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- Herausgeber: Darolt Books
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
Horace Bushnell was an American Congregational clergyman and theologian. Bushnell was a Yankee born in the village of Bantam, township of Litchfield, Connecticut. He graduated at Yale in 1827, was literary editor of the New York Journal of Commerce from 1828–1829, and in 1829 became a tutor at Yale. Here he initially studied law, but in 1831 he entered the theology department of Yale College. In May, 1833 Bushnell was ordained pastor of the North Congregational church in Hartford, Connecticut, where he remained until 1859, when due to extended poor health he resigned his pastorate. Thereafter he held no appointed office, but, until his death at Hartford in 1876, he was a prolific author and occasionally preached. Christ and the Salvation it is one of the most important works of his life. A message of faith and hope for believers around the world to grow in their knowledge of the Gospel of Christ.
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PREFACE
1 - CHRIST WAITING TO FIND ROOM.
"And she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn."-Luke ii. 7.
In the birth and birthplace of Jesus, there is something beautifully correspondent with his personal fortunes afterward, and also of the fortunes of his gospel, even down to our own age and time. He comes into the world, as it were to the taxing, and there is scant room for him even at that.
A Roman decree having been issued, requiring the people to repair to their native place to be registered for taxation, Joseph and Mary set off for Bethlehem. The khan or inn of the village is full, when they arrive, and, being humble persons, they are obliged to find a place in the stall or stable, where the holy child is born. It so happens, not by any slight of the guests, in which they mock the advent of the child, for he makes his advent only as the child of two very common people. But there is a great concourse and crowd-senators, it may be, landowners, merchants, money-changers, tradesmen, publicans, peddlers, men of all sorts-and the most forward, showiest, best attended, boldest in airs of consequence, take up all the places, till in fact no place is left. What they have secured too it is their conceded right to keep. If the carpenter and his wife are in a plight, people as humble as they can well enough take the stable, when there is nothing better to be had.
So it was, and perhaps it was more fitting to be so; for the great Messiah's errand allows no expectation of patronage, even for his infancy. He comes into the world and finds it preoccupied. A marvelous great world it is, and there is room in it for many things; room for wealth, ambition, pride, show, pleasure; room for trade, society, dissipation; room for powers, kingdoms, armies and their wars; but for him there is the smallest room possible; room in the stable but not in the inn. There he begins to breathe, and at that point introduces himself into his human life as a resident of our world-the greatest and most blessed event, humble as the guise of it may be, that has ever transpired among mortals. If it be a wonder to men's eyes and ears, a wonder even to science itself, when the flaming air-stone pitches into our world, as a stranger newly arrived out of parts unknown in the sky, what shall we think of the more transcendent fact, that the Eternal Son of God is born into the world; that proceeding forth from the Father, not being of our system or sphere, not of the world, he has come as a Holy Thing into it-God manifest in the flesh, the Word made flesh, a new divine man, closeted in humanity, there to abide and work until he has restored the race itself to God! Nor is this wonderful annunciation any the less welcome, or any the less worthy to be celebrated by the hallelujahs of angels and men, that the glorious visitant begins to breathe in a stall. Was there not a certain propriety in such a beginning, considered as the first chapter and symbol of his whole history, as the Saviour and Redeemer of mankind?
But I am anticipating my subject, viz., the very impressive fact that Jesus could not find room in the world, and has never yet been able to find it.
I do not understand, you will observe, that this particular subject is formally stated or asserted in my text. I only conceive that the birth of Jesus most aptly introduces the whole subsequent history of his life, and that both his birth and life as aptly represent the spiritual fortunes of his gospel as a great salvation for the world. And the reason why Jesus can not find room for his gospel is closely analogous to that which he encountered in his birth; viz., that men's hearts are preoccupied. They do not care, in general, to put any indignity on Christ; they would prefer not to do it; but they are filled to the full with their own objects already. It is now as then and then as now; the selfishness and self-accommodation, the coarseness, the want of right sensibility, the crowding, eager state of men, in a world too small for their ambition-all these preoccupy the inn of their affections, leaving only the stable, or some by-place, in their hearts, as little worthy of his occupancy and the glorious errand on which he comes.
See how it was with him in. his life. Herod heard the rumor that the Messiah, that is, the king, was born, and it being specially clear that there was no room for two kings in Galilee, raised a slaughter general among the children, that he might be sure of getting this particular one out of the way. Twelve years later when Joseph and his mother turned back to seek the child at Jerusalem, where they had left him, and found him sitting with the doctors of the temple, asking them questions and astonishing their comprehension by his answers; when also his mother, remonstrating with him for remaining behind, hears him say that he "must be about his Father's business," and goes home pondering his strange answer in her heart; how clear is it that they, none of them, have room, even if they would, to take in the conception of his divine childhood, or the history preparing in it. John the Baptist, again, even after he has testified in the Spirit on seeing him approach-"Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world!" and has all but refused to baptize him because of his superior dignity, grows doubtful afterward, yields to misgivings, gets perplexed, like any poor half-seeing sinner, with his mystery, and finally sends to inquire whether he is really the Christ, or whether some other is still to be looked for! is great ministry, wonderful in its dignity and power, wins but the scantiest hospitality; he journeys on foot through many populous towns and by the gates of many palaces, sleeping in desert places of the mountains, as he slept his first night in a manger, not having where to lay his head. Nicodemus, and many others probably in the higher conditions of life, felt the sense of some mysterious dignity in him, and went, even by night, to receive lessons of spiritual instruction from him, yet never took him to his house, and too little conceived him to so much as break silence at his trial by a word of vindication.
