Chapter 21

But another thing which strikes any thinking man in David’s psalms, is his strong feeling for the poor, and the afflicted, and the oppressed. That is what makes the Psalms, above all, the poor man’s book, the afflicted man’s book. But how did he get that fellow-feeling for the fallen? By having fallen himself, and tasted affliction and oppression. That was how he was educated to be a true king. That was how he became a picture and pattern—a “type,” as some call it, of Jesus Christ, the man of sorrows. That is why so many of David’s psalms apply so well to the Lord; why the Lord fulfilled those psalms when He was on earth. David was truly a man of sorrows; for he had not only the burden of his own sorrows to bear, but that of many others. His parents had to escape, and to be placed in safety at the court of a heathen prince. His friend Abimelech the priest, because he gave David bread when he was starving, and Goliath’s sword—which, after all, was David’s own—was murdered by Saul’s hired ruffians, at Saul’s command, and with him his whole family, and all the priests of the town, with their wives and children, even to the baby at the breast. And when David was in the mountains, everyone who was distressed, and in debt, and discontented, gathered themselves to him, and he became their captain; so that he had on him all the responsibility, care, and anxiety of managing all those wild, starving men, many of them, perhaps, reckless and wicked men, ready every day to quarrel among themselves, or to break out in open riot and robbery against the people who had oppressed them; for—(and this, too, we may see from David’s psalms, was not the smallest part of his anxiety)—the nation of the Jews seems to have been in a very wretched state in David’s time. The poor seem in general to have lost their land, and to have become all but slaves to rich nobles, who were grinding them down, not only by luxury and covetousness, but often by open robbery and bloodshed. The sight of the misrule and misery, as well as of the bloody and ruinous border inroads which were kept up by the Philistines and other neighbouring tribes, seems for years to have been the uppermost, as well as the deepest thought in David’s mind, if we may judge from those psalms of his, of which this is the key-note; and it was not likely to make him care and feel less about all that misery when he remembered (as we see from his psalms he remembered daily) that God had set him, the wandering outlaw, no less a task than to mend it all; to put down all that oppression, to raise up that degradation, to train all that cowardice into self-respect and valour, to knit into one united nation, bound together by fellow-feeling and common faith in God, that mob of fierce, and greedy, and (hardest task of all, as he himself felt) utterly deceitful men. No wonder that his psalms begin often enough with sadness, even though they may end in hope and trust. He had a work around him and before him which ought to have made his heart sad, which was a great part of his appointed education, and helped to make him perfect by sufferings.

And so, upon the bare hill-side, in woods and caves of the earth, in cold and hunger, in weariness and dread of death, did David learn to be the poor man’s king, the poor man’s poet, the singer of those psalms which shall endure as long as the world endures, and be the comfort and the utterance of all sad hearts for evermore. Agony it was, deep and bitter, and for the moment more hopeless than the grave itself, which crushed out of the very depths of his heart that most awful and yet most blessed psalm, the twenty-second, which we read in church every Good Friday. The “Hind of the Morning” is its title; some mournful air to which David sang it, giving, perhaps, the notion of a timorous deer roused in the morning by the hunters and the hounds. We read that psalm on Good Friday, and all say that our Lord Jesus Christ fulfilled it. What do we mean hereby?

We mean hereby, that we believe that our Lord Jesus Christ fulfilled all sorrows which man can taste. He filled the cup of misery to the brim, and drained it to the dregs. He was afflicted in all David’s afflictions, in the afflictions of all mankind. He bare all their sicknesses, and carried all their infirmities; and therefore we read this psalm upon Good Friday, upon the day in which He tasted death for every man, and went down into the lowest depths of terror, and shame, and agony, and death; and, worst of all, into the feeling that God had forsaken Him, that there was no help or hope for Him in heaven, as well as earth—no care or love in the great God, whose Son He was—went down, in a word, into hell; that hell whereof David and Heman, and Hezekiah after them, had said, “Shall the dust give thanks unto thee? and shall it declare thy truth?”—“Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thy Holy One to see corruption.”—“My life draweth nigh unto hell. . . I am like one stript among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, whom thou rememberest no more; and they are cut off from thy hand. . . . Wilt thou show wonders to the dead? and shall the dead arise and praise thee? Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? and thy righteousness in the land of destruction?”—“For the grave cannot praise thee; death cannot celebrate thee: they that go down to the pit cannot hope for thy truth.”

