Gertrude Atherton - "The White Morning"

Various - "Notes & Queries, No. 41, Saturday, August 10, 1850"

Various - "McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896"

Percy Molesworth Sykes - "Door Oost Perzie"

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The Christian Life written by Thomas Arnold

T >> Thomas Arnold >> The Christian Life





These passages, of which the first is taken from the gospel of this
morning's service, the other from the second lesson, differ in words,
but their meaning is very nearly the same. The house which was empty,
swept and garnished, was especially one empty of the love of God.
Whatever evil there may not have been in it; whatever good there may
have been in those of whom Christ spoke in the second passage: yet it
and they agreed in this; one thing they had not, which alone was worth,
all the rest besides; they had not the love of God.

And so it is still; many are the faults which we have not; many are the
good qualities which we have; but the life is wanting. What is so rare
as to find one who is not indifferent to God? What so rare, even rarer
than the other, as to find one who actually loves him?

Therefore it is that those who go in at the broad gate of destruction
are many, and those who go in at the narrow gate of life are few. For
destruction and life are but other terms for indifference to God on the
one hand, and love to him on the other. All who are indifferent to him,
die; a painless death of mere extinction, if, like the brute creation,
they have never been made capable of loving him; or a living death of
perpetual misery, if, like evil spirits and evil men, they might have
loved him and would not. And so all who love him, live a life, from
first to last, without sin and sorrow, if, like the holy angels, they
have loved him always; a life partaking at first of death, but
brightening more and more unto the perfect day, if, like Christians,
they were born in sin, but had been redeemed and sanctified to
righteousness.

Whoever has watched human character, whether in the young or the old,
must be well aware of the truth of this: he will know that the value of
any character is in proportion to the existence or to the absence of
this feeling, or rather, I should say, this principle. An exception may,
perhaps, be made for a small, a very small number of fanatics; an
apparent exception likewise exists in the case of many who seem to be
religious, but who really are not so. The few exceptions of the former
case are so very few, that we need not now stop to consider them, nor to
inquire how far even these would be exceptions if we could read the
heart as God reads it. The seeming exceptions being cases either of
hypocrisy, or of very common self-deceit, we need not regard either; for
they are, of course, no real objection to the truth of the general
statement. It remains true, then, generally, that the value of any
character is in proportion to the existence, or to the absence, in it of
the love of God.

But is there not another exception to be made for the case of children,
and of very young persons? Are they capable of loving God? and are not
their earthly relations, their parents especially, put to them, as it
were, in the place of God, as objects of trust, of love, of honour, of
obedience, till their minds can open to comprehend the love of their
Father who is in heaven? And does not the Scripture itself, in the few
places in which it seems directly to address children, content itself
with directing them to obey and honour their parents? Some notions of
this sort are allowed, I believe, to serve sometimes as an excuse, when
young persons are blamed for being utterly wanting in a sense of duty
to God.

The passages which direct children to obey their parents, are of the
same kind with those, directing slaves to obey their masters, and
masters to be kind to their slaves; like those, also, which John the
Baptist addressed to the soldiers and publicans: in none of all which
there is any command to love God, but merely a command to fulfil that
particular duty which most arose out of the particular relation, or
calling of the persons addressed. In fact, when parents are addressed,
they are directed only to do their duties to their children, just as
children are directed to do theirs to their parents; in both cases
alike, the common duty of parents and children to God is not dwelt upon,
because that is a duty which does not belong to them as parents, or as
children, but as human beings; and as such, it belongs to all alike. In
fact, the very language of St. Paul's command to children implies this;
for he says, "Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is
right:" right, that is, in the sight of God: so that the very reason for
which children are to discharge their earthly duties is, because that
earthly duty is commanded by, or involved in, their heavenly duty; if
they do not do it, they will not please God. But it is manifest that, in
this respect, there is for all of us one only law, so soon as we are
able to understand it. The moment that a child becomes capable of
understanding anything about God and Christ,--and how early that is,
every parent can testify,--that moment the duty to love God and Christ
begins. It were absurd to say, that this duty has not begun at the age
of boyhood. A boy is able to understand the force of religious motives,
as well as he can that of earthly motives: he cannot understand either,
perhaps, so well as he will hereafter; but he understands both enough,
for the purposes of his salvation; enough, to condemn him before God, if
he neglects them; enough to make him derive the greatest benefit from
faithfully observing them.

