Purity

41 Pure religion and undefiled befo* t
God and the Father is this. To
visit the fatherless and widows in
their affliction and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” — ST JAMES i. 27.

T^ISTINGUISHED from other jewels that have but one colour, such as the fiery ruby, the milk-white pearl, the sapphire that borrows its tint from the sky, and the emerald from the sea, diamonds owe their beauty, brilliancy, and costly value to this, that they burn with many hues. Turned round, they sparkle with shifting colours, as the light flashes from their different faces. Still, though it appears in this variety of aspects, the diamond is one gem — “pure and undefiled,” as a dew-drop distilled from the skies.

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And why should not Christians believe that the Church of the living God is also one, though in forms of worship, ecclesiastical constitutions, and somewhat even in doctrines, it presents various aspects — as St Paul says, “There are differences of administration, but the same Lord.”

Like the costliest and most brilliant of gems, pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father presents itself under various aspects. Every one is beautiful, heavenly in its source — like the rays of the diamond caught from the sun; yet each differs from another, as much as do the properties which St James assigns to divine wisdom. In this passage, “the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy,” we have something like a full description; but in saying that “pure and undefiled religion is to visit the widow and fatherless in their affliction, and keep himself unspotted from the world,” the apostle does not attempt to give a full-length portrait. Out of many he mentions but two features; but these, though highly characteristic, neither embrace all the duties of a Christian’s life, nor exhaust the graces of his character. On the contrary, as the sun in his annual course passes through all the signs of the zodiac, pure and undefiled religion, overlooking no commandment, but endeavouring to keep the entire law of God, walks the whole circle of Christian duties. Then, though some may be more prominent and more fully developed than others, the believer, “complete in Christ,” is bedecked with every Christian grace. None are wanting; all are there, like the precious stones of the high priest’s breastplate, when, with a blood-filled bowl of purest gold, wearing his crown, and robed in white, he drew aside the veil; and vanishing, entered into the Holy of Holies to commune alone with God. With this explanation, let us now study the second phase of true and undefiled religion.

It requires us to keep out selves unspotted from the world.

An obstruction to our prayers, efforts, and progress meets us here, in limine, — on the very threshold, which it is necessary to take out of the way. It lies in a feeling, or fancy, that it is impossible to keep ourselves unspotted from the world, or even to come within sight of such a high attainment. To live in this world, and yet keep ourselves uncontaminated by its influence, pure in heart and life, seems as impossible as to be immersed in water, and yet keep dry; or to walk a muddy road, and keep our garments clean; or to take fire into our bosom, and not be burned. Well, if not more impossible than these, it can be done. It has been done — to some extent, at least, by help of Him who says, “My grace is sufficient for thee.” To be plunged overhead in water, and yet keep dry, is not impossible. From rocking boat, or sandy shore, observe yon sea-fowl poised on white wing above the deep. Catching sight of her prey, see! she descends like a flash of light, diving into the belly of the wave; ere long she emerges, and bearing no touch of damp on her snowy plumage, rises into the air with feathers dry as the eagle’s, that springs from the rock to soar in sunny skies. With feet webbed to swim, and broad sails to fly, and warm downs to preserve her heat, God has furnished this bird with an oil, that, coating her feathers, protects them from the touch of water.

Nor is it impossible to crawl undefiled in mire. How often have I seen a creeping thing come wriggling out of the foulest mud, pure; clean; without a speck on its ringed and slimy form. And if God enables it, by a fluid secreted from its lubricious skin, to pass through defilement undefiled, may not the Christian say, Shall He take such care of the poor worm that we tread upon, and not preserve from worse pollution those whom He has called to heaven, and redeemed with the blood of His beloved Son?

“He who His Son, most dear and loved,

Gave up for us to die,
Shall He not all things freely give
That goodness can supply?”

Grant that contact with a sinful world is like taking fire into our bosom; — it does not follow that we shall certainly be burned. With the troubled king, his nobles, and the eager multitude that crowd round the fiery furnace, look at these three Hebrews! Their naked feet are on glowing coals! they breathe the burning flame! and yet they come forth, no hair singed on beard or eyelash, nor smell of fire upon their clothes.

