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SERMON XV. ANTIPATHIES

(Tenth Sunday after Trinity.)

1 Cor. xii. 3, 4, 5, 6.  Wherefore, I give you to understand, that no man speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed: and that no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.  Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit.  And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord.  And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all.

We are to come to the Communion this day in love and charity with all men.  But are we in love and charity with all men?

I do not mean, are there any persons whom we hate; against whom we bear a spite; whom we should be glad to see in trouble or shame?  God forbid, my friends, God forbid.  There are, indeed, devil’s tempers.  And yet more easy for us to keep in the bottom of our hearts, and more difficult to root them out, than we fancy.

It is easy enough for us to forgive (in words at least) a man who has injured us.  Easy enough to make up our minds that we will not revenge ourselves.  Easy enough to determine, even, that we will return good for evil to him, and do him a kindness when we have a chance.  Yes, we would not hurt him for the world: but what if God hurt him?  What if he hurt himself?  What if he lost his money?  What if his children turned out ill?  What if he made a fool of himself, and came to shame?  What if he were found out and exposed, as we fancy that he deserves?  Should we be so very sorry?  We should not punish him ourselves.  No.  But do we never catch ourselves thinking whether God may not punish him; thinking of that with a base secret satisfaction; almost hoping for it, at last?  Oh if we ever do, God forgive us!  If we ever find those devil’s thoughts rising in us, let us flee from them as from an adder; flee to the foot of Christ’s Cross, to the cross of him who prayed for his murderers, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do; and there cry aloud for the blood of life, which shall cleanse us from the guilt of those wicked thoughts, and for the water of life, which shall cleanse us from the power of them: lest they get the dominion over us, and spring up in us, and spread over our whole hearts; not a well of life, but a well of poison, springing up in us to everlasting damnation.  Oh let us pray to him to give us truth in our inward parts; that we may forgive and love, not in word only, but in deed and in truth.

I could not help saying this in passing.  But it is not what the text is speaking of; not what I want to speak of myself to-day.  I want to speak of a matter which is smaller, and not by any means so sinful: and which yet in practice is often more tormenting to a truly tender conscience, because it is more common and more continual.

How often, when one examines oneself, whether one be in love and charity with all men, one must recollect that there are many people whom one does not like.  I do not mean that one hates them.  Not in the least: but they do not suit one.  There is something in them which we cannot get on with, as the saying is.  Something in their opinions, manners, ways of talking; even—God forgive us—merely in their voice, or their looks, or their dress, which frets us, and gives us what is called an antipathy to them.  And one dislikes them; though they never have harmed us, or we them; and we know them, perhaps, to be better people than ourselves.  Now, are we in love and charity with these people?  I am afraid not.

I know one is tempted to answer; but I am afraid the answer is worth very little—Why not?  We cannot help it.  You cannot expect us to like people who do not suit us: any more than you can expect us to like a beetle or a spider.  We know the beetle or the spider will not harm us.  We know that they are good in their places, and do good, as all God’s creatures are and do; and there is room enough in the world for them and us: but we have a natural dislike to them, and cannot help it; and so with these people.  We mean no harm in disliking them.  It is natural to us; and why blame us for it.

Now what is the mistake here?  Saying that it is natural to us.  We are not meant to live according to nature, but according to grace; and grace must conquer nature, my friends, if we wish to save our souls alive.  It is nature, brute nature, which makes some dogs fly at every strange dog they meet.  It is nature, brute nature, which makes a savage consider every strange savage as his enemy, and try to kill him.  But unless nature be conquered in that savage, it will end, where following brute nature always ends, in death; and the savages will (as all savages are apt to do) destroy each other off the face of the earth, by continual war and murder.  It is brute nature which makes low and ignorant persons hate foreign people, because their dress and language seem strange.  But unless that natural feeling had been in most of us conquered by the grace of God, which is the spirit of justice and of love, then England would have remained alone in conceit and ignorance, hated by all the nations; instead of being what, thank God! she is—the Sanctuary of the world; to which all the oppressed of the earth may flee; and find a welcome, and safety, and freedom, and justice, and peace.

