Chapter II: Preface (2)

Now the great blessing of the Easter message is that it entirely reverses this aspect of life. It reveals to us, on the assurance of Christ and His Apostles, that this world and this life are a very small thing indeed compared with the realities which Christ has revealed to us by His resurrection. He has revealed to us, first for Himself and in His own person, and secondly for ourselves, that the world in which we really live is an eternal and spiritual realm, in which we are privileged to be in the company of Christ Himself, and of all the souls who, from the commencement of the world, have lived and died in harmony with the spirit of Christ and the will of God. That is the real life into which every one in this congregation is admitted, if he will. One of those great men in the past, to whom I have referred, imagined the case of men having lived all their lives in a cave to which only broken beams of sunlight penetrated, and who had no idea of the splendid vision of the sun, and of the earth with all its beauties, which would burst upon their vision the moment they stepped outside their cave. That, as his marvellous wisdom perceived, is the case of too many among us, even among Christians. We have our caves, created by the temporal interests and obligations around us; and broken gleams, from the truths of the Gospel which we imperfectly realize, afford a dim religious light to our condition. But, in reality, there is a spiritual, a glorious, and an eternal world around us, which will burst upon us with overpowering splendour when, after death, we step out of the cave of this flesh. The problems of God’s dispensations, both to the world at large and to ourselves, are beyond our comprehension and solution, because they have reference not merely to this world, in which most of us live for no more than three score years and ten, but to that eternal and infinite world of spirits, which will endure for ever, and which is beyond our ken. To each individual soul, young or old, the question of chief importance is not what happens to them in this world, whether their life be short or long, whether it be a happy life or a sad one, but what happens to them afterwards, in that eternal career, which opens to them all at death. The only true Christian attitude, as the Apostle says elsewhere, is to “look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen, for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.”

But what are these things that are eternal? That is one of the most precious parts of the Christian revelation. In some respects, of course, they must remain unknown to us while we are in the flesh, for “eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.” But though we do not know what the external circumstances of that life will be, we do know, because Christ Himself, and His Apostles on His authority, have revealed it to us, what the essential part of them will be so far as our spiritual nature is concerned. They will be simply and precisely the spiritual things which are the highest and best in this world. They will be perfect truth, and peace, and love, and, in a word, all those graces and perfections which were manifested in Christ Himself. The Apostle bids us “seek those things that are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God”; and then he proceeds to explain what those things are. “Put on,” he says, a few verses further, “as the elect of God a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, long suffering; forbearing one another, and forgiving one another; ... even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye; and above all these things, put on love, which is the bond of perfectness ... and whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him.” That is the character of the future world, the future society, to which we have the privilege of being admitted at death: a world in which all the graces and glories of the Christian character exist, without any of the imperfections by which even the holiest lives are clouded here; a world of perpetual thanksgiving to God the Father for the love with which He has loved us; a world in short which is ablaze with the light and warmth of all love and truth.

One blessed consequence from this revelation of the nature of the spiritual world, in which the risen Christ reigns, is that we can enter it, and live for it, even in the present life, without any disregard of the obligatory claims which this world has upon us. However busy a man’s life, however absorbed he may necessarily be in the requirements and duties of his daily occupations, he can also be exerting his energies of thankfulness and prayer to God, of truth and love and compassion and meekness and peace, which make the life of the eternal world. There is no occupation or condition of life in which those blessed graces may not be exerted and cultivated; and men and women may thus live in the spirit and light Of Heaven, even while they are confined within the cave of the flesh. In proportion as they are living in this light even here, they are being prepared for the eternal Heaven of the future; they are fulfilling, all the more completely, their duty to the society and the life of this world because they are guided by the illumination, both of the present Heaven which overshadows their souls, and of the future Heaven, of which the approaching gleams throw flashes of light across their path.

