SERMON XXII
THE BEGINNING AND END OF WISDOM
Proverbs ii. 2, 3, 5
If thou incline thine ear to wisdom, and apply thine heart to understanding; yea, if thou criest after wisdom, and liftest up thy voice for understanding; then shalt thou understand the fear of the Lord, and find the knowledge of God.
We shall see something curious in the last of these verses, when we compare it with one in the chapter before. The chapter before says, that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. That if we wish to be wise at all, we must
begin
by fearing God. But this chapter says, that the fear of the Lord is the
end
of wisdom too; for it says, that if we seek earnestly after knowledge and understanding,
then
we shall understand the fear of the Lord, and find the knowledge of God.
So, according to Solomon, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the end likewise. It is the starting point from which we are to set out, and the goal toward which we are to run.
How can that be?
If by wisdom Solomon meant high doctrines, what we call theology and divinity, it would seem more easy to understand: but he does not mean that, at least in our sense; for his rules and proverbs about wisdom are not about divinity and high doctrines, but about plain practical every-day life; shrewd maxims as to how to behave in this life, so as to thrive and prosper in it.
And yet again they must be about divinity and theology in some sense. For what does he say about wisdom in the text? ‘If thou search after wisdom, thou shalt understand the fear of the Lord;’ and is that all? No. He says more than that. Thou shalt find, he says, the knowledge of God. To know God.—What higher theology can there be than that? It is the end of all divinity, of all religion. It is eternal life itself, to know God. If a man knows God, he is in heaven there and then, though he be walking in flesh and blood upon this mortal earth.
How can all this be?
Let us consider the words once again.
Solomon does not say, To understand the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but simply the fear of the Lord is the beginning of it. But the end of wisdom, he says, is not merely to fear the Lord, but to understand the fear of the Lord.
This then, I suppose, is his meaning: We are to begin life by fearing God, without understanding it: as a child obeys his parents without understanding the reason of their commands.
Therefore, says Solomon to the young man, begin with that—with the solemn, earnest, industrious, God-fearing frame of mind—without that you will gain no wisdom. You may be as clever as you will, but if you are reckless and wild, you will gain no wisdom. If you are violent and impatient; if you are selfish and self-conceited; if you are weak and self-indulgent, given up to your own pleasures, your cleverness will be of no use to you. It will be only hurtful to you and to others. A clever fool is common enough, and dangerous enough. For he is one who never sees things as they really are, but as he would like them to be. A bad man, let him be as clever as he may, is like one in a fever, whose mind is wandering, who is continually seeing figures and visions, and mistaking them for actual and real things; and so with all his cleverness, he lives in a dream, and makes mistake upon mistake, because he knows not things as they are, and sees nothing by the light of Christ, who is the light of the world, from whom alone all true understanding comes.
Begin then with the fear of the Lord. Make up your mind to do what you are told is right, whether you know the reason of it or not. Take for granted that your elders know better than you, and have faith in them, in your teachers, in your Bible, in the words of wise men who have gone before you: and do right, whatever it costs you.
If you do not always know the reason at first, you will know it in due time, and get, so Solomon says, to
understand
the fear of the Lord. In due time you will see from experience that you are in the path of life. You will be able to say with St. Paul, I
know
in whom I have believed; and with Job, ‘Before I heard of thee, O Lord, with the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee.’
And why? Because, says Solomon, God himself will show you, and teach you by his Holy Spirit. As our Lord says, ‘The Holy Spirit shall take of mine, and show it unto you, and lead you into all truth.’ And therefore Solomon talks of wisdom, who is the Holy Ghost the Comforter, as a person who teaches men, whose delight is with the sons of men. He speaks of wisdom as calling to men. He speaks of her as a being who is seeking for those that seek her, who will teach those who seek after her.
Yes, this, my friends, is, I believe, the secret of life. At least it is the secret both of Solomon’s teaching, and our Lord’s, and St. Paul’s, and St. John’s, that true wisdom is not a thing which man finds out for himself, but which God teaches him. This is the secret of life—to believe that God is your Father, schooling and training you from your cradle to your grave; and then to please him and obey him in all things, lifting up daily your hands and thankful heart, entreating him to purge the eyes of your soul, and give you the true wisdom, which is to see all things as they really are, and as God himself sees them. If you do that, you may believe that God will teach you more and more how to do, in all the affairs of life, that which is right in his sight, and therefore good for you. He will teach you more and more to see in all which happens to you, all which goes on around you, his fatherly love, his patient mercy, his providential care for all his creatures. He will reward you by making you more and more partaker of his Holy Spirit and of truth, by which, seeing everything as it really is, you will at last—if not in this life, still in the life to come—grow to see God himself, who has made all things according to his own eternal mind, that they may be a pattern of his unspeakable glory; and beyond that, who needs to see? For to know God, and to see God, is eternal life itself.