We might meet this difficulty with such answer as the holy Leighton once gave to such another plea. Grieved with the unhappy state of his country, and the failure of his own well-meant attempts to reconcile his countrymen to prelacy, and stop the bloody cruelties of the time, he had retired into England to pass the clouded evening of his life in the house of a married sister. Having a family, she had many domestic cares; and cumbered by them, she came far short of his close and devout walk with God. One day, addressing her brother, who had never married, she said, “It is easy for you to live a holy life; it is otherwise with me; with children and many household cares to occupy my thoughts and engross my attention, such a life as yours is to me impossible.” With one blow of his gentle hand, Leighton demolished her plea. He engaged in no argument, nor set himself to prove her wrong; but kindly turning to her, and quoting God’s own word, he said, “Enoch walked with God, and begat sons and daughters.” Like her, many deem high degrees of grace beyond their reach; therefore they aim low, and in consequence of that their attainments are low; for few are so fortunate as the son of Kish, who, leaving home to seek his father’s asses, found a crown on the way. We expect too little; and to those who would dismiss this subject, abandoning all efforts after a purity which they deem as impossible in this world, as to live in water, or breathe unhurt in fire, I have an answer, drawn also from the Word of God — an arrow taken from the quiver where the good Archbishop found his shaft. What saith the Lord? He puts the case in your own form, and taking your very figures of fire and water, says, “When thou passest through the waters I will be with thee, and through the rivers they shall not overflow thee; thou shalt walk through the fire, and not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.”

To keep themselves unspotted from the world, God’s people are carefully to avoid its vices. There is much vice in the world. Thousands make no profession of religion; having broken loose from their anchors, and drifted into practical infidelity, they have no connexion with any church, and seek none. Thousands besides are to be found within the Church who are dead — dead as the bodies that rot and moulder outside its walls! They have the form of godliness, but are strangers to its power. It requires neither an intimate nor an extensive acquaintance with society, to discover that thousands are living in open profligacy. The vices of town and country indeed thrust themselves on our notice. Though not exactly defended, they are allowed and winked at — now excused on the plea that the young must sow their wild oats, as if it was no solemn truth that “what a man soweth that shall he also reap” — and now varnished over by giving respectable names to bad things. For example, seduction is called an affair of gallantry; murder by duel, an affair of honour; drunkenness, intemperance; the debauchee who ruins his health, is a fast liver; and he who cheats another, is a sharp man of business. Licentiousness, with brazen front and painted face, openly walks our streets — pushing virtue aside, and putting modesty to the blush; while immoral and impure habits, though discreetly veiled, like an internal cancer, are destroying the health, the fortunes, the happiness, the bodies and souls of thousands. With idiot look, drunkenness reels abroad in the face of day; and events ever and anon are coming to light that show how many of both sexes, and of all ranks, are the secret slaves of this debasing vice. What falsehoods are told, and frauds largely practised in commerce, and in almost every kind of business! and are not the poor often defrauded of their wages, helpless widows and orphans of their substance, to maintain a splendid extravagance — a false position in society, to blow and keep up a bubble that sooner or later bursts? By how many is God’s holy name profaned; and how many more — like the drunken king, who, in carousal with his wives and concubines, made winecups of the vessels of the sanctuary — profane the Sabbath by idle recreation, or feasting, or business, wasting its sacred hours on the most common purposes!

To warn religious people against such vices may seem unnecessary. I know that they will not practise them; yet they may fall into what they will not practise. Fall? alas! how have the mighty fallen! and were all our secrets revealed, how would it be seen that many who never fell, had been on the point of falling — tottering, when God’s arm pulled them back, on the very edge of the precipice. What sore battles have been fought of which the world knows nothing! Examples of this, that “the righteous scarcely are saved;” wounded, and bleeding, and all but overcome, their shield and helmet battered, their crown in danger and all but taken, they have come off conquerors only by help of Him who finds his opportunity in man’s extremity, and saves at the very uttermost.

