Chapter 5
To understand what I mean, consider any animal—a dog, for instance—how much every animal has in it what men have,—a body, and brain, and heart; it hungers and thirsts as we do, it can feel pleasure and pain, anger and loneliness, and fear and madness; it likes freedom, company, and exercise, praise and petting, play and ease; it uses a great deal of cunning, and thought, and courage, to get itself food and shelter, just as human beings do: in short, it has a fleshly nature, just as we have, and yet, after all, it is but an animal, and so, in one sense, we are all animals, only more delicately made than the other animals; but we are something more, we have a spirit as well as a flesh, an immortal soul. If any one asks, what is a man? the true answer is, an animal with an immortal spirit in it; and this spirit can feel more than pleasure and pain, which are mere carnal, that is, fleshly things; it can feel trust, and hope, and peace, and love, and purity, and nobleness, and independence, and, above all, it can feel right and wrong. There is the infinite difference between an animal and a man, between our flesh and our spirit; an animal has no sense of right and wrong; a dog who has done wrong is often terrified, but not because he feels it wrong and wicked, but because he knows from experience that he will be punished for doing it: just so with a man’s fleshly nature;—a carnal, fleshly man, a man whose spirit is dead within him, whose spiritual sense of right and wrong, and honour and purity, is gone, when he has done a wrong thing is often enough afraid; but why? Not for any spiritual reason, not because he feels it a wicked and abominable thing, a sin, but because he is afraid of being punished for it, because he is afraid that his body, his flesh will be punished by the laws of the land, or by public opinion, or because he has some dim belief that this same body and flesh of his will be burnt in hell-fire; and fire, he knows by experience, is a painful thing—and so he is _afraid_ of it; there is nothing spiritual in all that,—that is all fleshly, carnal; the heathens in all ages have been afraid of hell-fire; but a man’s spirit, on the other hand, if it be in hell, is in a very different hell from mere fire,—a spiritual hell, such as torments the evil spirits, at this very moment, although they are going to and fro on this very earth. This earth is hell to them; they carry about hell in them,—they are their own hell. Everlasting shame, discontent, doubt, despair, rage, disgust at themselves, feeling that they are out of favour with God, out of tune with heaven and earth, loving nothing, believing nothing, ever hating, hating each other, hating themselves most of all—_there_ is their hell! _There_ is the hell in which the soul of every wicked man is,—ay, is now while he is in _this_ life, though he will only awake to the perfect misery of it after death, when his body and fleshly nature have mouldered away in the grave, and can no longer pamper and stupify him and make him forget his own misery. Ay, there has been many a man in this life who had every fleshly enjoyment which this world can give, riches and pleasure, banquets and palaces, every sense and every appetite pampered,—his pride and his vanity flattered; who never knew what want, or trouble, or contradiction, was on the smallest point; a man, I say, who had every carnal enjoyment which this earth can give to a man’s selfish flesh, and yet whose spirit was in hell all the while, and who knew it; hating and despising himself for a mean selfish villain, while all the world round was bowing down to him and envying him as the luckiest of men. I am trying to make you understand the infinite difference between a man’s flesh and his spirit; how a man’s flesh can take no pleasure in spiritual things, while man’s spirit of itself can take no pleasure in fleshly things. Now, the spirit and the flesh, body and soul, in every man, are at war with each other,—they have quarrelled; that is the corruption of our nature, the fruit of Adam’s fall. And as the Article says, and as every man who has ever tried to live godly well knows, from experience, “that infection of nature does remain to the last, even in those who are regenerate.” So that as St. Paul says, the spirit lusteth against the flesh, and the flesh against the spirit; and it continually happens that a man cannot do the things which he would; he cannot do what he knows to be right; thus, as St. Paul says again, a man may delight in the law of God in his inward man, that is, in his spirit, and yet all the while he shall find another law in his members, _i.e._ in his body, in his flesh, in his brain which thinks, and his heart which feels, and his senses which are fond of pleasure; and this law of the flesh, these appetites and passions which he has, like other animals, fight against the law of his mind, and when he wishes to do good, make him do evil. Now how is this? The flesh is not evil; a man’s body can be no more wicked than a dumb beast can be wicked. St. Paul calls man’s flesh sinful flesh; not because our flesh can sin of itself, but because our sinful souls make our flesh do sinful things; for, he says, Christ came in the likeness of sinful flesh, and yet in him was no sin. The pure and spotless Saviour could not have taken man’s flesh upon him if there was any sinfulness in it. The body knows nothing of right and wrong; it is not subject to the law of God, neither, indeed, can be, says St. Paul. And why? Because God’s law is spiritual; deals with right and wrong. Wickedness, like righteousness, is a spiritual thing. If a man sins, his body is not in fault; it is his spirit; his weak, perverse will, which will sooner listen to what his flesh tells him is pleasant than to what God tells him is right; for this, my friends, is the secret of the battle of life. We stand between heaven and earth. Above is God’s Spirit striving with our spirits, speaking to them in the depths of our soul, shewing us what is right, putting into our hearts good desires, making us long to be honest and just, pure and manful, loving and charitable; for who is there who has not at times longed after these things, and felt that it would be a blessed thing for him if he were such a man as Jesus Christ was and is?