And so with us, my friends.  It is natural, and according to the brute nature of the old Adam, to dislike this person and that, just because they do not suit us.  But it is according to grace, and the new Adam, who is the Lord from heaven, to honour all men; to love the brotherhood; to throw away our own private fancies and personal antipathies; and, like the Lord Jesus Christ, copy the all-embracing charity of God.  And no one has a right to answer, ‘But I must draw the line somewhere.’  Thou must not.  I am afraid that thou wilt, and that I shall, too, God forgive us both! because we are sinful human beings.  We may, but we must not, draw a line as to whom we shall endure in charity.  For Christ draws no line.  Is it not written, ‘No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.’  Is not the Spirit of Christ in a Christian man, unless he be a reprobate? and who is reprobate, we know not, and dare not try to know; for it is written, ‘Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned.’

But what has the text to do with all this?

My friends, is not this just what the text is telling us?  I said this moment, that the Spirit of Christ was in a Christian man, unless he be a reprobate.  And the text says further, that there are diversities of gifts in Christian men: but the same spirit in all of them.

Yes: people will be different one from another.  There are diversities of gifts.  Differences in talents, in powers, in character, in kinds of virtue and piety; so that you shall find no two good men, no two useful men, like each other.  But there is the same Spirit.  The same Spirit of God is in each, though bearing different fruit in each.  And there are differences of administrations, of offices, in God’s kingdom.  God sets one man to do one work, and another to do another: but it is the same Lord who puts each man in his place, and shows him his work, and gives him power to do it.  And there are diversities of operations, that is, of ways of working; so that if you put any two men to do the same thing, they will most probably do it each in a different way, and yet both do it well.  But it is the same God, who is working in them both; the God who works all in all, and has his work done by a thousand different hands, by a thousand different ways.

And it is right and good that people should be so different from each other.  ‘For the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal.’  To profit, to be of use.  If all men were alike, no one could learn from his neighbour.  If all mankind were as like each other as a flock of sheep, there would be no more work, no more progress, no more improvement in mankind, than there is in a flock of sheep.  Now each man can bring his own little share of knowledge or usefulness into the common stock.  Each man has, or ought to have, something to teach his neighbour.  Each man can learn something from his neighbour: at least he can learn this—to have patience with his neighbour.  To live and let live.  To bear with what in him seems odd and disagreeable, trusting that God may have put it there; that God has need of it; that God will make use of it.  God makes use of many things which look to us ugly and disagreeable.  He makes use of the spider and of the beetle.  How much more of our brethren, members of Christ, children of God, inheritors of the kingdom of heaven.  Shall they be to us, even if they be odd or disagreeable in some things—shall they be to us as the beetle or the spider, or any other merely natural things?  They are men and women, in whom is the Spirit of the living God.  And my friends, if they are good enough for God, they are good enough for us.  Think but one moment.  God the Father adopts a man as his child, God the Son dies for that man, God the Holy Ghost inspires that man; and shall we be more dainty than God?  If, in spite of the man’s little weaknesses and oddities, God shall condescend to come down and dwell in that man, making him more or less a good man, doing good work; shall we pretend that we cannot endure what God endures?  Shall we be more dainty, I ask again, than the holy and perfect God?  Oh my friends, let us pray to him to take out of our hearts all selfishness, fancifulness, fastidiousness, and hasty respect of persons, of all which there is none in God.  Let us ask for his Spirit, the Spirit of Charity, which sees God in all, and all in God, and therefore sees good in all, and sees all in love.

Then we shall see how much more there is in our neighbours to like, than to dislike.  Then all these little differences will seem to us trifles not to be thought of, before the broad fact of a man’s being, after all, a man, an Englishman, a Christian, and a good Christian, doing good work where God has put him.  Then we shall be ashamed of our old narrowness of heart; ashamed of having looked so much at the little evil in our neighbours, and not at the great good in them.  Then we shall go about the world cheerfully; and our neighbour’s faces will seem to us full of light: instead of seeming full of darkness, because our own eyes and minds are dark for want of charity.  Then we shall come to the Communion, not with hearts narrowed and shut up, perhaps, from the very person who kneels next to us: but truly open-hearted; with hearts as wide—ah God, that it were possible!—as the sacred heart of Christ, in which is room for all mankind.  And so receiving his body, which is the blessed company of all faithful people, we shall receive Christ, who dwelleth in them, and they in him.

