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A SERMON TO LEOPOLD.
When the curate stood up to read, his eyes as of themselves sought
Mrs. Ramshorn's pew. There sat Helen, with a look that revealed, he
thought, more of determination and less of suffering. Her aunt was
by her side, cold and glaring, an ecclesiastical puss, ready to
spring upon any small church-mouse that dared squeak in its own
murine way. Bascombe was not visible, and that was a relief. For an
unbelieving face, whether the dull dining countenance of a mayor, or
the keen searching countenance of a barrister, is a sad bone in the
throat of utterance, and has to be of set will passed over, and, if
that may be, forgotten. Wingfold tried hard to forget Mrs.
Ramshorn's, and one or two besides, and by the time he came to the
sermon, thought of nothing but human hearts, their agonies, and him
who came to call them to him.
"I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance."
"Was it then of the sinners first our Lord thought ere he came from
the bosom of the Father? Did the perfect will embrace in the
all-atoning tenderness of the divine heart, the degraded,
disfigured, defiled, distorted thing, whose angel is too blind ever
to see the face of its Father? Through all the hideous filth of the
charnel-house, which the passions had heaped upon her, did the Word
recognise the bound, wing-lamed, feather-draggled Psyche, panting in
horriblest torture? Did he have a desire to the work of his hands,
the child of his father's heart, and therefore, strong in
compassion, speed to the painful rescue of hearts like his own? That
purity arid defilement should thus meet across all the great
dividing gulf of law and morals! The friend of publicans and
sinners! Think: he was absolutely friendly with them! was not
shocked at them! held up no hands of dismay! Only they must do so no
more.
"If he were to come again, visibly, now, which do you think would
come crowding around him in greater numbers--the respectable
church-goers, or the people from the slums? I do not know. I dare
not judge. But the fact that the church draws so few of those that
are despised, of those whom Jesus drew and to whom most expressly he
came, gives ground for question as to how far the church is like her
Lord. Certainly many a one would find the way to the feet of the
master, from whom the respectable church-goer, the pharisee of our
time, and the priest who stands on his profession, would draw back
with disgust. And doubtless it would be in the religious world that
a man like Jesus, who, without a professional education, a craftsman
by birth and early training, uttered scarce a phrase endorsed by
clerical use, or a word of the religious cant of the day, but taught
in simplest natural forms the eternal facts of faith and hope and
love, would meet with the chief and perhaps the only BITTER
opponents of his doctrine and life.
"But did our Lord not call the righteous? Did he not call honest men
about him--James and John and Simon--sturdy fisher-folk, who faced
the night and the storm, worked hard, fared roughly, lived honestly,
and led good cleanly lives with father and mother, or with wife and
children? I do not know that he said anything special to convince
them that they were sinners before he called them. But it is to be
remarked that one of the first effects of his company upon Simon
Peter was, that the fisherman grew ashamed of himself, and while
ashamed was yet possessed with an impulse of openness and honesty no
less than passionate. The pure man should not be deceived as to what
sort of company he was in! 'Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O
Lord!' I would I could clearly behold with my mind's eye what he
then saw in Jesus that drew from him that cry! fle knew him for the
Messiah: what was the working of the carpenter upon the fisherman
that satisfied him of the fact? Would the miracle have done it but
for the previous talk from the boat to the people? I think not.
