Chapter 32

And in the same way the Jews lived, for the most part, before the Lord Jesus came in the flesh of man. Not so viciously and wickedly, of course, because the law of Moses was holy, and just, and good; the law which the Lord Himself had given them, because it was the best for them then; because they were too sinful, and slavish, and stupid, for anything better. But, as St. Paul says, Moses’s law could not give them life, any more than any other law can. That is, it could not make them righteous and good; it could not change their hearts and lives; it could only keep them from outward wrong-doing by threats and promises, saying: “Thou shalt not.” It could, at best, only show them how sinful their own hearts were; how little they loved what God commanded; how little they desired what He promised; and so it made them feel more and more that they were guilty, unworthy to look up to a holy God, deserving His anger and punishment, worthy to die for their sins; and thus by the law came the knowledge of sin, a deeper feeling of guilt, and shame, and slavish dread of God, as St. Paul sets forth, with wonderful wisdom, in the seventh chapter of Romans.

Now, let us consider the latter half of the text. “But ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry Abba, Father.”

What is this adoption? St. Paul tells us in the beginning of the fourth chapter of his epistle to the Galatians. He says: As long as a man’s heir is a child, and under age, there is no difference in law between him and a slave. He is his father’s property. He must obey his father, whether he chooses or not; and he is under tutors and governors, until the time appointed by his father; that is, until he comes of age, as we call it. Then he becomes his own master. He can inherit and possess property of his own after that. And from that time forth the law does not bind him to obey his father; if he obeys him it is of his own free will, because he loves, and trusts, and reverences his father.

Now, St. Paul says, this is the case with us. When we were infants, we were in bondage under the elements of the world; kept straight, as children are, by rules which they cannot understand, by the fear of punishment which they cannot escape, with no more power to resist their father than slaves have to resist their master. But when the fulness of time was come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under a law, that He might redeem those who were under a law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.

As much as to say: You were God’s _children_ all along: but now you are more; you are God’s sons. You have arrived at man’s estate; you are men in body and in mind; you are to be men in spirit, men in life. You are to look up to the great God who made heaven and earth, and know, glorious thought! that He is as truly your Father as the men whose earthly sons you call yourselves. And if you do this, He will give you the Spirit of adoption, and you shall be able to call Him Father with your hearts, as well as with your lips; you shall know and feel that He is your Father; that He has been loving, watching, educating, leading you home to Him all the while that you were wandering in ignorance of Him, in childish self-will, and greediness after pleasure and amusement. He will give you His Spirit to make you behave like His sons, to obey Him of your own free will, from love, and gratitude, and honour, and filial reverence. He will make you love what He loves, and hate what He hates. He will give you clear consciences and free hearts, to fear nothing on earth or in heaven, but the shame and ingratitude of disobeying your Father.

The Spirit of adoption, by which you look up to God as your Father, is your right. He has given it to you, and nothing but your own want of faith, and wilful turning back to cowardly superstition, and to the wilful sins which go before superstition, and come after it, can take it from you. So said St. Paul to the Romans and the Galatians, and so I have a right, ay, and a bounden duty, to say to every man and woman in this church this day.

For, my dear friends, if you ask me, what has this to do with us? Has it not everything to do with us? Whether we are leading good lives, or middling lives, or utterly bad worthless lives, has it not everything to do with us? Who is there here who has not at times said to himself: “God so holy, and pure, and glorious; while I am so unjust, and unclean, and mean! And God so great and powerful; while I am so small and weak! What shall I do? Does not God hate and despise me? Will He not take from me all which I love best? Will He not hurl me into endless torment when I die? How can I escape from Him? Wretched man that I am, I cannot escape from Him! How, then, can I turn away His hate? How can I make Him change His mind? How can I soothe Him and appease Him? What shall I do to escape hell-fire?”

Did you ever have such thoughts? But, did you find those thoughts, that slavish terror of God’s wrath, that dread of hell, made you any _better_ men? I never did. I never saw them make any human being better. Unless you go beyond them—as far beyond them as heaven is beyond hell, as far above them as a free son is above a miserable crouching slave, they will do you more harm than good. For this is all that I have seen come of them: That all this spirit of bondage, this slavish terror, instead of bringing a man nearer to God, only drove him further from God. It did not make him hate what was wrong; it only made him dread the punishment of it. And then, when the first burst of fear cooled down, he began to say to himself: “I can never atone for my sins. I can never win back God to love me. What is done, is done. If I cannot escape punishment, let me be at least as happy as I can while it lasts. If it does not come to-day, it will come to-morrow. Let me alone, thou tormenting conscience. Let me eat and drink, for to-morrow I die!” And so back rushed the poor creature into all his wrong-doing again, and fell most probably deeper than ever into the mire, because a certain feeling of desperation and defiance rose up in him, till he began to fancy that his terror was all a dream—a foolish accidental rising up of old superstitious words which he learnt from his mother or his nurse; and he tried to forget it all, and did forget it—God help him!—and his latter end was worse than his first.

