Verses 1-34
The Teachings of Nature
The Apostle is speaking about a particular subject; it is of no interest to us: but the principle which he lays down is of perpetual value and application. I wish to lure you into two or three simple admissions. The church in which we assemble built itself. I want you to admit that simple statement to be true. No human hand touched it; whether it came down, or whether it rose up from the earth, it is impossible to say; but precisely as it now stands it was found by those who occupy it. No man built it, no man touched it, no man charged for it; the whole edifice came to earth just as we see it. Do you receive the statement with a smile? Why should you do so? There may be more in the admission or supposition than you expect. Be careful how you admit anything at any time. Things are so connected one with another that, in talking the commonest speech, you may be committing yourselves to the most subtle and complicated scheme of metaphysics. Let me then make a less demand upon your imagination, and get you to admit that, if the church did not build itself, the pulpit did. That is a much smaller area, and therefore will tax, in proportionate degree, much less of your credulity and imagination. The pulpit came up out of the earth or descended from the roof, we cannot tell which; but here it is: no man touched it, no tool fashioned it, no fingers polished it; but just as you see it, it came to be. Do you still smile? Do you think I would lead you into fooldom, and tease and torture you with your own folly? Then let me circumscribe still more, and say that if the church did not build itself, or the pulpit did not build itself, the glass in one of the windows made itself. Let us circumscribe still further and say one of the panes; let us still further circumscribe and say, the Very smallest pane of glass in this building made itself. Now how do we stand? Just as badly as ever; I cannot get any one to assent to these propositions. If you think it worth while to condemn them you simply dismiss them with a sneer, or turn aside from them with most suggestive indifference.
You have a theory, which has sometimes led you into trouble. Your theory is to believe nothing that transcends the circle of positive human experience. Within the four corners of that theory you are prepared to believe largely, but beyond the four corners of that theory you will not go one inch. So you exclude miracles, supernaturalism, inspiration, the unseen universe, God. You take rank with those philosophers who are experiental; they subject every theory, suggestion, proposition to the test of actual human experience, saying, Has man ever known anything like this? Does this thing come within our experience and observation? Can we subject it to the test of our hands? Will it confine itself within the bounds of our reason? If not, we dismiss it; therefore we take up all books of divinity, according to Hume's suggestion, and we simply commit them to the flames. Our theory, say you, is the theory of experience. So you will not believe that the church built itself, that the pulpit built itself, or that the smallest pane of glass in the windows of the church made itself; you have never known any such self-making in any department of life; the very suggestion of self-making in these directions excites the resentment of your reason. So be it. Let us go away from the church altogether.
Above us, around us, beneath us, there is a great structure called the universe: I propose that we say it made itself. What do you say in reply to that suggestion? Let us circumscribe and say, If the whole universe of the telescope did not make itself, our own little world is self-made. Again you pause, again I cannot get you to assent to my suggestion; then let us try within more circumscribed limits to get some assent to this theory of self-creation, let us pluck a blade of grass from the meadow and say, This one blade is its own creator. You will not even admit so small a proposition as that; you are as consistent in your denials with regard to the universe, the earth, and the grass as you were with regard to the church, the pulpit, and the window pane. What do you know about nature? That is a very common word in the books of the day. Suppose a man should come to the city and write a book about it, and suppose that he should state in the preface of the book that he has only stood at one street-corner of the city, and has seen nothing of the city beyond what he could see from that position; and he has written an elaborate treatise about the metropolis. He has never seen its libraries, its galleries of art; he has never walked through its museums, or inspected its historical and monumental buildings; he has simply stood at one street-corner, and taken in as much as he could by glancing round from right to left, and he has written a large book upon the metropolis of England. What would you think of him? Would you buy the book? You would not even borrow it. Yet this is very much more than anybody has done in relation to God's great city of the universe. We have not even stood at one little street-corner in it; yet we tell what the universe is, and what nature is, and what nature can do, and has done, and will do. It is very impertinent! Were a man to publish what he had seen from his own street-corner he would be acting legitimately and reasonably: were men to say all they now know about the little piece of nature that has come under their survey, they, too, would be acting in a rational manner. Beyond that, however, they must not go. We know nothing about nature beyond a very limited line; and what there is in the further nature, the deeper, loftier, grander nature, that shall modify and rectify and explain the little portion of nature we do know, no man can tell.