The learned rabbis could have bid him welcome, if he had come teaching "corban," or the precise mode or merit of baptizing cups, or tithing anise, but when he spoke to them of judgment and mercy and the right of doing good on Sundays, they had no room, in their little theologies, for such a kind of doctrine. His own disciples got but the slenderest conception of his person and mission from his very explicit teachings. They still wanted even the explanations of his parables explained. It was as if the sun had broken out upon a field of moles-there was a wonderful incapacity and weakness in all their apprehensions; he shone too brightly and they could see only the less. The priests, and rabbis, and magistrates, saw enough in him to be afraid of him, or rather of his power over the people. They charged him, before Pilate, with a design to make himself king instead of Cæsar, and when he answered, in effect, that he came only to be king of the truth, Pilate, greatly mystified by his answer, and the more that he had the sense of some strange power in his person, wanted still, like a child, to know what he could mean by the truth? On the whole it can not be said that Christ ever once found room, and a clear receptivity for his person, any where, during his mortal life. Mary and Martha did their best to entertain him and give him a complete hospitality, and yet their hospitality so little conceived him as to assume that being nicely lodged, and complimented with a delicate housewifery, was a matter of much more consequence than it was; even more, a great deal, than to fitly receive the heaven-full of honor and beauty brought into their house in his person. And so it may be truly said of him that he came unto his own, and his own received him not. lie was never accepted as a guest of the world any more than on that first night in the inn. There was not room enough in the world's thought and feeling to hold him, or even to suffer so great a presence, and he was finally expelled by an ecclesiastical murder.
At the descent of the Spirit there was certainly a great opening in the minds of his disciples concerning him, and there has been a slow, irregular, and difficult progress in the faith and perception of mankind since that day, but we shall greatly mistake, if we suppose that Christ has ever found room to spread himself at all in the world, as he had it in his heart to do, when he came into it, and will not fail to do, before his work is done.
Were a man to enter some great cathedral of the old continent, of which there are many hundreds, survey the vaulted arches and the golden tracery above, wander among the forests of pillars on which they rest, listen to the music of choirs and catch the softened light that streams through sainted forms and histories on the windows, observe the company of priests, gorgeously arrayed, chanting, kneeling, crossing themselves, and wheeling in long processions before the great altar loaded with gold and gems; were he to look into the long tiers of side chapels, each a gorgeous temple, with an altar of its own for its princely family, adorned with costliest mosaics, and surrounded, in the niches of the walls, with statues and monumental groups of dead ancestors in the highest forms of art, noting also the living princes at their worship there among their patriarchs and brothers in stone-spectator of a scene so imposing, what but this will his thought be: "surely the infant of the manger has at last found room, and come to be entertained among men with a magnificence worthy of his dignity." But if he looks again, and looks a little farther in-far enough in to see the miserable pride of self and power that lurks under this gorgeous show, the mean ideas of Christ, the superstitions held instead of him, the bigotry, the hatred of the poor, the dismal corruption of life-with how deep a sigh of disappointment will he confess: "alas, the manger was better and a more royal honor!"
So if we speak of what is called Christendom, comprising, as it does, all the most civilized and powerful nations of mankind, those most forward in learning, and science, and art, and commerce, it may well enough seem to us, when we fix. the. name Christendom-Christ-dominion-on these great powers of the earth, that Christ has certainly gotten room, so far, to enter and be glorified in human society. And it is a very great thing, doubtless, for Christ to be so far admitted to his kingly honors-more, however, as a token of what will sometime appear, than as a measure of power already exerted. Still what multitudes of out-lying populations are there that have never heard of him. And the states and populations that acknowledge him,-how unjust are their laws, how intriguing and dishonest their diplomacies, how cruel their wars, what oppressions do they put upon the weak, what persecutions raise against the good, what abuses and distortions of God's truth do they perpetrate, what idolatries and mummeries of superstition do they practice, and, to include all in one general summation, how little of Christ, take them all together, appears to be really in them. Now and then a saint appears, a real Christly man, but the general mass are sharp for money and dull to Christ, and whether sharp or dull, are for the most part extremely ignorant as regards all spiritual knowledge, even if they happen, as men, to be specially intelligent, or practiced much in philosophy. The savor of Christ, in short, is so weak that we can scarcely get the sense of it once in a day. A wind blowing off from his cross might almost be expected to carry as much grace with it-so slight, evanescent, scarcely perceptible, doubtfully real is the evidence shown of a genuine Christly power, even in just those upper tiers of humanity, which are called the Christendom, or Christ-dominion itself.
But we must take a closer inspection, if we are to see how very little room Christ has yet been able to obtain, and how many things conspire to cramp the efficacy and narrow down the sway of his gospel. Great multitudes, it is well understood, utterly reject him, and stay fast in their sins. They have no time to be religious, or the sacrifices are too great. Some are too poor to have any heart left, and some are too rich-so rich, so filled up with goods, that a camel can as well get through a needle's eye, as Christ get into their love. Some are too much honored to receive him, and some too much want to be. Some are in their passions, some in their pleasures, some in their expectations. Some are too young and wait to give him only the dry remains of life, after the natural freshness is gone. Some are too old and are too much occupied with old recollections and stories of the past forever telling, to have any room longer for his reception. Some are too ignorant, and think they must learn a great deal before they can receive him. Others know too much, having stifled their capacity already in the dry-rot of books and opinions. The great world thus, under sin, even that part of it which is called Christian, is very much like the inn at Bethlehem, preoccupied, crowded full in every part, so that, as the mother of Jesus looked up wistfully to the guest-chambers that cold night, drawing her Holy Thing to her bosom, in like manner Jesus himself stands at the door of these multitudes, knocking vainly, till his head is filled with dew, and his locks are wet with the drops of the night.