But what I would more particularly ask, at the present moment, amid the strain and distress of these months and years of war, is whether the promise of this eternal blessedness, the vision of this unseen and eternal world, does not justify the Apostle’s description of all the sorrows and sufferings which he and his fellows underwent, as “our light affliction, which is but for a moment.” If this world were the main scene of our life and of our hopes, there would be something appalling in the destruction, or mutilation, of so many of the best lives among us, and the cruel bereavement of those who are left behind. But in the light of this revelation, is it not our privilege to regard it all as “a light affliction, which is but for a moment,” and which is working for us all, for those who are taken and for those who are left, a far more exceeding and eternal glory? What does it matter to a life, however young and bright, that it should be cut short in this world if, through death in the discharge of duty, it passes to the full enjoyment of those “things that are with Christ,” in that world where Christ will welcome it with the greeting: “Well done, good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord?” It is, indeed, a hard fate for those whose life in this world is, for the future, maimed by injuries, or marred by bereavement. But for them, too, there is the assurance of Christ that if they suffer with Him, and in sympathy with Him, they shall also be glorified together, and that all they suffer, in obedience to His will here, will help them forward in the way that leads to everlasting life. These are not mere human hopes and imaginings; they are the express promises and assurances of the Lord, Who suffered and died upon the Cross, and of those Apostles, whom He commissioned to bring His message to the world. This Heaven, of the present and the future, has been constituted by them the great reality, the greatest of all realities, the supreme reality, of our lives, here and hereafter; and in proportion as we look at everything here in the light of it, the sorrows and sacrifices of this life are reduced to comparatively small proportions, and the hope and the blessings of the eternal life become the great Heaven, the glorious vault of God’s light and love by which we are surrounded.

It is thus that Easter Day brings home to us a message which satisfies the deepest cravings and necessities of life, and affords a practical solution of the difficulties which, without such a revelation, are involved in the miseries of war. War itself, indeed, points to some such solution, and compels men in practice to embrace it. It has been said that war is the greatest of educators, and there are various senses in which this is true. It educates, it exercises, it manifests, as nothing else does, some of the highest excellences of human nature: self-sacrifice, endurance, mutual devotion, faith and loyalty, and, in Tennyson’s pregnant phrase, “all that makes a man.” But perhaps its greatest educative influence consists in the fact that it compels men to act, without hesitation, on the instinct, which God has implanted in their hearts, that nothing in this world is of any importance in comparison with the maintenance and the assertion of righteousness, truth, justice, and mercy. The mass of a people may be living in comfort and luxury, with their minds and affections mainly engaged in the energies, the pleasures, and the interests of this life; but as soon as some great challenge is offered to those supreme principles of righteousness and mercy, on which the whole fabric of true human life depends, their hearts spring up with an instinct that everything they value in this world must be sacrificed in defence of those moral and spiritual causes. The moment the note is struck of a great war for righteousness, like the present, that moment men and women feel compelled, by their very nature, to “set their affection on the things above,” not on the things of this world; they realize, that to this world they must become practically dead, and live for those high moral and spiritual causes which are the supreme treasures of mankind, and that, in this sense at all events, their “life is hid with Christ in God.” If, as we may confidently say, we are warring for right and truth, and for the maintenance of the will of God among men, we may then apply even to the war itself, and all the national and individual sacrifices it entails, the thankful conviction of the Apostle that “our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” It is working out for our nation and Empire, and for the world at large, the establishment on a firmer basis than ever of true Christian civilization. Those whose lives are sacrificed are but brought by death into the nearer presence of Christ, where His love and His mercy, no less than His justice, will be still more to them than in the world they leave; and those who are left behind may learn to prize the privilege of suffering with their Saviour, that they may in time be glorified with Him.

THE NEED AND THE MEANS OF RIGHT JUDGMENT.

CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, WHIT SUNDAY, 1915.

“_The Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, Whom the Father will send in My Name, He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you._”--St. John xiv. 26.

Never in our time, perhaps never in the history of the world, has there been such urgent occasion as there is to-day for joining with all our hearts, in the prayer of the Whit Sunday Collect, that God will grant us, by the help of His Spirit, “to have a right judgment in all things.” We have before our eyes the most tremendous illustration ever afforded of the awful consequences which may ensue from the absence of such a right judgment, and the prevalence of a wrong judgment. In the first place, the war itself is entirely due to the exercise of a wrong judgment by some person or persons. Nothing but a great misjudgment, on one side or the other, of the circumstances which occasioned the war, or of its consequences, could have precipitated all the nations of Europe into such a deadly and disastrous conflict.

Every statesman, of course, thinks that some other statesman has blundered, but the mutual recriminations form at least a general confession of wrong judgment somewhere. When we see such wrong judgment possible among the ablest and most powerful men in Europe, in a matter which involves the sacrifice of tens of thousands of lives, the desolation of thousands of homes, and the devastation of some of the fairest countries in Europe, have we not need to cry to God, with the most intense earnestness, that He will grant to us, and to all who act for us and with us, the help of His Spirit to give us a right judgment in all things? This gift of a right judgment may seem, perhaps, in ordinary times, a comparatively small matter to be treated as the culminating blessing won for us by the Death and Resurrection and Ascension of our Lord. This is the final festival of the series which commemorates the great events of His Life; for Trinity Sunday, which follows, does but sum up the whole substance of the Christian revelation, as that of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The Whit Sunday Collect embodies the final craving of the Christian life, for those gifts which, on our Lord’s Ascension, He became empowered to bestow upon His Church. But we may appreciate, at this time, better than ever before, why all those gifts are summed up in the prayer that we may be granted a right judgment in all things. Upon that right judgment in the leaders of the Christian nations depends the peace of the whole world, and the possibility of ourselves leading a peaceable life in all godliness and honesty. It is demonstrated, by the most awful example ever given, that all the wisdom, all the experience, all the knowledge of human nature, accumulated for twenty centuries, are insufficient, of themselves, to ensure that right judgment; and we are driven to-day to act upon the exhortation of St. James, “If any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God” and “it shall be given him.”

