Sermons at Rugby Part 5

He had cheated his brother out of his father's blessing; he was leaving his father's house in consequence, to avoid this brother's threatened vengeance; and as he slept at Bethel he dreamed his dream of the ladder set up on earth and reaching to heaven; and he saw the angels ascending and descending, and the Lord standing above it, and he heard the Divine voice charged with promise and with blessing: "I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest." This, taking it in all its parts, is a very surprising narrative; and the point in it on which I desire to fix your attention for a moment is this, that this vision startled him into a new consciousness--"Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not." It was the beginning of a new life.

That vision, we may be sure, never entirely faded. He was never afterwards the same man he had been before it. It had awakened the divine capacity in him; and it remained with him as a constant reminder of the presence of G.o.d in his life, to protect and to inspire him--"I am with thee, and I will keep thee in all places whither thou goest." Such a voice as this in a man's heart gives his life a new quality; it puts him in a new relation to all common things.

We may well believe that it was this more than anything else which drew Jacob apart from the common heathen life around him, from that day onwards. It was this which, in spite of all his weaknesses, defects, and failures in life and character, gradually raised him to a different level.

It was this which finally culminated in transforming him from Jacob the supplanter to Israel the prince of G.o.d.

So far as appears, he had gone out from his home, as so many go forth in all ages, a dull soul, though with latent capacities, his thoughts bent on securing his personal safety and his worldly success. But he woke in the desert after that vision, with the seeds of the new life rooted and growing in him.

It is this moment of awakening on which I desire to fix your thoughts--this moment of his transfiguration; when he saw and felt a heaven above him, and yet very close, with its ladder of angelic communication, which he had not _so_ seen or felt before; the moment when a new consciousness flashed through his soul, and illumined unsuspected chambers in it, stirring new thoughts and new aspirations. He woke up to be a new man henceforth, moving in a new presence, and having always in his ears the voice of a Divine call.

Do you ask why I dwell on this familiar history, or desire that you should contemplate and realise this change in the young man Jacob? It is because there is just the same soul, the same capacity of higher life in every one of us: in some it is awake already and transfiguring their life; in others still latent, sleeping, undiscovered.

I dwell on it because it makes and will make all the difference in the world to your life whether in your case this capacity is awakened or not.

This, then, is what I have to postulate as giving a value beyond the power of words to describe to every soul amongst us.

It bids us recognise and keep always before us that in every common life, of child or man, even in the most worldly or the hardest, the most frivolous, the most cynical, the most sensual, or the most degraded, there is latent, it may be altogether unfelt and disregarded through long years, giving no sign of its presence, it may be, it often is, overlaid, trodden down, even at the point of death, but still there, this living soul with all its possibilities. It is within every one of us, stamped with the image of G.o.d, and charged with unimagined possibilities.

And it must be obvious that the whole difference between any two lives, between your life and your neighbour's life, may depend on this awakening of the soul in one of you and its not awakening in the other.

Of the two brothers, Esau and Jacob, I suppose we are all drawn at the outset to Esau; our heart goes out to him, as we read, the impulsive, the impetuous, the affectionate, and we feel a corresponding dislike of Jacob's craft and cunning, and selfish calculations. There can be no doubt, we say, which was the meaner character to begin with.

But neither is there any doubt why it was that it came to be written, "Jacob I have loved, but Esau have I hated." The one was just the child of the world around him, yielding to its temptations, living by its standards. The soul in him never awoke, so as to transfigure his thoughts and purposes. The other is a man of Divine visions, inspired with the sense of a Divine presence and a Divine purpose directing him.

Nowhere do we see more clearly than in this narrative how great a change may come to any of us, if the unawakened capacities of our soul are touched by the breath of some uplifting inspiration.

As we read of this contrast between Esau and Jacob, and their destinies, we feel--and we feel it all the more because Jacob to begin with seems to be made of such common clay--we feel what a transforming power in a man's life this awaking of the soul may be.

A life which is without the inspiration that takes possession of us in the moments of this awakening, and is consequently without these visions that flash before the soul as it awakens, a life that is not deeply stirred by spiritual hopes or Divine thought, or the call to new duty, remains in one man a selfish and worldly life, in another a frivolous, in a third a sensual life. But the very same life--and here is the practical value to us, here is the hopefulness of such considerations--the very same life, when the breath of G.o.d's spirit or His penetrating voice has stirred and roused the soul in it, is felt to be transformed. The man is born anew.

