somehow acquired the power to stamp on those who go out from it a certain impress of nobility.
They go forth like the knights of our famous English legend--imperfect no doubt and erring, but each one of them inspired with the consciousness that his life is a holy quest.
There are other societies and schools among them which seem to possess everything but this one power.
What, then, are we to say of our hopes? What is to be the mission of our generation here? Shall we contribute anything to raise the common type? Or shall we drift on as the world drifts, a little better, or a little worse?
Shall we not rather pray and hope as we begin once more to weave the web of mutual influence, that you may grow up here not altogether like the herd of common men, but emancipated early from the life of selfish desire, feeling the spirit of Christ within you, remembering your baptismal vows, with eyes open to heavenly visions, and not disobedient unto them?
XII. THE SOWER AND THE SEED.
"A sower went out to sow his seed."--ST. LUKE viii. 5.
It is significant that the first of the Saviour's parables is the parable of the sower, that the first thing to which He likens His own work is that of the sower of seed, the first lesson He has to impress upon us by any kind of comparison is that the word of God is a seed sown in our hearts, a something which contains in it the germ of a new life.
It is no less significant that He returns so often to this same kind of comparison for the purpose of impressing us always with the primary fact, that our relationship to God, the Father of Spirits, in other words our spiritual condition at the present moment, our hope for the time to come, does not depend upon some body of doctrine, but on our having received into the secret places of the heart the seeds of a new life.
This is suggestive of a great many considerations which touch our life very closely; but I will not turn aside to them at this moment, as my desire is to fix your thoughts for the present on this one fundamental thing, that the principle of moral and spiritual life in you is a seed, and as such it is endowed with a power of independent separate growth; it was intended to grow in you.
The sower casts his seed upon the earth and goes his way, and, once sown, it springs up and grows, as Jesus said in another parable, "he knoweth not how." This, then, is the truth which He is impressing on our attention, when He speaks of His revelation as a seed, a seed to be sown by hands which have no control over it except to sow it. The soul of each and every one of us is a seed-field, and the seeds of new life and purpose should be growing in it.
As we recall the other parable of the seed growing secretly, recorded in St. Mark's Gospel, we feel even more strongly how the essence of all our life is in seeds of influence. "So is the Kingdom of Heaven as if a man should cast seed upon the earth, and the seed should spring up and grow, he knoweth not how." It grows in us mysteriously we know not how.
And I am not sure that we all, indeed I think it likely that we do not all, take it home to our thoughts with sufficient seriousness that this mysterious growth in the thing sown implies a mysterious vital power or force which is inherent in it.
I call it a mysterious vital power, because all life is a mystery to us. The very thought of life lands us in mystery, in mystery which defies analysis. We know that all the life in us and around us follows certain laws, as we call them, the life of plants, the life of animals, the life of man, each following its own laws after its kind, and that is all we know about it. We can observe its action, its uniformities, its sequences, and variations, but beyond this we cannot penetrate its secret. It grows mysteriously, we know not how.
But this much we know, that no life is spontaneously generated. The science of our day has demonstrated it, as we believe, beyond dispute, that you cannot create life out of dead matter. All life comes from some antecedent life. Wherever you see life of any kind, you know that there must have been before it some form of life which was its parent.
Yet again, the scientific investigator points out another suggestive fact, that the lower creature does not of its own lower nature expand into the higher, but that life is lifted up and grows by the infusion of something higher than itself. So, too, we believe that the Spirit of God touches with its mysterious power the dead souls of men; it transforms them, it uplifts them, they are born again. They are roused and stirred to new capacity by the touch and inspiration of this Divine life. This is what is meant when it is said that if any man be in Christ he is a new creature. He has received into his nature this mysterious gift, or rather this seed of the new life.
Such is the Christian doctrine of the new birth, or of the life-giving breath of the Spirit, or of the sowing the seed of Divine life in us. You may describe it how you please, if only you take due note of this, that in proportion as you realise or accept this truth as in any way intimately connected with your own personal life and conduct, all the common things around you acquire a new importance, and I might even say some touch of sacredness, because they are felt to be strewn with these seeds of influence which God is sowing around us, with a hand that never rests, through all our years, in uncounted ways.
This seed of new life which is to save you from the power of sin and the flesh and give you new aspirations, purer tastes, stronger purposes, need I remind you how it is sown, in what manifold and various ways? It must be within the personal experience of some of you to testify how your meetings in this chapel every morning may sow it. One day it falls on your heart in some word of some hymn or prayer, or in some thought or feeling which flashes through you, or some pricking of conscience for no other knows what sin or fault, or in some new resolve.
Sometimes it is found that a passing word of a preacher sows it (it is in this hope I preach to you), or again it is sown in the common ways of daily life, by the reading of some book, or by the word or example of a friend, or by some casual sight or experience. We remember how the seed of an unresting and beneficent life, a life devoted to the good of the poor and the suffering, was sown in Lord Shaftesbury by the shocking sight of a pauper funeral when he was a boy at Harrow. So it may be sown in your hearts you know not beforehand when or where, to grow up and bear fruit an hundred fold.
The wind bloweth where it listeth--so is every one that is born of the Spirit. You never know what Divine seed it may deposit in your heart at any moment; but this you do know, that if the word of Christ be true, whenever this gift of life comes to you it is a new birth.
And there is all the more mystery and sacredness about our common life just because we never know how or when these seeds may fall upon our life to bless it, and because men are often altogether unconscious of the beginnings of their growth in them. Some seed of good influence falls into the soil of their heart, and seems to lie there buried in the winter of neglect or waste.
Thus some men may carry the seeds long and far, not knowing the power or the potency of the life that is in them; but some day they strike root and grow and bear fruit in new convictions, or in new desires and purposes; and this may be the case with any one amongst us, and hence it is natural that we should press the question on ourselves and on each other--What are you making of those seeds of higher life which have been sown in you by your mother's love, by your father's words, by all the lessons and influences of such a place as this, seeds which are falling around you continually, and may possibly be trodden down or overlaid?
As we look at these parables of the Lord telling of this sowing and this growth of seeds, they bring it home to us very forcibly that the only true test of life in Christ is growth in Christian graces. And this brings us to a consideration of grave practical importance. It bids us be very careful to distinguish between seeds of life taking root in the heart and springing up into new activities, and mere waves of impression. The seed springs up and grows in you, the wave merely flows over you, lifting and moving you for a moment, and then leaving you as before. Thus, and it is a warning which is not unneeded in our day, a day of much emotional religion, there is all the difference in the world between a religion of moods and a religion of growth. The one is the plaything of the winds, the other is rooted in Christ.