[Front page image from The
Independent (Friday 18 February, 2011.)]
DEMOCRACY, SOCIALISM
AND
THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT.*
[* NOTE.
Not all footnotes are included. – Ed.]
By D. M. PANTON.
Criticism
of the social structure is a habit of modern thought. Society and the thought that reflects it have
grown chaotic: the Ritualist jostles the Quaker, the Socialist is neighbour to
the Imperialist, the Anarchist haunts the chambers of kings; and over all broods
the sleepless eye of the Jesuit.
Reforming zeal, grown more ambitious with the instability of thrones,
presses now to social rather than political issues. The ancient controversy lay in the
entrenchments and the outworks; it now rages in the citadel of the State
itself. Thus it is more deep-seated and
momentous. For a re-constructer of the
social order handles a more dangerous explosive
than was ever handled by politician or even revolutionist. Autocracy might yield to democracy, and
empires collide or disappear; but to
alter the nature and functions of the State, and forcibly to readjust all
social relations, is to apply the knife so deeply as to kill or cure. Yet it is certain that the social order is
deeply diseased. Dislodgment of Birth
from the places of power has merely resulted in their occupation by centralized
and irresponsible Wealth. Labour, where
freed from the shackles of priest craft, and also from the sacred restraints of
religion, lifts a surly countenance upon the appropriated wealth it helped to
produce, and on the self-created and impassable barriers erected by the
rich. Want and disease send a wailing
cry through all lands. Competition
tramples whole classes under its ensanguined feet. In this travail of jarring classes and murderous
monopolies, Socialism* was brought
forth. Socialism is rooted in the
failure of freedom to produce co-operative brotherhood; in the despair of
effecting general happiness either by the accomplished reforms which, in
earlier years, danced as a mirage before the seers of a political Utopia, or by
the experiments in a miniature Communism which have continuously failed through
a lack of cohesive power; and in the hope, which is the fiery heart of the new
faith, of effecting redress by means of a drastic reconstruction of society.
[* Socialism is a steadily growing
power in Continental parliaments and States
it permeates literature with a singularly penetrating propaganda its societies,
buttressed by powerful names, are active
in English cities and universities, hitherto immune; and even the Christian
Churches are not exempt from what Dr.
Clifford calls “a regeneration of their social
consciousness.”]
SOCIALISM
Exigencies of conviction have divided Socialism into its Christian,
State, and Anarchic branches. Christian
Socialism divides itself into Catholic and Evangelical. Catholic Socialism aims at social reforms,
and society reconstituted under a sacerdotal hierarchy, together with revived
mendicant orders, craftsmen’s guilds, and a general control by the Catholic
Church.1 [1 See F.S. Nitti’s Catholic Socialism, London 1895.] Political economy, says the Evangelical Socialist, is
the anatomist to show the construction of the social body; Socialism is the
pathology which describes the malady; and the Gospel is the therapeutics for
the application of the remedy.2 [2 See
Bishop Barry’s Christianity and Socialism, London, 1890.]
State Socialism desires to turn the State into an impersonal Mandarin,
by which all sources of power and wealth shall be possessed and controlled for
the common weal, set up - for no gentler process is deemed practicable by the
dominant school - on the overturned thrones and altars of the world. “We wish,”
says the Alliance of the Socialist Democracy (afterwards absorbed in the
International Working Men’s Association), “to destroy
all States and all Churches, with all their institutions and laws, religious,
political, juridical, financial, magisterial, academical, economical, and
social,” to establish, in their place, industrial co-operation and
collective ownership of land and capital.
Anarchic Socialism, by a like process of revolution, wars further
against all centralized government, for which it would substitute, after its
violent removal, control of its own affairs by each isolated industrial
unit. “Our task,”
says a Nihilist document (1876), “is the most
terrifying, ruthless, universal destruction.” “Let everything return to chaos,” cries
[* Socialists avoid the details of social reconstruction; they
form forward the negative work, to
destroy that which bars the way to the constructive: and so their energies, for
the most part, are bent on creating a mighty reservoir of revolution. Even the
advocates of a pacific Socialism admit that the most powerful and philosophic
Socialistic thought is revolutionary.
** But the greater part of Socialism is frankly and deeply
anti-Christian. In the sphere of
religion, says Mr. Belfort Bax,
Socialism is “Athestic Humanism”; “It utterly despises the ‘other world,’ with all its stage
properties – that is, the present objects of religion.”
*** E.g., Matt. 13: 39-42; 25:
31-46; Luke 17: 26-30; 18: 8, etc.
**** The pioneer of Christian Socialism in
THE SPIRIT OF THE DISCIPLE
Ch. 5: 1. And seeing
the multitudes, He went up into the mountain: and when He had sat down, His disciples came unto Him: 2 and He opened His mouth,
and taught them.
It is disciples, though within earshot of the multitude, that our Lord, in solemn
session, sets Himself to teach. Luke is
equally explicit: “He lilted up His eyes on
His disciples, and said” (Luke 6: 20). The Sermon on the Mount, as Bishop Gore
succinctly puts it,* was spoken into the ear of the Church and overheard by the
world.*
[* The Sermon on the
Mount, p. 15; London, 1896. As
Augustine’s comment is fullest of pregnant epigram; Tholuck’s the most erudite
and exhaustive; Bengel’s the most subtly suggestive; so Mr. Govett’s is the
most original, and, I believe, correct, of the commentaries on the Sermon with
which I am acquainted.]
3. Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs
is the kingdom of leaven.
It is spiritual character upon which our Lord strikes the first deep, strong note. Blessed is the man who is before he does. The
new creation of the indwelling Spirit enfolds within itself all potentialities
of blessed action. But consequent acts
of love and mercy are the indispensable proofs that travel down into life’s
little things - the robbed cloak and the assaulted cheek. “I am trying to
build up new countries,” Cecil
Rhodes said to General Booth; “you and your father are trying to build up new men; and
you have chosen the better part.” In a ripe maturity of political experience
second to none, Mr. Gladstone said:
“The welfare of mankind does not now depend on the
State, or on the world of politics: the real battle is being fought out in the
world of thought; and we politicians are children playing with toys in comparison to that
great work of restoring belief.”
On the threshold of the Sermon Christ erects the gate of
humility. “And He called to Him a little child, and set
him in the midst of them, and said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye turn, and become as little children, ye shall in no wise
enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:
3). Without a changed nature the
malignant evils of the social order, deeply seated in a diseased heart, would
reproduce themselves for ever, and reduce even God’s Kingdom to chaos. The Celestial Hills can be reached only
through the Vale of the lowly heart.
4. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Blessed, says the Socialist, is a general diffusion of
comfort: Blessed, says the politician, is the greatest happiness of the
greatest number: “Blessed,” says Christ, “are they that mourn.” This
radical divergence springs from antagonistic views of the world. The philosopher is content to reform without
regenerating; sin, to him, is a distemper of the skin; the world is disordered,
but not condemned. Christ reveals that
the world, jarred out of all harmony with God, is deeply cankered with
sin. Wickedness predominates; therefore
mourning is blest. The disciple is bowed by the cross he has
lifted. But of righteous sorrow Christ
approves; the mourners shall be comforted when earth is regenerate, and the
Curse departs from every island and continent like a lifted shadow. Sorrow, in a sinless world, would be sinful.
5. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
An exquisite proof of the truth of Christ’s words is their
amazing unworldliness. It is precisely
the meek who are uniformly excluded from earthly inheritance; high places yield
to the assault of wealth, ambition, and organized power. The meek waive, rather than prosecute, their
claims; sufferers, doing right, with patience; much forgiven, they are much
forgiving. For such the earth, when
become Messiah’s in its uttermost parts, is reserved, as the hundredfold
compensation for suffered wrong. The earth
is yet to governed by its aristocracy of grace. But the possession is reached by the path of
renunciation. “Dost
thou wish,” says Augustine, “to possess the earth?
Beware then lest thou be possessed by it.”
6. Blessed are
they that hunger and thirst after
righteousness: for they shall be filled.
Not, Blessed are the righteous; but blessed are disciples
consciously imperfect and sinful, eager to crown imputed righteousness with
active goodness. The daily recurring
appetite is set on weaving the pure, bright linen - the …* [righteous acts] of the Bride. The love of righteousness, a thirst planted
in the soul by God, is for ever
baffled in the spheres of labour, politics, religion: Wealth triumphs in
monopoly; Cabinets shape the course of kingdoms by expediency; the great State
Churches dare not uproot powerful corruptions; the individual writhes under the
tyranny of habitual sin. Nevertheless
the hunger shall be satisfied. For the
righteousness of Christ, falling on the shoulders of faith, is a pledge of
ultimate sanctification. The body
of resurrection will harbour no traitor
within. Divine might shall establish
upon earth a Kingdom of right.
[* Rev. 19: 8; Cf. 2 Cor.
5: 3.]
7. Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
JUSTICE was the foundation principle of the
Law (Deut. 16: 20); MERCY is the soul of the Gospel.
8. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
This is explicit. The
beatific vision is for the pure alone; and for the pure, not in act only, but
in heart. Purity of heart is far rarer than purity of life. But the entry into the sacred presence is, even among disciples,
conditional*: God dwells in a
privacy of holy light inaccessible to all but the heart-pure. “Without
sanctification none shall see the
Lord” (Heb. 12: 14). The Resurrection of Life, in which the Father
reveals Himself, belongs to disciples whose righteousness exceeds the Levitical
purity of the flesh.
[* “Even believers,” says Dr. Tholuck, “may
inherit a partial unblessedness. This is
a point,” he significantly adds, “on which our
doctrine requires further elaboration.” - Sermon on the Mount, P. 39.
Before the Bema disciples are to be arraigned (Rom. 14: 10; 2
Cor, 5: 10), with possible loss of all but eternal life (1 Cor.
3: 15; 9: 27), and a possible infliction of active but temporary
punishment (Luke 12: 46-48; Matt. 25: 14, 30). Gift (Rom . 6: 23) is retained after
prizes (Rev. 3: 11)
are lost. For an expansion of this
truth, see the seventh Present Day Pamphlet, The Judgment Seat of Christ.]
9. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called sons of God.
It is characteristic that obedience to these commands falls
within the compass of the lowliest and the humblest. As quarrels are universal,
so are the opportunities of the peacemaker.
Christ’s disciples are not only to be peaceful, but makers of peace, as oil upon the world’s
waters: sons of God in character, as also, in the Regeneration, in title.*
[* “Pity, purity, peace,”
comments Dr. Tholuck, “not accidental ethical virtues, but characteristic Christian
graces, the possession of which presupposes the possession of salvation.”
‑ Sermon on the Mount, P. 88.]
10. Blessed are they that have been persecuted for righteousness sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
11. Blessed
are ye when men shall reproach you, and persecute you, and say all manner of
evil against you falsely, for My sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were
before you.
Antagonism to the wor1d is
an essential of discipleship. The “world” in modern literature has lost the shadowed,
fallen, terrifying sense with which it was burdened on the lips of Christ. But so fundamental is the antagonism that He
lays it down as a perpetual basis of action.
Reproaches, damaged reputation, and the cruelty of false reports pursue even the holder of every beatitude, and constitute
an ineradicable note of discipleship. “All that would live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution” (2 Tim. 3: 12). But it is for His sake whom we love: that
is enough. There are times when merely
to suffer is the truest service that can be rendered to Christ.
