We mean hereby, that we believe that our Lord Jesus Christ fulfilled all sorrows which man can taste. He filled the cup of misery to the brim, and drained it to the dregs. He was afflicted in all David's afflictions, in the afflictions of all mankind. He bare all their sicknesses, and carried all their infirmities; and therefore we read this psalm upon Good Friday, upon the day in which He tasted death for every man, and went down into the lowest depths of terror, and shame, and agony, and death; and, worst of all, into the feeling that God had forsaken Him, that there was no help or hope for Him in heaven, as well as earth—no care or love in the great God, whose Son He was—went down, in a word, into hell; that hell whereof David and Heman, and Hezekiah after them, had said, "Shall the dust give thanks unto thee? and shall it declare thy truth?"—"Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thy Holy One to see corruption."—"My life draweth nigh unto hell. . . I am like one stript among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, whom thou rememberest no more; and they are cut off from thy hand. . . . Wilt thou show wonders to the dead? and shall the dead arise and praise thee? Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? and thy righteousness in the land of destruction?"—"For the grave cannot praise thee; death cannot celebrate thee: they that go down to the pit cannot hope for thy truth."

Even into that lowest darkness, where man feels, even for one moment, that God is nothing to him, and he is nothing to God—even into that Jesus condescended to go down for us. That worst of all temptations, of which David only tasted a drop when he cried out, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Jesus drained to the very dregs for us.— He went down into hell for us, and conquered hell and death, and the darkness of the unknown world, and rose again glorious from them, that He might teach us not to fear death and hell; that He might know how to comfort us in the hour of death: and in the day of judgment, when on our sick bed, or in some bitter shame and trouble, the lying devil is telling us that we are damned and lost, and forsaken by God, and every sin we ever did rises up and stares us in the face.

Truly He is a king!—a king for rich and poor, young and old, Englishmen and negro; all alike He knows them, He feels for them, He has tasted sorrow for them, far more than David did for those poor, oppressed, sinful Jews of his. Read those Psalms of David; for they speak not only of David, now long since dead and gone, but of the blessed Jesus, who lives and reigns over us now at this very moment. Read them, for they are inspired; the honest words of a servant of God crying out to the same God, the same Saviour and Deliverer as we have. And His love has not changed. His arm is not shortened that He cannot save. Your words need not change. The words of those psalms in which David prayed, in them you and I may pray. Right out of the depths of his poor distracted heart they came. Let them come out of our hearts too. They belong to us more than even they did to the Jews, for whom David wrote them—more than even they did to David himself; for Jesus has fulfilled them—filled them full—given them boundlessly more meaning than ever they had before, and given us more hope in using them than ever David had: for now that love and righteousness of God, in which David only trusted beforehand, has come down and walked on this earth in the shape of a poor man, Jesus Christ, the Son of the maiden of Bethlehem.

Oh, you who are afflicted, pray to God in those psalms; not merely in the words of them, but in the spirit of them. And to do that, you must get from God the spirit in which David wrote them—the Spirit of God. Pray for that Spirit; for the spirit of patience, which made David wait God's good time to right him, instead of trying, as too many do, to right himself by wrong means; for the spirit of love, which taught David to return good for evil; for the spirit of fellow- feeling, which taught David to care for others as well as himself; and in that spirit of love, do you pray for others while you are praying for yourself. Pray for that Spirit which taught David to help and comfort those who were weaker than himself, that you in your time may be able and willing to comfort and help those who are weaker than yourselves. And above all, pray for the Spirit of faith, which made David certain that oppression and wrong-doing could not stand; that the day must surely come when God would judge the world righteously, and hear the cry of the afflicted, and deliver the outcast and poor, that the man of the world might be no more exalted against them. Pray, in short, for the Spirit of Christ; and then be sure He will hear your prayers, and answer them, and show Himself a better friend, and a truer King to you, than ever David showed himself to those poor Jews of old. He will deliver you out of all your troubles—if not in this life, yet surely in the life to come; and though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, yet the peace of God shall keep your hearts and minds in Him who loved you, and gave Himself for you, that you might inherit all heaven and earth in Him.



XXVI—THE VALUE OF LAW



Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God. The powers that be are ordained of God.—ROMANS xiii. 1.

What is the difference between a civilised man and a savage? You will say: A civilised man can read and write; he has books and education; he knows how to make numberless things which makes his life comfortable to him. He can get wealth, and build great towns, sink mines, sail the sea in ships, spread himself over the face of the earth, or bring home all its treasures, while the savages remain poor, and naked, and miserable, and ignorant, fixed to the land in which they chance to have been born.

True: but we must go a little deeper still. Why does the savage remain poor and wretched, while the civilised people become richer and more prosperous? Why, for instance, do the poor savage gipsies never grow more comfortable or wiser—each generation of them remaining just as low as their forefathers were, or, indeed, getting lower and fewer? for the gipsies, like all savages, are becoming fewer and fewer year by year, while, on the other hand, we English increase in numbers, and in wealth, and knowledge; and fresh inventions are found out year by year, which give fresh employment and make life more safe and more pleasant.

This is the reason: That the English have laws and obey them, and the gipsies have none. This is the whole secret. This is why savages remain poor and miserable, that each man does what he likes without law. This is why civilised nations like England thrive and prosper, because they have laws and obey them, and every man does not do what he likes, but what the law likes. Laws are made not for the good of one person here, or the other person there, but for the good of all; and, therefore, the very notion of a civilised country is, a country in which people cannot do what they like with their own, as the savages do. "Not do what he likes with his own?" Certainly not; no one can or does. If you have property, you cannot spend it all as you like. You have to pay a part of it to the government, that is, into the common stock, for the common good, in the shape of rates and taxes, before you can spend any of it on yourself. If you take wages, you cannot spend them all upon yourself and do what you like with them. If you do not support your wife and family out of them, the law will punish you. You cannot do what you like with your own gun, for you may not shoot your neighbour's cattle or game with it. You cannot do what you like with your own hands, for the law forbids you to steal with them. You cannot do what you like with your own feet, for the law will punish you for trespassing on your neighbour's ground without his leave. In short, you can only do with your own what will not hurt your neighbour, in such matters as the law can take care of. And more, in any great necessity the law may actually hurt you for the good of the nation at large. The law may compel you to sell your land, to your own injury, if it is wanted for a railroad. The law may compel you, as it did fifty years ago, to serve as a soldier in the militia, to your own injury, if there is a fear of foreign invasion; so that the law is above each and all of us. Our own wills are not our masters. No man is his own master. The law is the master of each and all of us, and if we will not obey it willingly, it can make us obey unwillingly.

Can make us? Ay, but ought it to make us? Is it right that the law should over-ride our own free wills, and prevent our doing what we like with our own?

It is right—absolutely right. St. Paul tells us what gives law this authority: "There is no power but of God. The powers that be are ordained of God." And he tells us also why this authority is given to the law. "Rulers," he says, "are not a terror to good works, but to evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of those who administer the law? Do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise from them, for they are God's ministers to thee for good."

For good, you see. For the good of mankind it was, that God put into their hearts and reasons, that notion of making laws, and appointing kings and magistrates to see that those laws are obeyed. For our good. For without law no man's life, or family, or property would be safe. Every man's private selfishness, and greediness, and anger, would struggle without check to have its way, and there would be no bar or curb to keep each and every man from injuring each and every man else; so the strong would devour the weak, and then tear each other in pieces afterwards. So it is among the savages. They have little or no property, for they have no laws to protect property; and therefore every man expects his neighbour to steal from him, and finds it his shortest plan to steal from his neighbour, instead of settling down to sow corn which he will have no chance of eating, or build houses which may be taken from him at night by some more strong and cunning savage. There is no law among savages to protect women and children against the men, and therefore the women are treated worse than beasts, and the children murdered to save the trouble of rearing them. Every man's hand is against his neighbour. No one feels himself safe, and therefore no one thinks it worth while to lay up for the morrow. No one expects justice and mercy to be done to him, and therefore no one thinks it worth while to do justice and mercy to others. And thus they live in continual fear and quarrelling, feeding like wild animals on game or roots, often, when they have bad luck in their hunting, on offal which our dogs would refuse, and dwindle away and become fewer and wretcheder year by year; in this way do the savages in New South Wales live to this day, for want of law.