You acknowledge that the church must have been built by some one; you acknowledge that the universe must have had a maker or a making; and you say you do not know who made it. Very well: what does that matter? That is of no consequence. You do not know who made the glass that is in your windows at home. Who was he? You cannot tell. What is his name? You never heard it. Where was he born? Impossible to say. And yet you believe it was made; you cannot get out of that admission. But your agnosticism amounts to nothing. If you really and truly wanted to find out the man you would at least make some inquiry about him; you could at least fee a detective; if you wanted to find out who made the universe, you could at all events reverently inquire. The main point is that we admit that this universe must have been made. Deny that it was made as a whole: what does that amount to? Nothing. If you taunt Paley and his followers with the suggestion that they only remove the inquiry one step backward, so do we taunt all other men who are supposed to deny the Divine creatorship of the universe. Say the universe came out of a speck, a germ, a tuft of fire-mist who made it? It takes as much wisdom to account for one little tuft of fire-mist as to account for the universe. It may take even more, for how wondrous must have been that little cloud of fiery particles out of which came all constellations, all systems, all things great, beautiful, musical, majestic, tender! Who hid in so small a receptacle wonders so infinite, so dazzling? No matter therefore what your theory of making is, and no matter whether you say the universe was made by a Secret, an Energy, a Force, you still come to the grand religious point. Whether that point can be amplified, put into words, set in a broader aspect before your mind, is a question which for the moment may be reserved: enough has been admitted to give us a teaching nature when it is admitted that according to human experience nothing known to men ever made itself; therefore the universe, if it is to be accepted as a fact, must be accepted according to the limits of this doctrine of experience. This might be enough to begin with.
Now let us see how much of a Bible we can make for ourselves. We have human experience bearing evidence in a certain direction, we have a universe as the basis of induction and inference; we will not listen to prating theologians, to pedantic divines who have learned lessons from books and are reciting them from treacherous memories! we will have nothing to do with the brood theological: we will write a book upon what we do see of the universe that is round about us. Now, begin! Shall I dictate what you write, and will you stop me the moment you cannot assent to what I dictate? Let that be the understanding between us for a moment. Thus then would I dictate the new Bible: Whoever made this universe must have infinite strength or say, in equal words, infinite power. It is a big thing to have made. It is so broad, deep, so cubic; it measures in every direction, length, breadth, depth, height, diametrically, diagonally: how full of measure! That is verse 1. Verse 2 read thus: Whoever made this universe must have continuing strength enough to keep it going. This is not the work of some giant, who in a moment of spasmodic strength threw off the miracle of creation; there is abiding, sustaining, providential strength in the maker of this universe, be he man or angel, God or devil, personality or influence and energy. Science tells us that there are orbits, circles of movement, so great that the orbit made by our solar system would lie upon their infinite distances like a straight line. No wheel goes wrong, no planet makes a noise as it drives its chariot through the fields of immensity. The stars have all been there, not according to the theologians, but according to the men of science thousands of years. That would be a mean time. Tens of thousands of years? You scarcely relieve the meanness even by that heightening suggestion. Millions of years, billions countless. Put down therefore as the second verse in the Bible suggested by nature, that whoever or whatever made this universe must have continuing strength to sustain it.
Put another verse down: Whoever or whatever made the universe constantly utilises danger as an element in education, This is a great school, and it is full of peril, and this peril is utilised as an agent or instrument in the education of the whole human family. We learn by what we suffer; we are made cautious by what we fear. A yard off there may be a bottomless pit; near at hand there may be devouring fire. We are led. therefore, constantly to look out, to study, to consider, to test by careful experiment. If we put our hand into the fire, we are burned; there is poison in the very air; the next little plant I pluck for my hunger may kill me because it is a poison-flower. The lightning may be sleeping, but it is never absent; it may strike the proudest tower and level the proudest town: I must take care how I build, I must bribe that dangerous fluid if I can; I must offer it the hospitality of iron that it may be conducted away from the tower into the ditch. Nature herself has taught us thus much. We cannot riot and be wanton in nature. Nature hath her constables, nature hath her code of laws and her register of punishments, her magistrates and judges, and her gaols and hulks and penal settlements. "Doth not even nature itself teach you" that life is subject to continual danger, and that danger is to be regarded as an element in the culture of our judgment and in the distribution and control of our faculties?
