Chapter IV: Preface (4)

War, in fact, is the natural penalty by which, under God’s constitution of the world, the evil passions of men punish themselves. We may take an example from the physical world. The earth under our feet is held together, and affords us a sure foothold, by virtue of certain physical and chemical laws which are perpetually at work in it, such as the law of gravitation and the laws of chemical attraction. They are always working silently, and it is by means of the incessant action of those laws that the whole face of the earth is maintained from day to day. But from time to time, from some causes which we do not yet understand, something occurs to disturb their ordinary peaceful course, and then by their own natural action they produce some tremendous convulsions, like earthquakes or the eruptions of volcanoes. So it is with the moral world of national and international life. It is maintained in peace and stability, as a rule, by the principles of mutual trust and regard, if not of love, which are at the root of social and political life; but if falsehood and jealousy and covetousness accumulate in some part of the world, there is sure, sooner or later, to be a terrible convulsion and a devastating eruption of “blood and fire and vapour of smoke.” War is thus the outburst, the visible embodiment, of the passions behind it, of the accumulated sins which nations and generations have been indulging. We look with horror on war and all its miseries, and justly so; but what we ought to look on with more horror are the sins and wickedness and passions of which war is the inevitable result. People say that war is wrong, and of course it is wrong that there should be war; but the wrong in it is not the actual waging of the war, not at least the using of the sword, in the Name of God, to assert right against wrong; that is the bounden duty of the lawful authority. Where the wrong lies is in the passions which make the war, and which compel men to resort to so terrible a vindication of righteousness.

Have we not, I must ask, a glaring illustration of the profound moral principles thus asserted by our Lord in the present war? The means of communication in our day enable us to realize the feelings which are at work over the face of Europe amidst this terrible convulsion; and there is one fact which is appallingly conspicuous in that manifestation. That fact is the falsehood, the hatred, the violent imputations of evil motives, the overbearing ambition which are at work in the great nation--for a great nation it is--with which we are at war. As I will presently observe, I am far from acquitting ourselves of all blame in the matter. There was never a human struggle yet in which either side was perfectly free from blame; but as to the gross misrepresentations which are eagerly disseminated abroad respecting the motives and the conduct of this country, there can be no question whatever, and no adequate excuse. Whatever faults and errors we have committed, our statesmen have not been animated in the development of our Empire by greed and selfish ambition, or by a mere desire to be supreme over other nations. So far as our enemies are acting upon these ideas of our motives, they are absolutely blind; and there is nothing more terrible in the revelations which this war affords than that individuals and nations are capable of such absolute delusions, on so vast a scale, respecting one another’s motives and characters. It is plain that what has made this war is a total absence of that Christian charity between individuals and nations which St. Paul inculcates as “the very bond of all virtues,” and which is therefore the bond of all society. The most heart-rending thing, after all, is not that we are at war, but that Christian nations should be capable, in their daily life and thought, of such an absolute negation of those principles of moral life and faith which our Lord came to establish among us. Our Lord here warns us that unless men repent of this uncharitable temper, and of the sins associated with it, war can never be abolished, and we shall all perish in some fearful conflagration. At present the conflagration, like the tower in Siloam, has wrought its destruction mainly upon others than ourselves. A modern despot, indignant, like Pilate, at opposition to the claims of his nation, has mingled the blood of Belgian men and women and children with their sacrifices, with their ruined churches and desolated homes. But it is certainly not because a people like the brave Belgians were sinners above all men that dwelt in Europe that they have thus suffered. “I tell you, Nay,” our Lord’s Voice is heard in this text; “but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.” Look to yourselves; ask yourselves whether there are or have been sins prevailing among you which, under the laws of God’s righteousness, must work out their evil consequence in your social and national life; and repent, lest ye likewise perish.

It is impossible, in dealing with this subject, not to express, as I have done, a deep indignation at the motives and the spirit which have been displayed by our enemies in this war. But we should miss the whole purpose of our Lord’s warning unless we applied it in the first instance, and in the main, to ourselves. Let us bear in mind that what has happened in Belgium and France might in conceivable circumstances, in the further development of scientific warfare, in the air as well as in the sea, happen to ourselves; and let us take to heart the clear warning of our Lord that the only way to avert such destructions, and to avoid perishing ourselves, is to repent, and from our hearts to cultivate among us those principles of charity, truth, righteousness and religion, which alone can keep human nature in peace.