Anyhow St. Peter judged himself among the sinners, and we may be
sure that if these fishers had been self-satisfied men, they would
not have left all and gone after him who called them. Still it would
hardly seern that it was specially as sinners that he did so. Again,
did not men such as the Lord himself regarded as righteous come to
him--Nicodemus, Nathaniel, the young man who came running and
kneeled to him, the scribe who was not far from the kingdom, the
centurion, in whom he found more faith than in any Jew, he who had
built a synagogue in Capernaum, and sculptured on its lintel the pot
of manna? These came to him, and we know he was ready to receive
them. But he knew such would always come drawn of the Father; they
did not want much calling; they were not so much in his thoughts
therefore; he was not troubled about them; they were as the ninety
and nine, the elder son at home, the money in the purse. Doubtless
they had much to learn, were not yet in the kingdom, but they were
crowding about its door. If I set it forth aright, I know not, but
thus it looks to me. And one thing I cannot forget--it meets me in
the face--that some at least,--who knows if not all?--of the purest
of men have counted themselves the greatest sinners! Neither can I
forget that other saying of our Lord, a stumbling-block to many--our
Lord was not so careful as perhaps some would have had him, lest men
should stumble at the truth--The first shall be last and the last
first. While our Lord spoke the words: The time cometh that
whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service, even
then was Saul of Tarsus at the feet of Gamaliel, preparing to do God
that service; but like one born out of due time, after all the rest
he saw the Lord, and became the chief in labour and suffering. Thus
the last became first. And I bethink me that the beloved disciple,
who leaned on the bosom of the Lord, who was bolder to ask him than
any--with the boldness of love, he whom the meek and lowly called a
Son of Thunder, was the last of all to rejoin the master in the
mansions of his Father. Last or first--if only we are with him! One
thing is clear that in the order of the Lord's business, first came
sinners.
"Who that reflects can fail to see this at least, that a crime
brings a man face to face with the reality of things? He who knows
himself a sinner--I do not mean as one of the race--the most
self-righteous man will allow that as a man he is a sinner--he to
whom, in the words of the communion service, the remembrance of his
sins is grievous, and the burden of them intolerable, knows in
himself that he is a lost man. He can no more hold up his head among
his kind; he cannot look a woman or a child in the face; he cannot
be left alone with the chaos of his thoughts, and the monsters it
momently breeds. The joys of his childhood, the delights of
existence, are gone from him. There dwells within him an ever
present judgment and fiery indignation. Such a man will start at the
sound of pardon and peace, even as the camel of the desert at the
scent of water. Therefore surely is such a man nearer to the gate of
the kingdom than he against whom the world has never wagged a
tongue, who never sinned against a social custom even, and has as
easy a conscience as the day he was born; but who knows so little of
himself that, while he thinks he is good enough, he carries within
him the capacity and possibility of every cardinal sin, waiting only
the special and fitting temptation which, like the match to the
charged mine, shall set all in a roar! Of this danger he knows
nothing, never dreams of praying against it, takes his seat in his
pew Sunday after Sunday with his family, nor ever murmurs Lead us
not into temptation with the least sense that temptation is a
frightful thing, but repeats and responds and listens in perfect
self-satisfaction, doubting never that a world made up of such as he
must be a pleasant sight in the eyes of the Perfect. There are men
who will never see what they are capable or in danger of until they
have committed some fearful wrong. Nay there are some for whom even
that is not enough; they must be found out by their fellow-men, and
scorned in the eyes of the world, before they can or will admit or
comprehend their own disgrace. And there are worse still than these.
"But a man may be oppressed by his sins, and hardly know what it is
that oppresses him. There is more of sin in our burdens than we are
ourselves aware. It needs not that we should have committed any
grievous fault. Do we recognize in ourselves that which needs to be
set right, that of which we ought to be ashamed, something which,
were we lifted above all worldly anxieties, would yet keep us
uneasy, dissatisfied, take the essential gladness out of the
sunlight, make the fair face of the earth indifferent to us, a
trustful glance a discomposing look, and death a darkness?--I say to
the man who feels thus, whatever he may have done or left undone, he
is not so far from the kingdom of heaven but that he may enter
thereinto if he will.
"And if there be here any soul withered up with dismay, torn with
horrible wonder that he should have done the deed which he yet hath
done, to him I say--Flee from the self that hath sinned and hide
thee with Christ in God. Or if the words sound to thee as the words
of some unknown tongue, and I am to thee as one that beateth the
air, I say instead--Call aloud in thy agony, that, if there be a
God, he may hear the voice of his child, and put forth his hand and
lay hold upon him, and rend from him the garment that clings and
poisons and burns, squeeze the black drop from his heart, and set
him weeping like a summer rain. O blessed, holy, lovely repentance
to which the Son of Man, the very root and man of men, hath come to
call us! Good it is, and I know it. Come and repent with me, O heart
wounded by thine own injustice and wrong, and together we will seek
the merciful. Think not about thy sin so as to make it either less
or greater in thine own eyes. Bring it to Jesus, and let him show
thee how vile a thing it is. And leave it to him to judge thee--sure
that he will judge thee justly, extenuating nothing, for he hath to
cleanse thee utterly, and yet forgetting no smallest excuse that may
cover the amazement of thy guilt, or witness for thee that not with
open eyes didst thou do the deed. At the last he cried, Father
forgive them, for they know not what they do. For his enemies the
truth should be spoken, his first words when they had nailed him to
the cross. But again I say, let it be Christ that excuseth thee; he
will do it to more purpose than thou, and will not wrong thy soul by
excusing thee a hair too much, or thy heart by excusing thee a hair
too little.