Even into that lowest darkness, where man feels, even for one moment, that God is nothing to him, and he is nothing to God—even into that Jesus condescended to go down for us. That worst of all temptations, of which David only tasted a drop when he cried out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Jesus drained to the very dregs for us.—He went down into hell for us, and conquered hell and death, and the darkness of the unknown world, and rose again glorious from them, that He might teach us not to fear death and hell; that He might know how to comfort us in the hour of death: and in the day of judgment, when on our sick bed, or in some bitter shame and trouble, the lying devil is telling us that we are damned and lost, and forsaken by God, and every sin we ever did rises up and stares us in the face.

Truly He is a king!—a king for rich and poor, young and old, Englishmen and negro; all alike He knows them, He feels for them, He has tasted sorrow for them, far more than David did for those poor, oppressed, sinful Jews of his. Read those Psalms of David; for they speak not only of David, now long since dead and gone, but of the blessed Jesus, who lives and reigns over us now at this very moment. Read them, for they are inspired; the honest words of a servant of God crying out to the same God, the same Saviour and Deliverer as we have. And His love has not changed. His arm is not shortened that He cannot save. Your words need not change. The words of those psalms in which David prayed, in them you and I may pray. Right out of the depths of his poor distracted heart they came. Let them come out of our hearts too. They belong to us more than even they did to the Jews, for whom David wrote them—more than even they did to David himself; for Jesus has fulfilled them—filled them full—given them boundlessly more meaning than ever they had before, and given us more hope in using them than ever David had: for now that love and righteousness of God, in which David only trusted beforehand, has come down and walked on this earth in the shape of a poor man, Jesus Christ, the Son of the maiden of Bethlehem.

Oh, you who are afflicted, pray to God in those psalms; not merely in the words of them, but in the spirit of them. And to do that, you must get from God the spirit in which David wrote them—the Spirit of God. Pray for that Spirit; for the spirit of patience, which made David wait God’s good time to right him, instead of trying, as too many do, to right himself by wrong means; for the spirit of love, which taught David to return good for evil; for the spirit of fellow-feeling, which taught David to care for others as well as himself; and in that spirit of love, do you pray for others while you are praying for yourself. Pray for that Spirit which taught David to help and comfort those who were weaker than himself, that you in your time may be able and willing to comfort and help those who are weaker than yourselves. And above all, pray for the Spirit of faith, which made David certain that oppression and wrong-doing could not stand; that the day must surely come when God would judge the world righteously, and hear the cry of the afflicted, and deliver the outcast and poor, that the man of the world might be no more exalted against them. Pray, in short, for the Spirit of Christ; and then be sure He will hear your prayers, and answer them, and show Himself a better friend, and a truer King to you, than ever David showed himself to those poor Jews of old. He will deliver you out of all your troubles—if not in this life, yet surely in the life to come; and though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, yet the peace of God shall keep your hearts and minds in Him who loved you, and gave Himself for you, that you might inherit all heaven and earth in Him.

XXVI. THE VALUE OF LAW.

Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God. The powers that be are ordained of God.—ROMANS xiii. 1.

WHAT is the difference between a civilised man and a savage? You will say: A civilised man can read and write; he has books and education; he knows how to make numberless things which makes his life comfortable to him. He can get wealth, and build great towns, sink mines, sail the sea in ships, spread himself over the face of the earth, or bring home all its treasures, while the savages remain poor, and naked, and miserable, and ignorant, fixed to the land in which they chance to have been born.

True: but we must go a little deeper still. Why does the savage remain poor and wretched, while the civilised people become richer and more prosperous? Why, for instance, do the poor savage gipsies never grow more comfortable or wiser—each generation of them remaining just as low as their forefathers were, or, indeed, getting lower and fewer? for the gipsies, like all savages, are becoming fewer and fewer year by year, while, on the other hand, we English increase in numbers, and in wealth, and knowledge; and fresh inventions are found out year by year, which give fresh employment and make life more safe and more pleasant.