Put down another verse. We are getting now, I see, a rather useful Bible without the aid of the theologians at all. Whoever made or whatever made this universe has established within it the principle of obedience. If we do not obey we die; if we disobey we die. We make no laws except little ones, subsidiary laws, mere transcripts of the great ordinances of nature. We must obey. Doth not even nature herself teach you so? And we must obey the sun. The sun settles all your customs and habits. You may not have thought of that, but everything even in your civilisation goes right back to the sun. When George Stephenson said that the engine that was flying across the landscape was being driven by light he was right. That same light drives all the engines of civilisation. The sun tells you what coat to put on. Do not distress yourself as to how you will dress your poor body; the sun will settle that. Here let us suppose is a burning summer day and a man is going to put on his very thickest top coat. His children laugh. I am not now speaking of instances of infirmity or of any special and unique instances of feebleness, I am speaking of the broad customs of society. The sun settles your wardrobe. And you must obey the sun in the food you take. What is good in one climate is intolerable in another; consult the sun. The sun determines what kind of houses you will build; the sun is the architect. In some climates he permits you to build wooden shanties, and they are quite enough; in other countries he forbids any such poor building, and says, You must build in this country of granite. And you cannot help it. Freemen! bondmen. The sun settles all business. The merchant has to look up to the sun to see what he must buy next, how his next speculation is to run; there is one speculation for summer and another speculation for winter, and all the shop-windows simply say where the sun is. Sometimes the sun seems to play them rather vexatious tricks. Still, he is the sun and he settles the profits of Regent-street. Regent-street can never get over one thorough wet day. A wondrous nature. Can we not do double business the next day? No. If there has been one day lost by rain it can never be recovered.
Doth not even nature itself teach thee? Is there not something more in all this? Have we not here a field of vivid and practical suggestion? We might continue the inquiry along all directions. Suppose therefore now we terminate our dictation of the new Bible, because the Bible, as we know it, has been put into our hands. Now we are prepared in some degree to read it. What does it say? It says: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth"; and we say, Blessed be his name! It does look as if this might be true; it seems as if it were worthy of God, so great, so bright, so wondrous, so adapted in part to part, so silent, yet so musical; it may be true, "And God said, Let there be light": it looks as if he might have said so, the light is so beautiful, so glorious, so silent. It fills all things, yet takes up no room; it does not displace the tiniest child from the tiniest chair. It may be God's light; it shines as brightly upon the poor man's cottage as upon the monarch's palace; it kisses as tenderly the poor man's one little window-flower as it does the radiant, glowing parterre in the king's garden: it may be that God did make this light. "God said, Let us make man": he may have done so; man is so strange, so complex, so wondrous altogether: now an angel, now almost a demon; now writing his Iliad and his Paradise Lost, and now degrading himself into the lowest, basest life, and then suddenly springing up into song and prayer, and stretching out eloquent hands to condescending heaven. God may have made us! The Christian believer has no difficulty in stepping from nature to nature's God. The Christian believer has no difficulty in going up from providence to redemption. The Christian believer does not discard reason, he takes up his reason under the wings of his faith. The Christian believer finds no difficulty in saying to Christ, "My Lord, and my God": and in saying this he does not give up his reason, he sanctifies it, he turns it to its divinest uses. The Christian believer has no doubt or difficulty about the miracles of Christ; the miracles were in the hem of his garment, in every tone of his voice, in the glance of his gentle or rebuking eyes. He himself was the supreme miracle, and all lesser miracles fall out of him as gentle showers from the infinite clouds. Let us abide in this faith; let us rest and content ourselves as in a divine sanctuary. Let nature herself be our first teacher, and if we submit ourselves to her eloquent lessons, so patiently given, there shall come in upon us another voice, and yet not another, the voice that made nature will interpret nature, and the voice that made nature will not keep heaven from us.