"I dreamed once that I had committed a terrible crime. Carried
beyond myself by passion, I knew not at the moment HOW evil was the
thing I did. But I knew it was evil. And suddenly I became aware,
when it was too late, of the nature of that which I had done. The
horror that came with the knowledge was of the things that belong
only to the secret soul. I was the same man as before I did it, yet
was I now a man of whom my former self could not have conceived the
possibility as dwelling within it. The former self seemed now by
contrast lovely in purity, yet out of that seeming purity this
fearful, foul I of the present had just been born! The face of my
fellow-man was an avenging law, the face of a just enemy. Where,
how, should the frightful face be hidden? The conscious earth must
take it into its wounded bosom, and that before the all-seeing
daylight should come. But it would come, and I should stand therein
pointed at by every ray that shot through the sunny atmosphere! "The
agony was of its own kind, and I have no word to tell what it was
like. An evil odour and a sickening pain combined, might be a symbol
of the torture. As is in the nature of dreams, possibly I lay but a
little second on the rack, yet an age seemed shot through and
through with the burning meshes of that crime, while, cowering and
terror-stricken, I tossed about the loathsome fact in my mind. I had
DONE it, and from the done there was no escape: it was for evermore
a thing done.--Came a sudden change: I awoke. The sun stained with
glory the curtains of my room, and the light of light darted keen as
an arrow into my very soul. Glory to God! I was innocent! The stone
was rolled from my sepulchre. With the darkness whence it had
sprung, the cloud of my crime went heaving lurid away. I was a
creature of the light and not of the dark. For me the sun shone and
the wind blew; for me the sea roared and the flowers sent up their
odours. For me the earth had nothing to hide. My guilt was wiped
away; there was no red worm gnawing at my heart; I could look my
neighbour in the face, and the child of my friend might lay his hand
in mine and not be defiled! All day long the joy of that deliverance
kept surging on in my soul.
"But something yet more precious, more lovely than such an awaking,
will repentance be to the sinner; for after all it was but a dream
of the night from which that set me free, and the spectre-deed that
vanished had never had a place in the world of fact; while the
horror from which repentance delivers, is no dream, but a stubborn
abiding reality. Again, the vanishing vision leaves the man what he
was before, still capable it may be of committing the crime from
which he is not altogether clean to whom in his sleep it was
possible: repentance makes of the man a new creature, one who has
awaked from the sleep of sin to sleep that sleep no more. The change
in the one case is not for greatness comparable with that in the
other. The sun that awakes from the one sleep, is but the outward
sun of our earthly life--a glorious indeed and lovely thing, which
yet even now is gathering a crust of darkness, blotting itself out
and vanishing: the sun that awakes a man from the sleep of death is
the living Sun that casts from his thought out into being that other
sun, with the space wherein it holds planetary court--the Father of
lights, before whose shining in the inner world of truth eternal,
even the deeds of vice become as spectral dreams, and, with the
night of godlessness that engendered them, flee away.