But this failure of good judgment in the political management of the world is not the only, nor the most terrible, exhibition which is afforded at the present time of the grievous liability of human nature to form wrong judgments. The worst and most distressing exhibition of all is seen in the moral perversion of one of the greatest of European nations. Unless our own judgment is absolutely perverted, Germany has become possessed by an utterly false, un-Christian, and even inhuman judgment in moral conduct. The case was justly summed up in a letter published the other day by an eminent member of our Church, the Dean of Exeter--“Women outraged, treaties broken, inoffensive citizens, women and babes, murdered wholesale by land and sea, wells poisoned, deadly gases taking the place of manly conflict, Houses of God ruthlessly destroyed, fair lands desolated, noble cities destroyed without provocation, without reasonable object or purpose, the world filled with abominable lies, the hymn of hate chosen as a national anthem, and a baleful curse placed, as a nation’s prayer, on the lips of children, and placarded in the streets, a fit sequel to the hymn of hate”--this is the moral and religious spectacle which Germany now exhibits, and its rulers and guides not only allow these things to be done, but have pleasure in them that do them. It is not merely that these un-Christian and inhuman things are done, but that they are justified, that they are treated as lawful and meritorious, that the spirit which promotes them is recognized and applauded as the right spirit--this is the amazing and appalling exhibition of wrong judgment which Germany now offers to the world.

Let us, moreover, if we would duly appreciate the lesson to be derived from such a spectacle, bear in mind the character and capacities of the nation by which it is exhibited. We should bear in mind that Germany is probably the most highly educated country in Europe; its science, its literature, its arts, its industry have been among the finest that the world has seen. In religion it gave Europe the Reformation; and the great Protestant nations of the world, alike in Europe and America, recognize the immense spiritual debt they have owed to it in the past. Our own theological literature, during the last century, has acknowledged an immense debt to it, and German scholars have, in our own time, been in the front rank of the learning of the world. It is a country which was proud of its culture, and, in such matters as I have mentioned, with full justice. No thoughtful man can treat the Germans, as a nation, as inferior to any other in Europe, in all the externals of such culture. All the achievements of past history, all the acquisitions of Christian civilisation, lay open before them, as much as before ourselves, and they are bound to us by intimate ties of blood and of common interests. It is a nation, in short, with every equipment which human intellect, and art, and Nature can bestow; and yet, notwithstanding all this, the nation, as a whole, has formed a judgment so false and inhuman, on the very elements of moral duty, that we are forced to recognize that in fighting it we are fighting not merely a political foe, but a moral outlaw from Christian civilisation.

If such an awful perversion of judgment is possible, have we not reason to tremble at the possibilities of human error? The horrors I have recalled are a disgrace to Germany; but let us not disguise from ourselves the lamentable fact that they are also a disgrace to human nature. To this, we must realize, human nature can come, in spite of literature, and science, and art, and the traditions of generations, and profound religious capacities. One cannot divide the Germans from all other human races, or even from ourselves, and say that they have a human nature of their own. It is our common human nature which, in this case, has succumbed to such a degraded judgment, and which has become false to the inherited principles of Christian civilization. What we ought to learn from so distressing a spectacle is the absolute need of some influence higher than any that mere human nature, when left to itself, can exert, if the moral judgment, the moral sense, the moral character of nations and races, and of ourselves among them, are to be kept true to the ideals towards which human nature, at its best, has always been striving, and which our Lord Jesus Christ has revealed as the eternal standard established by God. I am afraid there can be no doubt respecting one cause, at all events, of this terrible degradation. For the last generation or two, in consequence of the prevalence in Germany of a false philosophy and an extravagant criticism, the minds of the educated classes in that country have been imbued with a complete distrust of the Scriptures, and of the revelation of God in Christ; and, in consequence, they have abandoned all deference to the authority of God’s Word and the example and teaching of our Lord. I believe, indeed, that faith in God and God’s Word, and love of Christ, still subsist in much of their old intensity among the simpler classes of the German nation--among numbers to whom the name and the teaching of Luther are still a venerated influence. But they have ceased to mould the character and guide the thoughts of the educated classes, and the consequence is that human nature has broken loose from all control, and has abandoned itself to an unbridled lust of power and of earthly pleasure.