How then shall a man escape shame and misery, and an evil conscience, and rise out of these sins of his? For do it he must. The wages of sin is death—death to body and soul; and from sin he must escape.

There is but one way, my friends. There never was but one way. Believe the text, and therefore believe the warrant of your Baptism. Believe the message of your Confirmation.

Your baptism says to you, God does _not_ hate you, be you the greatest sinner on earth. He does not hate you. He loves you; for you are His child. He hateth nothing that He hath made. He willeth not the death of a sinner, but that _all_ should come to be saved. And your baptism is the sign of that to you. But God hates everything that He has not made; for everything which He has not made is bad; and He has made all things but sin; and therefore He hates sin, and, loving you, wishes to raise you out of sin; and baptism is the sign of that also. Man was made originally in the image and likeness of God, and of Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, the express image of God the Father; and therefore everything which is sinful is unmanly, and everything which is truly manful, and worthy of a man, is like Jesus Christ; and God’s will is, that you should rise out of all these unmanly sins, to a truly manful life—a life like the life of Jesus Christ, the Son of Man. And baptism is God’s sign of this also. That is the meaning of the words in the Baptism Service which tell you that you were baptised into Jesus Christ, that you might put off the old man—the sinful, slavish, selfish, unmanly pattern of life, which we all lead by nature; and put on the new man—the holy and noble, righteous and loving pattern of life, which is the likeness of the Lord Jesus. That is the message of your baptism to you; that you are God’s children, and that God’s will and wish is that you should grow up to become His _sons_, to serve Him lovingly, trustingly, manfully; and that He can and will give you power to do so—ay, that He has given you that power already, if you will but claim it and use it. But you must claim it and use it, because you are meant not merely to be God’s wilful, ignorant, selfish children, obeying Him from mere fear of the rod; but to be His willing, loving, loyal sons. And that is the message which Confirmation brings you. Baptism says: You are God’s child, whether you know it or not. Confirmation says: Yes; but now you are to know it, and to claim your rights as His sons, of full age, reasonable and self-governing.

Baptism says: You are regenerated and born from above, by water and the Holy Spirit. Confirmation answers: True, most true; but there is no use in a child’s being born, if it never comes to man’s estate, but remains a stunted idiot.

Baptism says: You may and ought to become more or less such a man as the Lord Jesus was. Confirmation says: You can become such; for you are no longer children; you are grown to man’s estate in body, you can grow to man’s estate in soul if you will. God’s Spirit is with you, to show you all things in their true light; to teach you to value them or despise them as you ought; to teach you to love what He loves, and hate what He hates. God wishes you no longer to be merely His children, obeying Him you know not why; still less His slaves, obeying Him from mere brute coward fear, and then breaking loose the moment that you forget Him, and fancy that His eye is not on you: but He wishes you to be His sons; to claim the right and the power which He has given you to trample your sins under foot; to rise up by the strength which God your Father will surely give to those who ask Him; and so to be new men, free men, true men, who do look boldly up to God, knowing that, however wicked they may have been, and however weak they are still, God’s love belongs to them, God’s help belongs to them, and that those who trust in Him shall never be confounded, but shall go on from strength to strength to the measure of the stature of a perfect man, to the noble likeness of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.

For this is the message of the blessed sacrament of the body and blood of Christ, to which you have been all called this day. That sacrament tells you that in spite of all your daily sins and failings, you can still look up to God as your Father; to the Lord Jesus Christ as your life; to the Holy Spirit as your guide and your inspirer; that though you be prodigal sons, your Father’s house is still open to you, your Father’s eternal love ready to meet you afar off, the moment that you cry from your heart: “Father, I have sinned;” and that you must be converted and turn back to God your Father, not merely once for all at Confirmation, or at any other time, but weekly, daily, hourly, as often as you forget and disobey Him; and that he will receive you. This is the message of the blessed sacrament, that though you cannot come there trusting in your own righteousness, you can come trusting in His manifold and great mercies; that though you are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under His table, yet He is the same Lord whose property is ever to have mercy; that He will, as surely as He has appointed that sign of the bread and wine, grant you so to eat and drink that spiritual flesh and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, which is the life of the world, that your sinful bodies may be made clean by His body, and your souls washed in His most precious blood, and that you may dwell in Him, and He in you, for ever.