—Above us, I say, is God’s Spirit speaking to our spirits, below us is this world speaking to our flesh, as it spoke to Eve’s, saying to us, “This thing is pleasant to the eyes—this thing is good for food—that thing is to be desired to make you wise, and to flatter your vanity and self-conceit.” Below us, I say, is _this_ world, tempting us to ease, and pleasure, and vanity; and in the middle, betwixt the two, stands up the third part of man—his _soul_ and _will_, set to choose between the voice of God’s Spirit and the temptations of this world—to choose between what is right and what is pleasant—to choose whether he will obey the desires of the spirit, or obey the desires of the flesh. He must choose. If he lets his flesh conquer his spirit, he falls; if he lets his spirit conquer his flesh, he rises; if he lets his flesh conquer his spirit, he becomes what he was not meant to be—a slave to fleshly lust; and _then_ he will find his flesh set up for itself, and work for itself. And where man’s flesh gets the upper hand, and takes possession of him, it can do nothing but evil—not that it is evil in itself, but that it has no rule, no law to go by; it does not know right from wrong; and therefore it does simply what it likes, as a dumb beast or an idiot might; and therefore the works of the flesh are—adulteries, drunkenness, murders, fornications, envyings, backbitings, strife. When a man’s body, which God intended to be the servant of his spirit, has become the tyrant of his spirit, it is like an idiot on a king’s throne, doing all manner of harm and folly without knowing that it _is_ harm and folly. That is not _its_ fault. Whose fault is it, then? _Our_ fault—the fault of our wills and our souls. Our souls were intended to be the masters of our flesh, to conquer all the weaknesses, defilements of our constitution—our tempers, our cowardice, our laziness, our hastiness, our nervousness, our vanity, our love of pleasure—to listen to our spirits, because our spirits learn from God’s Spirit what is right and noble. But if we let our flesh master us, and obey its own blind lusts, we sin against God; and we sin against God doubly; for we not only sin against God’s commandments, but we sin against ourselves, who are the image and glory of God.
Believe this, my friends; believe that, because you are all fallen human creatures, there must go on in you this sore life-long battle between your spirit and your flesh—your spirit trying to be master and guide, as it ought to be, and your flesh rebelling, and trying to conquer your spirit and make you a mere animal, like a fox in cunning, a peacock in vanity, or a hog in greedy sloth. But believe, too, that it is your sin and your shame if your spirit does not conquer your flesh—for God has promised to help your spirits. Ask Him, and His Spirit will teach them—fill them with pure, noble hopes, with calm, clear thoughts, and with deep, unselfish love to God and man. He will strengthen your wills, that they may be able to refuse the evil and choose the good. Ask Him, and He will join them to His own Spirit—to the Spirit of Christ, your Master; for he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit with Him. Ask him, and He will give you the mind of Christ—teach you to see and feel all matters as Christ sees and feels them. Ask Him, and He will give you wisdom to listen to His Spirit when it teaches your spirit, and then you will be able to walk after the spirit, and not obey the lusts of the flesh; and you will be able to crucify the flesh with its passions and lusts, that is, to make it, what it ought to be, a dead thing—a dead tool for your spirit to work with manfully and godly, and not a live tyrant to lead you into brutishness and folly; and then you will find that the fruit of the spirit, of your spirit led by God’s Spirit, is really, as St. Paul says, “love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, honesty”—“whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honourable and of good report;” and instead of being the miserable slaves of your own passions, and of the opinions of your neighbours, you will find that where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty, true freedom, not only from your neighbours’ sins, but, what is far better, freedom from your own.
These are large words, my friends, and promise mighty things. But I dare speak them to you, for God has spoken to you. These promises God made you at your baptism; these promises I, on the warrant of your baptism, dare make to you again. At your baptism, God gave you the right to call Him your loving Father, to call His Son your Saviour, His Spirit your Sanctifier. And He is not a man, that He should lie; nor the son of man, that He should repent! Try Him, and see whether He will not fulfil His word. Claim His promise, and though you have fallen lower than the brutes, He will make men and women of you. He will be faithful and just to forgive you your sins, and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness.
SERMON VII. RETRIBUTION.
NUMBERS, xxxii. 23.
“Be sure your sin will find you out.”
THE full meaning of this text is, that every sin which a man commits is certain, sooner or later, to come home to him with fearful interest.