It is for our good, then, that God has put into the heart of man to make laws, and to obey them as sacred and divine things. For our good, in order to save us from sinking down into the same state of poverty and misery in which the savages are. For our good, because we are fallen creatures, with selfish and corrupt wills, continually apt to break loose, and please ourselves at the expense of our neighbours. For our good, because, however fallen we are, we are still brothers, members of God's family, bound to each other by duty and relationship, if not by love.

Just as in a family, if parents, brothers, and sisters will not do their duty to each other lovingly and of their free will, the law interferes, and the custom of the country interferes, and the opinion of neighbours interferes, and says: "You may not love your parents: but you have no right to leave them to starve." "You may not love your brothers: but if you try to injure and slander them, you are doing an unnatural and hateful thing, abhorred by God and man, and you must expect us to treat you accordingly, as a wild beast who does not feel the common laws of nature and right and wrong." So with the law of the land. The law is meant to remind us more or less that we are brothers, members of one body; that we owe a duty to each other; that we are all equal in God's sight, who is no respecter of persons, or of rank, or of riches, any more than the law is when it punishes the greatest nobleman as severely as the poorest labourer. The law is meant to remind us that God is just; that when we injure each other, we sin against God; that God's rule and law is, that each transgression should receive its just reward, and that, therefore, because man is made in the likeness of God, man is bound, as far as he can, to visit every offence with due and proportionate punishment. And the law punishes, as St. Paul says, in God's name, and for God's sake. The magistrate is a witness for God's righteous government of the world, the minister of God's vengeance against evil-doers, to remind all continually that evil-doing has no place, and cannot prosper, and must not be allowed, upon this God's earth whereon we live.

But what if the laws are unfair, and punish only some sorts of evil- doers and not others? What if they are like spiders' webs, which catch the little flies, and let the great wasps break through? What if they punish poor and weak offenders, and let the rich and powerful sinners escape? "Obey them still," says St. Paul. In his time and country the laws were as unfair in that way as laws ever were, and yet he tells Christians to obey them for conscience's sake. Thank God that they do punish weak offenders. Pray God that the time may come when they may be strong enough to punish great offenders also. But, in the meantime, see that they have not to punish you. As far as the laws go, they are right and good. As far as they keep down any sort of wrong-doing whatsoever, they are God's ordinances, and you must obey them for God's sake.

But what if the laws are not only unfair and partial, but also unjust and wrong? Are we to obey them then? Obey them still, says St. Paul. Of course, if they command you to do a clearly wrong thing; if, for instance, the law commanded you to worship idols, or to commit adultery, there is no question then; such laws cannot be God's ordinance. The laws can only be God's ordinance as far as they agree with what we know of God's will written in our hearts, and written in His holy Bible. Then a man must resist the law to the death, if need be, as the old martyrs did, dying as witnesses for God's righteous and eternal law, against man's false and unrighteous law. It is a very difficult thing, no doubt, to tell where to draw the line in such matters. But we, thank God, here in England now, have no need to puzzle our heads with such questions. Every man's conscience is free here, and he has full liberty to worship God as he thinks best, provided that by so doing he does not interfere with his neighbour's character, or property, or comfort. There is no single law in England now, that I know of, which a man has any need to refuse to obey, let his conscience be as tender as it may. And as for laws which we think hurtful to the country, or hurtful to any particular class in the country, our thinking them hurtful is no reason that we should not obey them. As long as they are law, they are God's ordinance, and we have no right to break them. They may be useful after all. Or even if they are hurtful in some way, still God may be bringing good out of them in some other way, of which we little dream, as He has often done out of laws and customs which seem at first sight most foolish and hurtful, and yet which He endured and winked at, for the sake of bringing good out of evil. At all events, whatsoever laws are here in England, are made by the men whom we English have chosen, as the men most fit and wise to make them, and we are bound to abide by them. If Parliament is not wise enough to make perfectly good laws, that is no one's fault but our own; for if we were wise, we should choose wise law-makers, and we must be filled with the fruit of our own devices. As long as these laws have been made and passed, by Commons, Lords, and Queen, according to the ancient forms and constitution which God has taught our forefathers from time to time for more than a thousand years, and which have had God's blessing and favour on them, and made us, from the least of all nations, the greatest nation on the earth; in short, as long as those laws are made according to law, so long we are bound to believe them to be God's ordinance, and obey them. But understand; that is no reason why we should not try to get them improved; for when they are changed and done away according to the same law which made them, that will be a sign that they are God's ordinances no longer; that God thinks we have no more need for them, and does not require us to keep them. But as long as any law is what St. Paul calls "the powers that be," obeyed it must be, not only for wrath, but for conscience's sake.

That is a very important part of the matter. Obey the law, St. Paul says, not only for wrath, that is, not only for fear of punishment, but for conscience's sake. Even if you do not expect to be punished; even if you think no one will ever find out that you have broken the law, remember it is God's ordinance. He sees you. Do not hurt your own conscience, and deaden your own sense of right and wrong, by breaking the least or the most unjust law in the slightest point.

For instance: some people think the income-tax is very unfair; and therefore they think there is no harm in cheating the revenue a little, by making out their income less than it is. Others, again, think the laws against smuggling unjust and harsh; and therefore they see no harm in trying to avoid paying duty on goods which they bring home, whenever they have an opportunity, or buying cheap goods, which they must know from their price are smuggled. Others, again, think the game laws are unfair, and therefore see no harm in going out shooting on their own lands without a licence; while many see no harm, or say they see no harm, in poaching on other people's grounds, and killing game contrary to law wherever they can. That it is wrong to break the law in these two first cases, you all know in your own hearts. On the matter of poaching, some of you, I know, have many very mistaken notions. But, my friends, I ask you only to look at the sin and misery which poaching causes, if you want to see that those who break the law do indeed break the ordinance of God, and that God's laws avenge themselves. Look at the idleness, the untidiness, the deceit, the bad company, the drunkenness, the misery and sin, to man, woman, and child, which that same poaching brings about, and then see how one little sin brings on many great ones; how a man, by despising the authority of law, and fancying that he does no harm in disobeying the laws, from his own fancy about poaching being no harm, falls into temptation and a snare, and pierces himself through with many sorrows. My young friends, believe my words. Avoid poaching, even once in a way. The beginning of sin is like the letting out of water; no one can tell where it will stop. He who breaks the law in little things will be tempted to go on and break it in greater and greater things. He who begins by breaking man's law, which is the pattern of God's law, will be tempted to go on and break God's law also. Is it not so? There is no use telling me, "The game is no one's; there is no harm in taking it." Light words of that kind will not do to answer God with. You know there is harm in taking it; for you know, as well as I do, that you cannot go after game without neglecting your work to get it; or without going to the worst of public-houses, among the worst of company, to sell it. You know, as well as I do, that hand in hand with poaching go lying, and idling, and sneaking, and fear, and boasting, and swearing, and drinking, and the company of bad men and bad women. And then you say there is no harm in poaching. Do you suppose that I do not know, as well as any one of you here, what goes to the snaring of a hare, and the selling of a hare, and the spending of the ill-got price of a hare? My dear young men, I know that poaching, like many other sins, is tempting: but God has told us to flee from temptation—to resist the devil, and he will flee from us. If we are to give up ourselves without a struggle to every pleasant thing which tempts us, we shall soon be at the devil's door. We were sent into the world to fight against temptation and to conquer it. We were sent into the world to do what God likes, not what we like; and therefore we were sent into the world to obey the laws of the land wherein we live, be they better or worse; because if we break one law because we don't like it, our neighbour may break another because he don't like that, and so forth; till there is neither law, nor peace, nor safety, but every man doing what is right in his own eyes, which is sure to end by every man's doing what is right in the devil's eyes. We were sent into the world to live as brothers, under laws which make us give up our own wills and selfish lusts for the common good. And if we find it difficult to keep the laws, if we are tempted to break the laws, God has promised His Spirit to those who ask Him. God has promised His Spirit to us. If we pray for that Spirit night and morning, He will make it easy for us to keep the laws. He will make us what our Lord was before us, humble, patient, loving, manful and strong enough to restrain our fancies and appetites, and to give up our wills for the good of our neighbours, anxious and careful to avoid all appearance of evil, trusting that because God is just, and God is King, all laws which are not wicked are His ordinance, and therefore being obedient to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake, even as Jesus Christ Himself was, who, though He was Lord of all, paid taxes and tribute money to the Roman government, like the rest of the Jews, and kept the law of Moses perfectly, and was baptised with John's baptism, to show that in all just and reasonable things we are to obey the laws and customs of our forefathers, in the country to which it has pleased the Lord that we should belong.