And what can have been the purpose with which the only particular of our
Lord's early life has been handed down to us, if it were not to direct
our attention to this special truth, that our youth, no less than our
riper age, belongs to God? "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's
business?" were words spoken by our Lord when he was no more than twelve
years old. At twelve years old, he thought of preparing himself for the
duties of his after-life; and of preparing himself for them, because
they were God's will. He was to be about his Father's business. This is
Christ's example for the young; this, and scarcely anything more than
this, is recorded of his early years. Those are not like Christ who, at
that same age, or even older, never think at all of the business of
their future lives, still less would think of it, not as the means of
their own maintenance or advancement, but as the duty which they owe
to God.

Such as these are the very persons whose hearts are like the house in
the parable, empty, swept, and garnished. The house so described in the
parable is one out of which an evil spirit has just departed. In case of
the young, the evil spirit in this sense, that is, as representing some
one particular favourite sin, may perhaps have never entered it. That
empty, swept, and garnished house, how like is it to what I have seen,
to what I am seeing so continually, when a boy comes here with much
still remaining of the innocence of childhood! Evil spirit, in the sense
of any one particular vice, there is none to be found in that heart, nor
has there been any ever. It is empty, swept, and garnished: there is the
absence of evil; there are the various faculties, the furniture, as they
may be called, of the house of our spirits, which the spirit uses either
for evil or for good. There is innocence, then; there is, also, the
promise of power. God hath richly endowed the earthly house of our
tabernacle: various and wonderful is the furniture of body and mind with
which it is supplied. How can we help admiring that open and cheerful
brow which, as yet, no care or sin has furrowed; those light and active
limbs, full of health and vigour; the eye so quick; the ear so undulled;
the memory so ready; the young curiosity so eager to take in new
knowledge; the young feelings, not yet spoiled by over-excitement, ready
to admire, ready to love? There is the house, the house of God's
building, the house which must abide for ever; but where is the spirit
to inhabit it? Evil spirit there is none: is it, then, possessed by the
Spirit of God? Has the fire from heaven as yet descended upon that
house,--the living sign of God's presence, which alone can convert the
house of perishable clay into the everlasting temple?

Can that blessed Spirit of God be indeed there, and yet no sign of his
presence be manifest? It may be so, or to speak more truly, it might
have been supposed to be so, if God's word had not declared the
contrary. What God's secret workings are; in how many ways, to us
inscrutable, he may pervade all nature; in how many cases he may be near
us, and we know it not; may, perhaps, be amongst those real mysteries,
those truths revealed to none, nor to be revealed; those yet uncleared
forests, so to speak, of the world of nature, into which the light of
grace has not been permitted to penetrate. But all such mysteries are to
us as if they did not exist at all: we have nothing to do with them. God
has told us nothing of his unseen and undiscernible presence; when and
where he is so present, he is to us as if he were not present at all.
God was in the wilderness of Horeb before the bush was kindled; but he
was not there for Moses. God, in some sense discernible, it may be, to
other beings, may be in that house which, to us is empty; but God, our
own God, the Holy Spirit, into whose service we were baptized, where he
is, the house is not empty to us, but full of light. Invisible in
himself, the signs of his presence are most visible: where no works, no
fruits of the Holy Spirit are to be discerned, there, according to our
Lord's express declaration, there the Holy Spirit is not.