“Have been persecuted”
Here our Lord strikes a note of profound discord with all Utopian
ideals. No slow process of evolution,
reaching after centuries the full flower of social perfectness, can justify a
God of goodness and love. For
what of the trampled myriads of bygone agonies? What of the servants of God
slain? Without
a resurrection, a tender reunion upon
an earth regenerated and crowned with an opened heaven, who could justify the
ways of God to men? But “these all,
having had witness borne to them through their faith, received not the promise: God having provided some better thing
concerning us, that apart from us they should not be made perlect” (Heb. 11:
39, 40); nor we, apart from
them. Half-lights of dawn break through
the midnight of suffering.* For painful
service God is pledged to recompense: by it the disciple is proved in the
blessed succession of the righteous.
[* “In the subject” (throughout the Beatitudes), says
Royal rank awaits the sufferer. Throughout the Beatitudes the Kingdom, with
its riches - many names, as Augustine says, but one reward - is the prize held
forth: a Kingdom of the heavens, for its metropolis is the heaven-born
Jerusalem (Rev. 19: 7; 21: 10); an
inheritance upon earth, for to the fallen soil Christ returns (Zech. 14: 4); a vision of the Father, for it is
also His Kingdom (Rev. 11: 15); a treasured
reward in heaven, for it is
no worldly State reformed to perfect conditions, or rebuilt on the ideals of
Socialism.* Christ is yet to triumph in the arena of the
nations. On earth God’s will is yet to be done.
“Since Augustine’s time,” says Dr. Hort, “the
Kingdom of heaven or
[* The Kingdom. as Dr. Tholuck observes. was no new idea. To
Christ’s hearers it was the Messianic Kingdom, the lodestar of Israel; and the
millennial Kingdom, four times associated with “the Christ,” is, the Messianic
(Rev. 11: 15; 12: 10; 20: 1-6). But its heavenly compartment, for the risen saints, was not understood (Rev. 19:
6-9). Afterwards, it is the eternal Kingdom, on new heavens and new earth (1 Cor. 15: 24; Rev.
21. and 22.). “This view of the
Kingdom and its coming,” says Dr.
H. A. W. Meyer, “as the winding up of the world’s
history, a view which was also shared by the principal Fathers (Tertullian, Chrysostum, Augustine, Euth.
Zigabenus), is the, only one which corresponds with the historical
conception of the … throughout the whole of the New Testament.” On Matthew, trans. Edinburgh, 1877.
** Christian Ecclesia,
p. 19; London, 1897. Bishop Waldgrave’s Bampton Lectures on Millenarianism (
13. Ye are the salt of the earth but if
the salt have lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth
good for nothing, but to be cast out and trodden under foot of men. 14. Ye are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be
hid. 15.
Neither do men light a lamp, and put it under the
bushel, but on the stand; and it shineth unto all that are in the house. 16. Even so let your light
shine before men, that they may see your
good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.
The cardinal point of the Sermon is here resolved. Christ is addressing disciples. The
disciple is the conscious follower of Christ.
The multitude, though from its bosom the disciple is drawn, ultimately
hurried Him to crucifixion. Sometime
darkness (Eph. 5: 8), disciples are now light in the Lord. The Sun has kindled Himself in them. Grace has seasoned and salted their characters. The body our Lord addresses throughout is
distinguished from the nations of the world; it is the little flock; its lifted
face is rosy as with the lights of dawn.
“For all these things do the nations of the world seek after: but your Father knoweth
that ye
have need of these things. ...
Fear not, litt1e flock. …
Let your
loins be girded about, and your lamps burning; and be ye yourselves like unto
men looking
for their lord” (Luke 12: 30-36).
Christ embodies a code of legislation, not for the humanity of creation,
but for the humanity of redemption –
“a sphere wherein is realized what human life is meant to be, and, rightly dealt with, is capable of becoming.”* Works are demanded of those already disciples. The
flooding light fills the eyes of beholders; the crag-borne city is the monument
of its founder: so the convincing, compelling evidence of the glory of God is
His servant’s consecrated life. The
Church is the lampstand of God.**
[* Bishop Gore’s Social Doctrine of the Sermon on the Mount, p. 8; London,
1892. Individually God presents the
Gospel, socially the Church. The body of
brethren, radically distinct from the world, is, the sphere of Divine
community. The early Church’s unique
experiment, a community of use rather than a community of property, assumed
profound premises never accepted by later Communism (Acts
4: 32-35). (1) It was in no sense
economic legislation for the world; (2) it was based on new-born hearts, and
bodies baptized with the Holy Ghost; (3) it was not a unity born of
self-interest, but of heart and soul infused with the Spirit of God. Nor (4) was this, enthusiasm of sacrifice
commanded by the Spirit or by Apostles, or (5) practised in any apostolic
Church beside
** The Church, our Lord implies, if once unsalted; if emptied
of its distinguishing doctrine and peculiarity of conduct; if; as salt on a
damp floor, it absorbs earthly corruption, and grace departs, and faith (Rom. 11: 20-22),
the lampstand will not be restored (cf. Rev. 2: 5);
and God’s protection will be withdrawn from a devitalized Christianity.]
CHRIST’S RELATION TO THE LAW OF MOSES.
17. Think not that I came to destroy the
law or the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfil. 18. For verily I say unto
you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise
pass away from the law, till all things be accomplished. 19. Whosoever
therefore shall break one of these least
commandments, and shall teach men so,
shall be called least in the kingdom of
heaven: but whosoever shall do and
teach them, he shall be called great
in the kingdom of heaven.
Christ fulfilled the Law by obedience, and the Prophets by suffering. But, delivered on the threshold of His
ampler-spirited code, more is obviously meant by this pregnant utterance. He fuller-filled* both. Never antagonistic to the Law, but to the
tradition of the elders (Mark 7: 1-13);
sanctioning the priestly succession, though sentencing the priestly sepulchres
(Matt. 23: 2-4); asserting Law and Prophets as alike inspired** and alike
indestructible, He, as the Prophet greater than Moses, rescinds entire laws,
amplifies others, and fulfils the complement of all to a perfect standard. Moses and Christ are not two irreconcilables,
as Count Tolstoy, reviving Gnosticism
affirms.*** For with solemnest sanction
our Lord asserts that, for Jewish disciples, He will adjudicate rank in His
Kingdom according to their obedience to the lightest of Moses’ precepts. “As we treat the
word of God,” said Bengel, “so does God treat us.”
[* See Tholuck. ** Our
Lord here asserts, in language that could hardly be more explicit, the verbal inspiration of Law and Prophets as
originally delivered. “… is the Hebrew Jod,” says Dean Alford, “the smallest letter in the
alphabet kepaiai [See Gk.] are the little
turns of the strokes by which one letter differs from another similar to it.” *** Gospel
in Brief, p. 11;
20. For I say unto you, that except your
righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom
of heaven.
But the new code is to supersede the old. Love, the strong undercurrent of the Law,
Christ now diverts into the open channel of Grace. The standard of obedience is exalted. The righteousness demanded of Christian
disciples surpasses the legal; it exceeds both in kind and in degree; for it is
more righteous intensively, and more exacting in the obedience it
requires. “The
whole of the rest of our Lord’s Sermon," as Dean Alford observes, “is a comment on,
and illustration of, the assertion in this verse.” The new Lawgiver lays down a momentous
principle. By obedience to the higher righteousness, expressed in detail in the
Sermon, entrance on the
[* Cf. Matt. 7: 21; 1 Cor. 6:
1-10; 2 Tim. 2: 12; Heb. 4: 11, etc.]
IMPULSES OF ANGER AND LUST.
21. Ye have
heard that it was said to them of old time, Thou ,shalt not kill; and whosoever
shall kill shall be in danger of the Judgment: 22.
but I say unto you,
that every one who is angry with his
brother shall be in danger of the judgment; and whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of the hell of fire.
23. If therefore
thou art offering thy gift at the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother
hath aught against thee, 24. leave there thy ,gift before the altar, and go thy way, first
be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift. 25. Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art with him
in the way; lest haply the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge
deliver thee to the officer, .and thou be cast into prison. 26, Verily I say unto thee,
Thou shalt by no means come out thence
till thou have paid the last farthing.
Authority is here recognized by our Lord; a
principle that underlies the council, the judgment, and the sentence of
Gehenna; and authority that expresses itself in law. Human government, though
tarnished and corrupt, is a reflection of that eternal Sovereignty and
immutable Order which rears itself in the background of the invisible; and
since God’s plan has designed its ideal for each created soul, perfection of
freedom lies in the choice of obedience, by which the tributary soul revolves
round God in a perfect orbit.
Lawlessness, by which this design is thwarted, now rears its head with
bold front against Heaven. “Our enemy,” said the Anarchist Congress of Geneva in
1882, “is every abstract authority, whether devil or good God, in the name
of which priests have so long governed good souls. OUR ENEMY IS THE LAW.”* Socialism betrays a kindred spirit. “The whole department of law,” says Mr. Bax, “will
be swept away in the perfected State.”**
This lawlessness - to be ripened in its season, as Paul reveals, in the
Man of Lawlessness,*** who, himself a tyrant, will enthrone his tyranny on the ruins of established law,**** - actually
attributes itself to Christ. “All power and authority” - words put into His mouth
by Count Tolstoy - “must disappear,
... and all ruling power.”*****. Exactly antithetical are His actual words,
which not only recognize the principle in its last and most awful form, the
horrors of Gehenna.******
[* Mr. Rae’s Contemporary
Socialism, P. 254 (my italics). ** Religion of Socialism, p. 146. Dr. Percy Dearmer writes: “When we have established Collectivism we shall probably pass
on to Communism; and after some centuries of Communism humanity may become pure
enough to live without laws at all, to enjoy what is called by that
much-misunderstood name, Anarchism.” - Christian Socialism, p. 9; London, 1897. Not thus shall Heb.
10: 16 be fulfilled. *** O avopus [see
Gk. word] in 2
Thess. 2: 8. ****Thess. 2. 4-7; Dan.
11: 36, 37; Rev. 13. “In precipitating,” say Signors Cafiero and Reclus,
“from the heights of the heavens Him from whom all
power is reputed to descend, societies unseat all those who reigned in his
name. Such is the Revolution now in
progress.” Preface to God
and
the State;
These words, for the disciple, are
very startling: for, Jesus being the Wisdom of God, the existence of Hell is
taken bodily out of the region of doubt; and, more astounding still, it is the
recalcitrant disciple whom Christ,
hereafter the judge, thus threatens. No
gloss, no casuistry, can evade the full force of this revelation.* “The anger
without a cause,” says Mr. F. D.
Maurice, “is the commencement of the disease; it
has become chronic when it finds vent in words of fury; it has become radical,
it has infected the vitals of your constitution, when it finds vent in words of
settled scorn.”** Love is the
immovable basis on which God has established the household of faith.
[* Cf. Luke 12: 4, 5; Rev. 2. 11. See Mr.
Govett’s Sermon on the
**
27. Ye have heard that it was said, Thou
shalt not commit adultery: 28. but I say unto you,
that every one that looketh on a woman
to lust after her hath committed
adultery with her already in his heart.
The Law is not only deepened and enlarged; not only is there
here a revelation of its inner meaning: Christ substitutes a law which, beyond
bodily actions, takes cognizance of the heart.
“This is the Second Commandment,”* says Count Tolstoy; “‘Do not think that love towards woman is good.’”**
This is not comment, but caricature; it is the deliberate gaze of lust
our Lord forbids..**
[* Gospel in Brief, p. 52. ** So Dr.
Trench.:‑“ …(eo
ut) is not = … (ita vt). In the first, [Greek
word] which stands
here, is involved not merely the event, but also the intention.” [The Greek word …]
says Dr. Tholuck, is here to be
understood in the sense of …, uxor, a married woman.]