XXVII—THE SOURCE OF LAW



Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God. The powers that be are ordained of God.—ROMANS xiii. 1.

In this chapter, which we read for the second lesson for this afternoon's service, St. Paul gives good advice to the Romans, and equally good advice to us.

Of course what he says must be equally good for us, and for all people, at all times, in all countries, as long as time shall last; because St. Paul spoke by the Spirit of God, who is God eternal, and therefore cannot change His mind, but lays down, by the mouth of His apostles and prophets, the everlasting laws of right and wrong, which are always equally good for all.

But there is something in this lesson which makes it especially useful to us; because we English are in some very important matters very like the Romans to whom St. Paul wrote; though in others, thanks to Almighty God, we are still very unlike them.

Now, these old Romans, as I have often told you, had risen to be the greatest and mightiest people in the world, and to conquer many foreign countries, and set up colonies of Romans in them, very much as the English have done in India, and North America, and Australia: so that the little country of Italy, with its one great city of Rome, was mistress of vast lands far beyond the seas, ten times as large as itself, just as this little England is.

But it is not so much this which I have to speak to you about now, as how this Rome became so great; for it was at first nothing but a poor little country town, without money, armies, trade, or any of those things which shallow-minded people fancy are the great strength of a nation. True, all those things are good; but they are useless and hurtful—and, what is more, they cannot be got—without something better than them; something which you cannot see nor handle; something spiritual, which is the life and heart of a country or nation, and without which it can never become great. This the old Romans had; and it made them become great. This we English have had for now fifteen hundred years; even when our forefathers were heathens, like the Romans, before we came into this good land of England, while we were poor and simple people, living in the barren moors of Germany, and the snowy mountains of Norway; even then we had this wonderful charm, by which nations are sure to become great and powerful at last; and in proportion as we have remembered and acted upon it, we English have thriven and spread; and whenever we have forgotten it and broken it, we have fallen into distress, and poverty, and shame, over the whole land.

Now, what is this wonderful charm which made the old Romans and we English great, which is stronger than money, and armies, and trade, and all the things which we can see and handle?

St. Paul tells us in the text: "Let every soul be subject to the higher powers. For there is no power but of God. The powers that be are ordained of God."

To respect the law; to believe that God wills men to live according to law; and that He will teach men right and good laws; that magistrates who enforce the laws are God's ministers, God's officers and servants; that to break the laws is to sin against God;—that is the charm which worked such wonders, and will work them to the end of time.

So you see it was a very proper thing for St. Paul, when he wrote to these Romans after they became Christians, to speak to them as he does in this chapter. They might have fancied, and many did fancy, that because they were Jesus Christ's servants now, they need not obey their heathen rulers and laws any more. But St. Paul says: "No; Jesus Christ's being King of Kings, is only the strongest possible reason for your obeying these heathen rulers. For if He is King of all the earth, He is King of Rome also, and of all her colonies; and therefore you may be sure that He would not leave these Roman rulers, and laws here if He did not think it right and fitting. If Jesus Christ is Lord of lords He is Lord of these Roman rulers, and they are His ministers and stewards; and you must obey them, and pay taxes to them for conscience's sake, as unto the Lord, and not unto man."

So you see that St. Paul gave these Roman Christians no new commandment on these matters; nothing different from what their old heathen forefathers had believed. For the law which he mentions in verse 9, "Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal," etc., had been for centuries past part of the old Roman law, as well as of Moses' law.

Those old heathen Romans believed, and rightly, that all law and order came from the great God of gods, whom they called in their tongue Jupiter, that is, the Heavenly Father. They believed that He would bless those who kept the laws; who kept their oaths and agreements, and the laws about government, about marriage, about property, about inheritance; and that He would surely punish those who broke the laws, who defrauded their neighbours of their rights, who swore falsely against their neighbour, or broke their agreements, who were unfaithful to their wives and husbands, or in any way offended against justice between man and man. And they believed too, and rightly, that as long as they kept the laws, and lived justly and orderly by them, the great Heavenly Father would protect and prosper their town of Rome, and make it grow great and powerful, because they were living as He would have men live; not doing each what was right in the sight of his own eyes, but conquering their own selfish wills and private fancies, for the sake of their neighbour's good, and the good of his country, that they might all help and trust each other, as fellow-citizens of one nation.

Only St. Paul had told them: Your forefathers were right in fancying that law and right came from the great God of gods: but they knew hardly anything, or rather, in time they forgot almost everything, about that Heavenly Father. In their ignorance they mixed up the belief in the one great almighty and good God, which dwells in the hearts of all men, with filthy fables and superstitions till they came to fancy that there were many gods and not one, and that these many gods were sinful, foul, proud, and cruel, as fallen men. But you have been brought back to the knowledge of the one true, and righteous, and loving God, which your forefathers lost. He has revealed and shown Himself, and what He is like, in His Son Jesus Christ. He is love, and wisdom, and justice, and order itself; and, therefore, you must be sure, even more sure than your old heathen forefathers, that He cares for a nation being at peace and unity within itself, governed by wise laws, doing justice between man and man, and keeping order throughout all its business, that every man may do his work and enjoy his wages without hindrance, or confusion, or fear, or robbery and oppression from those who are stronger than he.

And so St. Paul says to them: "You must believe that power and law come from God, far more firmly and clearly than ever your heathen forefathers did."

Now that St. Paul was right in this we may see from the Old Testament. In the first lesson for this afternoon's service, we read how Jeremiah was sent with the most awful warnings to the king, and the queen, and the crown prince of his country. And why? Because they had broken the laws; because, in a word, they had been unfaithful stewards and ministers of the Lord God, who had given them their power and kingdom, and would demand a strict account of all which He had committed to their charge. But in the same book of the prophet Jeremiah we read more than this; we read exactly what St. Paul says about the heathen Roman governors: for the Lord God, who is the Lord Jesus Christ, sent Jeremiah with a message to all the heathen kings round about, to tell them that He was their Lord and Master, that He had given them their power, heathens as they were, because it seemed fit to Him, and that now, for their sins, He was going to deliver them over into the hand of another heathen, His servant Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon; and that whosoever would not serve Nebuchadnezzar, the Lord God would punish him with sword, and famine, and pestilence till he had consumed them. And the first four chapters of the book of Daniel, noble and wonderful as they are, seem to me to have been put into the Bible simply to teach us this one thing, that heathen rulers, as well as Christians, are the Lord's servants, and that their power is ordained by God. For these chapters are entirely made up of the history, how God, by His prophet Daniel, taught the heathen king Nebuchadnezzar that he was God's minister and steward. And the latter part of the book of Daniel is the account of his teaching the same thing to another heathen, Cyrus the great and good king of Persia. And here St. Paul teaches the Christian Romans just the same thing about their heathen governors and heathen laws, that they are the ministers and the ordinance of God.

Now, our own English forefathers, as I said before, believed this same thing; and if I had time, I could show you, I think, plainly enough from God's dealings with England, how He has blest and prospered us whensoever we have acted up to it. But whether we have believed it or not, there is enough in our English laws, and in our English Prayer Book too, to witness for it and remind us of it.

The very title which we give the Queen, "Queen by the grace of God;" the solemn prayers for her when she is crowned and anointed, not in her own palace, or in the House of Parliament, but in the Church of God at Westminster; the prayers which we have just offered up for the Queen, for the government, and for the magistrates—these are all so many signs and tokens to us that they are God's stewards, called to do God's work, and that we must pray for God's grace to help them to fulfil their calling. And are not those ten commandments which stand in every church, a witness of the same thing? They are the very root of all law whatsoever. And more, the solemn oath which a witness takes in the court of justice, what is it but a sign of the same thing, that our forefathers, who appointed these forms, believed that law and justice were holy things, and that he who goes into a court of law goes into the presence of God Himself, and confesses, when he promises to speak the truth, so help him God, that God is the protector and the avenger of law and justice?

But some people, and especially young and light-hearted persons, are ready to say: "Obey the powers that be, whosoever they may be, good or bad, and believe that to break their laws is to sin against God? We might as well be slaves at once. A man has a right to his own opinion; and if he does not think a law good, how can he be bound to obey it?"