And this true wisdom, which lies in knowing God, and understanding his laws, is within the reach of the simplest person here. As I told you, cleverness without godliness will not give it you; but godliness without cleverness may.
Therefore let no one say, ‘We are no scholars, nor philosophers, and we never can be. Are we, then, shut out from this heavenly wisdom?’ God forbid, my friends. God is no respecter of persons. Only remember one thing; and by it you, too, may attain to the heavenly wisdom. I said that the fear of the Lord was the beginning of wisdom. I said that the fear of the Lord was the end of wisdom. Now let the fear of the Lord be the middle of wisdom also, and walk in it from youth to old age, and all will be well.
That is the short way, the royal road to wisdom. To be good and to do good. To keep the single eye—the eye which does not look two ways at once, and want to go two ways at once, as too many do who want to serve God and mammon, and to be good people and bad people too both at once. But the single eye of the man, who looks straightforward at everything, and has made up his mind what it ought to do, and will do, so help him God. As stout old Joshua said, ‘Choose ye whom ye will serve: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.’ That is the single eye, which wants simply to know what is right, and do what is right.
And if a man has that he may be a very wise man indeed, though he can neither read nor write.
It is good for a man, of course, to be able to read, that he may know what wiser men than he have said: above all, that he may know what his Bible says. But, even if he cannot read, let him fear God, and set his heart earnestly to know and do his duty. Let him keep his soul pure, and his body also (for nothing hinders that heavenly wisdom like loose living), and he will be wise enough for this world, and for the world to come likewise.
I tell you, my friends, I have known women, who were neither clever women, nor learned women, nor anything except good women, whose souls were pure and full of the Holy Spirit, and who lived lives of prayer, and sat all day long with Mary at the feet of Jesus.—I have known such women to have at times a wisdom which all books and all sciences on earth cannot give. I have known them give opinions on deep matters which learned and experienced men were glad enough to take. I have known them have, in a wonderful degree, that wisdom which the Scripture calls discerning of spirits, being able to see into people’s hearts; knowing at a glance what they were thinking of, what made them unhappy, how to manage and comfort them; knowing at a glance whether they were honest or not, pure-minded or not—a precious and heavenly wisdom, which comes, as I believe, from none other than the inspiration of the Spirit of Christ, who is the discerner of the secret thoughts of all hearts: and when I have seen such people, altogether simple and humble, and yet most wise and prudent, because they were full of the fear of the Lord, and of the knowledge of God, I could not but ask—Why should we not be all like them?
My friends, I believe that we may all be more or less like them, if we will make the fear of the Lord the beginning of our wisdom, and the middle of our wisdom, and the end of our wisdom.
Nine-tenths of the mistakes we make in life come from forgetting the fear of God and the law of God, and saying not, I will do what is right: but—I will do what will profit me; I will do what I like. If we would say to ourselves manfully instead all our lives through, I will learn the will of God, and do it, whatsoever it cost me; we should find in our old age that God’s Holy Spirit was indeed a guide and a comforter, able and willing to lead us into all truth which was needful for us. We should find St. Paul had spoken truth, when he said that godliness has the promise of
this
life, as well as of that which is to come.
SERMON XXIII
HUMAN NATURE
(Septuagesima Sunday.)
Genesis i. 27
So God created man in his own image; in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
On this Sunday the Church bids us to begin to read the book of Genesis, and hear how the world was made, and how man was made, and what the world is, and who man is.
And why?
To prepare us, I think, for Lent, and Passion week, Good Friday, and Easter day.
For you must know what a thing ought to be, before you can know what it ought not to be; you must know what health is, before you can know what disease is; you must know how and why a good man is good, before you can know how and why a bad man is bad. You must know what man fell from, before you can know what man has fallen to; and so you must hear of man’s creation, before you can understand man’s fall.
Now in Lent we lament and humble ourselves for man’s fall. In Passion week we remember the death and suffering of our blessed Lord, by which he redeemed us from the fall. On Easter day we give him thanks and glory for having conquered death and sin, and rising up as the new Adam, of whom St. Paul writes, ‘As in Adam all died, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.’
And therefore to prepare us for Lent and Passion week, and Easter day, we begin this Sunday to read who the first man was, and what he was like when he came into the world.