So it should be, as you will easily perceive beforehand; for Christianity comes into the world by supposition, just because the world is not ready to receive it. The very problem it proposes is to get room where there is none, to open a heart where there is no heart, to regenerate opposing dispositions, to sweeten soured affections, to beget love where there is selfishness, to institute peace in the elemental war of the soul's disorders. This being true, we can see beforehand that the grand main difficulty of the gospel in restoring, the world, is to get room enough opened for its mighty renovations to work. It will come to be received where there is no receptivity. Mankind will even seem to be shutting it away by a conspiracy of littleness and preoccupied feeling, when formally preparing to receive it.
What shall Constantine, the first convert king do, for example, when he enters the fold, but bring in with him all his regal powers and prerogatives, and wield them for the furtherance of the new religion; never once imagining the fact that, in doing it, he was bringing church and gospel and every thing belonging to Christ, directly into the human keeping and the very nearly insulting patronage of the state. And so the gospel is to be kept in state pupilage, in all the old-world kingdoms, down to the present day-officered, endowed, regulated, by the state supremacy. Spiritual gifts have no place under the political regimen of course. Lay ministries are a disorder. No man comes to minister because he is called of God, or goes because he is sent of God, but he buys a living, or he has it given him, as he might in the army or the post-office. And so the grand, heaven-wide, gospel goes into quarantine, from age to age, getting no room to speak, or smite, or win, or save, beyond what worldly state-craft gives it. Call we this making room for the gospel?
Church-craft meantime has been quite as narrow, quite as sore a limitation as state-craft. Thus instead of that grand, massive, practically educated, character, that Christ proposes to create in the open fields of duty, by sturdy encounter with wrong, by sacrifices of beneficence and the bloodier sacrifices of heroic testimony for the truth, it contrives a finer, saintlier, more superlative, virtue, to be trained in cells and nightly vigils!-poor, unchristly, mean imposture, it turns out to be of course. To give the church the prestige of a monarchy, under one universal head, a primacy is finally created in the bishop of Rome, and now, behold the august father, occupied, as in Christ's name, in blessing rosaries, preparing holy water, receiving the sacred puffs of censers, and submitting his feet to the devout kisses of his people! O how wretched and barren a thing, how very like to a poor mummery of imposture, have these ecclesiastics, contriving thus to add new ornaments and powers, reduced the gospel of heaven's love to men!
And the attempted work of science, calling itself theology, is scarcely more equal to its theme. The subject matter outreaches, how visibly, and dwarfs all the. little pomps of the supposed scientific endeavor. What can it do, when trying, in fact, to measure the sea with a spoon! A great question it soon becomes, whether Christian forgiveness covers any but sins committed before baptism; as if the flow of God's great mercies in his Son could be stopped by the date of a baptism, and the sins of his children, afterward, left to be atoned by purgatorial fires! The death of Christ is conceived and taught, for whole centuries, as being a ransom paid to the devil; then, after so many centuries have worn the superstition fairly out, as an offering, or suffering, to appease the wrath of God.. Meantime it is carefully held, to save God's dignity in him, that he does not suffer at all as divine, but is even impassible; so that what he certainly suffers in his moral sensibilities, even because they are perfect-all to make the cross an expression of divine feeling powerful on the heart of sin-subsides into a stifled, unmoved, immovable mercy that, in fact, belongs to the stones. It becomes a great article of opinion also, that God only wants to save a particular number, and that exactly is the number He predestinates. Next, to coincide with this, Christ is shown to have died only for this particular part of mankind. Next to coincide with this, a limited or special grace is affirmed under the same restrictions. Regeneration, again, is wrought by baptism. Repentance subsides into doing penance. And the forgiveness of sins becomes a priestly dispensation.
But the most remarkable thing of all is that, when the old, niggard dogmas of a bigot age and habit give way, and emancipated souls begin to look for a new Christianity and a broader, worthier faith, just there every thing great in the gospel vanishes even more strangely than before. Faith becomes mere opinion, love a natural sentiment, piety itself a blossom on the wild stock of nature. Jesus, the Everlasting Word, dwindles to a mere man. The Holy Spirit is made to be very nearly identical with the laws of the soul. God himself too is, in fact, put under nature, shut in back of nature and required to stay there; the incarnation, the miracles, the Gethsemane, the Calvary, all the flaming glories of the gospel are stifled as extravagances, and the new Christianity, the more liberal, more advanced, belief, turns out to be a discovery that we are living in nature, just as nature makes us live. Salvation there is none, nothing is left for a gospel but development, with a little human help from the very excellent person, Jesus.
Now the blessed Lord wants room, we all agree; we even profess that we ourselves want mightily to be enlarged. Why then is it always turning out, hitherto, that when we try to go deepest, we drag every thing down with us? What, in fact, do we prove but that, when we undertake to shape theologically the glorious mystery of salvation by Christ, we just as much reduce it, or whittle it down, as human thought is narrower and tinier than the grand subject matter attempted.