Moses gave this warning to two tribes of the Israelites,—to the Reubenites and Gadites, who had promised to go over Jordan, and help their countrymen in war against the heathen, on condition of being allowed to return and settle on the east bank of Jordan, where they then were; but if they broke their promise, and returned before the end of the war, they were to be certain that their sin would find them out; that God would avenge their falsehood on them in some way in their lifetime: in their lifetime, I say, for there is no mention made in this chapter, or in any part of the story, of heaven or hell, or any world to come. And the text has been always taken as a fair warning to all generations of men, that their sin also, even in their lifetimes, will be visited upon them.
Now, it is strange, at first sight, that these texts, which warn men that their sins will be punished in this life, are just the most unpleasant texts in the whole Bible; that men shrink from them more, and shut their eyes to them more than they do to those texts which threaten them with hell-fire and everlasting death. Strange!—that men should be more afraid of being punished in this life for a few years than in the life to come for ever and ever;—and yet not strange if we consider; for to worldly and sinful souls, that life after death and the flames of hell seem quite distant and dim—things of which they know little and believe less, while this world they _do_ know, they are quite certain that its good things are pleasant and its bad things unpleasant, and they are thoroughly afraid of losing _them_. Their hearts are where their treasure is, in this world; and a punishment which deprives them of this world’s good things hits them home: but their treasure is _not_ in heaven, and, therefore, about losing heaven they are by no means so much concerned. And thus they can face the dreadful news that “the wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the people that forget God;” while, as for the news that the wicked shall be recompensed on the earth, that their sins will surely find them out in this life, they cannot face that—they shut their ears to it,—they try to persuade themselves that sin will _pay_ them _here_, at all events; and as for hereafter, they shall get off somehow,—they neither know nor care much how.
Yet God’s truth remains, and God’s truth must be heard; and those who love this world so well must be told, whether they like or not, that every sin which they commit, every mean, every selfish, every foul deed, loses them so much enjoyment in this very present world of which they are so mighty fond. That is God’s truth; and I will prove it true from common sense, from Holy Scripture, and _from the witness_ of men’s own hearts.
Take common sense. Does not common sense tell us that if God made this world, and governs it by righteous and God-like laws, this must be a world in which evil-doing cannot thrive? God made the world better than that, surely! He would be a bad law-giver who made such laws, that it was as well to break them as to keep them. You would call them bad laws, surely! No, God made the world, and not the devil; and the world works by God’s laws, and not the devil’s; and it inclines towards good, and not towards evil; and he who sins, even in the least, breaks God’s laws, acts contrary to the rule and constitution of the world, and will surely find that God’s laws will go on in spite of him, and grind him to powder, if he by sinning gets in the way of them. God has no need to go out of His way to punish our evil deeds. Let them alone, and they will punish themselves. Is it not so in every thing? If a tradesman trades badly, or a farmer farms badly, there is no need of lawyers to punish him; he will punish himself. Every mistake he makes will take money out of his pocket; every time he offends against the established rules of trade or agriculture, which are God’s laws, he injures himself; and so, be sure, it is in the world at large,—in the world in which men and the souls of men live, and move, and have their being.
Next, to speak of Scripture. I might quote texts innumerable to prove that what I say Scripture says also. Consider but this one thing,—that there is a whole book in the Bible written to prove this one thing,—that our good and bad deeds are repaid us with interest in this life—the Proverbs of Solomon I mean—in which there is little or no mention of heaven or hell, or any world to come. It is all one noble, and awful, and yet cheering sermon on that one text, “The righteous shall be recompensed in the earth, much more the wicked and the sinner,”—put in a thousand different lights; brought home to us a thousand different roads, comes the same everlasting doom,—“Vain man, who thinkest that thou canst live in God’s world and yet despise His will, know that, in every smiling, comfortable sin, thou art hatching an adder to sting thee in the days of old age, to poison thy cup of sinful joy, even when it is at thy lips; to haunt thy restless thoughts, and dog thee day and night; to rise up before thee, in the silent, sleepless hours of night, like an angry ghost! An awful foretaste of the doom that is to come; and yet a merciful foretaste, if thou wilt be but taught by the disappointment, the unsatisfied craving, the gnawing shame of a guilty conscience, to see the heinousness of sin, and would turn before it be too late.”
What, my friends,—what will you make of such texts as this, “That he who soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption?” Do you not see that comes true far too often? Can it help _always_ coming true, seeing that God’s apostle spoke it? What will you make of this, too, “That the wicked is snared by the working of his own hands;”—“That _evil_”—the evil which we do of its own self—“shall slay the wicked?” What says the whole noble 37th Psalm of David, but that same awful truth of God, that sin is its own punishment?