After all, can we be sure that we are not partly to blame for this war by our own faults and failures? Have our statesmen, have we as a nation, been looking facts in the face and meeting them with faithfulness and self-sacrifice? Do not many among us ask whether this war would ever have been possible if we had realized our danger and our duty in time, and prepared ourselves, at whatever cost, to avert the danger? How far have we, and those who guide us, allowed ourselves to be diverted from the truth of our condition by sectarian and party passions and uncharitable class jealousies? Have we seriously laid to heart “the great dangers we are in by our unhappy divisions?” Is it compatible with the love of God and of Christ that those divisions should prevail so far as to lead to the curtailment of the Christian instruction of our school-children, and the secularization of property left by our ancestors for the hallowing of God’s Name and the promotion of Christ’s Kingdom? We have, moreover, been on the verge of civil war; and the very possibility of such war is proof enough, on the principles we have been considering, that some of the passions which lead to all wars have been rife among us. The possibility of that intestine war seems, in fact, to have been one of the considerations which encouraged the present attack upon us. Add to all this the social and personal vices, against which good men among us and great societies have been struggling for years, and have we not abundant reason to apply earnestly to our nation and to our individual selves the Lord’s warning: “Repent, or ye shall likewise perish?” For my part, I could wish that we were afforded an opportunity, by some solemn appointment of a Day of National Humiliation as well as Intercession, to search our consciences in the sight of God, and to unite in one great act of national repentance. But let us at least endeavour to discharge this duty of repentance and amendment for our own souls and in our individual lives; and we may then be assured that we are doing the best we can towards averting from our nation that suffering and ruin, which are brought so closely home to us in the miseries of our Allies.

THE RIGHTEOUS IDEAL.

AT CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, SEPTUAGESIMA SUNDAY, 1915.

“_Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord: and in his law doth he meditate day and night._”--Ps. i. 12.

It is with the utmost appropriateness that this psalm is placed first in the Psalter, for it expresses the spirit which underlies all other psalms, and, in fact, the whole of the Scriptures. Its message lies, indeed, at the root of the religion of the Old Testament, and of the New Testament also. Let us notice, in the first place, that its opening word--the word “blessed”--is the keynote of the Scriptures from first to last. In the first chapter of Genesis, which we have read this morning, we read, not only that God saw everything that He had made, and behold it was very good; but more particularly, that when God made man He blessed them, and gave them a special commission. He placed them in the Garden of Eden, in which He made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the Tree of Life also in the midst of the Garden. He blessed them, and intended them to be blessed; and He gave them a command which they had only to obey in order to enjoy that blessing. Man forfeited the blessing by disobeying the command; but the last chapter of the Bible, which we have read this evening, describes the recovery of it by those who have faithfully served Him. It describes a day when there shall be no more curse, but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in the new Garden of the Tree of Life. “The throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and His servants shall serve Him; and they shall see His face; and His name shall be in their foreheads. And there shall be no night there; and they need no light of lamp, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever.” Thus the Bible holds out, from beginning to end, the prospect of blessedness, or perfect happiness, as that which God designs for men, and which will be ultimately bestowed upon His faithful servants. Between the beginning and the end, in the midst of this great dispensation, when our Lord appeared with His new covenant, His message is described as a Gospel, as “good tidings of great joy,” and the first word He utters in that great Sermon on the Mount, which contains his special teaching, is this characteristic word “blessed.” He repeats it again and again, “Blessed be ye poor.... Blessed are ye that hunger now.... Blessed are ye that weep.” The promise of blessing is thus the keynote of our Saviour’s message.

Now this characteristic of the Bible and of our Saviour’s teaching explains, and in great degree justifies, the universal craving of men and women for happiness. The pursuit of happiness in one form or another is the most universal motive of human conduct. It inspires some of our best exertions, and it prompts most of our sins. The motive of our first mother, as described in the third chapter of Genesis, is still that of nearly all of us, in one way or another. “When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and did eat.” The world, the flesh, and the devil are perpetually offering men fruits of this kind, and the craving for the happiness they promise is so great that men and women seize them, in spite of the knowledge they have in their consciences that to do so is wrong and against the will of God. In daily life we find that different fruits--forbidden fruits--appeal to different classes of men and women, but they are all liable to be attracted by some fruit or other and to be possessed by some “ruling passion.” It is striking, moreover, to look at the course of history, and observe how different fruits, different ideals, have attracted the various nations of the world. To the Greek the attraction was that of beauty and art, and their temptation was to give themselves up to the pleasures which those ideals could afford them, with but little moral restraint. The fruit which most attracted the Roman mind was that of rule and power. The passion, indeed, for creating great empires has been one of the strongest in mankind. We see it in full strength in the great Assyrian and Babylonian empires, and, unhappily, we see it in full force in a great nation of the present day. These pleasures and glories have accordingly been the subject of a vast amount of human literature--poetry, and history, and song.