29. And if thy right eye causeth thee to
stumble, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee
that one of thy members should perish, and not thy whole body be cast into hell. 30. And if thy right hand causeth thee to stumble, cut it off,
and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members
should perish, and not thy whole body go into hell.
Acute observers of the deeply seated diseases of the social
organism are, strangely enough, the most blindly optimistic of a cure to be
wrought, not by revolution of the heart, but by readjustment of the social
conditions. “According
to Christianity,” says Mr. Bax,
“and the ethics or religion of introspection
generally, regeneration must come from within, must begin in the heart and mind
of the individual. The ethic and
religion of modern Socialism, on the contrary, look for regeneration from
without, from material conditions and a higher social life.”*
The antagonism is fundamental.
Christ levels His law at the anger of the heart; at, impurity of heart; at treasure seducing the heart: “for from within,” He says, “out of
the heart of men, evil thoughts proceed,
fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, covetings, wickednesses, deceit,
lasciviousness, an evil eye, railing, pride, foolishness: ALL THESE EVIL THINGS
PROCEED FROM WITHIN, and defile the man” (Mark
7: 21-23).** Socialism is a clever device by which the
sins of the individual are cast on the shoulders of society. The corruption of each is deepened and
accelerated by the corrupt institutions of all; but society’s deadliest foe,
and his own, is man’s vice-sown heart.
So also, in forecasts of a world regulated to the Socialist’s ideal,
there is a curious absence of any consciousness of sin or any attempt to
eradicate it. It is man’s Utopia of sensuous and aesthetic gratification. “He will find his
pleasure,” say Messrs. Morris and Bax, “in the satisfaction, first, of his
bodily desires, and then of the intellectual, moral, and aesthetic needs which
will inevitably arise when a man is not at odds with his own body, and is not
exhausting his intellect in a vain combat with its urgent, promptings.”*** But some such combat is the very one here supposed and commanded. The hateful thing, evil, must be plucked out,
even at the cost of a maimed and broken life.
[* Ethics of Socialism, P. 19; London, 1989.
** True Socialism cannot be Christian; for the living kernel
of the Marxian creed, the right of a labourer to the entire produce of his
labour, is unjust, since it excludes reward on the land, capital, and
intelligence without which the labourer is powerless; and such inequity is
iniquity. But Capitalism also is
un-Christian; for it shares with Socialism an intense earthliness of taste and
aim; and, further, adds to the sin of avarice an abandonment to the profoundly
unspiritual fascination of possessed wealth.
The one veils covetousness under a philanthropy which would transfer
ill-used wealth to the pinched and struggling poor; the other shelters sensuous
greed behind the gorgeous structure of State religion.]
*** Socialism, P. 318;
2nd ed., London, 1896.]
31. It was said also, Whosoever shall
put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement: 32. but I say unto you, that every one that
putteth away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, maketh her an
adulteress: and whosoever shall marry
her when she is put away committeth adultery.
The concession of the Law is here definitely set aside. Christ binds the married in bonds
indissoluble, save for the one sin. For
the obedient disciple no civil statute can override the great Lawgiver’s
decision. He so decided on the ground of
God’s original design: for “[a] male and [a] female made He them” (Mark
10: 6). Socialism is deeply
tainted on the doctrine of marriage. The
Manifesto
of the Communist Party is stated by Mr. Frederick Engels, an adequate authority to be “the most international production of all Socialist
literature, the common platform acknowledged by millions of working men from
Siberia to California”; and the Manifesto advocates a legalized
community of women.*
[* So Mr. H. M.
Hyndman’s Historical Basis of
Socialism in Eogland, P. 452; London, 1883.
The earlier Socialism of Saint
Sinnon, Fourier, and Owen, also dabbled in free love; but
there are Socialists, who strongly repudiate it, See Mr.
Kirkup’s History of Socialism,
pp. 26, 34, 64, 192, and Mr. Pearson’s
Ethic of Free Thought, pp. 384, 442 ;
London, 1888.]
OATHS
33. Again, ye have heard that it was
said to them of old time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform
unto the Lord thine oaths: 34. but I say unto you, Swear
not at all: neither by the heaven, for it is the throne of God; 35. nor by the earth, for
it is the footstool of His feet; nor by
Closer study of these words confirms a cursory glance. Our Lord forbids the taking of oaths. It is no wonder that the [Greek word …] so perplexed Augustine*: it is a universal
negative; it purposely excludes, all exceptions. Swear not falsely, said Moses (Lev. 19: 12):
“SWEAR NOT
AT ALL,” says Christ. An oath binds the soul under .
self-imprecation.** The. Law not only
sanctioned oaths, but commanded them.*** Justification by works allowed the
Israelite, to imperil his salvation on his truthfulness. But this Christ forbids. A critical distinction between Moses, who
established judicial oaths, and Christ, by whom swearing is abolished
altogether, is not a distinction concerning profane oaths; for these are forbidden by both. “So help me God”
- it is a solemn challenge to the great Witness and Avenger to condemn or
acquit in the last assize according as we have or, have not, told the truth,
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.**** “A man may swear,” says Article 39 of the
Church of England, “when the magistrate requireth.”***** The Article sanctions
the judicial
oath. But any such exception, prohibited by the
exclusive ‑nature of our Lord’s language, is expressly excluded by an Apostle:
“But above all things, my brethren, swear
not, neither by the heaven,
nor by the earth, NOR BY ANY OTHER OATH:
but let your yea be yea, and your nay, nay; that ye fall not under judgment”
(James 5: 12). Christ’s words enjoin simplicity in all
discourse; but constitutional and judicial oaths are also excluded. The oath is the crux of allegiance to
world-powers; it is the basis, in conscience, of imperial codes; it shackles
Christian liberty, and, in oaths of obedience, the disciple unlawfully
abdicates responsibility; it is alien, together with all vows, from simple
dependence on the Holy Spirit; it binds the evil conscience, but is superfluous
to the cleansed and truth-loving soul; it is a solemn challenge to Deity, to
whom every oath is ultimately referable, for judgment on the ground of works;
it withdraws us from the graciousness of Saphet, and places us under the
thunderous brow of Sinai. Ecclesiastical
tradition made void our Lord’s obvious intent when the Church made its compact
with the State. “When the Church had opened her gates
to whole nations and populations,” says Dr. Dollinger, “and had established definite
relations with the civil power based on a mutual recognition of their
respective rights, she was obliged to allow political and judicial oaths, as
indispensable for bringing the truth to light and vindicating its claims.”******
The State, inexorably jealous concerning allegiance to itself, has in all
nations, and ages clashed sharply with this law of Christ. Our Lord does not summon His disciples to
that which will cost them nothing. But
the prisons of the world have ever been the nursery-ground of the Church.
[* Dr. Trench’s St. Augustine on the Sermon on the Mount,
p. 212. [The Greek word …], says Bengel, “extends
this prohibition to swearing truly as well as falsely; it does not, however,
universally prohibit all true swearing.”
This is tying one's self up in a knot.
** “Whatever be the form of oath,”
says Mr, Paley, “the signification is the same. ... It is invoking God’s vengeance, or
renouncing His favour, if what we say be false.” - Works, V. ii., P. 1126, 1845 ed.
So Webster, etc.
Ecclesiastical (Blunt’s Theological Dictionary) and legal (Wharton’s Law Lexicon) definitions involve the idea of
Divine vengeance, as pagan tribes swear by weapons to wound, by sun to burn,
and by beast to devour them if perjured. The imprecation lies in “So help me God.”
*** Exod. 22: 11; Deut. 6: 13;
Num. 5: 19. All vain and rash
oaths, all profanity, was already forbidden by the Law of Moses;- “Ye shall not swear by My name falsely, neither shall
thou profane
the name of thy God” (Lev 19: 12): it
was solemn and judicial oaths which the Law enforced in the quotation made by
our Lord, and it is these which Christ forbids.
Thus, so far from the Sermon on the Mount being “Jewish,” it actually forbids what the Law commanded;
it forbids it on the ground that it is inconsistent with Grace, that is, on Christian
ground; and the Sermon has never been accepted, and never will be, by
any Jew except such as become Christians: it is characterically and
fundamcntally Christian.
**** “As I shall answer
to God," says the Scottish oath, "at the great Day of judgment.”
***** A thoughtful defence of Christian oaths will be found in
Mr. F. D. Maurice’s Kingdom of Christ, v. ii., pp. 259‑269. But it is an inadequate defence; and
Mr. Maurice adds: “I do not say that the Quakers may
not be able to prove that this passage forbids all oaths, judicial and
religious, as well as vituperative and conversational.” Christ’s alleged oath (Matt. 26: 63), if an oath, was taken as Messiah
responding to the official inquiry of
****** First Age of Christianity and the Church,
p. 390; 2nd. Ed., London, 1867.
Justin, Irenaes, Clement, Origen,
Chrysostum, Jerome, and many others, rejected all oaths. See Mayer.
How mournful is the fact revealed by the learned writer on oaths in the Encylopcedia
Britannica: “By the Middle Ages oaths had
increased and multiplied in Christendom far beyond the practice of any
other age or religion” (my italics in both).]
RESISTANCE TO EVILDOERS.
38. Ye have heard that it was said, An
eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: 39.
but I say unto you, Resist not him that is evil: but whosoever smiteth thee on thy
right cheek, turn to him the other also.
Justice, the cardinal principle of
government, is surpassingly expressed
in this quotation from Jehovah’s
commands to
[*
**
*** “The
worst maxim,” says an Agnostic, “ever
proclaimed. The worst advice ever offered
to men.” This author’s Plain Commentary on the First Gospel (
**** So, 1
Cor. 6: 1-7; Rom. 12: 14-21. He
may, however, appear in his own defence, and also appeal for judical
exoneration of his character (Act 25: 12)]
Here more sharply emerges the fact
that this is no code for the world’s government; no adjustment of relations
between armed and conflicting nations; no scheme whereby to rule and regulate
an infidel society. “You can. govern,” says Mr. A. E. Fletcher, “in accordance with
the principles laid down by Jesus Christ in the Sermon on the Mount.”* This thinkers have universally repudiated: it
is impossible to retard criminals, to adjust civil disputes, to defend the
nation against the ambition of aggressive rivals, without the exercise of a
power resting ultimately on the sword.
Anarchy can alone replace government based on judicial retribution.” “In the next
revolution,” says the Anarchist Prince
Kropotkine, “we hope that this cry will go forth:
‘Burn the guillotines; demolish the prisons; drive away the judges, policemen,
and informers.’”** But the essential truth, the solution of the perplexing
riddle, lies in the fact that Christ is legislating for the Church; a body not
national, but supernational; whose selfish; and competitive passions, the bases
of social disorganization, have been eradicated, and whose love is to be
catholic, gratuitous, and perfect.
Defensive war, therefore, as well as aggressive, is forbidden to the
disciple. He withdraws himself from
human protection to cast himself upon the Divine: he is food for powder because
he would conquer by love.*** “Vengeance is Mine,” says God; “I will repay.”
[* Vox Clamantium,
p. 118.
** Law and Authority,
p. 23;
*** “Even martyrdom was not avoided,” says Dr. Tholuck of the early Christians,
“in order to escape enlistment.” - Sermon
on the Mount, p. 275.]
40. And if any man would go to law with
thee, and take away thy coat, let him
have thy cloke also. 41. And whosoever shall
compel thee to go one mile, go with him twain.
Capital sustains itself by force; by force only can it be
overthrown. Wealth has entrenched itself
behind the bayonet.* “The pockets of my coats and
trousers,” says a reigning Monarch, “are always
filled with loaded revolvers.”