Why should I go on quoting texts? Look for yourselves, you who fancy that it is only on the other side of the grave that God will trouble Himself about you and your meanness, your profligacy, your falsehood. Look for yourselves in the book of God, and see if there be any writer there,—lawgiver, prophet, psalmist, apostle, up to Christ the Lord Himself,—who does not warn men again and again, that here, on earth, their sins will find them out. Our Saviour, indeed, when on earth, said less about this subject than any of the prophets before Him, or the apostles after Him, and for the best of reasons. The Jews had got rooted in their minds a superstitious notion, that all disease, all sorrow, was the punishment in each case of some particular sin; and thus, instead of looking with pity and loving awe upon the sick and the afflicted, they were accustomed, too often, to turn from them as sinners, smitten of God, bearing in their distress the token of His anger. The blessed One,—He who came to heal the sick and save the lost,—reproved that error more than once. When the disciples fancied a certain poor man’s blindness to be a judgment from God, “Neither did he sin,” said the Lord, “nor his parents, but that the glory of God might be made manifest in him.” And yet, on the other hand, when He healed a certain man of an old infirmity at the pool of Bethesda, what were His words to him? “Go thy way, sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee;”—a clear and weighty warning that all his long misery of eight-and-thirty years had been the punishment of some sin of his, and that the sin repeated would bring on him a still severer judgment.
What, again, does the apostle mean, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, when he tells us how God scourges every son whom he receives, and talks of His chastisements, whereof all are partakers. Why do we need chastising if we have nothing which needs mending? And though the innocent _may_ sometimes be afflicted to make them strong as well as innocent, and the holy chastened to make them humble as well as holy, yet if the good cannot escape their share of affliction, how will the bad get off? “If the righteous scarcely be saved, where will the ungodly and the sinner appear?” But what use in arguing when you know that my words are true? You _know_ that your sins will find you out. Look boldly and honestly into your own hearts. Look through the history of your past lives, and confess to God, at least, that the far greater number of your sorrows have been your own fault; that there is hardly a day’s misery which you ever endured in your life of which you might not say, ‘If I had listened to the voice of God in my conscience—if I had earnestly considered what my _duty_ was—if I had prayed to God to determine my judgment right, I should have been spared this sorrow now?’ Am I not right? Those who know most of God and their own souls will agree most with me; those who know little about God and their own souls will agree but hardly with me, for they provoke God’s chastisements, and writhe under them for the time, and then go and do the same wrong again, as the wild beast will turn and bite the stone thrown at him without having the sense to see why it was thrown.
Think, again, of your past lives, and answer in God’s sight, how many wrong things have you ever done which have _succeeded_, that is, how many sins which you would not be right glad were undone if you could but put back the wheels of Time? They may have succeeded _outwardly_; meanness will succeed so—lies—oppression—theft—adultery—drunkenness—godlessness—they are all pleasant enough while they last, I suppose; and a man may reap what he calls substantial benefits from them in money, and suchlike, and keep that safe enough; but has his sin succeeded? Has it not _found him out_?—found him out never to lose him again? Is he the happier for it? Does he feel freer for it? Does he respect himself the more for it?—No! And even though he may prosper now, yet does there not run though all his selfish pleasure a certain fearful looking forward to a fiery judgment to which he would gladly shut his eyes, but cannot?
Cunning, fair-spoken oppressor of the poor, has not thy sin found thee out? Then be sure it will. In the shame of thine own heart it will find thee out;—in the curses of the poor it will find thee out;—in a friendless, restless, hopeless death-bed, thy covetousness and thy cruelty will glare before thee in their true colours, and thy sin will find thee out!
Profligate woman, who art now casting away thy honest name, thy self-respect, thy womanhood, thy baptism-vows, that thou mayest enjoy the foul pleasures of sin for a season, has not thy sin found thee out? Then be sure it will hereafter, when thou hast become disgusted at thyself and thine own infamy,—and youth, and health, and friends, are gone, and a shameful and despised old age creeps over thee, and death stalks nearer and nearer, and God vanishes further and further off, then thy sin will find thee out!
Foolish, improvident young man, who art wasting the noble strength of youth, and manly spirits which God has given thee on sin and folly, throwing away thine honest earnings in cards and drunkenness, instead of laying them by against a time of need—has not thy sin found thee out? Then be sure it will some day, when thou hast to bring home thy bride to a cheerless, unfurnished house, and there to live from hand to mouth,—without money to provide for her sickness,—without money to give her the means of keeping things neat and comfortable when she is well,—without a farthing laid by against distress, and illness, and old age:—_then_ your sin will find you out: then, perhaps, my text,—my words—may come across you as you sigh in vain in your comfortless home, in your impoverished old age, for the money which you wasted in your youth! My friends, my friends, for your own sakes consider, and mend ere that day come, as else it surely will!