It is painful to contemplate such a spectacle, and to recall it to you; but it is necessary we should realize what it means, if we are to learn the lesson which is the most imperative for us at this moment, and if we are to take home to our minds the full blessing of the promise of Whit Sunday. It is encouraging to bear in mind that a similar spectacle and crisis existed in the world at the time when our Lord spoke the words of the text. The Roman Empire, although, like the German nation, it rendered great services to mankind, was in His day developing into a terrible despotism, and its rulers were becoming the incarnation of a ruthless and unscrupulous force. The age of the twelve Cæsars, some of whom were monsters of violence and vice, was commencing; and at that moment there appeared another influence, that of the twelve Apostles, who proclaimed in the world the authority and the inspiration of another King, their Lord and Master, who taught the blessedness of another ideal--the ideal of poverty of spirit, of mourning, of meekness, of mercy, of purity, and of peacemaking. The two ideals struggled side by side for three centuries; but the spirit of violence proved unable to crush the spirit of meekness, and had at last to acknowledge its superiority, and to submit, in great degree, at all events, to the authority and example of our Lord. The mostly highly organized physical force that the world at that day had ever seen was slowly but surely undermined by the spirit of Christian meekness and love; and from that moment Christian principles of conduct extended their authority more and more over the whole range of worldly life, and even over the fierce passions and struggles of war. Gradually there became established those principles of chivalry under which, as our great philosophical statesman described it, there prevailed “that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.” That great amelioration of human passion and of human evil was won by the persistent contemplation and assertion of the authority and example of our Lord, and by the perpetual inculcation of the teaching of His Apostles. The Spirit of God, descending as on this great day, inspired Evangelists and Apostles to write those Gospels in which the Person, the teaching, and the example of our Saviour are so marvellously depicted, and those Epistles in which they are brought home to our hearts with such touching force. The same Spirit was vouchsafed to the great teachers and leaders of the Church, and quickened in the hearts of the people at large the gracious seed which was thus sown. If the new embodiment of the rule of force in human affairs is to be effectually overcome, it can only be by the same means. It cannot be done by our arms alone. Force alone is no remedy for force. The Spirit of Christ as it lives in the Books of the New Testament, must again make its appeal to the minds and consciences of the nations of Europe; and the Spirit of God, acting through those examples and exhortations, must bring home to us, once more, the life and love of Christ, must open men’s hearts to receive His image, and so enable them once more to have a right judgment in all things.

The prayer of the Collect, therefore, should turn our hearts and minds, at this juncture, to the supreme necessity, if we would save ourselves from the dangers of wrong judgment, and if, according to a famous saying, we would “save Europe by our example,” of submitting our hearts and lives with the deepest earnestness to the ideals set before us in the Scriptures, and especially in the teaching and example of our Lord and His Apostles, as the only sufficient means of maintaining a right judgment among us on the great moral problems of life. As a nation we have hitherto enjoyed unique advantages in this respect. To no other nation in the world has it ever been given to have the Word of God, the whole Word of God, read aloud in our churches, Sunday by Sunday, for more than three hundred years; and to have thus had the words and deeds of Christ, and the exhortations of His Apostles, and the devotions of Psalmists and Prophets, impressed upon our minds week by week, and sometimes day by day, until much of them has become the most familiar of all the records of our memories. There has been another means, moreover, especially in Scotland, but in England also, by which we have been kept in constant touch with the same influence, and that is the custom, which generally prevailed till recently, of Family Prayer, and the reading of the Holy Scriptures in the family circle. By these means that Divine Seed was sown in the hearts of young and old, and it could not but produce much fruit. If we desire to preserve the Christian instincts, which can alone protect us against such dreadful relapses into a world of violence and ungoverned passion as human nature has been proved capable of, let us submit ourselves with renewed earnestness to those Divine Words, and to that Christian discipline, which have maintained for so long, in this country, the character of Christian gentlemen and gentlewomen, and have upheld among us, in spite of our many faults and failures, at all events the main principles of a right judgment. When our Lord says, in the text, that His Spirit would bring all things to the remembrance of the Apostles, whatsoever He had said unto them, He gave a promise which was in the first instance fulfilled, as I have said, in the writings of the Evangelists and the Apostles, but to which it is also the privilege of every Christian to appeal. If we will read His Scriptures, He will open our minds to understand them, He will bring home to us, by His fellowship, the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Love of God; He will save us from false judgments of all kinds; and will enable us to uphold in our own hearts, and in the world at large, that truth and love, that meekness, gentleness, and humility, for the protection of which we are now appealing to the arbitrament of battles, and of the God of battles. May He grant us victory in that appeal; and when it has been granted to us, let us strive to render the victory secure by living more devoutly in His faith and fear, and seeking more diligently the Grace of His Holy Spirit.