SERMON XVI. ST. PAUL

(Eleventh Sunday after Trinity.)

1 Cor. xv. 8.  Last of all he was seen of me, also, as of one born out of due time.  For I am the least of the Apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.

You heard in this text (part of the epistle for this day) St. Paul’s opinion of himself.  You heard, also, in the Second Lesson for this day, the ninth chapter of Acts, the extraordinary story of his conversion.

And what may we learn from that story?  We may learn many lessons; lessons without number.

We may learn, first; not to be astonished, if we have to change our opinions as we grow older.  When we are young, we are very positive about this thing and that, as St. Paul was; violent in favour of our own opinions; ready to quarrel with any one who differs from us, as St. Paul was.  But let ten years, twenty years, roll over our heads, and we may find our opinions utterly changed, as St. Paul did, and look back with astonishment on ourselves, for having been foolish enough to believe what we did, as St. Paul looked back; and with shame, as did St. Paul likewise, at having said so many violent and unjust things against people, who, we now see, were in the right after all.

Next; we may learn not to be ashamed of changing our minds: but if we find ourselves in the wrong, to confess it boldly and honestly, as St. Paul did.  What a fearful wrench to his mind and his heart; what a humiliation to his self-conceit, to have to change his mind once for all on all matters in heaven and earth.  What must it not have cost him to throw up at once all his friends and relations; to part himself from all whom he loved and respected on earth, to feel that henceforth they must look upon him as a madman, an infidel, an enemy.  To an affectionate man, and St. Paul was an extremely affectionate man, what a bitter struggle that must have cost him.  But he faced that struggle, and conquered in it, like a brave and honest man.  And the consequence was, that he had, in time, and after many lonely years, many Christian friends for each Jewish friend that he had lost; and to him was fulfilled (as it will be to all men) our Lord’s great saying, ‘There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands for my sake, and the gospel’s, but he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, . . . and in the world to come eternal life.’

Next; we may take comfort, in the hope that God will not impute to us these early follies and mistakes of ours; if only there be in us, as there was in St. Paul, the honest and good heart; that is, the heart which longs to know what is true and right, and bravely acts up to what it knows.  St. Paul did so.  God, when he set him apart, as he says, from his very birth, gave him a great grace, even the honest and good heart; and he was true to it, and used it.  He tried to learn his best, and do his best.  He profited in the Jews’ religion, beyond all his fellows.  He was, touching the righteousness which was in the law, blameless.  He was so zealous for what he thought right, that he persecuted the Church of Christ, as the Pharisees, his teachers, had taught him to do.  In all things, whether right or wrong in each particular case, he was an honest, earnest seeker after truth and righteousness.  And therefore Christ, instead of punishing him, fulfilled to him his own great saying,—‘To him that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance.’  He had not yet, as he himself says, again and again, the grace of Christ, which is love to his fellow-men; and therefore his works were not pleasing to God, and had, as the article says, the nature of sin.  His empty forms and ceremonies could not please God.  His persecuting the Church had plainly the nature of sin.  But there was something which God had put in him, and which God would not lose sight of, or suffer to be lost; and that was, the honest and good heart, of which our Lord speaks in the parable of the sower.  In that Christ sowed the word of God, even himself, and his grace and Holy Spirit; and, behold, it sprang up and bore fruit a hundredfold, over all Christian nations to this day.

Keep, therefore, if you have it, the honest and good heart.  If you have it not, pray for it earnestly.  Determine to learn what is true, whatever be the trouble; and to do what is right, whatever be the cost; and then, though you may make many mistakes, and have more than once, perhaps, to change your mind in shame and confusion, yet all will come right at last, for the grace of Christ, sooner or later, will lead you into all truth which you require for this world and all worlds to come.