But the characteristic of the people of Israel, and of Jewish literature, is that none of these ideals of happiness, whether of beauty or glory or power, have animated their best representatives. The one ideal which was always before the minds of their great prophets, and poets, and teachers was the ideal of righteousness, the ideal of the law of God, which is the subject of this first Psalm. The truth, with which the Book of Genesis opens, that God has given a law to men, that He has declared His will to them, and given them statutes and commandments in which that will is expressed--this is the supreme thought in the mind of the Jewish Psalmist or prophet, and, in spite of all their faults, of the Jewish nation as a whole. Psalm cxix. is, perhaps, the fullest expression of this conviction and passion. That psalm is one long variation of its opening verse, “Blessed are they that are undefiled in the way, and walk in the law of the Lord. Blessed are they that keep His testimonies, and seek Him with their whole heart.” “O how love I Thy law! it is my meditation all the day.” “How sweet are Thy words unto my taste! yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth! Through Thy precepts I get understanding, therefore I hate every false way.” You will see that these phrases express a positive passion in the mind of the Psalmist for the law of God--as strong a passion at least, or even stronger, than the passions of some men for the pleasures of sense, and of others for the pleasures of ambition and worldly success. “I opened my mouth,” says the Psalmist, “and drew in my breath, for my delight was in Thy commandments.” The whole frame of the man, his body as well as his mind, is absorbed in this passion for the law of God. The Jew craves for blessing, or for happiness, as much as the Greek or the Roman, but he seeks that blessing in the knowledge and obedience of the law of God. He knows it is to be found in the way of righteousness and nowhere else. Thus the first Psalm is a fitting introduction to all the rest. “His delight,” it says, “is in the law of the Lord; and in His law doth he meditate day and night. And he shall be like a tree planted by the waterside, that will bring forth his fruit in due season. His leaf also shall not wither; and look, whatsoever he doeth, it shall prosper.” This psalm, in short, embodies the very essence of the belief of the true Jew, which is that the law of God and the righteousness of God are the one source of all happiness and blessedness, and that the highest privilege of men and women is to give themselves up, body and soul, to the pursuit of the happiness which is there to be found.

I think we shall all recognize that the tendency of men and women is, for the most part, too different from this. They may wish to do right and to avoid wrong, but it is comparatively rare for the supreme passion of their lives to be the pursuit of righteousness, and for the supreme love of their lives to be for the law of God. Is it not our general tendency to pursue our own objects, to seek enjoyment, and happiness, and success in our own ways, and to regard the law of God, and the principles of righteousness, as a controlling power, an external authority, which checks us when we are in danger of going wrong and so far guides us? but the love of it, and the longing for obedience to it, is too rarely the main motive of our lives. That is the characteristic of those whom we regard as Saints, but it is not, I fear, the characteristic of the mass of men and women. This, however, is the ideal put before us, throughout the Scriptures, as that which ought to be predominant in our hearts and lives. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God,” says Moses, “with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.” “This,” said our Lord, “is the great commandment.” “Blessed,” according to this Psalm, “is the man whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law doth he meditate day and night.” It is not enough for such a man not to do wrong; his whole soul is absorbed in the passion for doing what is right. He believes that the law of God has set before him a great ideal, a vision of the perfection of human nature; and his great craving is to realize that ideal and to be what God intended him to be. He knows that all blessing is to be found in that law and in those visions of perfection, and he pursues them with his whole heart.

This spirit of the godly man is associated with another aspect of the same truth which is ever present in the Bible, and which is very imperfectly realized among men in general. We are apt to be satisfied with recognizing right and wrong as one of the many elements with which we are concerned in life. Life is a vast scene of innumerable passions, and interests, and pleasures, and schemes--personal, social, political, and imperial; and nearly all of us recognize, no doubt, that right and wrong, righteousness and justice, have a momentous place among these various energies and interests; but in the light of the Bible, and in the teaching of our Lord, that is a very imperfect view to take of their position. There, right and wrong, righteousness and justice, are supreme over all other interests; they are the foundation on which the whole edifice of life is built up; or they are, as it were, the very cement by which the whole is held together. As the history of the Jewish people is told in the Bible, every event in their career is shown to turn on the question of their righteousness or wickedness. God’s one object is to educate them to be a righteous nation, to keep His commandments, and statutes, and judgments, so that they may realize His great design for them. They suffer punishment, such as invasion by enemies, or captivity by Assyria or Rome, not merely because of the ambition of those nations, and of their own comparative weakness, but because they were becoming faithless to the law of God, and not living for His honour and glory. All that the world, and the worldly historian, might see of them was that they had provoked the Assyrian or Roman monarch by some act of self-assertion and pride, and that he avenged himself by invading and desolating their country. But the prophetical men who wrote the Books of Kings, and other historical Books of the Old Testament, went behind this immediate cause, and saw that it was by the providence of God that the people were thus punished, because they had forgotten the God of their fathers, and were ceasing to serve Him. They were inspired to see this element of righteousness, and of the law of the Lord, as the most essential in the whole history, and asserting itself continually under the control of God’s providence.