You will often hear such words as those when you go out into the world, into great towns, where men meet together much. Let me give you, young people, a little advice about that beforehand; for, fine as it sounds, it is hollow and false at root.

If you wish to be really free, and to do what you like, like what is right; and do that, says St. Paul, and then the law will not interfere with you: "For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: for he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil." And then he sums up what doing right is, in one short sentence: "Love thy neighbour as thyself; for love is the fulfilling of the law." All that the laws want to make you do, is to behave like men who do love their neighbours as themselves, and therefore do them no harm—to behave like men who are ready to give up their own private wills and pleasures, and even their own private property, if wanted, for the good of their neighbours and their country. Therefore the law calls on you to pay rates and taxes, which are to be spent for the good of the nation at large. And if you love your neighbour as yourself, and have the good of everyone round you at heart, you will no more grudge paying rates and taxes for their benefit than you will grudge spending money to support and educate your own children. And so you will be free, free to do what you like, because you like, from the fear and love of God, to do those right things which the law is set to make you do.

But some may say: "That is not what we mean by being free. We mean having a share in choosing Members of Parliament, and so in making the laws and governing the country. When people can do that the country is a free country."

Well, my friends, and it is a strange thing, or rather not a strange thing, if we will but study our Bibles, that a country cannot be free in that way, unless the people of it do really believe that the powers that be are ordained of God. Instead of that faith making the old Romans slavish, or careless what laws were made, or how they were governed, as some fancy it would make a people, they were as free a people, and freer almost than we English now. They chose their own magistrates, and they made their own laws, and prospered by so doing. And why? Because they believed that laws came from God; and, therefore, they not only obeyed the laws when they were made, but they had heart and spirit to help to make them, because they trusted that The Heavenly Father, who loved justice, would teach them to be just, and that The God who protected laws and punished law-breakers, would put into their minds how to make the laws well; and so they were not afraid to govern themselves, because they believed that God would enable them to govern themselves well, and therefore they were free. And so far from their having a slavish spirit in them, they were the most bold and independent people of the whole earth. Their soldiers conquered almost every nation against whom they fought, because they always obeyed their officers dutifully and faithfully, believing that it was their duty to God to obey, and to die, if need was, for their country. Old history is full of tales, which will never be forgotten, I trust, till the world's end, of the noble deeds of their men, ay, and even of their women, who counted their own lives worthless in comparison with the good of their country, and died in torments rather than break the laws, or do what they knew would injure the people to whom they belonged.

And so with us English. For hundreds of years we have been growing more and more free, and more and more well-governed, simply because we have been acting on St. Paul's doctrine—obeying the powers that be, because they are ordained by God. It is the Englishman's respect for law, as a sacred thing, which he dare not break, which has made him, sooner or later, respected and powerful wherever he goes to settle in foreign lands; because foreigners can trust us to be just, and to keep our promises, and to abide by the laws which we have laid down. It is the English respect for law, as a sacred thing, which has made our armies among the bravest and the most successful on earth; because they know how to obey their officers, and are therefore able to fight and to endure as men should do. And as long as we hold to that belief we shall prosper at home and abroad, and become more and more free, and more and more strong; because we shall be united, helping each other, trusting each other, knowing what to expect of each other, because we all honour and obey the same laws.

And, on the other hand, have we not close to us, in France, a fearful sign and proof from God that without the fear of God no people can be free? Three times in the last sixty years have the French risen up against evil rulers, and driven them out. And have they been the better for it? They are at this very moment in utter slavery to a ruler more lawless than ever oppressed them before. And why? Because they did not believe that law came from God, and that the powers that be are ordained by Him. Therefore, whenever they were oppressed, they did not try to right themselves by lawful ways, according to the old English God-fearing custom, but to break down the old law by riot and bloodshed, and then to set up new laws of their own. But those new laws would never stand. They made them, but they would not obey them when they were made, and they could not make others obey them; because they had no real reverence for law, and did not believe that law came from God, or that His Spirit would give them understanding to make good laws. They talked loud about the power and rights of the people, and that whatever the people willed was right: but they said nothing about the power and rights of the Lord God; they forgot that it is only what God has willed from everlasting that is right; and so they made laws in the strength of their own hearts, according to what was right in the sight of their own eyes, to please themselves. How could they respect the laws, when the laws were only copies of their own selfish fancies? So, because they made them to please themselves, they soon broke them to please themselves. And so came more lawlessness and riot, and confusion worse confounded, till, of course, the strongest, and cunningest, and most shameless got the upper hand; and they were plunged, poor creatures! into the same pit of misery out of which they had been trying to deliver themselves in their own strength, for a sign and an example that the Lord is King, and not man at all, and that the fear of the Lord is the only beginning of wisdom.

And very much the same sad fate had happened to the Romans a little before St. Paul's time. They gave up their ancient respect for law; they broke the laws, and ran into all kinds of violence, and riot, and filthy sin; and therefore God took away their freedom from them, because they were not fit for it, and delivered them over into the hand of one cruel tyrant after another; and perhaps the cruellest of them all was the man who was emperor of Rome in St. Paul's time. Therefore it was that St. Paul says to them: Love each other, and obey the laws, "knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep."

As much as to say: "Your souls have fallen asleep; you have been in a dark night, not seeing that God would avenge you of all these sins of yours; that God's eye was on them: you have fallen asleep and forgotten your forefathers' belief, that God loves law, and order, and justice, and will punish those who break through them. But now the Lord Jesus, the light of the world, is come to awaken you, and to open your eyes to see the truth about this, and to show you that you are in God's kingdom, and that God commands you to repent, and to obey Him, and do justly and righteously. Therefore awake out of your sleep; give up the works of darkness, those mean and wicked habits which were contrary to the good old laws of your forefathers, and which you were at heart ashamed of, and tried to hide even while you indulged in them. Open your eyes, and see that God is near you, your Judge, your King, seeing through and through your souls, keen and sharp to discern the secret thoughts and intents of the heart, so that all things are naked and open in the sight of Him with whom we have to do."

And so I may say to you, my friends, it is high time for us to awake out of sleep. The people in England, religious as well as others, have fallen asleep of late years too much about this matter. They have forgotten that God is King, that magistrates are God's ministers. They talk as if laws were meant to be only the device of man's will, to serve men's private interests and selfishness; and therefore they have lost very much of their respect for law, and their care to make good laws for the future. And it is high time for us, while all the nations of Europe are tottering and crumbling round us, to awake out of sleep on this matter. We must open our eyes and see where we are. For we are in God's kingdom. God's Bible, God's churches, God's commandments, and all the solemn old law forms of England witness to us that God is King, set in the throne which judges right; that order and justice, fellow-feeling and public spirit, are His gifts, His likeness, on which He looks down with loving care and protection; and that if we forget that, and begin to fancy that law stands merely by the will of the many, or by the will of the stronger, or even by the will of the wiser—by any will of man in short; we shall end by neither being able to make just laws any more, nor to obey those which we have, by the blessing of God, already.



XXVIII—THE EDUCATION OF A HEATHEN



Now I Nebuchadnezzar praise, and extol, and honour the King of heaven, all whose works are truth, and His ways judgment; and those that walk in pride He is able to abase.—DANIEL iv. 37.

We read for the first lesson to-day two chapters out of the book of Daniel. Those who love to study their Bibles, have read often, of course, not only these two chapters, but the whole book.

And I would advise all of you who wish to understand God's dealings with mankind, to study this book of Daniel, and especially at this present time.

I do not wish you to study it merely on account of those prophecies in it, which many wise and good men think foretell the dates of our Lord's first and second comings, and of the end of the world. I am not skilled, my friends, in that kind of wisdom. I cannot tell you what God will do hereafter. But I think that the book of Daniel like the other prophets, tells us what God is always doing on earth, and so gives us certain and eternal rules by which we may understand strange and terrible events, wars, distress of nations, the fall of great men, and the suffering of innocent men, when we see them happen, as we may see any day—perhaps very soon indeed.