It is not the practice of fathers to publish the faults of their children; they are slow to believe them; they are much more ready to conceal than to reveal their failings. And for what end were the sins of Noah, and Jacob, and St Peter, and David, written in the Bible, and proclaimed in the ears of the world, but to warn us? Their moral is this, Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall. Do any, astonished and indignant at the insinuation, resent it, saying, There is no fear of me? Ah! the day was when these good men would have said the same, asking with horror as great as yours, Is thy servant a dog, that he should do such a thing? Yet they did it; and, though with Noah’s sons we would throw a mantle over their shame, the sound of their fall has its echo in our Saviour’s words, Watch! Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation.

We are to abstain from all worldly pursuits and pleasures that are of a doubtful character.

The atmosphere is sometimes in such a peculiar state that the spectator, on coast or shore, looking abroad over the sea, cannot tell where the water ends and the sky begins; and as if some magician had raised them out of their proper element, and turned their sails into wings, the ships seem floating in mid-air. But occasionally no line of separation is more difficult to draw than that which lies between what is right and what is wrong. Whether such and such a business or amusement, pursuit or pleasure, is wrong, and one, therefore, in which no Christian should engage, is a question that, so far as the thing itself is concerned, may be difficult to answer. But it is not difficult to answer, so far as you are concerned, if you doubt whether it is right. The apostolic rule is, Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind; and unless you are so, then, “what is not of faith is sin” — sin at least to you. No man, I freely admit, has any more right to add to the duties than he has to add to the doctrines of religion; and he assumes an authority which belongs not to man, who pronounces anything to be positively sinful that is not clearly forbidden either by the letter or by the spirit of God’s Word. These are the impious pretensions of the Church of Rome. Still, whatever others may feel themselves at liberty to do, if you are not satisfied in your own mind and conscience that the thing is right, that the pursuit, or pleasure, or enjoyment, is lawful, it may be right for others, but it is wrong for you to do it. Hence the Word of God says, He who doubteth is damned! not that he is damned in the common sense of that terrible expression; not that he is damned to hell; but that he is convicted, condemned of wrong-doing, in doing that which he is not sure is right.

In regard to the lawfulness of certain pursuits, pleasures, and amusements, it is impossible to lay down any fixed and general rule; but we may confidently say, that whatever is found to unfit you for religious duties, or to interfere with the performance of them; whatever dissipates your mind, or cools the fervour of your devotions; whatever indisposes you to read your Bibles, or engage in prayer; wherever the thought of a bleeding Saviour, or of a holy God, of the hour of death or of the day of judgment, falls like a cold shadow on your enjoyment; the pleasures which you cannot thank God for, on which you cannot ask His blessing, whose recollections will haunt a dying bed, and plant sharp thorns in its uneasy pillow, — these are not for you. These eschew; in these be not conformed to this world, but transformed in the renewing of your minds — “Touch not, taste not, handle not.” Never go where you cannot ask God to go with you; never be found where you would not like death to find you; never indulge in any pleasure which will not bear the morning’s reflection. Keep yourselves unspotted from the world! nor from its spots only, but even from its 5uspicions. If the virtue of Caesar’s wife, according to the Romans, was not even to be suspected, may I not say as much for the purity of the Lamb’s Bride? Remember that the character of a Christian is easily blemished; that they who wear white robes need to take care where they walk; that the smallest stain is visible on snow; that polished steel takes rust from the slightest touch of damp. Keep your garments clean. Keep your conscience tender — tender as the eye that closes its lids against an atom of dust, or as that sensitive plant which I have seen shrink and shut its leaves, not merely at the rude touch of a finger, but at the breath of the mouth.- Walk holily, and humbly, and circumspectly, lest your good should be evil spoken of, and you should give occasion to the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme. Mould your life on Christ’s; and, in the noble words of His apostle, “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, if there be any praise, think on these things.”

Religion does not require us to retire from the world.