XLI. THE FALL.

As by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed on all men, for that all have sinned.—ROMANS v. 12.

WE have been reading the history of Adam’s fall. With that fall we have all to do; for we all feel the fruits of it in the sinful corruptions which we bring into the world with us. And more, every fall which we have is like Adam’s fall: every time we fall into wilful sin, we do what Adam did, and act over again, each of us many times in our lives, that which he first acted in the garden of Paradise. At least, all mankind suffer for something. Look at the sickness, death, bloodshed, oppression, spite, and cruelty, with which the world is so full now, of which it has been full, as we know but too well from history, ever since Adam’s time. The world is full of misery, there is no denying that. How did that come? It must have come somehow. There must be some reason for all this sorrow. The Bible tells us a reason for it. If anyone does not like the Bible reason, he is bound to find a better reason. But what if the Bible reason, the story of Adam’s fall, be the only rational and sensible explanation which ever has been, or ever will be given, of the way in which death and misery came among men?

Some people will say: What puzzle is there in it? All animals die, why should not man? All animals fight and devour each other, why should not man do so too? But why need we suppose that man is fallen? Why should he not have been meant by nature to be just what he is? Some scholars who fancy themselves wise, and think that they know better than the Bible, will say that now, and pride themselves on having said a very fine thing; ignorant men, too, often are led into the same mistake, and are willing enough to say: “What if we are brutish, and savage, and ignorant, and spiteful, indulging ourselves, hating and quarrelling with each other? God made us what we are, and we cannot help it.” But there is a voice in the heart of every man, and just in proportion as a man is a man, and not a beast and a savage, that voice cries in his heart more loudly: No; God did not make you what you are. You are not meant to be what you are, but something better. You are not meant to fight and devour each other as the animals do; for you are meant to be better than they. You are not meant to die as the animals do; for you feel something in you which cannot die, which hates death. You may try to be a mere savage and a beast, but you cannot be content to be so. And yet you feel ready to fall lower, and get more and more brutish. What can be the reason? There must be something wrong about men, something diseased and corrupt in them, or they would not have this continual discontent with themselves for being no better than they are; this continual hankering and longing after some happiness, some knowledge, some good and noble state which they do not see round them, and never have felt in themselves. Man must have fallen, fallen from some good and right state into which he was put at first, and for which he is hankering and craving now. There must be an original sin in him; that is, a sin belonging to his origin, his race, his breed, as we say, which has been handed down from father to son; an original sin as the church calls it. And I believe firmly that the heart of man, even among savages, bears witness to the truth of that doctrine, and confesses that we are fallen beings, let false philosophers try as they will to persuade us that we are not.

Then, again, there are another set of people, principally easy, well-to-do, respectable people, who run into another mistake, the same into which the Pelagians did in old time. They think: “Man is not fallen. Every man is born into the world quite good enough, if he chose to remain good. Every man can keep God’s laws if he likes, or at all events keep them well enough.” As for his having a sinful nature which he got from Adam, they do not believe that really, though often they might not like to say so openly. They think: “Adam fell, and he was punished; and if I fall I shall be punished; but Adam’s sin is nothing to me, and has not hurt me. I can be just as good and right as Adam was, if I like.” That is a comfortable doctrine enough for easy-going well-to-do folks, who have but few trials, and few temptations, and who love little because little has been forgiven them. But what comfort is there in that for poor sinners, who feel sinful and base passions dragging them down, and making them brutish and miserable, and yet feel that they cannot conquer their sins of themselves, cannot help doing wrong, all the while they know that it is wrong? They feel that they have something more in them than a will and power to do what they choose. They feel that they have a sinful nature which keeps their will and reason in slavery, and makes sin a hard bondage, a miserable prison-house, from which they cannot escape. In short, they feel and know that they are fallen. Small comfort, too, to every thinking man, who looks upon the great nations of savages, which have lived, and live still, upon God’s earth, and sees how, so far from being able to do right if they choose, they go on from father to son, generation after generation, doing wrong, more and more, whether they like or not; how they become more and more children of wrath, given up to fierce wars, and cruel revenge, and violent passions, all their thought, and talk, and study, being to kill and to fight; how they become more and more children of darkness, forgetting more and more the laws of right and wrong, becoming stupid and ignorant, until they lose the very knowledge of how to provide themselves with houses, clothes, fire, or even to till the ground, and end in feeding on roots and garbage, like the beasts which perish. And how, too, long before they fall into that state, death works in them. How, the lower they fall, and the more they yield to their original sin and their corrupt nature, they die out. By wars with each other; by murdering their own children, to avoid the trouble of rearing them; by diseases which they know not how to cure, and which they too often bring on themselves by their own brutishness; by bad food, and exposure to the weather, they die out, and perish off the face of the earth, fulfilling the Lord’s words to Adam: “Thou shalt surely die.” I do not say that their souls go to hell. The Bible tells us nothing of where they go to. God’s mercy is boundless. And the Bible tells us that sin is not imputed where there is no law, as there is none among them. So we may have hope for them, and leave them in God’s hand. But what can we hope for them who are utterly dead in trespasses and sins? Well for them, if, having fallen to the likeness of the brutes, they perish with the brutes. I fancy if you, as some may, ever go to Australia, and there see the wretched black people, who are dying out there, faster and faster, year by year, after having fallen lower than the brutes, then you will understand what original sin may bring a man to, what it would have brought us to, had not God in His mercy raised us and our forefathers up from that fearful down-hill course, when we were on it fifteen hundred years ago.