"There is nothing finer," some one has said, "than to see a soul rise up in men, which amazes the very men in whom it rises." They are surprised to find that these new capacities were in them, unnoticed through their careless days, yet in them all the time. This birth of the new life, with all its promise of new tastes, new ambitions, new thoughts, new purposes, may indeed come to you without your feeling all at once how great a thing it is. At first it may be nothing more than some vision of the possibilities of your life, or some electric flash of new consciousness that runs through you, or the sharp pang of remorse for some sin or some neglect, or the flush of shame or repulsion as you think of something or other in your life, or the glow of some good resolution to begin some new life or new duty, or take some new turn, or pursue some new aim. You hardly think perhaps of this as the awakening of your soul.

It may never have occurred to you to think of it as being just as sacred a thing as was Jacob's vision at Bethel, as being indeed the work of the same Divine spirit.

But let us consider it a little further. Whatever it is that is thus stirring in your heart, it comes and it comes again; it lingers in your thoughts and feelings; it haunts, it impresses and awes you; it rises before you suddenly and stops you from some sin, or, if it fails to stop you, it turns the pleasure for which you craved into wretchedness; or it encourages and consoles you in some hour of weakness or sorrow. I suppose there is hardly one of you who has not had some such experience as this. And if you ask. What is it? It is, I repeat, the awakening of the soul in you--nothing less than this--and happy is it for you, if you recognise that it is the soul striving to win its proper place in the regulation of your life.

When Moses saw the vision of the burning bush, and suddenly felt himself on holy ground; when Elijah heard the still, small voice calling, "What doest thou here, Elijah?" when Saul, on his way to Damascus, fell to the ground conscience-smitten, crushed, blinded, rebuked; when the child Samuel heard the Divine voice calling to him in the darkness of the night;--in each case it was the awakening or the reawakening of the soul--the uprising of the spiritual capacities, the vision of the higher life--and so exactly with all of _you_. Are you not sometimes conscious of the uprisings in you of a spirit calling upon you to recognise the angels' ladder that connects _your_ life also with the heaven above us?

If so, there is this further thing to note about such moments of experience.

This feeling of some spiritual capacity in you, this call to some higher view of life and duty, this uprising of the moral sense and the repulsion towards the lower forms of life which comes with it--this is G.o.d's personal gift to us, and we pray that you may possess it early; for it is not only a new consciousness, it is itself a new power in your life.

You cannot have it, feeling its presence and hearing its suggestions, and debase your life in any way, as you might have done, but for its presence. It is so very true that, in the life of the Spirit, looking up means lifting up. As the plant turns to the sun, it grows towards the sun; as it looks up to the light, it grows towards the light; so it is with us. We feel that we are sons of G.o.d, and we tend to become so.

Through some influence or other, we awake to a vivid consciousness that G.o.d has created us in His image, endowed us with Divine capacities, and this consciousness becomes a purifying and inspiring force in our life, and it is a new life in consequence.

Pray that such influences may prevail around you here, and that you may hold them fast until they have blessed your life.

XI. "MEMBERS ONE OF ANOTHER."

"So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another."--ROMANS xii. 5.

There are some moral and spiritual truths which it seems to be almost impossible to impress upon the practical life of the world, although they meet with a sort of universal acceptance.

Men agree with them, they re-echo them, they applaud them; they do everything, in fact, but exhibit them as the moving, inspiring, and guiding truths of their daily practice.

And among these I fear we must still cla.s.s that one which is expressed in the text I have just read, a text which sets forth the fundamental fact that whatever else Christianity may teach, it teaches as one of its first and princ.i.p.al lessons that a Christian man has to live in Christ for his neighbours.

If such a text means anything, it means that Christianity is essentially a religion of society, that it sets before us social claims as standing before all other claims; that, starting from the Divine Sacrifice as the central fact of human life, it was intended to root out of our hearts the noxious weed of selfishness by the power of the Divine love, and to build up the organisation of men in their common relationships upon this new basis.

It may sound somewhat strange to speak at this time of day of what Christianity is intended to do, rather than what it has done already.

But it is even more strange to read the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, and all the other words of the Lord; all the lessons of His life and His sacrifice; the history of the first generation of Christians; the descent of the Spirit upon them; and the teaching of the apostolic brotherhood--to remember that all this is our accepted faith; that it has been the faith of one generation after another for eighteen hundred years; that we grow up in this faith, live in it, and die in it; and at the same time to contemplate side by side with it all the elements of the common life, all the rules and customs of society, all the standards of conduct which ordinary men take as their measure of daily duty and purpose.