Socialism, therefore in defiance of the precepts of Christ, retaliates
by an appeal to the drawn sword. “Force,” says Mr. Bax, “is
the midwife of progress.”** “Communists everywhere,” say Messrs. Marx and Engels, “support every revolutionary
movement against the existing social and political order of things. … The Communists disdain to conceal
their views and aims. They openly
declare that their ends can he attained only by the forcible overthrow of all
existing social conditions. Let the
ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution.”*** “There are not
wanting signs,” says Mr. Hyndman
approvingly, “that another serious revolutionary
agitation has begun.”**** Even if
revolution were not in profound antagonism to Christ, to wrest his sword from
the Capitalist will not permanently reform.
What force captures, counterforce can recapture. Socialism can only end in creating a succession
of Caesars.***** But the Socialist is
here in flagrant opposition to our Lord’s command. Christ counsels the yielding of the cloak:
the Socialist not only defends his threatened property, and further counsels
defence by illegal means, but actually would retaliate by a countertheft On principle he would confiscate the goods of
others. “To the
one [the Individualist] individual possession is right and justice, and social
confiscation is wrong and injustice; to the other [the Socialist] individual
possession is wrong and injustice, and confiscation is right and justice.”
******
[* England alone, in the judgment of Karl Marx, offers
conditions in which the social revolution can be effected legally and
peacefully; nevertheless the ruling classes, he expected, would offer a
sanguinary opposition. See Mr. Engels’
Preface to Marx’s Capital; London,
1896. Uncompensated seizure of all
private property, for example, would be bound to provoke civil war; and even a
Christian Socialist, though working for “a peaceful,
orderly, legal Social Revolution,” can advocate confiscation. - Mr. Headlam’s Christian Socialism, p. 13;
**Religion of Socialism, p. 105. ***
Manifesto of the Communist Party, p. 31.
**** The Coming
Revolution in
***** To State Socialism in an absolute monarchy, two factors
not irreconcilable, pacific Socialism tends.
The universal boycott organized by the Antichrist (Rev. 13: 17) implies either a vast consolidation
of trusts, or a complete State control of commerce. “The demi-god
destined to smother Socialism in his mighty and fatal embrace,” says Signor Nitti, “is
not yet born”; but he will arise, and perhaps embody, what Mr. Kirkup foresees, a Socialistic
Caesarism resting on a dernocracy. - Inquiry
into Socialism, p. 86.
****** Ethics of
Socialism, p. 76. If wealth is a robbery, it cannot be a stewardship.]
42. Give to him that asketh
thee, and from him that would borrow of
thee turn not thou away.
Christ here lays the axe at the root
of selfishness. He not only forbids us
to covet what we have not, but also to hoard what we have. The amount and kind of the gift our Lord
does not determine; gift itself could not be more decisively commanded. To take this text literally, in the judgment
of Dean Burgon, is to overthrow the
foundations of society. But society will
not disintegrate because our hands as well as our hearts are full of boundless
compassion. Take care of the poor at your
own doors, and God will take care of the poor at the doors of others. “A beggar is at thy
gate,” says Augustine; “thou art thyself a beggar at God’s gate. As thou dealest with thy seeker, even so will
God deal with His.” Full of
loving-kindness and truth are the apocryphal words: “Turn
not thy face from any poor man, and the face of the Lord shall not he turned
away from thee.”*
[* Tobit iv. 7. Cf. 1 John 3: 17,
18; 1 Tim. 6: 17-19.]
43. Ye have heard that it was said, Thou
shalt love thy neighbour, .and hate thine enemy: 44. but I say unto you, Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you;
45. that ye may be
sons of your Father which is in heaven: for He maketh His sun to rise on the
evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust. 46. For if ye love them that love you, what reward have ye? do
not even the publicans the same? 47. And if ye salute your
brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the Gentiles the same? 48. Ye therefore shall
be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
THE LAW OF LOVE.
The retributive spirit of the Law is superseded by the
Christian perfection of mercy. It is a
supreme proof of the Divine origin of grace that it not, only commands, but can
infuse, such love. “It is impossible.” says Count Tolstoy, “to love our personal
enemies.”* Yet Christ commands it; and in the obedient heart He can
fulfil this supremely difficult law. But
casuistry must not be allowed to eviscerate the command. Hate of persons our Lord forbids, not
relatively, but absolutely; yet Mr. F.
D. Maurice writes: “Do we not feel that that man
has a very poor love of his kind, and of each individual man as a member of
that kind, who does not regard as his enemies those who hinder the good and
help forward the evil, and who does not, in that character and capacity, hate
them?”** Hatred of them, as distinct from their sin, is a violation of this law: we are
not only not to hate, but are
to love,
our enemies. For God’s attitude
regulates the attitude of His sons. When
He judges and makes war, His sun - for the sun is His - does not shine on all, nor Heaven’s windows
empty their treasure***: common mercies are proofs of a common love.**** His love embraces His enemies; so must ours.
“Obtain by your prayers,” says Bengel, “blessings
for those who take blessings from you.”
It is a degree and quality of love unknown to the nations; it is a
perfection that inheres in the Father’s character, whose standard for
His sons is not less than perfection; it is, in the disciple who so loves, a last proof of the
Incarnation.
[* Christ’s
Christianity, p.191; trans. London, 1885.]
**
*** Wise charity, as distinct from
lazy, most blesses; but be it observed that God’s fertilizing rain and sunshine
are indiscriminate
charity. Charity confined to the deserving is not the Divine charity: “For He is kind toward the unthankful and evil”
(Luke 6: 35). If His sunlight be abused, it is the
recipient, not the Donor, who is responsible.
An order of ministry in the Church sprang from the administration of
relief (Acts 6: 1-6); and the enormous
charities of the first Churches, an essence, not an accident, of their life,
prove the sub-apostolic view of the apostolic commands. See Dr.
Hatch’s Organization of the Early
Christian Churches, pp. 32-55. “The apparent and admitted evils which were
wrought,” adds Dr. Hatch, “were
counterbalanced, even from the economical point of view, by the forces which
Christian organization kept in motion.
These forces have been among the strongest conservative forces of
society. They have arrested decay; they
have prevented the disintegration, and possibly the disintegration by a vast
and ruinous convulsion, of the social fabric.”
**** Natural judgments on broken laws still fall; supernatural, though God is provoked daily, are held back until Mercy shall, he displaced by
justice ]
Love works no ill to its neighbour. Can we love as a disciple, and hate as a citizen? “Every nation in
Christendom,” says Mr. F. D.
Maurice, “resorts to judicial oaths, imposes
punishments, in some cases capital, and believes war, under certain
circumstances, to be a duty. The
question, then, becomes a very important one; is this meant to be so or not?”* He decides in the affirmative by an appeal to
the Old Testament. But here lurks a
fatal flaw: there is now no national election. By
consequence the Sons of God, a supernational body, are not sharers in national
administration, nor involved in national quarrels. The growth and decay of nations,** and their
geographical boundaries, God Himself determines; the Socialist cannot overthrow
nationalism: but the disciple is not technically a citizen: “For we have not here an abiding city, but
we seek after the city which is to come” (Heb.
13: 14). Nor is he cosmopolitan. As
his metropolis is elsewhere, with the Kingdom to which he owes primary
allegiance, he is a stranger and a pilgrim. The
Lord is regulating the conduct of pilgrims*** - blameless and harmless,
children of God, in a generation crooked and perverse (Phil.
2: 12-16); servants to whom
strife is forbidden, gentle TOWARDS ALL,
opposing only in meekness (2 Tim. 2: 24-26);
sons exalted and perfected in a catholic love, and a perpetual charity.
[*
** Their [See Greek…] (Acts 17: 26).
*** Iniquitous wealth (James 6:
1-7) and even slavery (1 Cor. 7: 20-24) call from the pilgrim only Divine patience:
he knows that God has eternity in which to redress the balance of time. The antagonistic view is deeply infidel: “God can wait; the slums cannot. Every year they last adds to the sum of human
misery and to this heavy indictment against God’s justice. ... Stand up to God bravely.
If you think He is wrong, say so.
It will hurt neither of you.” - Mr. J. Trevor’s Theology and
the Slums, pp. 101 13.]
The disciple’s true relations to the State now emerge: he is
alien, but he is submissive. The maintaince of civil order God has
entrusted to the Gentile powers: “Let every soul be in
subjection to the higher powers: for there is no power but of God; and the
powers that be are ordained of God. Therefore
he that resisteth the power, withstandeth the ordinance of God”
(Rom. 13: 1, 2).* Socialism breaks in
successive but impotent waves against this rocky clur that guards the present
social order, for behind it is, the decision of God. “Put them in mind,”
says the Apostle, “to be in subjection to rulers, to
authorities” (Titus 3: 1). “Thou wouldest have
no power against
[* Force, the ultimate basis of rule, is not necessarily
violence. “To
possess power and to do violence,” says Count Tolstoy, “are synonymous terms.”‑Kingdom of God within You, p. 251. This is an abuse of language, if it is not a
criminality of thought; yet it is by an argument so suicidal that he meets the
retort, obvious and fatal, that the overthrow of the State would be the signal
of anarchy.]
ALMSGIVING, PRAYER, AND
FASTING.
Ch. 6: 1. Take heed that ye do not your righteousness before men, to be
seen of them: else ye have no reward with your Father which is in heaven.
It is a fundamental of revelation that God is a Rewarder: our
Lord assumes it. It is remarkable to
observe how Christ unveils, as embedded in us all, the constant peril of a
desire for the praise of others; and counterworks it by a constant reminder of God’s
praise, and the danger of His forfeited reward.
To seek glory from God is to seek the glory of God.
2. When therefore thou doest alms,
sound not a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in
the streets, that they may have glory of men.
Verily I say unto you, They have received their reward. 3. But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: 4. that thine alms may he
in secret: and thy Father which seeth in
secret shall recompense thee.
Our Lord also assumes that almsgiving, prayer, and fasting
will be prominent among the works of His disciples. The Socialist scorns charity, and demands for
the poor a share in communal wealth: our Lord assumes the permanence of
poverty, and elevates charity into the highest rank of service. The disciple is to give, not for the
amelioration of a disorganized society, but for the relief of the distressed
individual. Pauperism ensues on the
removal of the necessity of labour; but the Christian disciple is to ease the
pain of individual sufferers under the stern economic law. Three only are to know of the disciple’s
gift: himself, the sufferer, and God.
5. And when ye pray, ye shall not be as
the hypocrites: for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and in the
corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have received their
reward. 6.
But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thine inner
chamber, and having shut thy door, pray
to thy Father which is in secret, and thy Father which seeth in secret shall recompense thee. 7. And in praying use not
vain repetitions, as the Gentiles do: for they think that they shall be
heard for their much speaking. 8. Be not therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask Him.
Not
public, but ostentatious, prayer is forbidden.*
It is remarkable that God who, sinking His gaze to the moving springs,
sees by what weights and wheels go, promises not only to answer sincere prayer, but to reward
it. But garrulous petitions, worded for applause, are paid on the spot:
they exhaust** their reward. Not repetition, but vain repetition,*** is forbidden,
counted prayers, which depend for efficacy on prescribed rotation or
parrot-like abundance. Only the tensely
strung bow lodges its arrow in heaven.
We do not ask for miracle, though we should for gifts of
miracle.**** God decides whether to
answer supernaturally,***** or by that complexity of power which controls
creation’s minutest atom. “Your Father knoweth”; but He makes certain blessings
dependent on our asking: He would win us to prayer.
[* Verse 6
treats of private, and verse 9 of public prayer.
** See
Alford.
*** Mark 14: 39; cf. 1Kings 18: 26; Acts 19: 34. “That very abuse of prayer which our Lord here especially
reproves,” says Dr. Tholuck,
“has become authorized and honoured in His own Church
by the rosary of the Roman Catholics.”