The great lesson, I think, that this book of Daniel teaches us is, that God is not the Lord of the Jews only, or of Christians only, but of the whole earth; that the heathens are under His moral law and government, as well as we; and that, as St. Peter says, God is no respecter of persons: but in every nation, he that feareth God, and worketh righteousness, is accepted of him. For the history of Nebuchadnezzar seems to me to be the history of God's educating a heathen and an idolater to know Him. And we must always remember, that as far as we can see, it was because Nebuchadnezzar was faithful to the light which he had, that God gave him more. Of course he had his sins; the Bible tells us what they were; just the sins which one would expect of a man brought up a heathen and an idolater; of one who was a great conqueror, and had gained many bloody battles, and learned to hold men's lives very cheap; of one who was an absolute emperor, with no law but his own will, furious at any contradiction; of a man of wonderful power of mind—confident in himself, his own power, his own cunning. But he seems not to have been a bad man, considering his advantages. The Bible never speaks harshly of him, though he carried away the Jews captive to Babylon. In all that fearful war, Nebuchadnezzar was in the right, and the Jews in the wrong; so at least Jeremiah the prophet declared. Nebuchadnezzar saved and respected Jeremiah; and Daniel seems to have regarded the great conqueror with real respect and affection. When Daniel says to him, "O king, live for ever," and tells him that he is the head of gold, and prays that his fearful dream may come true of his enemies and not of him, I cannot believe that the prophet was using mere empty phrases of court-flattery. He really felt, I doubt not, that Nebuchadnezzar was a great and good king, as kings went then, and his government a gain (as it easily might be) to the nations whom he had conquered, and that it was good that he should reign as long as possible.

And we may well believe Daniel's interest in this great king, when we consider how teachable Nebuchadnezzar showed himself under God's education of him, so proving that there was in him the honest and good heart, which, when The Word is sown in it, will bring forth fruit, thirty-fold or a hundred-fold, according to the talents which God has bestowed on each man.

This first lesson we read in the first chapter of Daniel. He dreamt a dream. He felt that it was a very wonderful one: but he forgot what it was. None of the magicians of Babylon could tell him. A young Jew, named Daniel, told him the dream and its meaning, and declared at the same time that he had found it out by no wisdom of his own, but God had revealed it to him. Nebuchadnezzar learned his lesson, and confessed Daniel's God to be a God of gods and a Lord of kings, and a revealer of secrets, seeing that Daniel could reveal that secret; and forthwith, like a wise prince, advanced Daniel and his companions to places of the highest authority and trust.

But Nebuchadnezzar required another lesson. He had learned that the God of the Jews was wiser than all the planets and heavenly lords and gods whom the Babylonian magicians consulted; he had not learned that that same God of the Jews was the Creator and Lord of heaven and earth. He had learned that the God of heaven favoured him, and had helped him toward his power and glory; but he thought that for that very reason the power and glory were his own—that he had a right over the souls and consciences of his subjects, and might make them worship what he liked, and how he liked.

Three Jews, whom he had set over the affairs of Babylon, refused to worship the golden image which he had set up, and were cast into a fiery furnace, and forthwith miraculously delivered, and beheld by Nebuchadnezzar walking unhurt and loose in the midst of the furnace, and with them a fourth, whose form was like the form of the Son of God.

So Nebuchadnezzar was taught that this God of the Jews was the Lord of men's souls and consciences; that they were to obey God rather than man. So he was taught that the God of the Jews was no mere star or heavenly influence who could help men's fortunes, or bestow on them a certain fixed destiny; but a living person, the Lord and Master of the fire, and of all the powers of the earth, who could change and stop those powers at His will, to deliver those who trusted in Him and obeyed Him.

And this lesson, too, Nebuchadnezzar learned. He confessed his mistake upon the spot, just in the way in which we should have expected a great Eastern king to do, though not in the most enlightened or merciful way. He "blessed the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who hath sent His angel, and delivered His servants who trusted in Him. Therefore I make a decree, that every people, nation, and language, which speak anything amiss against the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, shall be cut in pieces, and their houses be made a dunghill: because there is no other God that can deliver after this sort."

But there was still one deep mistake lying in the great king's heart which required to be rooted out. He had learnt that Jehovah, the God of the Jews, was a revealer of secrets, a master of the fire, a deliverer of those who trusted in Him, a living personal Lord, wise, just, and faithful, very different from any of his star gods or idols. But he looked upon Jehovah only as the God of the Jews, as Daniel's God. He had not yet learnt that God was HIS God as well as Daniel's; that Jehovah was very near his heart and mind, and had been near him all his life; that from Jehovah came all his wisdom, his strength of mind, his success, and all which made him differ, not only from his fellow-men, but from the beast; that Jehovah, in a word, was the light and the life of the world, who fills all things and by whom all things consist, deserted by whose inward light, even for a moment, man becomes as one of the beasts which perish. In his own eyes Nebuchadnezzar was still the great self-dependent, self- sufficing conqueror, wiser and stronger than all the men around him. He thought, most probably, that on account of his wisdom, and courage, and royalty of soul, the God of heaven had become fond of him and favoured him. In short, he was swollen with pride.

God sent him again a strange dream, which made him troubled and afraid. He told it to his old counsellor Daniel; and Daniel, at the danger of his life, interpreted it for him; and a very awful meaning it had. A fearful and shameful downfall was to come upon the king; no less than the loss of his reason, and with it, of his throne. But whether this came to pass or not, depended, like all God's everlasting promises and threats, on Nebuchadnezzar's own behaviour. If he repented, and broke off his sins by righteousness, and his iniquities by showing mercy to the poor, there was good reason to hope that so his tranquillity might be lengthened.

But the lesson was too hard for the proud conqueror; he did not take the warning. He could not believe that the Most High ruled in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He will. He still fancied that he, and such as he, were the lords of the world, and took from others by their own power and cunning whatsoever they would. He does not seem to have been angry, however, with Daniel for his plain speaking. Most Eastern kings like Nebuchadnezzar would have put Daniel to a cruel death on the spot as the bearer of evil news, speaking blasphemy against the king; and no one in those times and countries would have considered him wicked and cruel for so doing; but Nebuchadnezzar seems to have learnt too much already so to give way to his passion.

Yet, as I said before, he had not learned enough to take God's warning. The lesson that he was nothing, and that God is all in all, was too hard for him. And, alas! my friends, for whom of us is it not a hard lesson? And yet it is the golden lesson, the first and the last which man has to learn on earth, ay, and through all eternity: "I am nothing; God is all in all." All in us which is worth calling anything; all in us which is worth having, or worth being; all in us which is not disobedience and shortcoming, failure and mistake, ignorance and madness, filthiness and fierceness, as of the beasts which perish; all strength in us, all understanding, all prudence, all right-mindedness, all purity, all justice, all love; all in us which is worth living for, all in us which is really alive, and not mere death in life, the death of sin and the darkness of the pit—all is from God the Father of lights, and from Jesus Christ the life and the light, who lighteth every man who cometh into the world, shining for ever in the darkness of our spirits, though that darkness, alas! too often cannot comprehend, and embrace, and confess Him who is striving to awake it from the dead and give it light. Hardest of all lessons! Most blessed of all lessons! So blessed, that if we will not let God teach it us in any other way, it would be good and advantageous to us for Him to teach it us as He taught it to Nebuchadnezzar—good for us to become with him for awhile like the beasts that perish, that we might learn with him to lift up our eyes to heaven, and so have our understandings return to us, and learn to bless the Most High, and not our own wit, and cunning, and prudence; and praise and honour Him that liveth for ever, instead of praising and honouring our own pitiful paltry selves, who are in death in the midst of life, who come up and are cut down like the flower, and never continue in one stay.

"All this came upon the King Nebuchadnezzar." It seems that after he or his father had destroyed the old Babylon, the downfall of which Isaiah had prophesied, he built a great city, after the fashion of Eastern conquerors, near the ruins of the old one; and "at the end of twelve months he walked in the palace of the kingdom of Babylon. The king spake, and said, Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty? While the word was in the king's mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken, The kingdom is departed from thee. And they shall drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field: they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, and seven times shall pass over thee, until thou know that the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He will. The same hour was the thing fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar."

What a lesson! The great conqueror of all the East now a brutal madman, hateful and disgusting to all around him—a beast feeding among the beasts: and yet a cheap price—a cheap price—to pay for this golden lesson.