I venture to think we might illustrate the matter by an example from modern science. We know now that the most important and universal force in nature is that of which one of the most familiar forms is electricity. We know that its influence in the form of light and magnetism pervades the whole of nature; we know that the very movements of our limbs, of our hands and fingers, are dependent upon it, that this is the force which animates our nerves and through them controls our whole bodies. We know that the element in which it works--the ether--pervades the whole universe, and that the light which flashes from stars hundreds of millions of miles away is due to this subtle force. And yet until less than a hundred years ago men hardly realized its existence. It was an unseen force, which worked behind all other forces, and even men of science had but a dim appreciation of it. So it was with this supreme force of righteousness, until it was brought into full light by the revelation of the prophets and of our Lord and His Apostles. What they revealed to us, what the Bible is teaching in every page, what our Lord, above all, impresses on us with supreme force, is that God’s righteousness is like the ethereal fluid, which is at once the illuminating agent and the motive force of all human life. It is quiet for the most part, and men hardly observe it; but on a sudden it bursts out into some great storm, like that which startled the author of Psalm xxix. “The voice of the Lord is upon the waters: the God of glory thundereth: the Lord is upon many waters.” We see the flash of the lightning of righteousness, and hear the crash of its thunder. “The voice of the Lord divideth the flames of fire. The voice of the Lord shaketh the wilderness.” That is the meaning, no doubt, of a great war like the present. Some evil had been accumulating, some passions of ambition and greed, some failures in duty, some defections from truth, faults of one kind in one nation, and sad failures of duty in another, and, on a sudden, some spark lights an explosion, and the whole world is ablaze with flames of fire. So it is also in our private lives. We may go on for a long time yielding to weaknesses, or even sins, and righteousness may seem to be silent, the voice of conscience may seem to be a mere voice and not to be asserting its supremacy; but, on a sudden, or after a long and gradual accumulation of wrong-doing, God asserts His law, our neglect of righteousness finds us out, and God’s justice is vindicated upon us.

These considerations ought to lead to a deeper devotion to those principles of right and wrong, and to that supreme vision of righteousness which the Bible and our Lord and His Apostles impress upon us; but I would add that it is the great message we should take home to ourselves, not merely in our individual lives, but in our national life. We see before us a great nation, endowed with some of the highest capacities of human nature, allowing itself to be absorbed more and more, year by year, by a great passion for power and dominion and supremacy in the world. This passion has taken such hold on it that it thinks itself justified in over-riding and defying the laws of truth and justice and mercy, even in the imperfect form in which they have been formally recognized in the law of nations. Everything, we are told, must yield to the demands of a nation which believes that a certain supremacy in the world is necessary for it. The consequence is that the air has to be cleared by this awful outburst of national thunder and lightning. But let us apply the danger and the lesson to ourselves. What is our own ideal as a nation and as an empire? Perhaps we too have been in danger of being fascinated too much by that vision of empire. It is a legitimate ideal when applied to right purposes, and subject to the right control; but those purposes must be those of Divine righteousness, and the control is the control of the law of God. If we make it the main object of every power with which God has entrusted us to promote His laws, to support and to spread further the Kingdom of His Christ, to do righteousness and justice in the world, so far as our power and influence reaches; if for that purpose we strive to ensure that all our legislation, and all our imperial and national action, is deliberately and constantly directed to the support and extension of the law of God and of Christ, then we may hope for God’s blessing on our achievements, and may trust to be preserved from those perversions of national spirit, and from that military and arbitrary passion, against which we have at this moment to maintain so desperate a struggle. Let us strive after this great object, alike in ourselves, in our country, and throughout our Empire, and then we may hope that as a nation we may be, in the Psalmist’s words, “like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season,” and that whatsoever we do may prosper. In a word, as a nation no less than as individuals, let our delight be in the law of the Lord, and in His law let us meditate day and night.

REASONS FOR INTERCESSION.

CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL: DAY OF SPECIAL INTERCESSION FOR THE WAR, JUNE 17, 1915.

“_The heathen make much ado, and the kingdoms are moved: but God hath shewed His voice, and the earth shall melt away._”--Ps. xlvi. 6.

We are come here this evening to offer our earnest prayers and supplications to God for His help in this grievous and dangerous crisis of our national life, to entreat Him to grant the victory to our King and his Allies, and to deliver our nation, our Empire, and the world from the violence and oppression with which they are threatened by the enemy. In order that we may do so aright, it is necessary we should realize distinctly what is God’s special concern with the war, and what is our own relation to Him in respect to it. Now, the one supreme truth which I would urge upon you this evening is that the war, as a whole--its origin, its course, its end, and its purpose--is in the hands of God, and that we must look to Him, and to Him alone, for our guidance in it, and our deliverance from it. I fear we are too much disposed to think of the natural causes of the war, of the natural means we have of conducting it, and of the human and physical forces which are engaged in it; while we think of God as standing outside the struggle, and appeal to Him to interfere in it, as we might appeal to some great human power, in our extremity. We are too much disposed to act and think as if the result depended entirely on the number of men we can put in the field, upon the munitions of war we can obtain, the guns and the shells and the other physical means we can bring into action. It is true that these thing--men and the munitions of war--are the indispensable instruments of success and victory. Even in times when God interfered miraculously, He required His people, as under Joshua and David, to put forth their full strength, and to make the utmost sacrifices for their cause. But the main lesson which is inculcated in the Scriptures respecting war is that it is one of God’s great agencies for carrying out His will and accomplishing His own purposes, and that its issue is in all cases absolutely in His hands. It is He Who permits war; it is He Who in the exercise of His righteous judgment, occasions war; it is He Who alone can determine the issue of war; and it is His purposes, and not ours, which are brought to pass by war.

If, in fact, we would apprehend our position and the position of our Empire and of Europe in this war, we must in spirit see God upon His throne, permitting by His judgment the fierce passions of war to break forth, and controlling the whole course of the tremendous storms they involve by His justice and His will. As the Psalmist says, “The Lord reigneth, be the people never so impatient, He sitteth between the Cherubim, be the earth never so unquiet.” Or, again, “The Lord is King, the earth may be glad thereof; yea, the multitude of the isles may be glad thereof: Clouds and darkness are round about Him, righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His seat. There shall go a fire before Him and burn up His enemies on every side. His lightnings gave shine unto the world: the earth saw it and was afraid.” That might be taken for a picture of war with the thunders and lightnings of its “red artillery.” Let us, if we would turn this occasion to due account, look up for a while from the human thunders and lightnings by which the earth and sea are now shaken; let us raise our eyes and our hearts to the Psalmist’s vision of God sitting on His throne, above all these earthly and human struggles and sufferings, and though clouds and darkness are round about Him, yet controlling them by His righteous judgment.

Let us look into this general consideration a little more particularly. War is the result of human passion, human error, and human sin. If only men were unselfish, wise, and true, there would be no occasion for the struggles from which it springs; but instead of that they are covetous, foolish, and blind, and God has so constituted mankind that the ultimate appeal of these passions and follies must be made to force; and in the ordinary course of His providence He leaves them to make that appeal. He lets their passions work themselves out to their natural results, and so bring their own punishment upon themselves. If, indeed, men sought His guidance and grace in all humility and earnestness before war broke out, we may be confident He would guide and control them; but the very danger of their pride and their passion is that it makes them forget Him, and then He suffers them to find their need of Him by leaving them to bear the consequences. But when those consequences have broken out into war, they are then, in the most absolute degree, subject to His over-ruling hand. It is an essential characteristic of war that it sets forces loose which are beyond calculation, and beyond human control. Ordinary ways of action are suspended, and we become subject to the most unexpected and most incalculable influences. We are beginning to see it ourselves in the present war. We are forced to resort to public measures which all confess to be absolutely unprecedented; and the whole world, old and new, is immersed in dangers and disorders never before dreamed of. But when men and nations are in this tumult and disorder and blindness, then they realize, as they too often fail to do in quiet times, that they are absolutely dependent on God. He has at His command infinite natural and spiritual forces by which the result of a war or a battle can be determined. As in the famous battle of Joshua, or in the destruction of the Spanish Armada in our own history, storms and tempests, or a mere turn in the weather, or it may be added, the invisible interposition of some angelic agent, may defeat all human schemes and determine the issue of a battle, and, through a battle, the fate of an Empire. Of great commanders, moreover, no less than of kings, the words of our Collect are true, that their hearts are in God’s rule and governance, and that He disposes and turns them as it seems best to His godly wisdom.