But saddest of all is the practical depreciation of Christ, or of what he will do as a Saviour, experimentally, from sin. The possibilities of liberty, assurance, a good conscience, a mind entered into rest, are, by one means or another, let down, obscured, or quite taken away. To believe much is enthusiasm, to attempt much, fanaticism. The assumption is, that Christ will, in fact, do only a little for us, just as there is only a little done; when the very sufficient reason is, that there is only a little allowed to be done. As to any common footing with the ancient saints in their inspirations, guidances, and gifts-it is even a kind of presumption to think of it. They had their religion at first hand, we are now a degree farther off. They had the inbirth of God, and knew him by the immediate knowledge of the heart. We only read of him and know about him and operate our minds, alas! how feebly, toward him, under the notions, or notional truths, gotten hold of by our understanding. O it is a very sad picture! Dear Lord Jesus can it never be that better room shall be given thee?
True there is no grace of Christ that will suddenly make us perfect; but there is a grace that will take away all conscious sinning, as long as we sufficiently believe, raising us above the dominating power of sin into a state of divine consciousness, where we are new-charactered, as it were, continually, by the righteousness of God, spreading itself into and over and through the faith, by which we are trusted to his mercy. All this Christ will do. In this state of power and holy endowment, superior to sin, he can, he will establish every soul that makes room wide enough for him to enter and bestow his fullness. He will be a Saviour, in short, just as mighty and complete as we want him to be, just as meager and partial and doubtfully real as we require him to be. O what meaning is there, in this view, in the apostle's invocation-"That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend, with all saints, what is the length, and breadth, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ that passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God." This heavy, long-drawn sigh, whose wording carries such a weight of promise still-what does it invoke but that Christ may somehow, any how, get fit room, as he never yet has done, in these stunted human hearts.
And this same sigh has been how fit a prayer for all ages. Probably nothing comparatively of the power of Christ, as a gift to the world, has ever yet been seen or realized in it. And a main part of the difficulty is, that Christ is a grace too big for men's thoughts, and of course too big for their faith,-the Eternal Word of God robed in flesh, the humanly manifested love and feeling of God, a free justification for the greatest of sinners and for all sin, a power of victory in the soul that raises it above temptation, supports it in peace, and makes obedience itself its liberty. Such a Christ of salvation fully received, embraced in the plenitude of his gifts-what fires would he kindle, what tongues -of eloquence loosen, what heroic witnessings inspire! But, as yeti the disciples are commonly men of only a little faith, and it is with them according to their faith. They too often almost make a merit of having no merit, and think it even a part of Christian modesty to believe that Christ will do for them, only according to what they miss, or really do not undertake for themselves.
And so it comes to pass, my brethren, that our gospel fails, hitherto, of all its due honors, because we so poorly represent the worth and largeness of it. What multitudes are there, under the name of disciples, who maintain a Christian figure scarcely up to the line of common respect-penurious, little, mean, sordid, foul in their imaginations, low-minded, coarse-minded every way. Until Christ gets room in the higher spaces of their feeling, and their consciousness gets ennobled by a worthier and fuller reception, it must be so. Others are inconstant, falling away so feebly as to put a weak look on the gospel itself; as if it were only able to kindle a flare in the passions, not to establish a durable character. This too must be so, till Christ is fully enough received to be the head of their new capacity and growth. Multitudes, again, are not made happy as they should be, wear a long-faced, weary, dissatisfied, legally constrained look, any thing but a look of courage and joy and blessed contentation. Yes, and for the simple reason that there is nothing so wretched, so very close to starvation, as a little, doubtfully received grace. True joy comes by hearts'-full and when there is room enough given for Christ to flood the feeling, the peace becomes a river-never till then.
Discordant opinions and strifes of doctrines endlessly propagated are another scandal. And since heads are little and many, full of fractious and gaunt notions, all horning or hoofing each other, as hungry beasts in their stall, what wonder is it if they raise a clatter of much discord? No, the true hospitality is that of the heart, and if only the grand heart-world of the race were set open to the full entertainment of Jesus, there would be what a chiming of peace and unity in the common love.
Why, again, since Christianity undertakes to convert the world, does it seem to almost or quite fail in the slow progress it makes? Because, I answer, Christ gets no room; as yet, to work, and be the fire in men's hearts he is able to be. We undertake for him as by statecraft and churchcraft and priestcraft. We raise monasteries for him in one age, military crusades in another. Raymond Lull, representing a large class of teachers, undertook to make the gospel so logical that he could bring down all men of all nations, without a peradventure, before it. Some in our day are going to carry every thing by steam-ships and commerce; some by science and the schooling of heathen children; some by preaching agents adequately backed by missionary boards; some by tracts and books. But the work, however fitly ordered as respects the machinery, lingers, and will and must linger, till Christ gets room to be a more complete inspiration in his followers. They give him the stable when they ought to be giving him the inn, put him in the lot of weakness, keep him back from his victories, shut him down under the world, making his gospel, thus, such a secondary, doubtfully real, affair, that it has to be always debating in the evidences, instead of being its own evidence, and marching forward in its own mighty power.