Now we all say that man was created good, righteous, innocent, holy. But do you fancy that man had any goodness or righteousness of his own, so that he could stand up and say, I am good; I can take care of myself; I can do what is right in my own strength?
If you fancy so, you fancy wrong. The book of Genesis, and the text, tell us that it was not so. It tells us that man could not be good by himself; that the Lord God had to tell him what to do, and what not to do; that the Lord God visited him and spoke to him: so that he could only do right by faith: by trusting the Lord, and believing him, and believing that what the Lord told him was the right thing for him; and it tells us that he fell for want of faith, by not believing the Lord and not believing that what the Lord told him was right for him. So he was holy, and stood safe, only as long as he did not stand alone: but the moment that he tried to stand alone he fell. So that it was with Adam as it is with you and me. The just man can only live by faith.
And St. John explains this more fully, when he tells us that the voice of the Lord, the Word of God whom Adam heard walking among the trees of the garden, was our blessed Lord Jesus Christ, who was the life of Adam and all men, and the light of Adam and all men. All death and misery, and all ignorance and darkness, come at first from forgetting the Lord Jesus Christ, and forgetting that he is about our path and about our bed, and spying out all our ways; as St. John says, that Christ’s light is always shining in the darkness of this world, but the darkness comprehendeth it not; that he came to his own, but his own received him not; but as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, as he gave to man at first; for St. Luke says, that Adam was the Son of God. But a son must depend on his father; and therefore man was sent into the world to depend on God. So do not fancy that man before he fell could do without God’s grace, though he cannot now. If man had never fallen, he would have been just as much in need of God’s grace to keep him from falling. To deny that is the root of what is called the Pelagian heresy. Therefore the Church has generally said, and said most truly, that ‘Adam stood by grace in Paradise;’ and had a ‘supernatural gift;’ and that as long as he used that gift, he was safe, and only so long.
Now what does supernatural mean?
It means ‘above nature.’
Adam had a human nature: but he wanted something to keep him above that nature, lest he should die, as all natural things on earth must. Trees and flowers, birds and beasts, yea, the great earth itself must die, and have an end in time, because it has had a beginning.
Man had and has still a human nature; the most beautiful, noble, and perfect nature in the world; high above the highest animals in rank, beauty, understanding, and feelings. Human nature is made, so the Bible tells us, in some mysterious way, after the likeness of God; of Christ, the eternal Son of man, who is in heaven; for the Bible speaks of the Word or Voice of God as appearing to man in something of a human voice: reasoning with him as man reasons with man; and feeling toward him human feelings. That is the doctrine of the Bible; of David and the prophets, just as much as of Genesis or of St. Paul.
That is a great mystery and a great glory: but that alone could not make man good, could not even keep him alive.
For God made man for something more noble and blessed than to follow even his own lofty human nature. God made the animals to follow their natures each after its kind, and to do each what it liked, without sin. But he made man to do more than that; to do more than what he
likes
; namely, to do what he
ought
. God made man to love him, to obey him, to copy him, by doing God’s will, and living God’s life, lovingly, joyfully, and of his own free will, as a son follows the father whose will he delights to do.
All animals God made to live and multiply, each after their kind: and man likewise: but the animals he made to die again, and fresh generations, ay, and fresh kinds of animals to take their place, and do their work, as we know has happened again and again, both before and since man came upon the earth. But of man the Bible says, that he was not meant to die: that into him God breathed the breath, or spirit, of life: of that life of men who is Jesus Christ the Lord; that in Christ man might be the Son of God. To man he gave the life of the soul, the moral and spiritual life, which is—to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with his God; the life which is always tending upward to the source from which it came, and longing to return to God who gave it, and to find rest in him. For in God alone, in the assurance of God’s love to us, and in the knowledge that we are living the life of God, can a man’s spirit find rest. So St. Augustine found, through so many bitter experiences, when (as he tells us) he tried to find rest and comfort in all God’s creatures one after another, and yet never found them till he found God, or rather was found by God, and illuminated (so he says himself) with that grace which by the fall he lost.
What then does holy baptism mean? It means that God lifts us up again to that honour from whence Adam fell. That as Adam lost the honour of being God’s son, so Jesus Christ restores to us that honour. That as Adam lost the supernatural grace in which he stood, so God for Christ’s sake freely gives us back that grace, that we may stand by faith in that Christ, the Word of God, whom Adam disbelieved and fell away.
Baptism says, You are not true and right men by nature; you are only fallen men—men in your wrong place: but by grace you become men indeed, true men; men living as man was meant to live, by faith, which is the gift of God. For without grace man is like a stream when the fountain head is stopped; it stops too—lies in foul puddles, decays, and at last dries up: to keep the stream pure and living and flowing, the fountain above must flow, and feed it for ever.