The message of the Bible, in fact, from first to last, the message of Jewish history, and the message of the Psalms, is that God is in a pre-eminent degree the “Lord of war,” with Whom it lies to bring on men the judgment of war, to control war, and to make wars to cease. “O come hither,” says the Psalm of my text, “behold the works of the Lord, what destruction He hath brought upon the earth. He maketh wars to cease in all the world, he breaketh the bow, and knappeth the spear in sunder, and burneth the chariots in the fire. Be still, then, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen and I will be exalted in the earth.” Or, as it is expressed in another Psalm, “There is no king that can be saved by the multitude of an host, neither is any mighty man delivered by much strength. A horse is counted but a vain thing to save a man, neither shall he deliver any man by his great strength. Behold the eye of the Lord is upon them that fear Him, upon them that put their trust in His mercy.” Or, once more, “We have heard with our ears, O God, our fathers have told us, what Thou hast done in their time of old; How Thou hast driven out the heathen with Thy hand, and planted them in; how Thou hast destroyed the nations and cast them out. For they gat not the land in possession through their own sword; neither was it their own arm that helped them; but Thy right hand and Thine arm, and the light of Thy countenance, because Thou hadst a favour unto them.”

The first conviction, then, with which we should come before God to-day is that, although the utmost efforts on our part are required, still, when we have used the last ounce of our strength, and made the last sacrifice of life and limb, we are absolutely dependent for the issue upon the will, the power, and the over-ruling providence of God. We are bound to fall at His feet as His helpless creatures, absolutely dependent on His hand. We are bound to recognize that the wealth and power we enjoy, the great position which this Empire occupies in the world, have been gifts from Him, and that we gat not this possession by our own sword; neither was it our own arm that helped us; but God’s right hand and God’s arm, and the light of His countenance, because He had a favour towards us, for some great purposes of His own.

But what were those purposes? If we feel that we are thus the instruments of God’s hand, to be used as He pleases, we must needs ask, with anxious earnestness, What are His great purposes? and can we know whether we are acting in accordance with them? We know that we are not in the hands of an arbitrary power or an unreasoning will. We know that whatever God does is done with reason and justice and love. Here, again, it is our privilege to have revealed to us, in God’s Word, the great purposes for which He is working. His methods and His ways of carrying His purposes out are beyond our comprehension, but He has graciously told us what those purposes are. Their great object is the manifestation of His glory, His truth, His love, to be the light, the salvation, the infinite happiness of man. That was the object of the whole of His work in establishing the people of Israel in their land, in protecting them, in bringing punishments upon them, in delivering them from their enemies, or allowing them to fall into captivity. By means of them--through their history, their Prophets, their Psalmists, and their Kings--He made known that grand revelation of Himself which is recorded in our Bibles. All these acts were done, and their memory is preserved, in order that all the world might see and learn that in knowledge of Him, in obedience to Him, in love to Him and prayer to Him, is life and health, in body and soul, in this world and in the next. Let us be assured that that remains His purpose, and the guiding rule of His providence, throughout all history, and in our own, to the present day. If God has given us wealth, and strength, and prosperity, and imperial power, we may be sure that it is in order that we may be His instruments for the spread of His Kingdom, for bringing the knowledge of Christ and of Christ’s salvation to the ends of the earth, that the love of Christ, the example of Christ, the law of Christ may be established throughout the world. Do not let us suppose that there is any other object whatever in God’s dispensations. The manifestation of God in Christ, and the bringing of all human souls, all human life, into harmony with it, into the full enjoyment of it, and consequently into perfect obedience to His will--this is the end of all the struggles, of all the wars, of all the sufferings of mankind, mysterious as they are, and utterly baffling to our feeble apprehension.

There is surely an infinite comfort in realizing this great revelation. If we grasp the assurance that this is the sure and certain end of God’s dispensations, we can bear with patience, and even with thankfulness, the sufferings and sorrows through which they are worked out. While we bitterly mourn the loss of those who are sacrificed in such a war as this, we can feel that they have laid down their lives in the eternal battle in which Christ is the Commander, and in which we are all taking part, and that we remain one with them, and they one with us, in serving Christ and asserting the will of God.

One army of the Living God,
To His command we bow,
Part of the host have crossed the flood,
And part are crossing now,

or will be crossing soon. Only let us take care, if we are to have the reward, hereafter, of having served in this great army, that we are working, fighting, dying, and suffering bereavement, in the cause of this great Commander and in accordance with His will.