****1 Cor. 12: 31; 14: 1, 39; cf. Acts 4: 30.
*****E.g., Acts 12: 5.]
9. After this
manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name. 10. Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth.
11. Give us this day our daily bread. 12.
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our
debtors. 13.
And bring us not into temptation, but deliver us from
the evil one. 14. For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your
heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15.
But if ye
forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your
trespasses.
The Lord’s Prayer is not a summary of the Gospel;* it
is a model of approach for all believers to the throne of grace. (1) “Our Father which
art in heaven”:
because He is God, with a local sanctuary, and not a diffused influence;
because, moreover, His is a fatherhood which, while it invites love, forbids
familiarity. (2) Atheism sullies the
Sacred Name, for it refuses to it its due: Idolatry also, for it shares, with
others a glory due to it alone. The
multitude defile it by profane oaths: the disciple would hallow it, Threefold, the epitome of the
Faith. (3) The Church is to pray that the Kingdom should come; the two, then, are
distinct. We pray for its coming, for it
is absent; that it should come, not that we should go to it; that
the sceptre of the world should pass into the hands of Christ, not that we
should set up His Kingdom.** It is a crisis which can be hastened by
prayer.*** (4) Liberalism is
the freedom to do good or evil without infringing the rights of others:
Socialism is the freedom to do that only which is directly profitable to all:
Anarchism is the freedom of each to do his own will absolutely: Christian Faith
is the freedom which chooses to do the will of God. Swift, sure, willing, exact, and entire is
the angelic service; such, we pray, may be ours. (5) It is God, not the State, who is to grant
to each, according to his needs, his essential*** bread; and to-morrow’s hunger is forestalled by to-day’s petition, not by to-day’s
luxurious provision. (6) The sin of the
godless life is obliterated: but transgression follows after belief. Here
then is a startling revelation. The further
forgiveness we are to receive depends, in kind and measure, on the forgiveness
we practise; forgiving as we are forgiven, and
forgiven even as we forgive.**** (7) Satan tempts that we may fall; God tempts
to prove the good in us, or, through self-revelation, to produce good. But true self-knowledge shrinks from the
searching test. From the evil without,
and that within, we beseech deliverance.
“For this is the will of God, even your sanctification” (1 Thess.
4: 3).
[* As Count Tolstoy and Mr. Ruskin somewhat absurdly suppose. “We see at once,”
says Dr. Tholuck, “that the prayer is given solely for His disciples.”
** The prevalent confusion of the Church and the Kingdom led the
Anglican Bishops, when touching on industrial problems, to represent disciples
as “occupied with Christ’s work of setting
up the
** “I fancy,” says Mr. Ruskin, “that
the mind of the most faithful Christian is quite led away from its proper hope
by dwelling on the reign - or the coming again - of Christ; which indeed they
are to look for and watch for, but not to pray for.” - The Lord’s Prayer and the Church, P. 21;
*** For an exhaustive discussion … see Dr. Tholuck, Sermon,
pp. 341-349. So was the Manna
given. God controls the markets of the
world. Famine is a sword of God; and
when earth is to be vexed with the first faint signs of judgment, the issuing
Angel is thus commanded:- “A measure of wheat for a
penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and the oil and the wine hurt
thou not” (Rev. 6:. 6). It is His gift of sunshine or blight or hail,
over the vast wheat-fields of continents, which apportions plenty, or sends
exchange up to famine prices. Man lives
by the words out of the mouth of God.
See Lev. 25: 20‑23; 26: 3-26; Ps. 1: 12;
Jer. 5: 24-29.
**** So Luke 6: 37, 39; Jas. 2:
12, 13; and especially Matt. 28: 21-35. “This petition,”
says Dean Burgon, “becomes a terrible one on
the lips of the implacable man, for thereby he closes the Gate of Mercy against
himself; and declares his own dreadful sentence.” Christ instituted a rite to contain this
truth (John 13: 1-11). “Herein,” as Augustine remarks, “is the daily Washing of the Feet, for them that are already
partakers of the great Washing.”
“On no other condition,” says Calvin, “does
God admit us to pardon, but that we pardon our brethren whatever offences they
have committed against us.” - Harmony of the Evangelists, vol. 1. p. 330; Edinburgh ed., 1845.
16. Moreover when ye fast, be not, as
the hypocrites, of a sad countenance: for they disfigure their faces, that they
may be seen of men to fast. Verily I say unto you, They have received their
reward. 17. But
thou, when thou fastest, anoint thy head, and wash thy face; 18. that thou be not seen
of men to fast, but of thy Father which is in secret: and thy Father, which
seeth in secret, shall recompense thee.
Fasting is Judiac and Roman; but it is also Christian. Our Lord assumes its survival throughout His
mournful absence (Mark 2: 20), but forbids
that ostentatious neglect of the toilet* which empties the observance of its
self-humiliation.** A symbol od sorrow,
it is a secret act between God and the soul.
[* Christ sanctions life’s civilities. As politeness is enjoined (Matt. 5: 47), so here ascetism is discouraged.
** “It is not because our body is
evil,” says Bishop Gore, “that we are to fast;
but because our body is, or is meant to be holy, and the effective instrument
of the spirit.”‑ Sermon on the
Mount, p. 116.]
TREASURE
19. Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the earth, where moth and rust doth
consume, and where thieves break through and steal: 20. but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven,
where neither moth nor rust doth consume, and where thieves do not break
through nor steal: 21. for where thy treasure
is, there will thy heart be also.
To wealth, and the disciple’s relation to earthly treasure,
Christ now turns with pregnant emphasis.
The Law sanctioned the amassing of riches: Christ forbids it. For not only is wealth the prey of moth and
thief; it not only mealts with waste with waste and wear,* breaking banks,
unsafe securities, and unscrupulous competition: but even when safest, and
because safest, the heart follows it as surely as the needle swings to the
north. God is a jealous God: He counsels the placing in Heaven
of both treasure and consequent affection. Quickly and eagerly, as the fabric
of the world totters, the disciple is to transfer his wealth to the abiding
City. But how? “Sell that
ye have, and GIVE ALMS: make for
yourselves, purses which wax not old, A
TREASURE IN THE HEAVENS that faileth not, where no thief draweth near,
neither moth destroyeth” (Luke 12: 33). Wondrous love, that provides a lasting
treasury for the goods of earth: wondrous wisdom, which has discovered so
blessed a method of investment! “Blessed are ye poor: for yours is the
[* … the corrosion of time and use; see Trench and Tholuck. Treasure is all that is treasured, stored, above and beyond daily
requirement. “Marnmon,”
says Bengel, “means not only affluence, but external goods, however few.”]
Here Socialism reveals itself as essentially
un-Christian. “Poverty,”
says Professor Shuttleworth, “tends directly to promote the growth of wickedness, and to
hamper the advancement of wisdom and righteousness.”* “The Christian Socialist,” says Mr.. Stewart Headlam, “aims first at land nationalization, in order to the
abolition of poverty”**; and it is the abolition of poverty to which Dr. Clifford looks as the happy fruit
of Collectivism.*** “All asceticism, all, privation,” says Mr. Bax, “is
in itself an unmitigated evil.”****
For it is the redistribution of earthly wealth, and not its renunciation, which sums up the Socialist’s
profoundest aim, and on which he lavishes the full treasure of his heart. “Our first principle
as Socialists,” says the Social
Democratic Federation, “is that all should be well
fed, well housed, and well educated. For
this object we urge forward the Revolution”;* and “the Revolution,” says Herr Bebel, “does not seek new forms of
religion, it denies religion altogether.” Our Lord’s aim is the welfare of all; but a
welfare fed, not by wealth, but by that noble independence of things temporal
which, while it suffers creation’s travail, humbly waits for its riches in creation’s redemption. Both Capitalism and Socialism, the greed to
amass and the greed which covets, are essentially antagonistic to His ruling
spirit, who commands contentment under poverty, and gift rather than
demand. But here lies the fascination of
Socialism. It is the ideal of the
sensuous, worldly man; the Utopia of unbelief dressed in arguments of economic
wisdom; its economy political, not heavenly; its motto “Comfort,” not “Duty”; a
terrestrial religion from which God and Heaven, sin and judgment; have been
banished. This antagonism, an antagonism
of root principles, renders an incursion into the vast field of economic
argument superfluous. “Every line I write,” said Lassalle, “I write armed with the whole
culture of my century.” Earthly
wealth is sought because heaven has become a mirage. “Socialism,”
in the frank admission of Mr. Karl
Pearson, “arises from the recognition that the
sole aim of mankind is happiness in this life.”1 “To love each other as brothers and sisters,” says Mr. Blatchford, “and to
love the earth as mother of us all, that is part of our new religion. Our new religion tears the old dogmas to
tatters.”2 Thus Infidelity is the handmaid of Socialism, and
Socialism the un-erected palace of the Infidel.
“The belief in God,” says Karl Marx, “is
the keystone of a perverted civilization.” “God,” says Proudham, “is
the real evil.” “Surely now,” says a stout defender of the Atheistic
founders of Socialism, “when the paradises and
elysiums of the creeds are fast perishing from the hopes of men, it is time we
were setting ourselves to the realization of our fullest hopes of life upon
earth.”3 Yet the triumph of Materialism will
not inaugurate a Socialistic era. For
what is good in Socialism rests on sympathy with the poor4; and unbelief,
by cutting off this altruistic stream at its source, reopens he fountain of
cynical greed in individual the ambition, class monopoly, an general worship of
power. Treasure is not to be laid up in personal fortune, communal wealth,
State treasuries, or ecclesiastical endowments: it can be stored, safely and
righteously, only in Heaven.
[* Vox
Clamantium, p. 9. ** Christian
Socialism, p.11. *** Socialism and the Teaching of Christ, p.
10.
****Ethics of Socialism,
p. 145. The roots of the social
problem are in Genesis. Labour may be
painful, distressing, homicidal; or its heaviest shackles may be knocked off
until it grows more nearly into, the fine function of un-tired nerve, and
brain, and muscle; but labour it ever remains, difficult, precarious, and
exhaustive, for in the sweat of his brow
man must earn his bread. And at last it
ends in death. For man has gone forth
from the Tree of Life, and the land he has entered is the land of the play of
terrible forces, and the realm of a perpetual
struggle with dissolution. The doctrine is
denied: the fact survives
immutable and remorseless. Mankind is, economically, under the Iron Law; and
the Christian disciple is bound to labour by stringent command. If he work not, neither, in the Spirit’s
stern words, should he eat (2 Thess. 3: 10).
*****
1 The Ethic of Free Thought, P. 319.
2 The New Religion, P. 3;
3 The Religion of
Socialism, p. 16; 2nd ed.; by Miss Conway and Yr. J. B. Glasier. Some 120 Socialist Sunday Schools instruct
thousands of children that Marx is “greater than God,”
and the Red Dawn, a magazine for the young, says “Even the poor, downtrodden Jesus we leave to his class. The world during all ages has created a God
suitable to the epoch, and, as we change the world, so will we change our God.”
4 The Christian may also receive from Socialism a quickened
sense of the corruption of institutions; the perils of wealth; the terrors of
others' destitution; the labour of man against man, instead of man with man:-
the general disease of a world cradled in the Wicked One. But this is distinct from an acceptance of
Socialism. “As
Socialism becomes pacific, religious, and constitutional,” says Signor Nitti, “it
is sure to meet with ever-increasing sympathy among Catholics.” For Catholicism has always tended to the
sacrifice of the individual to society, as the Reformation was a reaffirmation
of the sacredness of the individual conscience.