"But a man may answer and say to me--'Thou art but borne on the
wings of thine imagination. The fact of the crime remains, let a man
tear out his heart in repentance, and no awaking can restore an
innocence which is indeed lost.' I answer: The words thou speakest
are in themselves true, yet thy ignorance makes them false, Thou
knowest not the power of God, nor what resurrection from the dead
means. What if, while it restored not thy former innocence, it
brought thee a purity by the side of whose white splendour and
inward preciousness, the innocence thou hadst lost was but a bauble,
being but a thing that turned to dross in the first furnace of its
temptation? Innocence is indeed priceless--that innocence which God
counteth innocence, but thine was a flimsy show, a bit of polished
and cherished glass--instead of which, if thou repentest, thou shalt
in thy jewel-box find a diamond. Is thy purity, O fair Psyche of the
social world, upon whose wings no spattering shower has yet cast an
earthy stain, and who knowest not yet whether there be any such
thing as repentance or need of the same!--is thy purity to compare
with the purity of that heavenly Psyche, twice born, who even now in
the twilight-slumbers of heaven, dreams that she washes with her
tears the feet of her Lord, and wipes them with the hairs of her
head? O bountiful God, who wilt give us back even our innocence
tenfold! He can give an awaking that leaves the past of the soul ten
times farther behind than ever waking from sleep left the dreams of
the night.
"If the potency of that awaking lay in the inrush of a new billow of
life, fresh from its original source, carrying with it an
enlargement of the whole nature and its every part, a glorification
of every faculty, every sense even, so that the man, forgetting
nothing of his past or its shame, should yet cry out in the joy of
his second birth: 'Lo! I am a new man; I am no more he who did that
awful and evil thing, for I am no more capable of doing it! God be
praised, for all is well!'--would not such an awaking send the past
afar into the dim distance of the first creation, and wrap the ill
deed in the clean linen cloth of forgiveness, even as the dull
creature of the sea rolls up the grain of intruding sand in the
lovely garment of a pearl? Such an awaking means God himself in the
soul, not disdaining closest vital company with the creature he
foresaw and created. And the man knows in full content that he is
healed of his plague. Nor would he willingly lose the scars which
record its outbreak, for they tell him what he is without God, and
set him ever looking to see that the door into the heavenly garden
stands wide for God to enter the house when it pleases him. And who
can tell whether, in the train of such an awaking, may not follow a
thousand opportunities and means of making amends to those whom he
has injured? "Nor must I fail to remind the man who has committed no
grievous crime, that except he has repented of his evil self, and
abjured all wrong, he is not safe from any, even the worst offence.
There was a time when I could not understand that he who loved not
his brother was a murderer: now I see it to be no figure of speech,
but, in the realities of man's moral and spiritual nature, an
absolute simple fact. The murderer and the unloving sit on the same
bench before the judge of eternal truth. The man who loves not his
brother, I do not say is at this moment capable of killing him, but
if the natural working of his unlove be not checked, he will
assuredly become capable of killing him. Until we love our brother,
yes, until we love our enemy, who is yet our brother, we contain
within ourselves the undeveloped germ of murder. And so with every
sin in the tables or out of the tables. There is not one in this
congregation who has a right to cast a look of reproach at the worst
felon who ever sat in the prisoners' dock. I speak no hyperbole, but
simple truth. We are very ready to draw in our minds a distinction
between respectable sins--human imperfections we call them,
perhaps--and disreputable vices, such as theft and murder; but there
is no such distinction in fact. Many a thief is a better man than
many a clergyman, and miles nearer to the gate of the kingdom. The
heavenly order goes upon other principles than ours, and there are
first that shall be last, and last that shall be first. Only, at the
root of all human bliss lies repentance.
"Come then at the call of the Water, the Healer, the Giver of
repentance and light, the Friend of publicans and sinners, all ye on
whom lies the weight of a sin, or the gathered heap of a thousand
crimes. He came to call such as you, that he might make you clear
and clean. He cannot bear that you should live on in such misery,
such badness, such blackness of darkness. He would give you again
your life, the bliss of your being. He will not speak to you one
word of reproach, except indeed you should aim at justifying
yourselves by accusing your neighbour. He will leave it to those who
cherish the same sins in their hearts to cast stones at you: he who
has no sin casts no stone. Heartily he loves you, heartily he hates
the evil in you--so heartily that he will even cast you into the
fire to burn you clean. By making you clean he will give you rest.
If he upbraid, it will not be for past sin, but for the present
little faith, holding out to him an acorn-cup to fill. The rest of
you keep aloof, if you will, until you shall have done some deed
that compels you to cry out for deliverance; but you that know
yourselves sinners, come to him that he may work in you his perfect
work, for he came not to call the righteous, but sinners, us, you
and me, to repentance."
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