THE ADVENT MESSAGE AND THE WAR.

IN CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, NOV. 29, 1914.

“_Because He hath appointed a day, in which He will judge the world in righteousness by that Man Whom He hath ordained; whereof He hath given assurance unto all men, in that He hath raised Him from the dead._”

The season of Advent, with which the Church’s year reopens brings to us a message of peculiar appropriateness and encouragement at the present moment. It does so because it lays the corner-stone of the grand edifice of the Gospel, or the good news of God, of which we shall follow the construction through the Church’s year. What is the special message of Advent? It is the message of that grand verse in the Psalms, “Righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His seat.” It proclaims to us the message of the prophets, opened to us in triumphant tones by the prophet Isaiah in the Lesson of to-day, that righteousness is the very foundation on which God is building up society; that it is the very root from which our own lives and the life of our nation derive their existence; that it was to promote this righteousness that our Lord came into the world at His first Advent in great humility; and that it is to establish that righteousness finally that He will come again in great glory to judge the quick and the dead. This is the beginning of God’s revelation to us, and it is also the end and the culmination of His revelation. It is the beginning of the Gospel, and it is also the end of the Gospel.

If we would understand the blessing of the Gospel, we must begin with the conviction that the one great object for which this whole dispensation of human society exists is that complete righteousness, the glory of the Divine righteousness, may be established in it, and that nothing but this can promote either the glory of God or the happiness of man. Read the Psalms with this consideration in your mind, and I think you will be deeply impressed with the fact that every prayer to God embodies a prayer for the establishment of right against wrong; so that the Psalmist only dares to pray for himself so far as the deliverances and successes he prays for are in harmony with the righteous will and purposes of God. Every prayer is in the spirit of the exquisite Psalm of this evening: “Deliver me, O Lord, from mine enemies: for I flee unto Thee to hide me. Teach me to do the thing that pleaseth Thee, for Thou art my God: let Thy loving spirit lead me forth into the land of righteousness.” We have no right to ask or expect help on any other condition than that; for the one supreme work which God is working day by day, and year by year, and century by century, is the realization in human life of what that righteousness and judgment are, which are the foundation of His throne.

Advent reminds us, in the first place, of this grand and simple fact, and bids us make it the starting point of all our Christian thought and hope; but it gives us the further assurance that God is not only carrying forward that work of righteousness now, but that He will complete it hereafter. It repeats that message which St. Paul proclaimed to the world at large, through the Athenians, that “God hath appointed a day in the which He will judge the world in righteousness by that Man Whom He hath ordained; whereof He hath given assurance unto all men, in that He hath raised Him from the dead.” That was the culmination of St. Paul’s Gospel to the people of Athens. That is the culmination of the message of the Gospel to ourselves at the present day. What do we need more than all at this moment? What are our minds full of but the dreadful spectacle before us of the whole earth filled with violence, of an awful outbreak of hatred, unrighteousness, injustice, wanton cruelty, and barbarity? The words of Isaiah read this morning are exactly applicable to the spectacle of Belgium and France at this moment: “Your country is desolate; your cities are burned with fire; your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers. And the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city.” Might not our hearts almost fail us as we contemplate such a volcanic eruption of injustice and violence after nineteen centuries of Christianity? But our hearts will not fail us, any more than the heart of Isaiah failed him in his day. And why? Because of this assurance--an assurance deep down in our souls--that this unrighteousness cannot prevail. That conviction lies very deep in human nature, even apart from God’s revelation in the Psalms and the Gospel. But by this revelation it is given an irrefragable strength, and we grasp with the deepest conviction the assurance of the Psalmist: “Let the floods clap their hands, and let the hills be joyful together before the Lord, for He is come to judge the earth, with righteousness to judge the world, and the people with His truth.” That is the message of Advent, and there never was a time in history when we could grasp it more thankfully with all our hearts and souls.