But what most of all grieves me, in such a review, is, that Christ himself has so great wrong to endure, in the slowness and low faith of so many ages. Why, if I had a friend, who was always making me to appear weaker and meaner than I am, putting the flattest construction possible on my words and sayings, professing still, in his own low conduct, to represent my ideas and principles, protesting the great advantage he gets, from being much with me, in just those things where he is most utterly unlike me-I could not bear him even for one week, I should denounce him utterly, blowing all terms of connection with him. And yet Christ has a patience large enough to bear us still; for he came to bear even our sin, and he will not start from his burden, even if he should not be soon through with it.
All the sooner, brethren, ought we to come to the heart so long and patiently grieving for us. Is it not time, dear friends, that Christ our Master should begin to be fitly represented by his people-received in his true grandeur and fullness as the Lord of Life and Saviour of all mankind; able to save to, the uttermost; a grace all victorious; light, peace, liberty, and power; wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. Be it yours then so to make room for him, even according to the greatness of his power-length, breadth, depth, height. Be no more straitened in your own bowels, stretch yourselves to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. Expect to be all that he will make you, and that you may be, open your whole heart to him broad as the sea. Give him all the widest spaces of your feeling-guest-chambers opened by your loving hospitality. Challenge for him his right to be now received by his disciples, as he never yet has been. Tell what changes and wondrous new creations will appear, when he finally breaks full-orbed on human experience-his true second coming in power and great glory. For this great consummation it is that every thing is preparing, and if there be voices and calls chiming through the spaces round us, which, for deafness, we have all these ages failed to hear, what is their burden but this-Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in.
2 - THE GENTLENESS OF GOD.
"Thy gentleness hath made me great."-Ps. xviii. 35.
Gentleness in a deity-what other religion ever took up such a thought? When the coarse mind of sin makes up gods and a religion by its own natural light, the gods, it will be seen, reveal both the coarseness and the sin together, as they properly should. They are made great as being great in force, and terrible in their resentments. They are mounted on tigers, hung about with snakes, cleave the sea with tridents, pound the sky with thunders, blow tempests out of their cheeks, send murrain upon the cattle, and pestilence on the cities and kingdoms of other gods-always raging in some lust or jealousy, or scaring the world by some vengeful portent.
Just opposite to all these, the great God and creator of the world, the God of revelation, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, contrives to be a gentle being; even hiding his power, and withholding the stress of his will, that he may put confidence and courage in the feeling of his children. Let us not shrink then from this epithet of scripture, as if it must imply some derogation from God's real greatness and majesty; for we are much more likely to reach the impression, before we have done, that precisely here do his greatness and majesty culminate.
What then, first of all, do we mean by gentleness? To call it sweetness of temper, kindness, patience, flexibility, indecisiveness, does not really distinguish it. We shall best come at the true idea, if we ask what it means when applied to a course of treatment? When you speak, for example, of dealing gently with an enemy, you mean that, instead of trying to force a point straight through with him, you will give him time, and ply him indirectly with such measures and modes of forbearance as will put him on different thoughts, and finally turn him to a better mind. Here then is the true conception of God's gentleness. It lies in his consenting to the use of indirection, as a way of gaining his adversaries. It means that he does not set himself, as a ruler, to drive his purpose straight through, but that, consciously wise and right, abiding in his purposes with majestic confidence, and expecting to reign with a finally established supremacy, he is only too great to fly at his adversary, and force him to the wall, if he does not instantly surrender; that, instead of coming down upon him thus, in a manner of direct onset, to carry his immediate submission by storm, he lays gentle seige to him, waiting for his willing assent and choice. He allows dissent for the present, defers to prejudice, watches for the cooling of passion, gives room and space for the weaknesses of our unreasonable and perverse habit to play themselves out, and so by leading us round, through long courses of kind but faithful exercise, he counts on bringing us out into the ways of obedience and duty freely chosen. Force and crude absolutism are thus put by; the irritations of a jealous littleness have no place; and the great God and Father, intent on making his children great, follows them and plies them with the gracious indirections of a faithful and patient love.
It is scarcely necessary to add that there are many kinds of indirection, which are wide, as possible, of any character of gentleness. All policy, in the bad sense of the term, is indirection. A simply wise expedient has often this character. But the indirections of God are those of a ruler, perfectly secure and sovereign, and their object is, not to turn a point of interest for himself, but simply to advance and make great the unworthy and disobedient subjects of his goodness.
This character of gentleness in God's treatment, you will thus perceive, is one of the greatest spiritual beauty and majesty, and one that ought to affect us most tenderly in all our sentiments and choices. And that we may have it in its true estimation, observe, first of all, how far off it is from the practice and even capacity generally of mankind. We can do almost any thing more easily than consent to use any sort of indirection, when we are resisted in the exercise of authority, or encounter another at some point of violated right.
There is a more frequent approach to gentleness, in the parental relation, than any where else among men. And yet even here, how common is the weak display of a violent, autocratic, manner, in the name of authority and government. Seeing the child daring to resist his will, the parent is, how often, foolishly exasperated. With a flush of anger and a stern, hard voice, he raises the issue of peremptory obedience; and when, either by force or without, he has carried his way, he probably congratulates himself that he has been faithful enough to break his child's will. Whereas, raising an issue between his own passions and his child's mere fears, he is quite as likely to have broken down his conscience as his will, unnerving all the forces of character and capacities of great manhood in him for life. Alas how many parents, misnamed fathers and mothers, fancy, in this manner, that when self-respect is completely demolished in their poor defenseless child, the family government is established. They fall into this barbarity, just because they have too little firmness to hold their ground in any way of indirection or gentleness. They are violent because they are weak, and then the conscious wrong of their violence weakens them still farther, turning them, after the occasion is past, to such a misgiving, half apologizing manner, as just completes their weakness.