But the light which declares his presence may indeed be a little spark;
just to be seen, and no more. It may show that he has not abandoned all
his right to the house of our tabernacle as yet; that he would desire to
possess us fully. Such a little spark, such an evidence of the Holy
Spirit's presence, is to be found in the outward profession of
Christianity. They who call Jesus Lord, do it by the Holy Ghost; and,
therefore, it is quite true in this sense, that in every baptized
Christian, who has not utterly apostatized, there is that faint sign of
the Holy Spirit's still having a claim upon him; he is not yet utterly
cast off. This is true; but it is not to our present purpose; such a
feeble sign is a sign of God's yet unwearied mercy, but no sign of our
salvation. The presence with which the parable is concerned, is a far
more effectual presence than this; the house in which there is no more
than such a faint sign of a divine inhabitant, is, in the language of
the parable, empty. To no purpose of our salvation is the Spirit of God
present in the house, when the light of his presence does not flash
forth from every part of it, when it is not manifest, not only that he
has not quite cast it off to go to ruin, but that he has been pleased to
make it his temple.

In this sense, therefore, in this practical, scriptural, Christian
sense, those many young minds, which we have seen so often, may truly be
called empty. But will they remain so long? How often have I seen the
early innocence of boyhood overcast; the natural simplicity of boyhood,
its open truth, its confident affection, its honest shame, perverted,
blunted, hardened! How often have I seen the seven evil spirits enter in
and dwell there,--I know not, and never may know, whether to be cast out
again, or to abide for ever. But I have seen them enter, and, whilst the
person was yet within my view, I have not seen them depart. And why have
they entered; why have they marred that which was so beautiful? For one
only reason,--because the house was empty, because the Spirit of God was
not there: there was no love of God, no thought of God. Mere innocence
taints and spoils as surely before the influence of the world, as true
principle flourishes in spite of it, and strengthens. This, too, I have
seen, not once only: I have seen the innocence of early boyhood
sanctified by something better than innocence, which gave a promise of
abiding. I have seen, in other words, that the house was not empty; that
the Spirit of God was there. I have watched the effect of those
influences, which you know so well: the second half-year came, a period
when mere innocence is sure to be worn away, greatly tainted, if not
utterly gone; but still, in the cases which I am now alluding to, the
promise of good was not less, but greater, there was a more tried, and,
therefore, a stronger goodness. I have watched this, too, till it passed
on, out of my sight. I never saw the blessed Spirit of God depart from
the house which he had chosen: I well believe that he abides in it
still, and will abide in it even to the day of Jesus Christ.

This I have seen, and this I shall continue to see; for still the great
work of evil and of good is going on; still the house, at first empty,
is possessed by the spirits of evil, or by the Spirit of God. And if we
do not see the signs of the Spirit of God, we are but too sure that the
evil spirit is there. We know him by the manifold signs of folly,
coarseness, carelessness; even when we see not, as yet, his worse fruits
of falsehood and profligacy. We know him by the sign of an increased,
and increasing selfishness, the everlasting cry of the thousand passions
of our nature, all for ever calling out, "Give, give;" all for ever
impatient, complaining, when their gratification is withheld, when the
call of duty is set before them. We know him by pride and
self-importance, as if nothing was so great as self, as if our own
opinions, judgment, feelings were to be consulted in all things. We know
him by the deep ungodliness which he occasions--no thought of God, much
less any love of him; living utterly without him in the world, or, at
least, whilst health and prosperity continue. These are the fatal signs
which show that the house is no longer empty; that the evil spirits have
entered in, and dwell there, to make it theirs, as too often happens,
for time and for eternity.




LECTURE XVI.

* * * * *

MATHEW xi. 10.

_I send my messenger before thy face, who shall prepare thy way before
thee_.