Seven times past over him in his madness. What those seven times were we do not know. They may have been actual years: or they may have been, as I am inclined to think, changes in his own soul and state of mind. But, at the end of the days, the truth dawned on him. He began to see what it all meant. He saw what he was, and why he was so; and he lifted up his eyes to heaven; and from that moment his madness past. He lifted up his eyes to heaven. That is no mere figure of speech: it is an actual truth. Most madmen, if you watch them, have that down look, or rather that inward look, as if their eyes were fixed only on their own fancies. They are thinking only of themselves, poor creatures—of their own selfish and private suspicions and wrongs—of their own selfish superstitious dreams about heaven or hell—of their own selfish vanity and ambition— sometimes of their own frantic self-conceit, or of their selfish lusts and desires—of themselves, in short. They have lost the one Divine light of reason, and conscience, and love, which binds men to each other, and are parted for a while from God and from their kind— alone in their own darkness. So was Nebuchadnezzar.

At last he looked up, as men do when they pray; up from himself to One greater than himself; up from the earth to heaven; up from the natural things which we do see, which are temporal and born to die, to moral and spiritual things which we do not see, which are real and eternal in the heavens; up from his own lonely darkness, looking for the light and the guidance of God; for now he began to see that all the light which he had ever had, all his wisdom, and understanding, and strength of will, had come from God, however he might have misused them for his own selfish ambition; that it was because God had taken from him His light, who is the Word of God, that he had become a beast. And then his reason returned to him, and he became again a man, a rational being, made, howsoever fallen and sinful, in the likeness of God; then he blessed and praised God. It was not merely that he confessed that God was strong, and he weak; righteous, and he sinful; wise, and he foolish; but he blessed and praised God; he felt and confessed that God had done him a great benefit, and taught him a great lesson—that God had taught him what he was in himself and without God, that he might see what he was with God in its true light, and honour and obey Him from whom his reason and understanding, as well as his power and glory, came, that so it might be fulfilled which the prophet says: "Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, nor the mighty man in his might, nor the rich man in his riches: but let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me, that I am the Lord which exercise loving-kindness, judgment, and righteousness IN THE EARTH; for in these things I delight, saith the Lord."

And so was Nebuchadnezzar's soul brought to utter, in his own way, the very same glorious song which, or something like it, is said to have been sung by the three men whom, years before, he had seen delivered from the fiery furnace, which calls on all the works of the Lord, angels and heaven, sun and stars, seas and winds, mountains and hills, fowls and cattle, priests and laymen, spirits and souls of the righteous, to bless the Lord, praise Him, and magnify Him for ever.

And so ends Nebuchadnezzar's history. We read no more of him. He had learnt the golden lesson. May God grant that we may learn it also!

But who tells the story of his madness? He himself. The whole account is in the man's own words. It seems to be some public letter or proclamation, which he either sent round his empire, or commanded to be laid up among his records; having, as it seems, set Daniel to write it down from his mouth. This one fact, I think, justifies me in all that I have said about Nebuchadnezzar's nobleness, and Daniel's affection for him. He does not try to smooth things over; to pretend that he has not been mad; to find excuses for himself; to lay any blame on any human being. He repents openly, confesses openly. Shameful as it may be to him, he tells the whole story. He confesses that he had fair warning, that all was his own fault. He justifies God utterly. My friends, we may read, thank God, many noble, and brave, and righteous speeches of kings and great men: but never have I read one so noble, so brave, so righteous as this of the great king of Babylon.

And therefore it is; because this letter of his, in the fourth chapter of the book of Daniel, is indeed full of the eternal Holy Spirit of God; therefore it is, I say, that it forms part of the Bible, part of holy scripture to this day,—a greater honour to Nebuchadnezzar than all his kingdom; for what greater honour than to have been inspired to write one chapter, yea, one sentence, of the Book of Books?

My friends, every one of you here is in God's school-house, under God's teaching, far more than Nebuchadnezzar was. You are baptised men, knowing that blessed name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which Nebuchadnezzar only saw dimly, and afar off. Jesus Christ, the Word of God, is striving with your hearts, giving to them whatsoever light and life they have. You have been taught from childhood to look up to Him as your King and Deliverer; to His Father as your Father, to His Holy Spirit as your Inspirer. Take heed how you listen to His voice within your hearts. Take heed how you learn God's lessons; for God is surely educating you, and teaching you far more than He taught the king of Babylon in old time. As you learn or despise these lessons of God's, will be your happiness or your misery now and for ever. Unto the king of Babylon little was given, and of him was little required. To you and me much has been given; of you and me will much be required.



XXIX—JEREMIAH'S CALLING



Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth.—JEREMIAH xxiii. 5.

At the time when Jeremiah the prophet spoke those words to the Jews, nothing seemed more unlikely than that they would ever come true. The whole Jewish nation was falling to pieces from its own sins. Brutish and filthy idolatry in high and low—oppression, violence, and luxury among the court and the nobility—shame, and poverty, and ignorance among the lower classes—idleness and quackery among the priesthood—and as kings over all, one fool and profligate after another, set on the throne by a foreign conqueror, and pulled down again by him at his pleasure. Ten out of the twelve tribes of Israel had been carried off captive, young and old, into a distant land. The small portion of country which still remained inhabited round Jerusalem, had been overrun again and again by cruel armies of heathens. Without Jerusalem was waste and ruins, bloodshed and wretchedness; within every kind of iniquity and lies, division and confusion. If ever there was a miserable and contemptible people upon the face of the earth, it was the Jewish nation in Jeremiah's time. Jeremiah makes no secret of it. His prophecies are full of it—full of lamentation and shame: "Oh that my head were a fountain of tears, to weep for the sins of my people!" He feels that God has sent him to rebuke those sins, to warn and prophesy to his fellow- countrymen the certain ruin into which they are rushing headlong; and he speaks God's message boldly. From the poor idol-ridden labourer, offering cakes to the Queen of Heaven to coax her into sending him a good harvest, to the tyrant king who had built his palace of cedar and painted it with vermilion, he had a bitter word for every man. The lying priest tried to silence him; and Jeremiah answered him, that his wife should be a harlot in the city, and his children sold for slaves. The king tried to flatter him into being quiet; and he told him in return, that he should be buried with the burial of an ass, dragged out and cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem. The luxurious queen, who made her nest in the cedars, would be ashamed and confounded, he said, for her wickedness. The crown prince was a despised broken idol—a vessel in which was no pleasure; he should be cast out, he and his children, into slavery in a land which he knew not. The whole royal family, he said, would perish; none of them should ever again prosper or sit upon the throne of David. This was his message; shame and confusion, woe and ruin, to high and low; every human being he passed in the street was a doomed man. For the day of the Lord was at hand, and who should be able to escape it?

A sad calling, truly, to have to work at; and all the more sad because Jeremiah had no pride, no steadfast opinion of his own excellence to keep him up. He hates his calling of prophet. At the very moment he is foretelling woe, he prays God that his prophecy may not come true; he tries every method to prevent its coming true, by entreating his countrymen to repent. There runs through all his awful words a vein of tenderness, and pity, and love unspeakable, which to me is the one great mark of a true prophet; a sign that Jeremiah spoke by the Spirit of God; a sign that too many writers nowadays do not speak by the Spirit of God. If they rebuke the rich and powerful, they do it generally in a very different spirit from Jeremiah's—in a spirit of bitterness and insolence, not very easy to describe, but easy enough to perceive. They seem to rejoice in evil, to delight in finding fault, to be sorry, and not glad, when their prophecies of evil turn out false; to try to set one class against another, one party against another, as if we were not miserably enough split up already by class interests and party spirit. They are glad enough to rebuke the wicked great; but not to their face, not to their own danger and hurt like Jeremiah. Their plan is to accuse the rich to the poor, on their own platform, or in their own newspaper, where they are safe; and, moreover, to make a very fair profit thereby; to say behind the back of authorities that which they dare not say to their face, and which they soon give up saying when they have worked their own way into office; and meanwhile take mighty credit to themselves for seeing that there is wrong and misery in the world; as if the spirits in hell should fancy themselves righteous, because they hated the devil! No, my friends, Jeremiah was of a very different spirit from that. If he ever was tempted to it when he was young, and began to fancy himself a very grand person, who had a right to look down on his neighbours, because God had called him and set him apart to be a prophet from his mother's womb, and revealed to him the doom of nations, and the secrets of His providence—if he ever fancied that in his heart, God led him through such an education as took all the pride out of him, sternly and bitterly enough. He was commissioned to go and speak terrible words, to curse kings and nobles in the name of the Lord: but he was taught, too, that it was not a pleasant calling, or one which was likely to pay him in this life. His fellow-villagers plotted against his life. His wife deserted him. The nobles threw him into a dungeon, into a well full of mire, whence he had to be drawn up again with ropes to save his life. He was beaten, all but starved, kept for years in prison. He had neither child nor friend. He had his share of all the miseries of the siege of Jerusalem, and all the horrors of its storm; and when he was set free by Nebuchadnezzar, and clung to his ruined home, to see if any good could still be done to the remnant of his countrymen, he was violently carried off into a heathen land, and at last stoned to death, by those very countrymen of his whom he had been trying for years to save. In everything, and by everything, he was taught that he was still a Jew, a brother to his sinful brothers; that their sorrows were his sorrows, their shame his shame, their ruin his ruin. In all their afflictions he was afflicted, even as his Lord was after him.