This is the reason: That the English have laws and obey them, and the gipsies have none. This is the whole secret. This is why savages remain poor and miserable, that each man does what he likes without law. This is why civilised nations like England thrive and prosper, because they have laws and obey them, and every man does not do what he likes, but what the law likes. Laws are made not for the good of one person here, or the other person there, but for the good of all; and, therefore, the very notion of a civilised country is, a country in which people cannot do what they like with their own, as the savages do. “Not do what he likes with his own?” Certainly not; no one can or does. If you have property, you cannot spend it all as you like. You have to pay a part of it to the government, that is, into the common stock, for the common good, in the shape of rates and taxes, before you can spend any of it on yourself. If you take wages, you cannot spend them all upon yourself and do what you like with them. If you do not support your wife and family out of them, the law will punish you. You cannot do what you like with your own gun, for you may not shoot your neighbour’s cattle or game with it. You cannot do what you like with your own hands, for the law forbids you to steal with them. You cannot do what you like with your own feet, for the law will punish you for trespassing on your neighbour’s ground without his leave. In short, you can only do with your own what will not hurt your neighbour, in such matters as the law can take care of. And more, in any great necessity the law may actually hurt you for the good of the nation at large. The law may compel you to sell your land, to your own injury, if it is wanted for a railroad. The law may compel you, as it did fifty years ago, to serve as a soldier in the militia, to your own injury, if there is a fear of foreign invasion; so that the law is above each and all of us. Our own wills are not our masters. No man is his own master. The law is the master of each and all of us, and if we will not obey it willingly, it can make us obey unwillingly.

Can make us? Ay, but ought it to make us? Is it right that the law should over-ride our own free wills, and prevent our doing what we like with our own?

It is right—absolutely right. St. Paul tells us what gives law this authority: “There is no power but of God. The powers that be are ordained of God.” And he tells us also why this authority is given to the law. “Rulers,” he says, “are not a terror to good works, but to evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of those who administer the law? Do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise from them, for they are God’s ministers to thee for good.”

For good, you see. For the good of mankind it was, that God put into their hearts and reasons, that notion of making laws, and appointing kings and magistrates to see that those laws are obeyed. For our good. For without law no man’s life, or family, or property would be safe. Every man’s private selfishness, and greediness, and anger, would struggle without check to have its way, and there would be no bar or curb to keep each and every man from injuring each and every man else; so the strong would devour the weak, and then tear each other in pieces afterwards. So it is among the savages. They have little or no property, for they have no laws to protect property; and therefore every man expects his neighbour to steal from him, and finds it his shortest plan to steal from his neighbour, instead of settling down to sow corn which he will have no chance of eating, or build houses which may be taken from him at night by some more strong and cunning savage. There is no law among savages to protect women and children against the men, and therefore the women are treated worse than beasts, and the children murdered to save the trouble of rearing them. Every man’s hand is against his neighbour. No one feels himself safe, and therefore no one thinks it worth while to lay up for the morrow. No one expects justice and mercy to be done to him, and therefore no one thinks it worth while to do justice and mercy to others. And thus they live in continual fear and quarrelling, feeding like wild animals on game or roots, often, when they have bad luck in their hunting, on offal which our dogs would refuse, and dwindle away and become fewer and wretcheder year by year; in this way do the savages in New South Wales live to this day, for want of law.

It is for our good, then, that God has put into the heart of man to make laws, and to obey them as sacred and divine things. For our good, in order to save us from sinking down into the same state of poverty and misery in which the savages are. For our good, because we are fallen creatures, with selfish and corrupt wills, continually apt to break loose, and please ourselves at the expense of our neighbours. For our good, because, however fallen we are, we are still brothers, members of God’s family, bound to each other by duty and relationship, if not by love.