If it was part of God's dispensation, that there should be one to
prepare the way before Christ's first coming, it may be expected much
more, that there should be some to prepare the way before his second.
And so it is expressed in the collect for the third Sunday in Advent: "O
Lord Jesus Christ, who at thy first coming didst send thy messenger to
prepare thy way before thee; grant that the ministers and stewards of
thy mysteries may likewise so prepare and make ready thy way, by turning
the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, that at thy
second coming to judge the world we may be found an acceptable people in
thy sight, who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit,
ever one God, world without end. Amen." NOW, in what does this preparing
for him consist; and what is its object? The Scripture will inform us as
to both. The object is, "Lest he come and smite the earth with a curse;"
lest, when he shall come, his coming, which should be our greatest joy
and happiness, should be our everlasting destruction; for there can
abide before him nothing that is evil. This is the object of preparing
for Christ's coming. Next, in what does the preparation consist? It
consists in teaching men to live above the common notions of their age
and country; to raise their standard higher; to live after what is right
in God's judgment, which often casts away, as faulty and bad, what men
were accustomed to think good. And as the people of Israel, although
they had God's revelation among them, had yet let their standard of good
and evil become low, even so it has been in the Christian Israel. We
have God's will in our hands, yet our judgments are not formed upon it;
and, therefore, they who would prepare us for Christ's coming, must set
before us a commandment which is new, although old: in one sense old, in
every generation, inasmuch as it is the same which we had from the
beginning; in another sense, in every generation more new, inasmuch, as
the habits opposed to it have become the more confirmed; and the longer
the night has lasted, the more strange to our eyes is the burst of the
returning light.

But when we thus speak of the common notions of our age and country
being deficient, and thus, in effect, commend notions which would be
singular, do we not hold a language inconsistent with our common
language and practice? Do we not commonly regard singularity as a fault,
and attach a considerable authority to the consent of men in general?
Nay, do we not often appeal to this consent as to a proof which a sane
mind must admit as decisive? Even in speaking of good and evil, have not
the very words gained their present sense because the common consent of
mankind has agreed to combine notions of self-satisfaction, of honour,
and of love, with what we call good, and the contrary with what we
call evil?

A short time may, perhaps, not be misapplied in endeavouring to explain
this matter; in showing where, and for what reasons, the common opinion
of our society is to be followed, where it is to be suspected, and
where it is absolutely to be shunned or trampled under foot, as clearly
and certainly evil.

I must begin with little things, in order to show the whole question
plainly. Take those tastes in us which most resemble the instincts of a
brute; and you will find that in these, as with instinct, common consent
becomes a sure rule. When I speak of those tastes which most resemble
instincts, I mean those in which nature, doing most for us at first,
leaves least for us to learn for ourselves. This seems the character of
instinct: it is far more complete than reason in its first stage, but it
admits of no after improvement; the brute in the thousandth generation
is no way advanced beyond the brute in the first. Of our tastes, even of
those belonging to our bodily senses, that which belongs to what are
called particularly our organs of taste is the one most resembling an
instinct: we have less to do for its improvement than in any other
instance. Men being here, then, upon an equality, with a faculty given
to all by nature, and improved particularly by none, those who differ
from the majority are likely to differ not from excellence but from
defect: not because they have a more advanced reason, but because they
have a less healthy instinct, than their neighbours. Thus, in those
matters which relate to the sense of taste--I am obliged to take this
almost trivial instance, because it so well illustrates the principle of
the whole question--we hold the consent of men in general to be a good
rule. If any one were to choose to feed upon what this common taste had
pronounced to be disgusting, we should not hesitate to say that such an
appetite was diseased and monstrous.

Now, let us take our senses of sight and hearing, and we shall find that
just in the proportion in which these less resemble instincts than the
sense of taste, so is common consent a less certain rule. Up to a
certain point they are instincts: there are certain sounds which, I
suppose, are naturally disagreeable to the ear; while, on the other
hand, bright and rich colours are, perhaps, naturally attractive to the
eye. But, then, sight and hearing are so connected with our minds that
they are susceptible of very great cultivation, and thus differ greatly
from instincts. As the mind opens, outward sights and sounds become
connected with a great number of associations, and thus we learn to
think the one or the other beautiful, for reasons which really depend
very much on the range of our own ideas. Consider, for a moment, the
beautiful in architecture. If the model of the leaning tower of Pisa
were generally adopted in our public buildings, all men's common sense
would cry out against it as a deformity, because a leaning wall would
convey to every mind the notion of insecurity, and every body would feel
that it was unpleasant to see a building look exactly as if it were
going to fall down. Now, what I have called common sense is, in a
manner, the instinct of our reason: it is that uniform level of reason
which all sane persons reach to, and the wisest in matters within its
province do not surpass. But go beyond this, and architecture is no
longer a matter of mere common sense, but of science, and of cultivated
taste. Here the standard of beauty is not fixed by common consent; but,
in the first instance, devised or discovered by the few: and, so far as
it is received by the many, received by them on the authority of the
few, and sanctioned, so to speak, not so much from real sympathy and
understanding, as from a reasonable trust and deference to those who are
believed the best judges.