But if these are the purposes with which God has directed all history, and controls all wars, we cannot dare to come before Him, and ask for His help, unless the spirit in which we are joining in this war is in harmony with His, and unless we mean, with His help, to act and fight in entire devotion to Him, and in obedience to Christ. If we fought merely to gain victory, to assert the supremacy of our Empire, to establish our superiority over other nations, we could not expect His countenance and help, and we should be affronting His Majesty and His Holiness by asking for it; but these are not our aims. They are, it appears, in the main, those of our enemy, and for that reason we may be confident that God’s face will be against them. But, so far as we are fighting for a kingdom and an Empire which acknowledges in all things the sovereignty of our Lord Jesus Christ, which endeavours to act, to govern, and to serve in accordance with His will, and which will promote and protect the spread of His Kingdom--so far as we are conscious in our consciences that that is our aim--we may confidently come before Him and appeal to Him to help us with His right hand and His holy arm. But we cannot thus serve Him and obey Him as a nation unless we obey and serve Him in our own individual lives; and when we kneel, therefore, before Him to-day we are called upon to pledge ourselves, with the utmost sincerity and earnestness, to give our hearts and wills and lives up to Him in all things, with greater truth and singleness of heart than we have ever yet realized.

If we look candidly into the recent life of our nation, it must, I fear, be acknowledged that we have in many respects grievously failed in this Christian spirit. The habits of our people have in too many respects declined from the Christian standard which was set us by our forefathers in their best days. The worship and service of God and Christ have not been held so high among us as the supreme duty of life. We see it in the increasing neglect of the public worship of God, in a less general piety of life, in a growing disposition to acquiesce in standards of action which are not in all respects those of the New Testament; in the failure to look to the authority of Christ and His Apostles as the supreme rule in all the relations of life, in the relations of men and women, in the ideals of domestic and private life. We have lived too much for this life and too little for the next. We have cared too much for time and too little for eternity. We shall not be able to fulfil the purposes of God for our nation and for the world unless we amend our lives in these respects, unless we humbly confess our failure before Him, and set ourselves resolutely to live more Christian lives in the future. If we kneel before Him this evening in this spirit of confession for the past, and of heartfelt devotion for the future, we may come boldly to His throne of grace; and we may be thankful to be assured that our country and our country’s cause, and the welfare of all who are dear to us, here and hereafter, are in His hands. You are invited to begin your supplication this evening with that penitential Psalm, in which David confessed from the bottom of his heart his own grievous sin, but was also inspired by God’s Holy Spirit to seek comfort and regeneration, righteousness and peace. That is the spirit in which we should approach God at all times, but especially in a time of sore trial like the present; and if we do so, we may confidently join in the concluding petition, in which the Psalmist beseeches God’s blessing upon His nation. “The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, shalt Thou not despise. O be favourable and gracious unto Zion; build Thou the walls of Jerusalem. Then shalt Thou be pleased with the sacrifice of righteousness,” with the devoted offerings and service of a regenerated and Christian nation. God grant it, for Christ’s sake.

THE ETERNAL SOURCE OF GOODNESS.

PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY CHURCH, MARGATE, NOVEMBER 7, 1915.

“_Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning._”--St. James i. 17.

In these words a singularly vivid picture is set before us. God is represented to us as the Sun in the Heavens, from Whom light and warmth are perpetually streaming. The text does not merely say that all good gifts come from above and that none but good gifts come from thence. It means also that those good gifts are perpetually being poured upon us, just as light and heat are perpetually flowing from the sun. But it points out one great difference between the physical sun and this Divine source of grace and glory. The sun and the other lights of the heavens which are dependent upon it are all liable to be obscured or eclipsed. They are “subject to variableness and shadow of turning,” that is, to the shadows occasioned by their turning in their daily revolutions, so that daylight is succeeded by the darkness of night, and the moon waxes and wanes. But the light of the Divine glory and grace is never thus obscured from us. It is perpetually shining, and we can enjoy its blessed influence at every moment. God is the Father of Lights--the Father of Light of all kinds; and all grace and truth are perpetually proceeding from Him. “Every good gift and every perfect boon is from above,” coming down continually from “the Father of Lights with Whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” This is the great truth which is embodied in the beautiful words of the Collect just used, “Lord of all power and might Who art the Author and Giver of all good things.”