He struggled, we find, again and again against this strange and sad calling of a prophet. He cried out in bitter agony that God had deceived him; had induced him to become a prophet, and then repaid him for speaking God's message with nothing but disappointment and misery. And yet he felt he must speak; God, he said, was stronger than he was, and forced him to it. He said: "I will speak no more words in His name; but the Word of the Lord was as fire within his bones, and would not let him rest;" and so, in spite of himself, he told the truth, and suffered for it; and hated to have to tell it, and pitied and loved the very country which he rebuked till he cursed "the day in which he saw the light, and the hour in which it was said to his father, there is a man-child born." You who fancy that it is a fine thing, and a paying profession, to be a preacher of righteousness and a rebuker of sin, look at Jeremiah, and judge! For as surely as you or any other man is sent by God to do Jeremiah's work, so surely he must expect Jeremiah's wages.

Do you think, then, that Jeremiah was a man only to be pitied? Pitiable he was indeed, and sad. There was One hung on a cross eighteen hundred years ago, more pitiable still: and yet He is the Lord of heaven and earth. Yes; Jeremiah had a sad life to live, and a sad task to work out; and yet, my friends, was not that a cheap price to pay for the honour and glory of being taught by God's Spirit, and of speaking God's words? I do not mean the mere honour of having his fame and name spread over all Christ's kingdom; the honour of having his writings read and respected by the wisest and the holiest to the end of time; that mere earthly fame is but a slight matter. I mean the real honour, the real glory, of knowing what was utterly right and true, and therefore of knowing Him who is utterly right and true; of knowing God; of knowing what God's character is: that he is a living God, and not a dead one; a God who is near and not absent at all, loving and merciful, just and righteous, strong and mighty to save. Ay, my friends, this is the lesson which God taught Jeremiah; to know the Lord of heaven and earth, and to see His hand, His rule, in all that was happening to his fellow-countrymen, and himself; to know that from the beginning the Lord, the Saviour-God, Jehovah, the messenger of the covenant, He who brought up the Jews out of Egypt, was the wise and just and loving King of the Jews, and of all the nations upon earth; and that some day or other He must and would conquer all the sinfulness, and misery, and tyranny, and idolatry in the world, and show Himself openly to men, and fulfil all the piteous longings after a just and good king which poor wretches had ever felt, and all the glorious promises of a just and good king which God had made to the wise men of old time; and, therefore, in the midst of shame and persecution, despair and ruin, Jeremiah could rejoice. Jehoiakim, the wicked king, and all his royal house, might be driven out into slavery; Jerusalem might become a heap of ruins and corpses; the fair land of Judaea, and the village where he was bred, might become thorns, and thistles, and heaps of stones; the vineyard which he loved, the little estate at Anathoth which had belonged to him, might be trodden down by the stranger, and he himself die in a foreign land; around him might be nothing but sin and decay, before him nothing but despair and ruin: yet still there was hope, joy, everlasting certainty for that poor, childless, captive old man; for he had found out that the Lord still lived, the Lord still reigned. He could not lie; he could not forget his people. Could a mother forget her sucking child? No. When the Jews turned to Him, He would still have mercy. His punishment of them was a sign that he still cared for them. If He had forgotten them, He would have let them go on triumphant in their iniquity. No. All these afflictions were meant to chasten them, teach them, bring them back to Him. It would be good for them, an actual blessing to them, to be taken away into captivity in Babylon. It might be hard to believe, but it must be true. The Lord of Israel, the Saviour-God, who had been caring for them so long, rising up early and sending His prophets to them, pleading with them as a father with his child, He would have mercy; He would teach them, in sorrow and slavery, the lesson they were too rebellious and hard-hearted to learn in prosperity and freedom: that the Lord was their righteousness, and that there was no other name under heaven which could save them from the plague, and from the famine, from the swords of the Chaldeans, or from the division, and oppression, and brutishness, and manifold wickedness, which was their ruin. And then Jeremiah saw and felt—how we cannot tell—but there his words, the words of this text, stand to this day, to show that he did see and feel it, that some day or other, in God's good time, the Jews would have a true King—a very different king from Jehoiakim the tyrant—a son of David in a very different sense from what Jehoiakim was; that He would come, and must come, sooner or later, The unseen King, who had all along been governing Jews and heathens, and telling his prophets that Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus, the Chaldee and the Persian, were his servants as well as they, and that all the nations of the earth could do but what he chose. "Behold the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute justice and judgment on the earth."

This was the blessed knowledge which God gave Jeremiah in return for all the misery he had to endure in warning his countrymen of their sins. And this same blessed knowledge, the knowledge that the earth is the Lord's, that to Jesus Christ is given, as He said Himself, all power in heaven and earth, and that He is reigning, and must reign, and conquer, and triumph till He has put all His enemies under His feet, God will surely give to everyone, high or low, who follows Jeremiah's example, who boldly and faithfully warns the sinner of his way, who rebukes the wickedness which he sees around him: only he must do it in the spirit of Jeremiah. He must not be insolent to the insolent, or proud to the proud. He must not be puffed up, and fancy that because he sees the evil of sin, and the certain ruin which is the fruit of it, that he is therefore to keep apart from his fellow- countrymen, and despise them in Pharisaic pride. No. The truly Christian man, the man who, like Jeremiah, has the Spirit of God in him, will feel the most intense pity and tenderness of sinners. He will not only rebuke the sins of his people, but mourn for them; he will be afflicted in all their affliction. However harshly he may have to speak, he will never forget that they are his countrymen, his brothers, children of the same Father, to be judged by the same Lord. He will feel with shame and fear that he has in himself the root of the very same sins which he sees working death around him—that if others are covetous, he might be so too—if they be profligate, and deceitful, and hypocritical, without God in the world, he might be so too. And he must feel not only that he might be as bad as his neighbours, but that he actually would be, if God withdrew His Spirit from him for a moment, and allowed him to forget the only faith which saves him from sin, loyalty to his unseen Saviour, the righteous King of kings. Therefore he will not only rebuke his sinful neighbours; but he will tell them, as Jeremiah told his countrymen, that all their sin and misery proceed from this one thing, that they have forgotten that the Lord is their King. He will pray daily for them, that the Lord their King may show Himself to their hearts and thoughts, and teach them all that He has done for them, and is doing for them; and may convert them to Himself that they may be truly His people, and His way may be known upon earth, His saving health among all nations.



XXX—THE PERFECT KING



Tell ye the daughter of Zion, Behold, thy King cometh to thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt, the foal of an ass.—MATTHEW xxi. 5.

You all know that this Sunday is called the First Sunday in Advent. You all know, I hope, that Advent means coming, and that these four Sundays before Christmas, as I have often told you, are called Advent Sundays, because upon them we are called to consider the coming of our King and Saviour Jesus Christ. If you will look at the Collects, Epistles, and Gospels for these next four Sundays, you will see at once that they all bear upon our Lord's coming. The Gospels tell us of the prophecies about Christ which He fulfilled when He came. The Epistles tell us what sort of men we ought to be, both clergy and people, because He has come and will come again. The Collects pray that the Spirit of God would make us fit to live and die in a world into which Christ has come, and in which He is ruling now, and to which He will come again. The text which I have taken this morning, you just heard in this Sunday's Gospel. St. Matthew tells you that Jesus Christ fulfilled it by riding into Jerusalem in state upon an ass's colt; and St. Matthew surely speaks truth. Let us consider what the prophecy is, and how Jesus Christ fulfilled it. Then we shall see and believe from the Epistle what effect the knowledge of it ought to have upon our own souls, and hearts, and daily conduct.