And another thing which shows that these poor savages are not as God intended them to be, but are falling, generation after generation, by the working of original sin, is, that they, almost all of them, show signs of having been better off long ago. Many, like the South Sea Islanders, have curious arts remaining among them in spite of their brutish ignorance, which they could only have learned when they were far more clever and civilised than they are now. And almost all of them have some sad remembrance, handed down from father to son, kept up in songs and foolish tales, of having been richer, and more prosperous, and more numerous, a long while ago. They will confess to you, if you ask them, that they are worse than their fathers—that they are going down, dying out—that the gods are angry with them, as they say. The Lord have mercy upon them! But what is, to my mind, the most awful part of the matter remains yet to be told—and it is this: That man may actually fall by original sin too low to receive the gospel of Jesus Christ, and be recovered again by it. For the negroes of Africa and the West Indies, though they have fallen very low, have not fallen too low for the gospel. They have still understanding left to take it in, and conscience, and sense of right and wrong enough left to embrace it; thousands of them do embrace it, and are received unto righteousness, and lead such lives as would shame many a white Englishman, born and bred under the gospel.

But the black people in Australia, who are exactly of the same race as the African negroes, cannot take in the gospel. They seem to have become too stupid to understand it; they seem to have lost the sense of sin and of righteousness too completely to care about it. All attempts to bring them to a knowledge of the true God have as yet failed utterly. God’s grace is all-powerful; He is no respecter of persons; and He may yet, by some great act of His wisdom, quicken the dead souls of these poor brutes in human shape. But, as far as we can see, there is no hope for them: but, like the Canaanites of old, they must perish off the face of the earth, as brute beasts.

I have said so much to show you that man is fallen; that there is original sin, an inclination to sin and fall, sink down lower and lower, in man. Now comes the question: What is this fall of man? I said that the Bible tells us rationally enough. And I have also made use several times of words, which may have hinted to some of you already what Adam’s fall was. I have spoken of the likeness of the beasts, and of men becoming like beasts by original sin. And this is why I said it.

If you want to understand what Adam’s fall was, you must understand what he fell from, and what he fell to. That is plain.

Now, the Bible tells us, that he fell from God’s grace to nature.

What is nature? Nature means what is born, and lives, and dies, and is parted and broken up, that the parts of it may go into some new shape, and be born and live, and die again. So the plants, trees, beasts, are a part of nature. They are born, live, die; and then that which was them goes into the earth, or into the stomachs of other animals, and becomes in time part of that animal, or part of the tree or flower, which grows in the soil into which it has fallen. So the flesh of a dead animal may become a grain of wheat, and that grain of wheat again may become part of the body of an animal. You all see this every time you manure a field, or grow a crop. Nature is, then, that which lives to die, and dies to live again in some fresh shape. And, in the first chapter of Genesis, you read of God creating nature—earth, and water, and light, and the heavens, and the plants and animals each after their kind, born to die and change, made of dust, and returning to the dust again. But after that we read very different words; we read that when God created man, He said:

“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” He was made in God’s likeness; therefore he could only be right in as far as he was like God. And he could not be like God if he did not will what God willed, and wish what God wished. He was to live by faith in God; he was justified by faith in God, and by that only.