There is something inexpressibly elevating and inspiring in this message of a future judgment and of the final vindication of righteousness, as it enables us to look beyond this present scene of distress and trouble, to realize that all that is passing around us is in reality only part of a far larger and grander scene, and that the events of the hour are but a brief passage in a universal history, which has been carried forward for centuries under God’s hand, and is being worked out under His guidance to a glorious and righteous conclusion. If you allow your gaze and your thoughts to be fixed mainly on your own lives, on the lives of your own generation, or even of our own national history, you may well be distressed and perplexed at the apparent defeat of righteous causes and purposes, at the overthrow of the laborious work of years of peace, at what seems like the destruction of those bonds of human society to which prophets and saints and soldiers and statesmen had devoted their labours and their very lives for generations. So it seemed to Isaiah in his day; so it seemed to Habakkuk when he exclaimed, “that judgment doth never go forth.” So it has seemed to many a devoted servant of God and man, if he trusted only to his own eyes, from generation to generation. Nothing but prophecy, the prophecy of the Old and New Testaments, is, in fact, adequate to the strain thus put upon men and women by these experiences. But only believe, as the prophets assure you, only believe as our Saviour declared, and as His Apostles proclaimed by His commission, that it is but part of one great history, one great universal dispensation, in which God is steadily ensuring, by whatever means may in His Divine wisdom be necessary, the supremacy of righteousness and the overthrow of evil, and you can then live through it, and struggle through it, not merely with the patience, but with the exultation, which marked the Jewish prophets and psalmists. Belgium and Northern France are now passing through the very experiences, to the letter, which Isaiah described in the case of the people of Israel in his day; but Isaiah looked through all these distresses to a time when “the Lord’s House should be established in the top of the mountains and should be exalted above the hills, and all nations should flow into it”; when “out of Zion should go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem”; when “He should judge the nations, and should rebuke many peoples, and should beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks, when nation should not lift up sword against nation, neither should they learn war any more.” That was Isaiah’s assurance, even in the dark days he describes. We have a hundred-fold more ground for the same assurance when it has been proclaimed to us by our Lord Himself, and sealed with His blood, and countersigned with the assurance and the blood of His Apostles and Saints.

Even from this general point of view, the message of Advent comes to us with a supremely inspiring force in the crisis of our great national struggle, but it has other aspects of profound grace and comfort as well as of warning. The most gracious, perhaps, of all its aspects is the assurance it gives us that the final judgment of the world, the final establishment of righteousness, the final reward of the good, will be in the hands of our Lord Jesus Christ. This, of course, is a matter of faith, based on positive revelation, resting on the personal assurance of our Lord and His Apostles. It is no matter of speculation, no matter of opinion, but a positive statement of fact, which is one of the corner-stones of the Christian religion. There is too much tendency at present to resolve that religion into matters of mere human thought and feeling and hope, and to make its acceptance depend on its conformity to modern ideas; but there is no possibility of treating in that manner such a point of definite, momentous, fundamental fact as that our Lord Jesus Christ has been appointed by God to be the Judge of quick and dead, to sum up the whole world’s destiny, and to assign to each one of us, to every one in this congregation, his place hereafter in the Kingdom of God or outside it. The office of judge, even in this world, is a solemn one. How infinitely awful is the position of the Eternal Judge of all! Now the substance of the revelation of Advent is that this great office is not veiled, as it was to the Jews, and as it must needs be, without revelation, to all the world, in the mysterious, distant, and dread form of the absolute majesty of God Himself; but that it is formally delegated to One Who is not only the Son of God, but the Son of Man, to the Lord Jesus Christ, Who took our flesh and blood upon Him, Who died for us and rose again. “God hath appointed a day,” St. Paul says, “in the which He will judge the world in righteousness by _that man_ Whom He hath ordained ... Whom He raised from the dead.” The grace which is involved in this declaration is so infinite that I hesitate to speak freely of it in my own words, and I am thankful to be able to express it in language of one of the most authoritative of all divines, our own Bishop Pearson, in his grave and deliberate _Exposition of the Creed_. “If,” he says (page 305), “we look upon the judgment to come only as revealing our secrets, as discerning our actions, as sentencing our persons, according to the works done in the flesh, there is not one of us can expect life from that tribunal at the last day.... It is necessary, therefore, that we should believe that _Christ_ shall sit upon the throne, that our Redeemer shall be our Judge, that we shall receive our sentence, not according to the rigour of the law, but the mildness and mercies of the Gospel; and then we may look not only upon the precepts, but also upon the promises of God. Whatsoever sentence in the sacred Scriptures speaketh anything of hope, whatsoever text administereth any comfort, whatsoever argument drawn from thence can breed in us any assurance, we can confidently make use of them all in reference to the judgment to come; because by that Gospel which contains them all we shall be judged. If we consider Whose Gospel it is, and Who shall judge us by it, ‘_we are the members of His Body, of His Flesh, and of His Bones; for which cause He is not ashamed to call us brethren_.’ As one of our brethren He hath redeemed us, He hath laid down His life as a ransom for us.... Well, therefore, may ‘_we have boldness and access with confidence_,’ by the faith of Him unto the throne of that Judge, Who is our brother, Who is our Redeemer, Who is our High Priest, Who is our Advocate, Who will not by His word at the last day condemn us, because He hath already by the same word absolved us, saying, ‘_Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that heareth My word, and believeth on Him that sent Me hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but is passed from death into life_.’”