The Night of Betrayal
These words were used by the Apostle Paul. There is a word put in "The same night in which he was betrayed": omit the word "same" "The night in which he was betrayed." Events make time memorable. Our sufferings are our birthdays, or our burial-days, or our resurrection-days, according to the view we are enabled to take of them whilst we tarry beside the all-engulfing and all-sanctifying woe of Christ. There is a subtle music in the very words. We could not have read "The morning in which he was betrayed: the glorious summer noontide in which he was betrayed." It is better thus: the night, the darkness, the gloom, the midnight involved in midnight, in which he was betrayed. But this is only one view, and it is only our view. We are shocked with a great surprise. Even the verbal fitness of things adds to our soul's disquiet. What view did Jesus Christ himself take of the night in which he was betrayed? What did he do? That is the very point. How did he use that darkness? Did he accept it as a signal of despair, and say, I have failed, and must return whence I came? Properly read, these words are the beginning of the sublimest revelation of Christ's character. "The same night in which he was betrayed" he was overwhelmed? No. He yielded himself to the malign spell of despair? No: He "took bread." He was always taking bread that he might give it. He would be great in darkness; the tragedy shall but reveal his majesty. What did Jesus Christ do the same night in which he was betrayed? He founded a sacrament; the simplest of feasts, a memorial banquet; and he said, As often as ye gather around this table ye gather around your Lord; and as oft as ye do this simple deed you do it in remembrance of me." Is that all? No, "in remembrance" takes us back away over the stony road of our yesterdays when we did all the sin, and committed all the folly; and this sacrament is intended to do more it is to show forth the Lord's death till he come. There is the future, the road we have never travelled, the unstained, unsullied path, the road of sunbeams and flowers, without a footprint but his own. This he did on the same night in which he was betrayed. He thought of his Church, he arranged the feast, suiting his own simplicity, he set up a memorial beautiful as love, and simple as the thought of a child; he condescended to poverty, so that any man who has one crumb of bread can eat the Lord's body. This was no feast for kings of wealth, for sons of splendour and children of luxury; it was the world's simple but ample board. Wherever there is bread and there is bread wherever there is life the Lord's death can be set forth till he come. Then he was not overwhelmed? Contrariwise, he was prophetic, poetic, victorious; the only quiet, noble, royal heart in the midst of the gathering gloom.
Not only did he take bread, he "gave thanks." He looked up where he was always looking. It is the upward look that saves you; the upward look is the cure for dizziness, the upward look shows the vastness of things; what you want is never down, it is always up and beyond, the stars being a mere trellis-work through which you catch gleamings of the splendour which is fitted for your soul's vision alone. Never was Jesus so great as on the night in which he was betrayed. He took the simple wine of the supper table, and made it blood, and called it the new covenant. Whoever can take a draught of water from the spring can drink Christ's blood. The man cannot turn the water into wine, but Christ can. Whatever you have, if you take it in the right spirit, it is the right thing; and whatever luxury you may have, if you take it in the wrong spirit, it is poison. If you cannot afford one mouthful of milk, take one mouthful of water, and in that water you will find the Lord's blood. Do not be led away by prosaic minds, those fools that spoil the garden, and say, How can this be so? Say, Art thou a master in Israel, and knowest not these things? art thou a rational being, and art thou degrading all God's poetry into this mean prose? The thing is what it is made by the thought, the motive, the spirit, the love. There are those who find great things in things that are small. Even the child finds the baby in her doll. There are those who see great sights in flowers that are burning but not consumed; there are minds that halt in all their urgency and forget all their need in the presence of a dawning day. "Things would be greater if we greater deemed them." If we said, "There is nothing common or unclean in God's house, all the universe is his, and there is nothing in it that is not pure," we should find more purity than we should ever find through the medium of our criticism and pedantry. To the pure all things are pure; to the good, true, honest heart all bread is sacramental, all water is symbolic of the blood of Christ, and every day is an opening into the eternity out of which all days come, as rain-drops fall from the rain-clouds. Thus the Lord set in that darkness a glowing star, whose solemn splendour shall rule the thought of men till stars are needed no longer, until the face of the Lord shall become the one light and the one glory of creation.