But true Socialism is barred for ever by Infallibility. “Our first and most
fundamental principle,” says Pope
Leo XIII., “when we undertake to alleviate the
condition of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property.”
- Encyclical on Socialism, 1891.]
22. The lamp of the body is the eye: if
therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. 23. But if thine eye be
evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness.
If therefore the light that
is in thee be darkness, how great is the darkness! 24. No man can serve
two masters: for either he will hate the
one, and love the other; or else he will hold to one, and despise the
other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
The straightforward, unclouded, liberal eye; controlled by one
master aim,* and reflecting a definite image of Christ and His Kingdom - if this
be withdrawn, and be replaced by the blurred vision** and the clouded
conscience that covet treasure both here and hereafter, the natural darkness
resumes, its sway, and the discipleship is ruined by provision for the lusts of
the flesh. “I
am constantly longing for wealth,” says Mr. Henry George, “Wealth would bring me comforts and luxuries
which I cannot now obtain; it would give me more congenial employments and
associates; it would enable me to cultivate my mind, and exert to a fuller
extent my powers; it would give me the ability to minister to the comfort and
enjoyment of those I love most; and therefore it is my principal object in life
to obtain wealth, or at least
more of it than I have at present.*** But mammon-worship, however disguised by
economic argument or buttressed by philanthropy, excludes Divine worship: “Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”
[* Greek] – single, undistracted. **
[Greek] - spiritually diseased.
*** Quoted by
ANXIETY
25. Therefore I say unto you, Be not
anxious for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for
your body, what ye shall put on. Is not
the life more than the food, and the body than the raiment? 26. Behold the birds of the heaven, that they sow not, neither do
they reap, nor gather into barns; and your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are not ye of much more value than they? 27. And which of you by
being anxious can add one cubit unto his stature? 28. And why are ye
anxious concerning raiment? Consider the
lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: yet I
say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of
these.
The perils of wealth having now been removed, our Lord addresses Himself to the
anxieties of poverty. For if mammon, the unrighteous wealth, is
not to be stored, how is provision to be made for Sickness, old age, and
adversity? The Lord, who forbids, will
provide. For behind nature stands God;
in whose eyes is the fall of every sparrow, and before whom all substance
becomes as shadow. Shall He not feed and
clothe the bodies which He first created and then redeemed? Thought is not forbidden, nor daily provision for the household (1 Tim. 5: 8); banking is not forbidden, if it
be for current needs, (John 13: 29); work is
not forbidden, for the idle disciple is not to be fed (2 Thess. 3: 10); but anxiety is.
It is the solicitude, says Augustine,
not the labour, which is excluded. For
consider the lilies, blown in a thousand fields; still rosy with the dust from
their Maker’s fingers, or white as no fuller can bleach; more gorgeous than
Solomon, more perfect in leaf and petal than silk from the loom, or the sheen
of the satin of queens: lovely, though they be, but to decay, and to-morrow they shall be as dust.
30. But if God doth so clothe the grass of the field, which
to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall He not much more clothe
you, O ye of little faith? 31. Be not therefore
anxious, saying, What shall we eat? or, What
shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we he clothed? 32. For after all these things do the Gentiles* seek: for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.
[* Rather the
nations, [See Greek]
- antithetical to the Church.]
Christ is addressing men of faith; but tenderly rebukes their little faith.
For not only are they worshippers of God and despisers of mammon: their God is a Father, by the adoption of
grace. As God, He knows our needs; as Father, He will supply them. Simple, childlike trust; a trust that wells
up from a deep love and a consecrated life; a trust that puts its hands into
the hands of our Father, to be led whithersoever He will; a trust that means
profound distrust of the world, and a thirst for the enduring riches; such is
the sweet, deep, pure, powerful trust of the faithful disciple. He who has abandoned all may also abandon himself
to Christ.
33. But seek ye first His kingdom, and His
righteousness: and all these things shall be added unto you. 34. Be not therefore anxious, for the morrow: for the morrow will
be anxious for itself. Sufficient unto
the day is the evil thereof.
“Not here the forensic righteousness
of justification [by faith],” as Dean Alford observes, “but the spiritual purity inculcated in this discourse.”*
In the kingdom of grace the disciple already stands (Col.
1: 13); the Thousand Years, the
abundant entrance on eternal life (2 Pet. 1: 11),
requires, in addition, the higher
standard of righteousness set up by our Lord in the Sermon. “I suffered the
loss of all things, ... if by
any means I may attain unto
the resurrection from the dead. ... One thing I do, forgetting
the things which are behind, and stretching toward to the things, that are
before, I press on toward the goal;unto the PRIZE of the high calling of
God in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3: 8-14). The [Millennial] Kingdom, the royal prize, is the controlling
passion of the faithful soul. “Let us therefore,” adds the Apostle, “as many as be perfect, be thus
minded.” But for so absorbing a
pursuit, requiring the entire faculties, God would free the disciple alike from
the cloying encumbrance of wealth, and the paralyzing distractions of anxiety.
To-day’s burden is ours,** tomorrow’s is God’s: take short views of life, and
let God take the long ones.
[* So also Tholuck
and Govett. “What is to form the
object and aim of our striving,” says Dr. Meyer, “is the Messianic Kingdom, the becoming partakers in it, the being admitted
into it, and the moral righteousness which God imparts to the believer to
assist him, to attain the [that] Kingdom.” Cf. Matt. 1: 12;
2 Thess. 1: 5; Rev. 11: 15-18, etc.
God begins to impart righteousness from the first moment that He imputes
it.
[** “Seek first.” Food and
clothing are also to be sought; [work] is lawful, but not …: work is commanded, anxiety is forbidden; but work is incidental,
the Kingdom is essential. The
prohibition of anxiety even for to-morrow is very remarkable.]
THE EXERCISE OF JUSTICE
Ch. 7: 1. Judge not, that ye be not judged. 2. For with what judgment
ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured unto you.
Discrimination Christ commands in this very chapter (vers. 6, 16):
it is the judicial bench which
is denied to the disciple. Proving this,
our Lord in Luke splits the judicial act into its constituent parts: “And judge not, and ye shall not be judged; and condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: release, and ye shall be released” (Luke 6: 37).
“Christ,” says Count Tolstoy, “forbade all earthly
tribunals of justice.”* Such quintessence of anarchy, nowhere taught by
Him, would endanger the very fabric of society.
Our Lord does not condemn the exercise of State justice; but
forbids the disciple to share in it. Discipline, necessarily based on acts of
judgment, is commanded within the Church;** but to all without the disciple, forgiving because
forgiven, is to be merciful as, and as long as, God is; an attitude which
incapacitates him for that rigorous exaction of the law rightly demanded of the
magistrate. Upon the believer who
judges, and therefore in countless cases sentences, justice will recoil: “For judgment is without mercy to him that hath showed no mercy” (James
2: 13).
[* Christ's
Christianity, p. 124. ([The Greek …] is to
pronounce upon with judicial authority.
See Tholuck.) “The magistrate,” says Prince Kropotkine, “I detest even more than the snake.” “By flinging
overboard Law, Religion, and Authority, mankind regain possession of the moral
principle which has been taken from them.” Anarchist Morality, pp. 8, 13;
San Francisco, 1888.
** Matt. 18: 15-17; 1 Cor. 5: 12. By an oversight of this distinction Bishop Gore is led to suppose Matt. 18: 15-17 contradictory to the literal acceptance of Matt.
5: 39, 40, - Sermon on the Mount, p. 104.
Judgment will be given to the saints in the epoch of judgment (Dan.
7: 22; Rev. 20: 4).]
3. And why beholdest thou the mote that
is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? 4. Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me cast out the mote
out of thine eye; and lo, the beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see
clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
Not rebuke of a brother,* but the unfit state of the rebuker,
is here condemned. The magisterial
spirit, as well as the magisterial function, is unsuited to the disciple:
censoriousness is not only unlovely, but often hypocritical. Criticism of others is speculative: self-examination is practical.
[* See 1 Tim. 5: 20; Titus 2: 15; 1 Thess. 5: 14.]
6. Give not that which is holy unto the
dogs, neither cast your pearls before the swine, lest haply they trample them
under their feet, and turn and rend you.
Deeply sundered as by a piercing arrow, the masses of men,
brought face to face with Christ, divide inevitably into believers and unbelievers. He is the obstructing Rock past which flow
the two mighty currents of mankind.* The
solidarity of the race – “the idea of humanity as a
vital organism, itself the creation and gift of the Christ” - is here
repudiated by Christ Himself in words we should hardly have dared to use. He assumes that His disciples will be able to
discriminate the two classes correctly implies that they must so distinguish;
and he forbids our inner sanctities to be conferred on the lustful and the
carnal. Holy rites and doctrinal
margarites, the peculiar treasures of Faith, rouse the brutality of unbelief,
and endanger the disciple.**
[* Both dogs and swine were unclean under the Law. But now the principle of separation is
deepened: then it was ceremonial; now it is spiritual. The
cleavage can disappear only with the unbelief.]
** To unbelievers the Gospel is offered because, while it
proclaims; the separation, it invites its removal. Otherwise the cleavage is eternal (Rev. 22: 15).]
THE GOLDEN RULE.
7. Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find;
knock, and it shall be opened unto you: 8.
for every one that asketh receiveth; and he that
seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. 9. Or what man is there of you, who, if his son shall ask him
for a loaf, will give him a stone; 10.
or if he shall ask for a fish, will give him a serpent?
Christ now presents to His disciples the golden key, the
enablement of the high tasks set them, which lies in direct access to the Father. The kernel of prayer is here revealed: the what?
- all good things; the how? - with triple importunity; the to
whom?
- your heavenly Father; the why? - because the asker receives,
the seeker finds, the knocker enters.
Here is the perpetual fountain of enabling grace.
11. “If ye then, being evil, know how to
give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in
heaven give good things to them that ask
Him?
“If ye then, being evil.” Our
Lord, as Bishop Gore has said,*
could not have more forcibly expressed human corruption, or our need of
regeneration. Society is but the
multiplied individual: bad individuals make bad society; and love, honesty,
industry, cannot be manufactured at Collectivist factories, or laid on like
gas. Individual sin has been the ruin of every institution. The iron of system
is mixed with the clay of humanity, and disaster ensues. The Socialist, who,
for aught of sin he sees, seems to have come fresh from
[* Sermon on the Mount, p. 169.]
**Looking
Upward, p, 188. The delusion of the Socialist, says Mr.
Herbert Spencer, is that “an ill-working humanity may
be framed into well-working institutions.”- Social Statics, p. 326.
*** “The man who did most to reform
the social life of England in the last, century,” says Dean Moore Ede, “was John Wesley. His,
appeal was direct: it was an appeal to the individual.” - The Church and Town Problems; Cambridge,
1896.]
12. All things
therefore whatsoever ye would that men should do, unto you, even so do ye also unto them: for this is the
law and, the prophets.
Heathen versions of the Golden Rule are all negative:*
reminiscences of primitive revelation proofs of an indwelling conscience. It is embedded in exhortations to prayer – “all things therefore” - because, while the pagan ethic shows
what should not be done, Christ shows how to do what should. “There can be nothing
simpler,” says Bishop Bossuet,
“than this principle; nothing more far-reaching in
practice; for all human society is included in it.”** If you hunger, you crave a little food; if
your coat is threadbare, you shiver; if heart-sick, you yearn for sympathy: O
child of God, you represent Him to these poor sufferers; you are to love them
as you would be loved; turn them not from your door, lest God send into your
life the despairing sob with which they turned away.
[* See Dr.
Tholuck’s Sermon on the Mount, p. 412. ** The
Sermon on the Mount, p. 138;
trans. London, 1900.]