It will also be observed, almost universally, among men, that where one conies to an issue of any kind with another, matters are pressed to a direct pointblank Yes or No. If it is a case of personal wrong, or a quarrel of any kind, the parties face each other, pride against pride, passion against passion, and the hot endeavor is to storm a way through to victory. There is no indirection used to soften the adversary, no waiting for time, nothing meets the feeling of the moment but to bring him down upon the issue, and floor him by a direct assault. To redress the injury by gentleness, to humble an adversary by his own reflections, and tame his will by the circuitous approach of forbearance and a siege of true suggestion-that is not the manner of men, but only of God.
True gentleness, we thus perceive, is, a character too great for any but the greatest and most divinely tempered souls. And yet how ready are many to infer that, since God is omnipotent, he must needs have it as a way of majesty, to carry all his points through to their issue by force, just as they would do themselves. What, in their view, is it for God to be omnipotent, but to drive his chariot where he will. Even Christian theologians, knowing that he has force enough to carry his points at will, make out pictures of his sovereignty, not seldom, that stamp it as a remorseless absolutism. They do not remember that it is man, he that has no force, who wants to carry every thing by force, and that God is a being too great for this kind of infirmity; that, having all power, he glories in the hiding of his power; that holding the worlds in the hollow of his hand, and causing heaven's pillars to shake at his reproof, He still counts it the only true gentleness for Him to bend, and wait, and reason with his adversary, and turn him round by His strong Providence, till. he is gained to repentance and a volunteer obedience.
But God maintains a government of law, it will be remembered, and enforces his law by just penalties, and what room is there for gentleness in a government of law? All room, I answer; for how shall he gain us to his law as good and right, if he does not give us time to make the discovery of what it is? To receive law because we are crammed with it, is not to receive it as law, but only to receive it as force, and God would spurn that kind of obedience, even from the meanest of his subjects. He wants our intelligent, free choice, of duty-that we should have it in love, nay have it even in liberty. Doubtless it is true that he will finally punish the incorrigible; but He need not therefore, like some weak, mortal despot, hurry up his force, and drive straight in upon his mark. If he were consciously a little faint-hearted he would, but he is great enough in his firmness to be gentle and wait.
But some evidence will be demanded that God pursues any such method of indirection, or of rectoral gentleness with us. See then, first of all, how openly he takes this altitude in the scriptures.
When our first father breaks through law, by his act of sin, he does not strike him down by his thunders, but he holds them back, comes to him even with a word of promise, and sends him forth into the rough trials of a world unparadised by guilt, to work, and suffer, and learn, and, when he will, to turn and live. The ten brothers of Joseph are managed in the same way. When they could not speak peaceably to him, or even endure his presence in the family, God lets them sell him to the Egyptians, then sends them down to Egypt, by the instigations of famine, and passes them back and forth with supplies to their father, allowing them to feed even the life of their bodies out of Joseph's bounty, till finally, when he is revealed as their brother and their father's son, they are seen doing exactly what they had sworn in their wrath should never be done-bowing their sheaf to the sheaf of Joseph. Here too is the solution of that very strange chapter of history, the forty years' march in the wilderness. The people were a slave-born people, having all the vices, superstitions, and unmanly weaknesses, that belong to slavery. God will not settle his land with such, and no thunders or earthquakes of discipline can drive the inbred weakness suddenly out of them. So he takes the indirect method, puts them on a milling of time and trial, marches them round and round to ventilate their low passions, lets some die and others be born, till finally they become quite another people, and are fitted to inaugurate a new history.
But I need not multiply these minor examples, when it is the very genius of Christianity itself to prevail with man, or bring him back to obedience and life by a course of loving indirection. What we call the gospel is only a translation, so to speak, of the gentleness of God-a matter in the world of fact, answering to a higher matter, antecedent, in the magnanimity of God. I do not say that this gospel is a mere effusion of divine sentiment apart from all counsel and government. It comes by counsel older than the world's foundations. The salvation it brings is a governmental salvation. It is, at once, the crown of God's purposes and of his governmental order. And the gentleness of God must institute this second chapter of gracious indirection, because no scheme of rule could issue more directly in good without it. For it was impossible in the nature of things that mere law-precept driven home by the forces of penalty-should ever establish a really principled obedience in us. How shall we gladly obey and serve in love, which is the only obedience having any true character, till we have had time to make some experiments, try some deviations, sting ourselves in some bitter pains of trials, and so come round into the law freely chosen, because we have found how good it is; and, what is more than all, have seen how good God thinks it himself to be, from what is revealed in that wondrous indirection of grace, the incarnate life and cross of Jesus. Here the very plan is to carry the precept of law by motives higher than force; by feeling, and character, and sacrifice. We could not be driven out of sin by the direct thrust of omnipotence; for to be thus driven out is to be in it still. But we could be overcome by the argument of the cross, and by voices that derive a quality from suffering and sorrow. And thus it is that we forsake our sins, at the call of Jesus and his cross, freely, embracing thus in trust, what in willfulness and ignorance we rejected.