Now this prophecy, "Behold, thy king cometh unto thee," etc., you will find in your Bibles, in the ninth verse of the ninth chapter of the book of Zechariah. But I do not think that Zechariah wrote it. St. Matthew does not say he wrote it; he merely calls it that which was spoken by the prophet, without mentioning his name. Provided it is an inspired word from God, which it is, it perhaps does not matter to us so much who wrote it: but I think it was written by the prophet Jeremiah, perhaps in the beginning of the reign of the good king Josiah; for the chapter in which this text is, and the two or three chapters which follow, are not at all like the rest of Zechariah's writings, but exactly like Jeremiah's. They certainly seem to speak of things which did not happen in Zechariah's time, but in the time of Jeremiah, nearly ninety years before. And, above all, St. Matthew himself seems plainly to have thought that some part, at least, of those chapters was Jeremiah's writing; for in the twenty- seventh chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel, and in the ninth verse, you will find a prophecy about the potter's field, which St. Matthew says was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet. Now, those words are not in the book of Jeremiah as it stands in our Bibles: but they are in the book of Zechariah, in the eleventh chapter, twelfth and thirteenth verses, coming shortly after my text, and making a part of the same prophecy. This has puzzled Christians very much, because it seemed as if St. Matthew has made a mistake, and miscalled Zechariah Jeremiah. But I believe firmly that, as we are bound to expect, St. Matthew made no mistake whatsoever, and that Jeremiah did write that prophecy as St. Matthew said, and the two chapters before it, and perhaps the two after it, and that they were probably kept and preserved by Zechariah during the troublous times of the Babylonish captivity, and at last copied by Nehemiah into Zechariah's book of prophecy, where they stand now; and I think it is a comfort to know this, and to find that the evangelist St. Matthew has not made a mistake, but knew the Scriptures better than we do.

But I think Jeremiah having written this prophecy in my text, which I believe he did, is also very important, because it will show us what the prophet meant when he spoke it, and how it was fulfilled in his time; and the better we understand that, the better we shall understand how our blessed Lord fulfilled it afterwards.

Now, when Jeremiah was a young man, the Jews and their king Amon were in a state of most abominable wickedness. They were worshipping every sort of idol and false god. And the Bible, the book of God's law, was utterly unknown amongst them; so that Josiah the king, who succeeded Amon, had never seen or heard the book of the law of Moses, which makes part of our Old Testament, till he had reigned eighteen years, as you will find if you refer to 2 Kings xxii. 3. But this Josiah was a gentle and just prince, and finding the book of the law of God, and seeing the abominable forgetfulness and idolatry into which his people had fallen, utterly breaking the covenant which God had made with their forefathers when he brought them up out of Egypt— when he found the book of the law, I say, and all that he and his people should have done and had not done, and the awful curses which God threatened in that book against those who broke His law, "he humbled himself before God, because his heart was tender, and turned to the Lord, as no king before him had ever turned," says the scripture, "with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his might; so that there was no such king before him, or either after him." The history of the great reformation which this great and good king worked, you may read at length in 2 Kings xxii. xxiii. and 2 Chron. xxxiv. xxxv. which I advise you all to read.

And it appears to me that this prophecy in the text first applies to the gentle and holy king Josiah, the first true and good king the Jews had had for years, and the best they were ever to have till Christ came Himself; and that it speaks of Josiah coming to Jerusalem to restore the worship of God, not with pomp and show, like the wicked kings both before and after him, but in meekness and humbleness of heart, for all the sins of his people, as the prophetess said of him in 2 Kings xxii. 19, "that his heart was tender and humble before the Lord;" neither coming with chariots and guards, like a king and conqueror, but riding upon an ass's colt; for that was, in those countries, the ancient sign of a man's being a man of peace, and not of war; a magistrate and lawgiver, and not a soldier and a conqueror. Various places of holy scripture show us that this was the meaning of riding upon an ass in Judaea, just as it is in Eastern countries now.

But some may say, How then is this a prophecy? It merely tells us what good king Josiah was, and what every king ought to be. Well, my friends, that is just what makes it a prophecy. If it tells you what ought to be, it tells you what will be. Yes, never forget that; whatever ought to be, surely will be; as surely as this is God's earth and Christ's kingdom, and not the devil's.

Now, it does not matter in the least whether the prophet, when he spoke these words, knew that they would apply to the Lord Jesus Christ. We have no need whatsoever to suppose that he did: for scripture gives us no hint or warrant that he did; and if we have any real or honest reverence for scripture, we shall be careful to let it tell its own story, and believe that it contains all things necessary for salvation, without our patching our own notions into it over and above. Wise men are generally agreed that those old prophets did not, for the most part, comprehend the full meaning of their own words. Not that they were mere puppets and mouthpieces, speaking what to them was nonsense—God forbid!—But that just because they did thoroughly understand what was going on round them, and see things as God saw them, just because they had God's Eternal Spirit with them, therefore they spoke great and eternal words, which will be true for ever, and will go on for ever fulfilling themselves for more and more. For in proportion as any man's words are true, and wide, and deep, they are truer, and wider, and deeper than that man thinks, and will apply to a thousand matters of which he never dreamt. And so in all true and righteous speech, as in the speeches of the prophets of old, the glory is not man's who speaks them, but God's who reveals them, and who fulfils them again and again.

It is true, then, that this text describes what every king should be— gentle and humble, a merciful and righteous lawgiver, not a self- willed and capricious tyrant. But Josiah could not fulfil that. He was a good king: but he could not be a perfect one; for he was but a poor, sinful, weak, and inconsistent man, as we are. But those words being inspired by the Holy Spirit, must be fulfilled. There ought to be a perfect king, perfectly gentle and humble, having a perfect salvation, a perfect lawgiver; and therefore there must be such a king; and therefore St. Matthew tells us there came at last a perfect king—one who fulfilled perfectly the prophet's words—one who was not made king of Jerusalem, but was her King from the beginning; for that is the full meaning of "Thy King cometh to thee." To Jerusalem He came, riding on the ass's colt, like the peaceful and fatherly judges of old time, for a sign to the poor souls round Him, who had no lawgivers but the proud and fierce Scribes and Pharisees, no king but the cruel and godless Caesar, and his oppressive and extortionate officers and troops. Meek and lowly He came; and for once the people saw that He was the true Son of David—a man and king, like him, after God's own heart. For once they felt that He had come in the name of the Lord the old Deliverer who brought them out of the land of Egypt, and made them into a nation, and loved and pitied them still, in spite of all their sins, and remembered His covenant, which they had forgotten. And before that humble man, the Son of the village maiden, they cried: "Hosanna to the Son of David. Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the Highest."

And do you think He came, the true and perfect King, only to go away again and leave this world as it was before, without a law, a ruler, a heavenly kingdom? God forbid! Jesus is the same yesterday, to- day, and for ever. What He was then, when He rode in triumph into Jerusalem, that is He now to us this day—a king, meek and lowly, and having salvation; the head and founder of a kingdom which can never be moved, a city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God. To that kingdom this land of England now belongs. Into it we, as Englishmen, have been christened. And the unchristened, though they know not of it, belong to it as well. What God's will, what Christ's mercies may be to them, we know not. That He has mercy for them, if their ignorance is not their own fault, we doubt not; perhaps, even if their ignorance be their own fault, we need not doubt that He has mercy for them, considering the mercy which He has shown to us, who deserved no more than they. But His will to us we do know; and His will is this—our holiness. For He came not only to assert His own power, to redeem his own world, but to set His people, the children of men, an example, that they should follow in His steps. Herein, too, He is the perfect king. He leads His subjects, He sets a perfect example to His subjects, and more, He inspires them with the power of following that example, as, if you will think, a perfect ruler ought to be able to do. Josiah set the Jews an example, but he could not make them follow it. They turned to God at the bidding of their good king, with their lips, in their outward conduct; but their hearts were still far from Him. Jeremiah complains bitterly of this in the beginning of his prophecies. He complains that Josiah's reformation was after all empty, hollow, hypocritical, a change on the surface only, while the wicked root was left. They had healed, he said, the hurt of the daughter of his people slightly, crying, "Peace, peace, when there was no peace." But Jesus, the perfect King, is King of men's spirits as well as of their bodies. He can turn the heart, He can renew the soul. None so ignorant, none so sinful, none so crushed down with evil habits, but the Lord will and can forgive him, raise him up, enlighten him, strengthen him, if he will but claim his share in his King's mercy, his citizenship in the heavenly kingdom, and so put himself in tune again with himself, and with heaven, and earth, and all therein.