Again, we may learn from St. Paul this lesson.  That though God has forgiven a man, that is no reason that he should forgive himself.  That may seem a startling saying just now.  For the common teaching now is, that if a man finds, or fancies, that God has forgiven him, he may forgive himself at once; that if he gets assurance that his sins are washed away in Christ’s blood, he may go swaggering and boasting about the world (I can call it no less), as if he had never sinned at all; that he may be (as you see in these revivals, from which God defend us!) one moment in the deepest agonies of conscience, and dread of hell-fire, and the next moment in raptures of joy, declaring himself to be in heaven.  Alas, alas! such people forget that sin leaves behind it wounds, which even the grace of Christ takes a long time in healing, and which then remain as ugly, but wholesome scars, to remind us of the fools which we have been.  They are like a man who is in great bodily agony, and gets sudden relief from a dose of laudanum.  The pain stops; and he feels himself, as he says, in heaven for the time: but he is too apt to forget that the cause of the pain is still in his body, and that if he commits the least imprudence, he will bring it back again; just as happens, I hear, in too many of these hasty and noisy conversions now-a-days.

That is one extreme.  The opposite extreme is that of many old Roman Catholic saints and hermits who could not forgive themselves at all, but passed their whole lives in fasting, poverty, and misery, bewailing their sins till their dying day.  That was a mistake.  It sprang out of mistaken doctrines, of which I shall not speak here: but it did not spring entirely from them.  There was in them a seed of good, for which I shall always love and honour them, even though I differ from them; and that was, a noble hatred of sin.  They felt the sinfulness of sin; and they hated themselves for having sinned.  The mercy of God made them only the more ashamed of themselves for having rebelled against him.  Their longing after holiness only made them loathe the more their past unholiness.  They carried that feeling too far: but they were noble people, men and women of God; and we may say of them, that, ‘Wisdom is justified of all her children.’

But I wish you to run into neither extreme.  I only ask you to look at your past lives, if you have ever been open sinners, as St. Paul looked at his.  There is no sentimental melancholy in him; no pretending to be miserable; no trying to make himself miserable.  He is saved, and he knows it.  He is an apostle, and he stands boldly on his dignity.  He is cheerful, hopeful, joyful: but whenever he speaks of his past life (and he speaks of it often), it is with noble shame and sorrow.  Then he looks to himself the chief of sinners, not worthy to be called an apostle, because he persecuted the Church of Christ.  What he is, he will not deny.  What he was, he will not forget, he dare not forget, lest he should forget that the good which he does, he does not—for in him (that is, in his flesh, his own natural character), dwelleth no good thing—but Christ, who dwells in him; lest he should grow puffed up, careless, self-indulgent; lest he should neglect to subdue his evil passions; and so, after having preached to others, himself become a castaway.

So let us do, my friends.  Let us not be too hasty in forgiving ourselves.  Let us thank God cheerfully for the present.  Let us look on hopefully to the future; let us not look back too much at the past, or rake up old follies which have been pardoned and done away.  But let us thank God whenever he thinks fit to shew us the past, and bring our sin to our remembrance.  Let us thank him, when meeting an old acquaintance, passing by an old haunt, looking over an old letter, reminds us what fools we were ten, twenty, thirty years ago.  Let us thank him for those nightly dreams, in which old tempers, old meannesses, old sins, rise up again in us into ugly life, and frighten us by making us in our sleep, what we were once, God forgive us! when broad awake.  I am not superstitious.  I know that those dreams are bred merely of our brain and of our blood.  But I know that they are none the less messages from God.  They tell us unmistakeably that we are the same persons that we were twenty years ago.  They tell us that there is the same infection of nature, the same capability of sin, in us, that there was of old.  That in our flesh dwells no good thing: that by the grace of God alone we are what we are: and that did his grace leave us, we might be once more as utter fools as we were in the wild days of youth.  Yes: let us thank God for everything which reminds us of what we once were.  Let us humble ourselves before him whenever those memories return to us; and let us learn from them what St. Paul learnt.  To be charitable to all who have not yet learnt the wisdom which God (as we may trust) has taught to us; to feel for them, feel with them, be sure that they are our brothers, men of like passions with ourselves, who will be tried by the same standard as we; whom therefore we must not judge, lest we be judged in turn: and let us have, as St. Paul had, hope for them all; hope that God who has forgiven us, will forgive them; that God who has raised us from the death of sin, to something of the life of righteousness, will raise them up likewise, in his own good time.

Amen.