Here, then, we suppose that the common judgment is right; but we
perceive a difference between this case and the one mentioned before,
inasmuch as in the first instance the right judgment of the mass of
mankind is their own; in the second instance, they have adopted it out
of deference to others. Not only, then, will men's common judgment be
right in matters of instinct and of common sense, but also in higher
matters, where, although they could not have discovered what was right,
yet they were perfectly willing to adopt it, when discovered by others.
And this opens a very wide field. For in all matters which come under
the dominion of fashion, where the avowed object is the convenience or
gratification of society, men listen to those who profess to teach them
with almost an excess of docility: they will adopt sometimes fashions
which are not convenient. But yet, as men can tell well enough by
experience whether they do find a thing convenient and agreeable or not,
so it is most likely that fashions which continue long and generally
prevalent are founded upon sound principles; because else men, being
well capable of knowing what convenience is, and being also well
disposed to follow it, would neither have been very long or very
generally mistaken in this matter; nor would have acquiesced in their
mistake contentedly.

We do perfectly right, then, to regard the common opinion as a rule in
all points of dress, in our houses and furniture, in those lighter
usages of society which come under the denomination of manners, as
distinguished from morals. In all these, if the mass of mankind could
not find out what would best suit them, yet they are quite ready to
adopt it when it is found out; and so they equally arrive at truth. But
take away this readiness, and the whole case is altered. If there be any
point in which men are not ready to adopt what is best for them; if they
are either indifferent, or still more, if they are averse to it; if
they thus have neither the power of discovering it for themselves, nor
the will to avail themselves of it, when discovered for them; then it is
clear that, in such a point, the common judgment will be of no value,
nay, there will even be a presumption that it is wrong.

Now as the common consent of mankind was most sure in matters where
their sense most resembled instinct, that is, where nature had done most
for them, and left them least to do for themselves; as here, therefore,
they who are sound are the great majority, and the exceptions are no
better than disease; so if there be any part of us which is the direct
opposite to instinct, a part in which nature has done next to nothing
for us, and all is to be done by ourselves; then, here the common
consent of mankind will be of the least value; here the majority will be
helpless and worthless; and they who are happy enough to be exceptions
to this majority, will be no other than Christ's redeemed.

Now, again, if this deficient part of our nature could be seen purely
distinct from every other; if it alone dictated our language, and
inspired our actions, then it would follow, that language which must
ever be fixed by the majority, would be, in fact, the language of the
world of infinite evil; and our actions those of mere devils. Then,
whoever of us would be saved, must needs begin by forswearing,
altogether, both the language and the actions of his fellow-men. But
this is not so; in almost every instance this deficient part of our
nature acts along with others that are not so corrupted; it mars their
work, undoubtedly; it often confuses and perverts our language; it
always taints our actions; but it does not wholly usurp either the one
or the other; and thus, by God's blessing, man's language yet affords a
high witness to divine truth, and even men's judgments and actions
testify, though with infinite imperfection, to the existence and
excellence of goodness.

And this it is which forms one of the great perplexities of life; for as
there is enough of what is right in men's judgments and conduct to
forbid us from saying, that we must take the very rule of contraries,
and think and do just the opposite to the opinions and practice of men
in general; so, on the other hand, there is always so much wrong in
them, that we may never dare to follow them as a standard, but shall
find, that if trusted to as such, they will inevitably betray us. So
that in points of greater moment than mere manners and fashion, it will
ever be true, that if we would be prepared for Christ's coming, we must
rise to a far higher standard than that of society in general; that in
the greatest concerns of human life, the practice of the majority,
though always containing something of good, is yet in its prevailing
character, as regards God, so evil, that they who are content to follow
it cannot be saved.