Thus, whilst on the one hand Christian influences, and all the changes in the world's life which are due to them, fill us with wonder and grat.i.tude, the failures of Christianity are scarcely less impressive.

When we consider the ordinary run of men's lives, so different for the most part in spirit, and in aim and guiding rules, from that type which the New Testament sets before us, it would almost seem as if to the majority their religion was not a ruling and dominating principle, pervading this present life, but only an _ideal_, shedding around us a glow of indefinite hopes and possibilities, an ideal hardly to be realised, laid up somewhere in the heavens--[Greek text]. These contrasts between the revelation of the Gospel and the standards of the Christian world have always troubled the most earnest spirits in every generation. Some of you remember, no doubt, how this contrast between Christian profession and the life of selfish sin and waste flashed into fierce poetry in one such spirit of the last generation, who grew up in this school.

"Through the great, sinful streets of Naples, as I pa.s.sed, With fiercer heat than flamed above my head My heart was hot within me, till at last My brain was lightened when my tongue had said Christ is not risen."

And men who are truly in earnest about faith and life, and who are perplexed and distressed by the contradictions and insincerities that meet them, must often be moved as he was.

And yet, when we look closer, and consider that the battle of spiritual progress has this peculiarity attached to it, that it has to be fought over again, in every generation, and in every separate individual soul, the result is less surprising. Remembering this, we do not expect the victory of the last generation to save us from defeat or failure.

And this has to be borne in mind equally in regard to the continuous life of societies and to our own separate lives. Thus in such a society as this, if our predecessors uplifted the standards of conduct, inculcated high principles, and inspired their generation with a strong pervading spirit, this should make it easier for us to do likewise; but it does not insure our doing it. All this higher life will die in our hands if the same regenerating spirit is not alive and working in our hearts also. So, again, your individual victory over sin in the power of the Spirit in you, does not save my life from having to fight the battle for itself and win its own victories.

So that, however perplexing the phenomena of life may seem whilst we look at them in the ma.s.s or from the outside, if we read the Gospel of Christ as a message to our own souls a great deal of the perplexity disappears.

And it was with this personal message that Christ came, and there is no hope of our understanding His mission, or of living in the light of His transforming spirit, if we think of it in any other way than this.

The purpose of His revelation is to crucify the selfish instinct in us, and to rouse us to the life of self-devotion, to the idea of consecrated energies; and this being so, all Christian life is of the nature of a warfare; and a warfare which begins afresh with each generation of men; because selfishness, with all its tribe of attendant appet.i.tes and pa.s.sions, springs afresh in every single soul, and is nurtured, strengthened, cultivated, by so many of the conditions of life.

If, then, the Spirit of Christ is really to prevail in our life, it must be by effecting our emanc.i.p.ation from selfish instincts, and rousing in us the spirit of devotion to the good of other lives.

In proportion as you diminish selfishness in your own life or in any other, by fostering generous affections and cultivating the spirit of social duty and religious aspiration, by walking in the footsteps of Christ and living in the light of His presence, you are laying the only possible foundation of any lasting progress, you are following the one true method by which the mystery of sin is to be overcome.

We may wonder that this should be so difficult; for of selfishness we should say that we all dislike it. In its grosser forms we repudiate it.

The very word is one which we articulate with a certain accent of contempt.

But when we come to its refined and subtle workings in our nature, when we think of its Proteus-like changeableness, its power of a.s.suming the various guises even of duty or religion; when we reflect how it can clothe itself in the choicest garb of art, or science, or divine philosophy, we find very likely that we are always in danger of being enslaved by it.

And we do well to pray in all sincerity that grace may expel our selfishness; for indeed the influence of true religion is to be gauged by the extent to which this prayer is being fulfilled in us. The fulfilment of it is what we mean by the regenerate life.

I need not ask you how you feel in the presence of any character which you recognise as cleansed from all taint of selfishness, a character, softened, refined, purified, inspired, consecrated. I would rather ask whether you know of any personal influence to be compared with that of such a character.

And if, as I antic.i.p.ate, you would answer that there is none like it, I would ask you to bear in mind that this influence may be yours. You are invited by all the highest calls within and around you to make it yours.

"What is the aim and purpose of his life?" is a question which men are justified in asking about us; and they are justified in pa.s.sing their verdict upon us by the answer which our life gives.