Nor does it vary at all our account of this gospel, that the Holy Spirit works concurrently in it, with Christ and his cross. For it is not true, as some Christian teachers imagine, that the Holy Spirit works conversion by a direct, soul-renewing fiat or silent thunder-stroke of omnipotence. He too works by indirection, not by any short method of absolute will. Working efficiently and, in a certain sense, immediately in the man, or subject, he still circles round the will, doing it respect by laying no force upon it, and only raising appeals to it from what he puts in the mind, the conscience, the memory, the sense of want, the fears excited, the aspirations kindled. lie moves upon it thus by a siege, and not by a fiat, carries it finally by a process of circumvallation, commonly much longer even than the ministry of Jesus. He begins with the child, opening his little nature to gleams of religious truth and feeling-at the family prayers, in his solitary hours and dreams, in the songs of praise that warble on the strings of his soul, and among the heavenly affinities of his religious nature. And thenceforward he goes with him, in all the future changes and unfoldings of his life, turning his thoughts, raising tender questions in him, working private bosom scenes in his feeling, forcing nothing, but pleading and insinuating every thing good; a better presence keeping him company, and preparing, by all modes of skill and holy inducement, to make him great, So that, if we could follow a soul onward in its life-history, we should see a Spirit-history running parallel with it. And when it is really born of God, it will be the result of what the Spirit has wrought, by a long, and various, and subtle, and beautiful process, too delicate for human thought to trace.
Holding this view of God's gentleness in the treatment of souls, and finding even the Christian gospel in it, we ought also to find that his whole management of us and the world corresponds. Is it so-is there such a correspondence?
See, some will say, what terrible forces we have ravening and pouring inevitably on about us day and night-roaring seas, wild hurricanes, thunder-shocks that split the heavens, earthquakes splitting the very world's body itself, heat and cold, drought and deluge, pestilences and deaths in all forms. What is there to be seen but a terrible, inexorable going on, still on, everywhere. The fixed laws everywhere refuse to bend, hearing no prayers, the great worlds fly through heaven as if slung by the Almighty like the smooth stone of David, and the atoms rush together in their indivertible affinities, like the simples of gunpowder touched by fire, refusing to consider any body. Where then is the gentleness of such a God as we have signaled to us, in these unpitying, inexorable, fated, powers of the world? Is it such a God that moves by indirection? Yes, and that all the more properly, just because these signs of earth and heaven, these undiverted, undivertible, all-demolishing and terrible forces permit him to do it. He now can hide his omnipotence, for a time, just at the point where it touches us; he can set his will behind his love, for to-day and possibly to-morrow; simply because he has these majestic inexorabilities for the rear-guard of his mercies. For we can not despise him now, when he bends to us in favor, because it is the bending, we may see, of firmness. Able to use force, he can now use character, and time, and kindness. Real gentleness in Him, as in every other being, supposes counsel, order, end, and a determinate will. A weak man can be weak and that is all. Not even a weak woman can be properly called gentle. No woman will so much impress others by her gentleness, when she is gentle, as one that has great firmness and decision. And so it is the firm, great God, he that goes on so inflexibly in the laws, and the inexorable forces and causes of the creation-He it is that can, with so much better dignity, gentle himself to a child or a sinner.
See then how it goes with us in God's management of our experience. Doing every thing to work on our feeling, temperament, thought, will, and so on our eternal character, He still does nothing by direct impulsion. It is with us here, in every thing, as it was with Jonah when the Lord sent him to Nineveh. It was a good long journey inland, but Jonah steers for Joppa, straight the other way, and there puts to sea, sailing off upon it, and then under it, and through the belly of hell, and comes to land nobody knows where. After much perambulation, he gets to Nineveh and gives his message doggedly, finally to be tamed by a turn of hot weather and the wilting of a gourd. Just so goes the course of a soul whom God is training for obedience and life. It may be the case of a young man, setting off willfully, with his face turned away from God. Whereupon God lets him please himself a little in his folly, and finally pitch himself into vice, there to ]earn, by the bitter woes of his thraldom, how much better God is to him than he is to himself, how much worthier of trust than he ever can be to himself. Or he takes, it may be, a longer course with him-gives him a turn of sickness, then of bankruptcy, then of desertion by friends, then of slander by enemies, taming thus his pride, sobering his feeling, making the world change color, but not yet gaining him to the better life. Then he fetches him out of his disasters by unexpected. vindications and gifts of mercy, such as soften unwontedly the pitch of his sensibilities. A faithful Christian wife, gilding his lot of adversity before, by her gentle cares, and quite as much, his recovery now, by the beautiful spirit she has formed in his and her children, by her faithful training-making them an honor to him as to herself-wins upon his willful habit, melts into his feeling, and operates a change in his temperament itself. Meantime his years will have been setting him on, by a silent drift, where his will would never carry him, and changing, in fact, the current of his inclination itself. Till at length, dissatisfied with himself, as he is more softened to God, and more softened to God, as he is more diverted from the satisfaction he once had in himself, he turns, with deliberate consent, to the call of Jesus, and finds what seemed to be a yoke, to be easy as liberty itself.
The change is great, nay almost total in his life, and yet it has been carried by a process of indirection so delicate, that he is scarcely sensible by what steps and curiously turned methods of skill it has been brought to pass. And so God is managing every man, by a process and history of his own; for he handles him as he does no other, adapting every turn to his want and to the points already gained, till finally he is caught by the gentle guile of God's mercies and drawn to the rock of salvation; even as some heavy and strong fish, that has been played by the skillful angler, is drawn, at last, to land, by a delicate line, that would not even hold his weight.