Is this all that he did on the night in which he was betrayed? No. What more did the Lord do on that memorable night? He sang a hymn. That proved him to be Lord. No other soul could have sung that night; that darkness would not have brought music into any other heart; that black curtain would have shutout God from any eyes but Christ's. The Lord and the little Church sang together. To have heard that hymn! minor, low, pensive, tremulous, grand because of self-suppression, saying more to the ear of the imagination than could be said to the ear of flesh. "They had sung an hymn." That old English suits the occasion better than your new-made grammar would ever do. It makes the occasion venerable and tender with a subtle melancholy. Old age lingers around the scene; this grey moss makes the table old as eternity. We sing our hymns at midday, our psalms are all retrospective; the trouble we came out of, the rivers we were taken across, the seas that were divided as we approached them, these are the subjects of our modern psalmody; but to be singing while the gathering darkness is descending is really to praise God. The doxology should be an intermediate as well as a final act of worship; when the stroke falls the tongue should sing, "I will sing as long as I live: my song shall be of mercy and judgment: unto thee, O Lord, will I sing." We are greater in gratitude and we are never very great in that than we are in trust. Give us to feel that not a feather has been taken away out of our nest, and we are willing to sing a doxology: give us to feel that the nest is being torn up and scattered on the winds, and where is our hallelujah? What shall be said concerning us when we think of the night in which we were ruined?
On that solemn occasion, after the Lord had discoursed about his betrayal, the disciples said one to another and to the Lord, "Is it I?" Yes, it is every one of us. Who betrayed the Lord? Everybody. There must always be one hand objective and concrete that does the deed, but it is only done representatively: it is a question of agency. It was not the hand of Iscariot that did it, else Christ had fallen a prey to a plot: it was Man that did it; therefore Christ submitted to the sacrifice. Jesus was not worsted by a gang of murderers: all the men that ever lived, and that ever are to live, gathered together in that one infernal representation, and betrayed the Lord when Iscariot kissed him. Iscariot is nobody; Iscariot is but a speck of dust that could have been cast off; but the Lord would not cast off' Man, for then had he cast off his own image, and disavowed his own signature, and laid himself prostrate before the conquering work of his own hands. Let us not adopt the shuffling piety that says, "Is it I?" either the question of an imperfect consciousness, or the question of a doubly-involved and unpardonable cowardice. There are those who would keep aloof from Iscariot. Why? We may not stand one inch away from that black character. He did what we wanted to do, and what we ourselves did. Thus again God's great gleaming axe is flying down to the root of the tree of our respectability, and we stand in one condemnation before God. Let us repeat the commonplace that, as amongst ourselves and between ourselves, there are good men and bad men, faithful men and unfaithful men: but as before God what is there? Only one human nature. There are those who have found that human nature to be very excellent, and they have done everything to establish that doctrine except proving it. They have praised it and repeated it and lauded it and magnified it and revelled in it: we have simply, quietly, and hopelessly waited for the proof.
But, supposing that we are anxious to press the matter personally and say, "Lord, is it I?" even there we can be gratified. Do you remember the time when you had an opportunity of speaking for Christ, and lost it? it was then that you betrayed the Lord. He was looking on, he was expecting a heroic defence, and you were criminally silent. Pray do not abuse Iscariot. Do you remember the time when two courses were set before you, the one dishonourable but leading to immediate wealth, the other honourable but meaning strenuous endeavour and doubtful success in a worldly sense, and you paused, and then took the course that led to pelf and pleasure, to gluttony and suicide? It was then, though you did not speak one word, that you betrayed the Lord. Do you remember making a selfish use of your Christianity, pawning your certificate of Church membership that you might receive some little dole of influence or praise, some small recognition of honour? It was then that you betrayed the Lord. Do you remember wriggling over the words "He that taketh not up his cross" do you remember trying to make them mean something else? do you remember your resort to the subtle grammarians who might help you out of the Cross by paving some way across to self-indulgence? Do you remember when criticism collided with criticism, and you accepted the one that involved the least pain and the least surrender and the least sacrifice? Think! it was then that you betrayed the Lord. Do you remember that night when you had two gifts in your hands, the one tolerably large and the other very small, and you said, Which shall I give? and the devil said, Begin by giving the little one: and you said falteringly, No, no, and he said, Certainly: and you put the larger donation back into your purse? It was then you lost the fight; after that the devil took you by the throat and shook you, and led you about whither he would; and the devil is never very dainty as to how he lays his terrific fingers upon the throat of man. Ever since then he could have sold you in any market; ever since then he laid his black hand upon your head and chuckled over you and said, This is the one that I fooled when he was parleying before the Cross.