This is the first grand truth which is revealed to us by our Christian faith. It is involved in the revelation of God to us as our Father in Heaven, and it is impressed on us in the Sermon on the Mount, when our Lord bids us live as “the children of our Father which is in Heaven: Who maketh the sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” It would be well for us to realize this more fully and constantly. We see the sun in the Heavens; we are sensible of its lifegiving influences day by day; but we do not always have so vividly before us the Supreme Sun of the spiritual Heavens, and we are tempted to live without the constant realization of His presence. There are, indeed, experiences which are a great trial to our faith in this constant Presence, and which even make men and women ask themselves in perplexity whether there can be, in reality, any such perpetually Divine source of all good things--whether any Divine Power is really at all times pouring the best blessing upon mankind. What is the meaning, for instance, many anxious hearts have asked themselves at a time like this--what is the meaning and the explanation of such fearful miseries as the world is now suffering through the present war? Can it be a God from Whom all good things are perpetually coming Who permits half the world to fall into such distresses and agonies as we have heard of lately, and are daily hearing? The evil in the world has at all times been a perplexity to faith, and when manifested on such a tremendous scale, when it rises before us in the monstrous form of an awful war, the question presses upon our hearts and minds with painful force. But the privilege of the Christian is to maintain through all these distresses the proclamation that the love of God, the goodness of God, the mercy of God, the blessing of God are still at work, notwithstanding the clouds with which they seem obscured. Clouds and darkness may be round about Him, but righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His throne.

The general explanation of this great mystery is that these sufferings are the means by which God asserts the supremacy of righteousness and truth. He has so ordered the world that unrighteousness, ungodliness, untruth, immorality of all kinds inevitably punish themselves by leading to appeals to force, and so provoke the wars and fightings of which St. James speaks in this Epistle. “From whence,” he says, “come wars and fightings among you? Come they not hence, even of your lusts, that war in your members? Ye lust and have not; ye kill, and desire to have and cannot obtain”--can there be a truer description, in brief, of the origin of the present war? These are God’s judgments, in which He so orders the world that nations and individuals punish themselves for their indulgence in covetous and unbridled passions. They will not submit to be checked by conscience or by reason, and therefore God leaves them to the natural consequences of their mutual lusts and violences. In fact, the miseries of war are a conspicuous instance of the great truth that good things are always coming from God. Vengeance for evil is a good thing; and the punishment, even the bitter punishment, of selfishness, whether in individuals or in national life, the severest punishments of covetousness, arrogance, forgetfulness of God, disobedience to Christ--these punishments are good things; and if God is chastising Europe for such sins, and ourselves in no small measure, He is doing it at once in judgment and in mercy. It is a warning to every nation, and to every man and woman, to consider in what respect they have been failing in their duty to God and to Christ, to their neighbour, and even to themselves, and to pray God to open their eyes and enable them to repent and amend. What we see before us in a convulsion like this, is the outburst of the lightnings and thunders of righteous judgment, and if it brings men to their knees in penitence and amendment of life, it may prove one of God’s greatest blessings to the world.

We may understand this the better if we consider, more particularly, the means by which God is always pouring upon the world those blessed influences of goodness and righteousness of which the text and the Collect speak. They tell us that He is like the sun in the heavens pouring His bright beams upon us and the world at large. Where is that Sun? It is in the Person of our Lord Jesus Christ, in all His words and deeds, and in those Scriptures which, as He said, testify of Him. The answer is contained in the truth that “God, Who, at sundry times and in divers manners spake in times past unto the fathers, by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son, Who is the brightness of His glory and the express image of His Person.” “No man,” we are told, “hath seen God at any time. The only begotten Son Who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him.” He declares Him in various ways. In the first place, the grace and truth and glory of God are seen in the Face of Jesus Christ, in His life as recorded in the Gospels, and in His words. “He that hath seen me,” said our Saviour Himself, “hath seen the Father.” It is God Himself Who is seen in every act and word of Jesus Christ, and if we want to know God, to realize His character and His will, we have only to study the life and words of our Lord, and we see it all in vivid human features. God in Christ is as visible to the eyes of our hearts and minds as the sun in the heavens. As the physical sun is visible to every human eye, so the sun of the spiritual world--God Himself--is visible to every human mind in the person of our Lord. This comparison is as old as the Psalms. “The heavens,” says the 19th Psalm, “declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth His handiwork,” and then it proceeds, “the law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul, the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.” The law of the Lord of which the Psalmist spoke was that revelation of the Will of God which was given to the Jews at sundry times and in divers manners, and is recorded in the ancient Scriptures. But that law is now summed up, explained, enlarged, and perfected in the face of Jesus Christ, and in His words. In Him is God to be seen. In Him is the source of the highest moral and spiritual goodness.