At a time when death is all around us, when so many of our nearest and dearest and best may pass at any moment through the shadow of death to the judgment which is beyond, it is of infinite comfort to be assured by this Divine message that they pass, not to a severe tribunal which will judge them by the letter of the law, and by a strict estimate of their faults, but to this gracious and merciful throne of their Brother, their Advocate, and their Redeemer, Who will judge them with infinite mercy and equity. I do not hesitate to say that He will judge them with peculiar sympathy, because they have died in the very cause in which He died Himself, and which it is His office as a judge to maintain--the cause of righteousness. In the ancient Church, martyrdom was regarded as ensuring remission of sins and absolution. Soldiers, no doubt, would feel that it would be putting their case too high to place their sacrifice of their lives in the cause of their King and country, in a war like this, on quite the same level as the heroic martyrdom of the great Saints of old. But it is a sacrifice of the same nature. It is coloured by the virtue of the sacrifice of Christ Himself, and of His followers; and we may confidently be assured that those who meet their death on the battlefields of this war in the spirit of faith in Christ, and in simple devotion to duty, will be received by Him in the sense of those gracious words, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” and may hope to be admitted in some degree into the joy of their Lord. According to the judgment of the ancient Church, and the greatest of our own Divines, we may confidently bear the memories of them in our prayers before that Throne of gracious judgment--not presuming to know, or desiring to know, more than this, that they are in the hands of One Who is at once a Judge and a Saviour, and trusting that, in praying for His gracious and merciful reception of them, we are but giving expression to the yearnings of His own Divine and Human Heart.

Such are some of the blessed assurances which the Advent Season brings us, and we cannot be too thankful for them in our present time of distress. But it brings us one lesson of warning, which it is equally important for us to bear in mind. A war like this is undoubtedly a judgment. It springs from the sins of men, from their passions and their lusts, their lack of love, their unrighteousnesses of various kinds. War shows us death, and all that is involved in death, as the natural consequence of human passions, when not controlled by the spirit of Christ and the Will of God. “When lust hath conceived it bringeth forth sin, and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.” That is the law of Nature. It applies more or less to all who are engaged in war, and we, in this war, must not shrink from acknowledging our part in the accumulation of human wrong which has, at length, exploded into this scene of violence and misery. Advent, therefore, bids us look into our own hearts and lives, and ask ourselves what there has been in them which is not in conformity with the Will of God and with the law of the Saviour Who is to be our Judge. One immense blessing conferred on us by the knowledge that He will be our Judge is that we know, by His teaching and by His example, what are the principles of that righteousness and judgment which it is His office to enforce. It points us to the records of His love and teaching in the Gospels, to the messages of His Apostles, and to the Bible which was His law, as our guide in daily life in all circumstances and relations. That is the standard by which we shall be hereafter judged; and in proportion as we believe and realize this, shall we devote ourselves to its study and strive after its fulfilment. We are sadly reminded now that in this world there is no comfort on which we can permanently rely; but there is one comfort in life and in death of which we may be assured; it is that which our Lord revealed to us, when He gave us at once this command and this assurance, “If ye love me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter, that He may abide with you for ever.” Let us seek that comfort in life and in death, and it will not fail us.

DIVINE JUDGMENT AND RENOVATION.

CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, OCTOBER 11, 1916.

“_And He that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new._”--Rev. xxi. 5.

These words were uttered by Him that sitteth on the throne, as the interpretation of the grand vision which passed before the Apostle at the conclusion of the Revelation vouchsafed to him. “I saw,” he says, “a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away.... And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. And He that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new.”

But this vision was the sequel of fearful scenes which had passed before the Apostle as the future course of the Divine judgments was unrolled before him. He had witnessed a terrible succession of destructions, and plagues, and wars, falling upon the inhabitants of the earth, involving miseries and sufferings incalculable. He had seen passing before him the awful punishments inflicted upon the enemies of God, of Christ, of righteousness, and truth. One quotation in the final scene will be enough to remind you of the nature of the visions. “I saw an angel,” says the Apostle (chapter xix. 17), “standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; that ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, small and great.” At length, when these fearful plagues and judgments are completed the Apostle sees a great white throne and Him that sat on it, from Whose face the earth and the heaven fled away, and there was found no place for them. Then the books were opened, and the dead, who stood before God, both small and great, were judged, every man according to their works. Then it is, after this awful consummation, that the Apostle sees a new heaven and a new earth. And He that sits upon the great white throne says, “Behold, I make all things new.”