And so it is with man. Man is the stream, Christ is the fountain of life. Parted from him mankind becomes foul and stagnant in sin and ignorance, and at last dries up and perishes, because there is no life in them. Joined to him in holy baptism, mankind lives, spreads, grows, becomes stronger, better, wiser year by year, each generation of his church teaching the one which comes after, as our Lord says, not only, ‘If any man thirst, let him come to me and drink;’ but also, ‘He that believeth in me, out of him shall flow rivers of living water.’
Yes, my brethren, if you want to see what man is, you must not look at the heathens, who are in a state of fallen and corrupt nature, but at Christians, who are in a state of grace; for they only (those of them, I mean, who are true to God and themselves), give us any true notion of what man can be and should be.
Heathendom is the foul and stagnant pool, parted from Christ, the Fount of life. Christendom, in spite of all its sins and short-comings, is the stream always fed from the heavenly Fountain. And holy baptism is the river of the water of life, which St. John saw in the Revelations, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb, the trees of which are for the healing of the nations. And when that river shall have spread over the world, there shall be no more curse, but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in the city of God; and the nations of them that are saved shall grow to glory and blessedness, such as eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath entered into the heart of man to conceive, but God hath prepared for those who love him.
Oh, may God hasten that day! May he accomplish the number of his elect and hasten his kingdom, and the day when there shall not be a heathen soul on earth, but all shall know him from the least to the greatest, and the knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth, as the waters cover the sea!
Then—when all men are brought into the fold of Christ’s holy Church—then will they be men indeed; men not after nature, but after grace, and the likeness of Christ, and the stature of perfect men: and then what shall happen to this earth matters little; no, not if the earth and all the works therein, beautiful though they be, be burned up; for though this world perish, man would still have his portion sure in the city of God which is eternal in the heavens, and before the face of the Son of man who is in heaven.
Oh, my friends, think of this. Think of what you say when you say, ‘I am a man.’ Remember that you are claiming for yourselves the very highest honour—an honour too great to make you proud; an honour so great that, if you understand it rightly, it must fill you with awe, and trembling, and the spirit of godly fear, lest, when God has put you up so high, you should fall shamefully again. For the higher the place, the deeper the fall; and the greater the honour, the greater the shame of losing it. But be sure that it was an honour before Adam fell. That ever since Christ has taken the manhood into God, it is an honour now to be a man. Do not let the devil or bad men ever tempt you to say, I am only a man, and therefore you cannot expect me to do right. I am but a man, and therefore I cannot help being mean, and sinful, and covetous, and quarrelsome, and foul: for that is the devil’s doctrine, though it is common enough. I have heard a story of a man in America—where very few, I am sorry to say, have heard the true doctrine of the Catholic Church, and therefore do not know really that God made man in his own image, and redeemed him again into his own image by Jesus Christ—and this man was rebuked for being a drunkard; and what do you fancy his excuse was? ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘you should remember that there is a great deal of human nature in a man.’ That was his excuse. He had been so ill-taught by his Calvinist preachers, that he had learnt to look on human nature as actually a bad thing; as if the devil, and not God, had made human nature, and as if Christ had not redeemed human nature. Because he was a man, he thought he was excused in being a bad man; because he had a human nature in him, he was to be a drunkard and a brute.
My friends, I trust that you have not so learned Christ. And if you have, it is from no teaching of your Bible, of your Catechism, or your Prayer-book; and, I say boldly, from no teaching of mine. The Church bids you say, Yes; I have a human nature in me; and what nature is that but the nature which the Son of God took on himself, and redeemed, and justified it, and glorified it, sitting for ever now in his human nature at the right hand of God, the Son of man who is in heaven? Yes, I am a man; and what is it to be a man, but to be the image and glory of God? What is it to be a man? To belong to that race whose Head is the co-equal and co-eternal Son of God. True, it is not enough to have only a human nature which may sin, will sin, must sin, if left to itself a moment. But you have, unless the Holy Spirit has left you, and your baptism is of none effect, more than human nature in you: you have divine grace—that supernatural grace and Spirit of God by which man stood in Paradise, and by neglecting which he fell.
Obey that Spirit; from him comes every right judgment of your minds, every good desire of your hearts, every thought and feeling in you which raises you up, instead of dragging you down; which bids you do your duty, and live the life of God and Christ, instead of living the mere death-in-life of selfish pleasure and covetousness. Obey that Spirit, and be men: men indeed, that you may not come to shame in the day when Christ the Son of Man