Just as in a family, if parents, brothers, and sisters will not do their duty to each other lovingly and of their free will, the law interferes, and the custom of the country interferes, and the opinion of neighbours interferes, and says: “You may not love your parents: but you have no right to leave them to starve.” “You may not love your brothers: but if you try to injure and slander them, you are doing an unnatural and hateful thing, abhorred by God and man, and you must expect us to treat you accordingly, as a wild beast who does not feel the common laws of nature and right and wrong.” So with the law of the land. The law is meant to remind us more or less that we are brothers, members of one body; that we owe a duty to each other; that we are all equal in God’s sight, who is no respecter of persons, or of rank, or of riches, any more than the law is when it punishes the greatest nobleman as severely as the poorest labourer. The law is meant to remind us that God is just; that when we injure each other, we sin against God; that God’s rule and law is, that each transgression should receive its just reward, and that, therefore, because man is made in the likeness of God, man is bound, as far as he can, to visit every offence with due and proportionate punishment. And the law punishes, as St. Paul says, in God’s name, and for God’s sake. The magistrate is a witness for God’s righteous government of the world, the minister of God’s vengeance against evil-doers, to remind all continually that evil-doing has no place, and cannot prosper, and must not be allowed, upon this God’s earth whereon we live.

But what if the laws are unfair, and punish only some sorts of evil-doers and not others? What if they are like spiders’ webs, which catch the little flies, and let the great wasps break through? What if they punish poor and weak offenders, and let the rich and powerful sinners escape? “Obey them still,” says St. Paul. In his time and country the laws were as unfair in that way as laws ever were, and yet he tells Christians to obey them for conscience’s sake. Thank God that they do punish weak offenders. Pray God that the time may come when they may be strong enough to punish great offenders also. But, in the meantime, see that they have not to punish you. As far as the laws go, they are right and good. As far as they keep down any sort of wrong-doing whatsoever, they are God’s ordinances, and you must obey them for God’s sake.

But what if the laws are not only unfair and partial, but also unjust and wrong? Are we to obey them then? Obey them still, says St. Paul. Of course, if they command you to do a clearly wrong thing; if, for instance, the law commanded you to worship idols, or to commit adultery, there is no question then; such laws cannot be God’s ordinance. The laws can only be God’s ordinance as far as they agree with what we know of God’s will written in our hearts, and written in His holy Bible. Then a man must resist the law to the death, if need be, as the old martyrs did, dying as witnesses for God’s righteous and eternal law, against man’s false and unrighteous law. It is a very difficult thing, no doubt, to tell where to draw the line in such matters. But we, thank God, here in England now, have no need to puzzle our heads with such questions. Every man’s conscience is free here, and he has full liberty to worship God as he thinks best, provided that by so doing he does not interfere with his neighbour’s character, or property, or comfort. There is no single law in England now, that I know of, which a man has any need to refuse to obey, let his conscience be as tender as it may. And as for laws which we think hurtful to the country, or hurtful to any particular class in the country, our thinking them hurtful is no reason that we should not obey them. As long as they are law, they are God’s ordinance, and we have no right to break them. They may be useful after all. Or even if they are hurtful in some way, still God may be bringing good out of them in some other way, of which we little dream, as He has often done out of laws and customs which seem at first sight most foolish and hurtful, and yet which He endured and winked at, for the sake of bringing good out of evil. At all events, whatsoever laws are here in England, are made by the men whom we English have chosen, as the men most fit and wise to make them, and we are bound to abide by them. If Parliament is not wise enough to make perfectly good laws, that is no one’s fault but our own; for if we were wise, we should choose wise law-makers, and we must be filled with the fruit of our own devices. As long as these laws have been made and passed, by Commons, Lords, and Queen, according to the ancient forms and constitution which God has taught our forefathers from time to time for more than a thousand years, and which have had God’s blessing and favour on them, and made us, from the least of all nations, the greatest nation on the earth; in short, as long as those laws are made according to law, so long we are bound to believe them to be God’s ordinance, and obey them. But understand; that is no reason why we should not try to get them improved; for when they are changed and done away according to the same law which made them, that will be a sign that they are God’s ordinances no longer; that God thinks we have no more need for them, and does not require us to keep them. But as long as any law is what St. Paul calls “the powers that be,” obeyed it must be, not only for wrath, but for conscience’s sake.

That is a very important part of the matter. Obey the law, St. Paul says, not only for wrath, that is, not only for fear of punishment, but for conscience’s sake. Even if you do not expect to be punished; even if you think no one will ever find out that you have broken the law, remember it is God’s ordinance. He sees you. Do not hurt your own conscience, and deaden your own sense of right and wrong, by breaking the least or the most unjust law in the slightest point.