13. Enter ye in
by the narrow gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to
destruction, and many be they that enter in thereby. 14. For narrow is the
gate, and straitened the way, that leadeth unto life, and few be they that find it.
It is disciples - men already justified,
and received as conscious followers - whom Christ addresses. He offers them a choice of principles. The strait gate is a renounced world, a heart-whole discipleship; the consequent way
is narrowed by the strict nature of His peculiar and isolating principles. It has to be found, for all feet are naturally in the broad; its reward is Life, a synonym for the
revealed Kingdom.* The wide gate is a bridge between Christ and the
world; the consequent way is an easy
morality, thronged by professing discipleship, and ending, for both disciple
and unbeliever, in terrible disillusionment.** Christ means what He commands:- He requires love of the brethren; purity of heart;
abstinence from oaths; perfect mercy and love; unostentatious righteousness;
wealth treasured in heaven; freedom from anxiety; abstention from judgment;
separation from the unclean; importunate prayer.*** As salt is unique in its flavour, and
the disciple is charged with peculiarity; so the higher path is restricted, and will be assailed as narrowness. Indescribably solemn and pathetic are His
closing words: “Few be they that find it.”****
[* Cp. Mark 9: 43 with 47.
** It is - such is the force of the second … - the crowded
concourse in the broad way which drains the narrow. Life offers its ample
halls: man’s will remains outside.
*** A conclusive proof that Christian disciples are subject to
these commands lies in their reproduction, in almost every detail, in the
Epistles, a reinforcement of this Decalogue of Christ.
**** It is the Decalogue of the Church. See, for fuller exposition, Mr. Govett's Sermon on the Mount Expounded, pp.
289-300.]
FALSE PROPHETS.
15. Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly
are ravening wolves. 16. By their fruits ye shall know them.
A profession of Christian faith can cloke a heart of brutal
antagonism. “But beware.” [See Alford] Rigid austerity of life, endorsing and surpassing the
abstinences of the strait gate, will claim to be the original Faith, while
really destructive of it like a corrosive acid.
A prophet’s fruit is especially his doctrine*; as a flute
breathed through from the unseen, his essence in sap and bud flowers in his
prophecy. Infidelity masquerading as
Christian faith, exhibited of old in Gnosticism, is reviving to-day its
hypocritical fleece. . Count Tolstoy,
for example, exalts the Sermon, and professes essential Christianity**; yet denies the supernatural, and
therefore the Incarnation and Resurrection; the Godhead of Christ; the
redemption of fallen man; the Holy Trinity; all specific revelation; even, it
appears, a personal God.*** Voltaire, says the Russian ascetic, not
unreasonably called the Christian Church
But the especial reference
appears to be to later times, and false prophets:- men inspired by unclean
spirits, and upholding false Christs, on the eve of the Advent.****
[* The tongue, says Calvin,
is the portrait of the mind. The fruit
of the children of light is “in all goodness, and righteousness, and truth” (Eph. 5: 9).
** Crammed in title and text with Christian phrases, his works
claim to set forth the primitive Christian Faith. Yet of orthodox Christianity
he says:- “The teaching to children of this so-called
religion, which is taking place among us, is the most dreadful crime we can
possibly imagine. Torture, murder, the
violation of children are nothing in comparison with this crime.” ‑Religious Education of the Young, p. 2.
Comment is superfluous.
***
“The Gospel,”
he says, “puts in the place of what men call ‘God’
a right understanding of life. ... No man can
see or know an external God; therefore our life cannot take for its aim the
service of such a God. ... Understanding of
life is God.” ‑Gospel in Brief, pp.
157, 158. “According to the
Christian teaching, God is that essence of
life which man recognizes, both within himself and in the whole universe, as
the desire for welfare.” – Christ’s
Teachings, p. 7; trans.
**** Matt. 24: 24;
Rev. 13.]
17. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or
figs of thistles? Even so every good
tree bringeth forth good fruit; but the corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.
18. A good
tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good
fruit. 19.
Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn
down, and cast into the fire. 20. Therefore by their
fruits ye shall know them.
How simple and exhaustive is the discrimination of Christ: ‑that
it is the issues of a man’s life, his
words and acts, which classify him; not a historical succession, nor
attachment to a society; not the austerity of his life, but the graciousness
and love that pervade it; not even the prophetic power when severed from the
fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5: 22). “Ye shall know them thoroughly”* [*See Alford]: the wolf reveals himself, classifies
himself. “First make the tree
good:” not by richness of soil, or strength of sunshine; but, engrafted into the Vine, by change of sap
and fibre.
THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN.
21. Not every one that saith unto Me,
Lord, Lord, shall enter into the
kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth
the will of My Father which is in heaven.
The
[* Therefore the
criticism is baseless which charges Scriptural “Chiliasm” with being carnal and
visionary. The Kingdom embraces, indeed,
the physical world, which is yet to be regenerate (Matt.
19: 28; Isa. 65: 17‑25); it lingers still in the region of inspired
vision; but the qualities fitting for entrance into it are, above all,
practical, and, beyond all, spiritual. “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is
the
** Social Aspects of
Christianity, p. 86;
*** Critics of a literal acceptance of the Sermon perplex
themselves by noting the embarrassing consequences of universal obedience. But Christ foresaw, and continuously implies,
that no popular concourse would throng the strait gate, or, by a world-wide
obedience, dissolve the very assumption on which the Sermon is constructed. Cf.
Luke 18: 8.
****But this effect ceases when the
Salt becomes foolish, silly, (Mat. 5: 13).
***** John 3: 5; Heb. 10: 16. Bishop
Westcott’s forecast is thus premature: “We wait
for the next stage in the growth of the State when, in full and generous
co-operation, each citizen shall offer the fullness of his own life that he may
rejoice in the fulness of the life of the body.” – Socialism, p. 8;
****** Matt. 19: 28. It is obvious that the obstinate rejection of
these prophecies in favour of a general triumph of the Faith must, in the minds
of benevolent casuists when met with the final facts, create such a shock of
confusion and heart-burning disillusionment as to rock their faith to its
foundations (Dan. 11: 35; Matt. 24: 10).]
22. Many will say to Me in that day,
Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy by Thy name, and by Thy name cast out devils,
and by Thy name do many mighty works? 23.
And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from Me, ye that work iniquity.
The most studied forecast of social and political development
is apt to be disturbed by the invading forces of the unseen. Our eyes scan only the narrow shore on which
beat the shining seas of angelic worlds.
But the prophet, the mouthpiece of unseen powers, is not proved holy by
exorcism or inspired utterance. So
Philanthropy, clothed in its inadequate rags, will hold them forth for Divine
approval, and, as here, be amazed at their rejection.* But the invocation of
Christ’s name by the wicked, with resultant miracle, being hitherto
unfulfilled, must, as Augustine saw,** occur in the last days. “And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour forth of My Spirit upon ALL
FLESH” (Acts 2: 17). Humanitarianism, divorced from the
supernatural, is benevolent Unbelief;
reinforced by the supernatural, it is the higher Paganism. For Christ is the supreme and eternal criterion. Not to be known of Him is not to know
Him: He
knows those in whom He recognizes Himself.
[* “Instead
of inanely repeating the old formula, ‘Respect the law,’” says Prince Kropotkine, “we say, ‘Despise law and all its attributes.’ In place of the cowardly phrase, ‘Obey the
law,’ our cry is, ‘Revolt against all laws!’” - Law and Authority, p. 6. So his Anarchism
in Socialistic Evolution, Appeal to the Young, Anarchist Communism, etc.
** “It must be either the Sermon on
the Mount or the Creed,” says Count
Tolstoy. “No man can believe in both. ... A man who believes in God, in the
Christ who is coming in His glory, to judge and punish the dead and the living,
cannot believe in a Christ who commands us to turn the other cheek to the
offender.” -
THE LAWS OF CHRIST
24. Every one therefore which heareth
these words of Mine, and doeth them,
shall be likened unto a wise man, which built his house upon the rock: 25. and the rain
descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house;
and it fell not; for it was founded upon the rock. 26. And every one
that heareth these words of Mine, and
doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man which built his house
upon the sand: 27. and the rain descended', and the floods came, and the wind
blew, and smote upon that house; and it fell : and great was the fall thereof.
“Our Lord,” says Bishop Gore, “is
giving us principles, not laws.”*
But the formal gravity with which, one by one, He quotes the laws of
Moses, to confirm or rescind; the solemn imperative of every utterance; the
consecutive code covering and regulating so vast a field of the disciple’s
action; the final classification of hearers between doers and disobedient:- if
principles, most surely they bind also with the finality of laws. Abysmal
profundities, deep spiritual principles, impulses to action as they are, their
dominant characteristic is yet the intense practicalness of the commands. The Sermon is full of realistic examples,
lest we should be touched only to an unobedient admiration of abstract
principles. “The
vast danger,” as Bishop Gore
admits, is lest, while professing to obey its “spirit,”
we fail to practise those specific acts by which Christ would have us prove,
and not merely assert, a noble disregard for our selfish interests. By many methods, Christians evade obedience
to the Sermon. (1) It is Jewish, and
therefore not obligatory on the Church**: (2) it is impracticable, and
therefore a counsel of perfection given only as an ideal***: (3) it applies, to
the disciple’s private life, and certain of his public acts may conform to the
Roman law of the State****: (4) it is the rule of conduct for Christ’s future
Kingdom, and therefore may now be disregarded.***** Its simplicity is a snare to the proud.******
Its collision with Gentile
militarism and heathen codes is a menace to the timorous. Its strenuous self-denial is distasteful to
the indolent. Its beatitude of poverty (Luke 6: 20, 24) is a stumbling-block to the rich,
and an obstacle to the ambitious. Its
law of love offends international rivalry and personal feud. Its way of sorrows has no tangible
compensation but a crown of thorns. Its
profound unworldliness, so subtle a proof of its truth, alienates the
multitude, and perplexes the averted face of the disciple. Nevertheless obedience, the fine test of
discipleship, is imperative. “But the Comforter,” said Christ, “even the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He shall
teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance ALL THAT I SAID UNTO YOU” (John 14: 26).
The largest consecutive body of His teaching preserved and recalled,
through the pressure of modern perplexities, to a forgetful Church, is enfolded
in this code of Christ. It is
recalled, to be obeyed: “Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations,
baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy
Ghost: TEACHING. THEM TO OBSERVE ALL THINGS WRATSOEVER I COMMANDED YOU: and lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of
the world” (Matt. 28: 19, 20). No
ecumenical council, no catholicity of tradition, no assumed infallibility of
Pope or Church, will save the body of disciples, disobedient, from rebuke; no
insistent claim on the privileges of grace, or repudiation of responsibility
for works done after faith; no empty admiration or praise of precepts insulted
by non-observance:- for Catholic, and Calvinist, and Socialist alike, for every
bearer whose hearing does not
become doing, the ruins of his house of works will fall
about him in disastrous overthrow. The
Rock here is the sayings of Christ: on which he who builds his life builds
strongly, and builds wisely. Wave and
wind of apostasy will sap and beat in vain.******* The Sand is every other body
of principles for controlling action, however plausible in economic argument,
however wise in apparent conciliation of a sceptical world; however splendid
with panoply of erudition, and pomp of patristic lore, and labour of science. “This is My beloved
Son,” saith God; “hear Him.”
[* Sermon on the Mount, P.
103. Or, as Bishop Stubbs expresses
it, “The Sermon on the Mount is not to be taken as the
direct measure of the Christian practice, but as the unalterable standard of
the Christian spirit.” ‑ Christ
and Economics, p. 83 ;
** That teaching cannot be Jewish which repeals laws of Moses,
exalts or revises others, defines fresh offences, creates, a new people of God,
distinguished by spiritual, not fleshly, distinctions, and deepens and
amplifies both penalties and rewards.