Such, in brief, is the burden of the Book of Revelation. It will be observed that it involves these two cardinal points: First, the judgment and the extirpation of all that is evil by a series of struggles and agonies; and secondly, after this terrible experience, the creation of all things new. The first part, however, in the process of the Divine administration, consists of a series of scenes of miseries, disasters, and bloodshed than which nothing more terrible can be imagined, and which are described with a lurid force to which no other human writing offers anything comparable. War and disease and the confusion of all the elements of human society, and even of heaven and earth, are brought before us, until men are reduced to cry to the very mountains and rocks to cover them. All is described as the inevitable result of the wrath of God against evil and its representatives, and a fearful joy is ascribed to the heavenly beings who behold this vindication of the Divine righteousness. The four and twenty elders fall on their faces and worship God, saying (xi. 17), “We give Thee thanks, O Lord God Almighty, Which art and wast and art to come, because Thou hast taken to Thee Thy great power and hast reigned. And the nations were angry, and Thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that Thou shouldest give reward unto Thy servants the prophets, and to the Saints, and to them that fear Thy Name, small and great, and shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth.” And then in awful response are heard, in the temple of God, “lightnings and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake and great hail.”

These dread scenes, these fearful judgments, are depicted as the inevitable preliminary in the manifestation of the Divine Will and the establishment of the Divine Kingdom. This is the main fact which stands out broadly from the Book. It is not necessary, for the purpose of appreciating this, to comprehend the signification of each of the awful scenes which are predicted. How far they are capable of any explanation before the final events may well be doubted. Old Testament prophecy remained in great part mysterious until the moment of its accomplishment, and the full interpretation of Christian prophecy can hardly be less dependent upon its actual realization. But one thing is plain, that the establishment of the Kingdom of Christ upon earth, the full realization of all its promises of peace and goodwill, the complete manifestation of the glory and power of its King--that these great hopes and blessed promises cannot, according to the Book of Revelation, be realized without the world passing through scenes of fearful struggle and misery, and without the execution of Divine judgment upon the evil and falsehood with which it abounds.

These are stern truths which it is well for us to bear in mind amidst the terrible scenes which are now being enacted in the present war. The New Testament begins with promises of peace, and it ends with a vision of peace and glory in which God will wipe away all tears from our eyes; but the warning is conveyed to us, through the mouth of the last Apostle, that this blessed condition cannot be reached except through a manifestation of Divine justice and Divine wrath, which will bring upon earth and upon all mankind inconceivable miseries. The sins of men must be brought into judgment. The Divine righteousness must expose their real character by the consequences they naturally involve. The truth must be manifested that there is a Judge of all the earth, Who brings every work of man into judgment, whether it be good or whether it be evil; and the evil in the works of men is so deep and far-reaching that its judgment must needs involve the most terrible suffering. In proportion as God takes to Himself His great power and reigns, the first result must be seen in these agonies of human nature, and must culminate in the disruption of the very elements of nature itself.

It is well we should remind ourselves how fearfully these pictures of the Apostle of love have been fulfilled in the history of the world since his time. It was not long after he wrote, when a series of persecutions broke upon the Christian Church, which were at length avenged by terrible intestine wars between the heads of the Roman Empire, and in due course of time, by the overthrow of that Empire itself in a long series of wars and devastations, which can only be fitly described in some of the vivid language of the Apocalypse itself. It would be appalling if we could realize the extent to which Europe was filled with “blood and fire and vapour of smoke” during the five or six centuries which elapsed between the overthrow of the Roman Empire and the establishment of the Christian civilisation of the Middle Ages. Then followed the incalculable miseries and untold bloodshed involved in the contest between the Christian and the Mohammedan world, throughout the long period of the Crusades. Add to this all the intestine wars between Christians themselves during the Middle Ages, and the fearful devastation of which the East was the victim in the course of Mohammedan conquests and revolutions, and you have before your eyes a picture not adequately described elsewhere than in this terrible Book. The Reformation was followed by a long series of wars, during which a great part of the surface of Europe suffered the most cruel devastations; and even to the present day the whole world open to our observation has been suffering from almost continuous bloodshed in one part or other of its surface.