In a similar way God manages, not seldom, to gain back infidels and doubters. First he commonly makes them doubt their doubts. Their conceit he moderates, meantime, by the sobering effect of years and sorrow. By and by he sharpens their spiritual hunger, by the consciously felt emptiness of their life, and the large blank spaces of their creed. Then he opens some new vista into the bright field of truth, down which they never looked before, and the mole eyes of their skepticism are even dazed by the new discovered glory of God's light.
Disciples who are lapsed into sin, and even into looseness of life, are recovered in the same way of indirection. God does not pelt them with storms, nor jerk them back into their place by any violent seizure. He only leads them round by his strong-handed yet gentle tractions, till he has got them by, or out of, their fascinations, and winnowed the nonsense out of their fancy or feeling, by which they have been captivated. And so at length he gets their feet upon the rock again never to be moved.
Indeed I may go farther. Even if you desire it, God will not thrust you on to higher attainments in religion, by any forcible and direct method. He will only bring you out into the rest you seek, just as soon as you are sufficiently untwisted, and cleared, and rectified, under his indirect methods, to be there. Commonly your light will spring up in quarters where you look not for it, and even the very hidings and obscurations you suffer, will give you out some spark of light, as they leave you. The obstacles you conquer will turn out to be, in some sense, aids, the discouragements that tried you will open, when they part, as windows of hope.
Having traced the manner and fact of God's condescension to these gentle methods, let us now pass on to another point where the subject properly culminates; viz., to the end he has in view; which is, to make us great. He may have a different opinion of greatness from that which is commonly held by men-he certainly has. And what is more, he has it because he has a much higher respect for the capabilities of our human nature, and much higher designs concerning it, than we have ourselves. We fall into a mistake here also, under what we suppose to be the Christian gospel itself; as if it were a plan to bring down, not the loftiness of our pride, and the willfulness of our rebellion, but the stature and majesty of our nature itself. Thus we speak of submitting, or losing our will, being made weak and poor, becoming little children, ceasing to have any mind of our own, falling into nothingness and self-contempt before God. All which are well enough: as Christian modes of expression; but we take them too literally. They are good as relating to our wrong will and wrong feeling, not as relating to our capacity of will and feeling itself. On the contrary, while God is ever engaged to bring down our loftiness in evil and perversity, he is just as constantly engaged to make us loftier and stronger in every thing desirable-in capacity, and power, and all personal majesty. We do not understand him, in fact, till we conceive it as a truth profoundly real and glorious, that he wants to make us great-great in will, great in the breadth and honest freedom of our intellect, great in courage, enthusiasm, self-respect, firmness, superiority to things and matters of condition; great in sacrifice and beneficence; great in sonship with Himself; great in being raised to such common counsel, and such intimate unity with him in his ends, that we do, in fact, reign with him.
Take, for example, the first point named, the will; for this, it will be agreed, is the spinal column even of our personality. Here it is that we assert ourselves with such frightful audacity in our sin. Here is the tap-root of our obstinacy. Hence come all the woes and disorders of our fallen state. Is it then His point to crush our will, or reduce it in quantity? If that were all, he could do it by a thought. No, that is not his way. His object is, on the contrary, to gain our will-gain it, that is, in such a manner as to save it, and make it finally a thousand fold stouter in good and sacrifice, than it has been, or could be, in wrong and evil. He will make it the chariot, as it were, of a great and mighty personality, inflexible, unsubduable, tremendous in good forever.
So of the intellect. Blinded by sin, wedded to all misbelief and false seeing, he never requires us to put violence upon it, never to force an opinion or a faith, lest we break its integrity; he only bids us set it for seeing, by a wholly right intent and a willingness even to die for the truth; assured that, in this manner, Time, and Providence, and Cross, and Spirit, will bring it into the light, clearing, as in a glorious sun-rising, all the clouds that obscure it, and opening a full, broad heaven of day on its vision. Recovered thus without being forced or violated, it feels itself to be a complete integer in power, as never before; and having conquered such obstacles under God, by the simple honesty of its search, it has a mighty appetite sharpened for the truth, and a glorious confidence raised, that time and a patient beholding will pierce all other clouds, and open a way for the light.
And so it is that God manages to save all the attributes of force and magnanimity in us, while reducing us to love and obedience. Take such an example as Paul. Do we speak of will? why he has the will-force of an empire in him. Of intelligence? let it be enough that he goes down into Arabia, and that in three years' time his mind has gone over all the course of Christian truth and doctrine, helped by no mortal, but only by God's converse with him, and his own free thought. Of courage, firmness, self-respect? what perils has he met, what stripes endured, and what offscouring of the world has he been taken for, unhumbled still, and erect in the consciousness of his glorious manhood in Christ-sorrowful yet always rejoicing, poor yet making many rich, having nothing yet possessing all things; confounding Athens and Ephesus and the mob at Jerusalem, out-pleading Tertullus the lawyer, convincing Felix and Agrippa, commanding in the shipwreck, winning disciples to the faith in the household of Cæsar, and planting, in fact, all over Cæsar's world-wide empire, the seeds of a loftier and stronger empire by which it is finally to be mastered.