The commands, monover, are repeated in the Epistles. The
Epistles duplicate seven leading characteristics of the Sermon on the Mount:
(1) prohibition of oaths - Jas. 5: 12; (2)
non-resistance - 1 Cor. 6: 7; (3) love
towards enemies - Rom. 12: 20; (4) fasting -
2 Cor. 6: 5; (5) the peril of un-forgiveness
- Jas. 2: 13; (6) renunciation of wealth - Jas. 5: 1; and (7) the command to seek the Kingdom
- 1 Thess. 2: 12, R.V. So those to whom Jesus is Lawgiver are always
a heavenly people - which excludes the Jew: yet
also a suffering people -
which excludes the Millennial Age. If
persecuted, “great is your reward in heaven” (Matt, 5:
12); if Wise, they would “lay up treasures in
heaven” (Matt. 6: 20); if justly excommunicated, it would
be ratified “in heaven” (Matt. 18: 18); if escaping the Tribulation, it is a heavenly
escape – “To stand before the Son of man”
(Luke 21: 36) returning on the clouds of
heaven; if in the Kingdom, in its heavenly compartment (2 Tim. 4:
18). This rich legacy of command,
is, as Bishop Wordsworth says, a
perfect code of Christian duty.
*** If it be the rule of life only for society perfected, how
can that perfection be brought
nearer by present infringement and abeyance of the rule? The Church’s blessing invoked on flag and
legal warrant promotes war, not peace, justice, not mercy; and perpetuates
indefinitely conditions in which obedience is imprisoned, and compromise is
endowed. Christ’s ideals are obligatory.
**** If the Sermon binds at all, it binds disciples; if it
binds disciples, it must control all the actions to which the Sermon refers;
if, therefore, this control is inconsistent with political, legal, military,
or. commercial life, the disciple has no option but to withdraw from them. Our duty is not to revise Christ’s laws, but
to obey them. Luther's distinction
(Meyer on v. 41) between the disciple as a Christian and as a man of affairs is obviously unsound.
***** This evasion is equally tenable. For the Kingdom is to be controlled by
swift and, where necessary, consuming justice. . See Zech. 14: 66-19; Ps. 2: 8-12 ; Isa.
11: 1-10; Rev. 12: 5. “And he that overcometh, and he that keepeth My works unto the
end, to him will I give authority over the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod
of iron, as the vessels of the potter are broken to shivers.” (Rev. 2:
26, 27): the Millennial Age will be a rule of sharp, retributive
justice; unresisting grace and poverty-stricken renunciation will have vanished
from the enthroned and judging co-heirs of Christ. Here Mr.
J. N. Darby trips:- “When the Kingdom shall be
established hereafter in power, the world will be governed according to these
principles.” Synopsis, vol.
iii. p. 55, 2nd ed. Persecution,
anger, lust, hate, hypocrisy, fasting, mammon, anxiety, false prophets, are present facts only to be met by an immediate
application of Christ’s principles, here thrown into the form of laws.
****** Some think the Sermon on the Mount is confined to a “dispensation of the Acts”; others, that it is
reserved for a Jewish remnant yet to arise; others again, that it will be the
rule of the Millennial Age: that is, it is for any age but our own, and for
anyone but ourselves. That there is no single alternative view
proves at once that there is none such in the context; nor does it seem to
reveal a very eager love in us to do all that our Lord commands if we tax
ingenuity to discover why we should not.
******* The peculiar importance of these words lies in the
prophecy implied: that disciples faithfully obedient to the Sermon will be so
founded upon rock, so fenced by the barriers of defensive grace that, the
Apostasy, in which all storms will throng together to the attack, will be
powerless to seduce, and equally powerless to. overwhelm.]
DEMOCRACY
Socialism is but a phase, and now a
passing phase, the wider phenomenon of democracy. Democracy is the world’s last
hope for achieving Utopia. Never was the
Clay - the brittle, unstable, fragile populace - more freely mixed in, yet
hopelessly un-amalgamated with, the hard crushing Iron of Imperialism (Dan. 2: 43.)
Democracy in 1919 reached in
It is essential that we should grasp the attitude of the Most
High to modern democracy. Democracy – “the government of the people, for the people, by the people”
- is the long-suffering of God granting to the less cultured classes such
political power as will prove whether the miscarriage of all human government
is due to its form, or to its sin; so that, when moral disaster overtakes
republics equally with empires, every mouth may be stopped, and every order of sinner
- whether Chaldean absolutist, Persian satrap, Greek oligarch, Roman
militarist, or modern democrat - be proved, by sin, equally
incompetent to control the world. To
prove whether bad government springs from ancient barriers - monarchy, peerage,
or sex - God grants adult suffrage at last, until the whole Colossus-Man -
collapses in ruin. And it is exceedingly
remarkable that an exactly parallel test, with a like piebald effect, holds
good in the Christian Church. For
through Plymouth Brethrenism, probably the most democratic polity ever known in the Church of Christ, God has appealed to a
democratic age with a spiritual appeal of pure democracy; and so also the last
Church named in Scripture, and that which will precede the final crash, is
Laodicea – “judgment ,by the people” – God’s
closing probation of the organized Church, in which He entrusts the maximum of
power to the non-ministerial elements of the Assembly.* For in both State and Church the whole
organism is being tested (in grace and love) down to the last man. “He who can
spiritualize democracy,” said Mazzini,
“will save the world.”
[* On its evil side it means the capture of thousands of
churches by Socialism. The International
Socialist Congress, which met at
For now we see the goal to which God is tending. Every form of Government, when administered
by righteous men, brings ample blessings in its wake; it is iniquity, and not
polity, that wrecks nations.* A Tsar who abandons Jehovah for a Rasputin is
given over to be shot: a Red Republic, abolishing all law courts (Times, September 10th 1918)
and flinging open all prisons, goes down in blood and fire. The vast and changing forces which we are now
confronting, threatening not forms of government but government itself, have
been thus strikingly stated by a close and shrewd political observer. Mr.
Frederic Harrison. “Would that men could see that
we are living not only in the crisis
of the greatest war that has ever afflicted mankind, but also in the Advent of
Revolution, at once material, moral, and spiritual; wider, I believe, and
deeper than any which in some thousand years has transformed civilization on
earth. The Russian Revolution, in its
scale of population and area, in its overwhelming changes, in its suddenness
and velocity, exceeds any revolution yet known.
Now in a state of revolution things move, change, appear and disappear
with lightning velocity. Things which we
imagine to be trifles swell up into incalculable forces: changes, which in
normal times could hardly be worked through in generations, spring up completed
in months or weeks.”** For spiritual agents in the unseen are
precipitating a world-crisis at lightning speed. “In the course of the present Armageddon,”
says Mr. A. P. Sinnett, the
Theosophist, “Unseen Powers embodying loftier
knowledge than common humanity has yet reached are taking part in the
struggle. Some of us are in conscious touch
with them.”***
[* At the same time it is true that, exactly as Apostles,
directly inspired and
miracle-gifted, ruled God’s ideal Church, so, even among nations wholly
regenerate at last, God’s ideal government is literally aristocracy - not rule
by the good, much less rule by the many, but rule by the best. - Rev. 22: 5.
** Fortnightly
Review, March, 1918. *** Nineteenth Century, March, 1916.]
THE COLLAPSE OF DEMOCRACY
For it is slowly dawning on careful thinkers that
world-salvation is no more lodged in democracy than in monarchy. The idea that the world is safe in the hands
of any class of the unregenerate is a pure chimera.* How stern was the disillusionment that awaited
Charles James Fox when he cried, on
the fall of the Bastille: “By how much is this the
greatest event that ever happened in the world, and by how much the best!” “I am sorry,” exclaimed
[* In 1906 Labour, by a card-vote, advocated the expulsion of religion
from the schools by 817,000 to 76,000; in 1907 by 1,239,000 to 126,000; and in
1908 by 1,433,000 to 131,000. “In all the Russian schools have been organised compulsory
lessons, beginning with the youngest children, called ‘Atheism courses,’ to train
them in the non-existence of a Divine being” (Times, Dec. 28th, 1918).]
But a further fact unfolds itself. Lawless democracy produces an invariable
ultimate-dictatorship. Iniquitous
anarchy and iniquitous tyranny act and react in a vicious and ineludable
circle. “
Democracy he anathematizes along with
Capitalism. “Democracy
is a State which recognizes the subjection of the
minority to the majority, that is, an organization for the systematic use of
violence by one class against the other.”* [*Times, Dec. 15th. 1920.] Finding that human nature, steeped
in sin, refuses to respond to altruistic ideals, Communism finds itself forced, in order to
make its ideals actual, to create an autocracy more ruthless than the
autocracies it supplanted, and so provides the inevitable dictator with his
absolutism. Bolshevism aiming at
world-revolution as a stage towards universal centralization; and “Russian so peasants who hope for a return to civilized life
- and there are thousands - say, ‘We trusted in God and the Emperor and the
Allies. God punishes us. The Emperor has left us. Only the Allies are left. If they don’t come, the Antichrist will.’”* [Times, Dec. 28,
1918.]
For democracy, in common with Imperialism and every other
modern movement, betrays most dangerous Messianic symptoms. It was a saying of Mazzim’s that “Great social
transformations have never been, and never will be, other than the application
of a religious principle, of a moral development, of a strong and active
faith. On the day when democracy shall
elevate itself to the position of a religious party, it will carry away the
victory, not before.” “What is happening now throughout the world,” we are
told, “is equal in importance to the events which
occurred at the time of Christ and after. The Russian Revolution may be said to
herald the second coming of Christ, the revelation of which will come again out
of the East - out of Russia; not the end of the world, but the end of the false
civilization of Europe.”* [*English review, 1918.] Lassalle, who was, with
Karl Marx, the founder of Socialism, “is looked upon
by his disciples,” says
[* For it is the Beast, not the Woman - the imperial power,
not the ecclesiastical - which the Spirit paints entirely scarlet (Rev. 17: 3.)
Antichrist will be born in the cradle of anarchy. “Never was there
such fanaticism as now, dominating everything in
Incalculably
impressive of the “mystery of iniquity” sub-terraneously at work, now shortly
to appear above the surface, are the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.* [*The Jewish Peril,
[* The Russian professor who edits the documents (presumably a
Greek Catholic) closes in words remarkably revealing another phase of
developing prophecy. “The hour has struck for summoning the Eighth Ecumenical
Council, to which, oblivious of the quarrels which have parted them for so many
centuries, will congregate the pastors and representatives of the whole of
Christianity, to meet the advent of the Antichrist.” It is the Woman preparing to confront the
Beast. For Rome, ever anti-Semite, is preparing to
merge back into her ancient source - the most implacable foe Israel ever had
the older Babylon (Zech. 5: 11); and this
book, instead of distinguishing carefully the monstrous apostates from Moses,
who are the root of Bolshevism, from the innocent masses of Israel, so
confounds the two, and so studiedly inflames the old racial prejudice, that it
may yet provoke savage pogroms even in the British Isles. Papal
MARANATHA
“In the days of those kings” - could any music be sweeter to our ears? – “shall the God of Heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never
be destroyed.” (Dan. 2: 44.) The epoch of the struggle of the Iron and the
Clay is the epoch of the return of Christ.
The advance of democracy over the
ruins of monarchies is so sure and rapid that, were the Advent indefinitely
delayed, it is doubtful if many kings - assumed by prophecy as present at the
end - would survive. The fallen
thrones of the Tsars and the Kaisers; the seven monarchies swept away in
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