We have not one of us betrayed the Lord in all points. There is the danger. We run off at points. There is hardly a man who has not some speck of respectability, some little redeeming point, some one excellence, which he can speak of and magnify and put up to public view. Would God sin were one huge black vice! we might escape it; if it were one overshadowing beast, fiercer than all tigers, we might run away: but sin is thick as the air is full of motes, as the sunbeam is crowded with specks of dust; we breathe them; we shut our mouths, and yet inhale them; we call it fresh air and are yet poisoned by them. Sin hath a thousand forms, yea ten thousand times ten thousand forms, and a man is not to be found, probably, who has submitted to sin in every form and in every aspect. Great Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, there are some chaste men who stand aside to let the poor drunkard go past: whereas he is a purer man than is the chastity that stands aloof from him. And there are some Pharisees in thy Church, O living Christ, who would not for the world utter a profane word, who are telling lies all day long. You may betray your friend, and yet not speak of him in wholesale disrespectfulness. A man may admire you, praise your genius, stand in awe of your fine intellectual capacity, and yet all the while may be robbing you. Where is the point of betrayal? Not in the admiration but in the robbery. A man may help you, and at the same time may slander you when you are not present; a man may know you in sunshine but he may never call upon you in adversity he betrays you. We betray a friend when we reveal his secrets, when we abuse his confidence, when we lead him into complications. It is easy to betray. A faithful man who can find? an honest white soul that says the same thing on both sides of the door, a downright frank spirit that cannot lie, cannot even look a lie? If judgment begin at the house of God, where shall the ungodly and the sinner be? The word of God is quick and powerful, sharper than a two-edged sword, piercing to the dividing asunder of the joints and marrow, and there is not a thought hidden in the plasm of the soul that it does not find out and examine and pronounce upon.
The Lord is being betrayed every morning, every noonday, every twilight, every midnight. We live to betray him. It is a gainful process of betraying him. We may betray him by professing him; the certificate would not have carried us through but for the sprinkled water of Christian baptism; but for the punctuation of Christian profession, but for the clerical signature. The other side is one of hope. We come to the eternal principle that if we can say from our hearts, Lord, all the preacher has said is true, and a thousand other things he might have said without exaggerating the truth: but, Lord Jesus, thou knowest all things, thou knowest that though my heart is often the house of devils, still I love thee; Jesus, Son of God, thou knowest that though there is no man out of hell that is so familiar with the pit as I am, yet thou knowest that I love thee. This is the tragedy of human consciousness and human experience. These are realities we can only approach after a lifetime of education, a lifetime of struggle, a lifetime of loss the kind of loss that prepares the soul for gain. Remember, the same night in which he was betrayed the Lord founded a sacrament, and sang a hymn, and set two new stars in the coronet of night. The Lord conquered in the very act of falling. When he died he became victor. He said to a wondering universe "Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die." He then planted one ear of wheat. Today he fills the wheatfields of the universe with golden grain. He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied.
Prayer
Lord, abide with us, for it is toward evening and the day is far spent. Come into our hearts, and break bread to our soul's hunger, and we shall know of a surety that it is the Lord. We are hungered, and we are smitten with thirst in the world; we cannot find satisfaction to our best desire; we have hewn out to ourselves cisterns broken cisterns that can hold no water: God pity us, God be merciful unto us sinners. We come to thy house that we may see heaven; we draw near to God that we may receive pardon. We long for forgiveness; it means release and liberty and hope and progress. If we confess our sins, thou art faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. We confess all our sins; we confess them at the Cross; and we behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world. The Lord pity us, the Lord cleanse us, through the precious blood of Christ. We come for light, we come for help; we are often in great darkness, our life is a constant need: Lord, guide us with thine eye, and feed us with thine hand. Amen.
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