In the strict sense of the term, the world has nothing to defile us. It is a beautiful world — furnished with delights, and full of loveliness. Its fields carpeted with flowers; its mountains wreathed with mists, or bathed in sunshine, or crowned with glistening snows; its bright skies and green woods ringing with merry music; its air loaded with the perfumes of ten thousand censers; its seas and lakes spread out like great mirrors of living gold or silver; its various elements teeming with happy myriads, that, gathering what God gives, are the pensioners of His bounty — the world is full of God; and converse with nature, so far from corrupting or defiling us, has a tendency to purify our thoughts and improve the mind. It was not of this world, in the ordinary sense of the term, that our Lord spake, when, seeing Satan advance to the combat, He said, “The prince of this world cometh, and he hath nothing in me.” Our earth owned not Satan, but Christ, as its Prince. It felt the pressure of His foot; its waters sustained His form; its midnight sky rang with the song of His nativity; its air bore Him up as He rose to His Father; in a golden cloud it provided the Conqueror with a chariot; its waves and winds in their wildest uproar were obedient to

His command; at His bidding its water reddened into wine, its graves opened to give up their dead, its bread multiplied to feed His train; and, as if the blow that struck Him had fallen heavy on its head, it trembled with -horror as it received His blood. It never gave its iron to be nails for His blessed hands; nor grew its thorns to pierce His brow. With high heaven, the earth was a mourner at Christ’s death; and as if it were never to recover the shock of that day, when they hung its King and Creator on a tree, an old legend says, that the reason why the aspen leaf is ever trembling on its stalk is because the cross was made of an aspen tree.

It is not the world, but the men of it, that are corrupt and corrupting. It is from these that religion calls us to keep ourselves unspotted. Uncontaminated and unstained by their vices, we are to recoil from them, saying, My soul, come not thou into their secret; with them, mine honour, be not thou united. In Scripture, the world often stands for the ungodly; and the application of that term to them proves, alas! that the ungodly form the great mass of mankind. God’s enemies are the majority; His people the minority; and in some places a very small minority. Hence they are called a peculiar people — a description altogether inappropriate, were the mass of society holy and leavened with divine principles; for in that case it would be the bad, not the good who were peculiar — distinguished from the multitude, like the man at the marriage feast who wore no wedding garment. An important, this is a serious and alarming consideration. It makes it all the more difficult to keep ourselves unspotted by prevailing ungodliness; just as it is more difficult to make way in the streets against a rush and press and crowd of people, than against a few individuals advancing in a direction opposite to our own. Here number is power; mass is power; as in the ball that goes crashing through walls of oak, or grinds granite stones to powder, and owes as much to its mass as to its momentum — to its weight as to its velocity.

Alarmed at this, and deeming it impossible, if exposed to it, to stem the flood of evil, and maintain a successful resistance against such odds and

power of numbers, some have fled from the world.

There are good Christians now-a-days who shut themselves up as they would in a town where the plague was raging; retreating before danger, they keep aloof from society — mingling little, or not at all with the world. Under the same fears, though allowing themselves to be carried to greater lengths, men in old times withdrew to the solitude of deserts, rocks, and forests; and became hermits. Content with a bed of dry leaves for their couch, a bare cave for their home, wild fruits for their food, the crystal spring for their simple drink, they renounced the society of man for that of the more innocent beasts, that they might escape the contaminations of an evil world. It were unjust not to admire the self-denying, brave devotion of these old anchorites; yet they mistook the path of duty. While all, and especially young Christians — the raw recruits as they may be called — should carefully avoid the dangers of temptation, still, I ask, If the leaven is withdrawn from the lump, how is the meal to be leavened? If the candle is removed, how is the house to be lighted? If Christian men and women are to retire from the world, — pity the world! how is it ever to be converted? It is well to retire at times, by prayer, and meditation, and communion with God, to get our wounds healed and our strength renewed for the warfare and the work. But though our Lord, for example, did occasionally withdraw Himself to lone shores, and desert places, and mountain-tops, His common walk was among the haunts of men. Now He is at a merry marriage feast, and now in the silent house of mourning — here He dines with a pharisee, there He accepts the hospitalities of a publican — His footprints are on the sands of busy shores and the dusty streets of Bethsaida, Capernaum, and Jerusalem. He went about continually doing good.

Followers of Jesus! seek others’ good as well as your own. We are to leaven the world, not to leave it; not to run away, but to stay. “The field is the world,” said our Lord; our ploughshare is to gleam in its furrows, and with flashing sickles we are to go in and reap it. Though He sent them out as sheep among wolves, to be hunted, and torn, and murdered, Jesus said to His disciples, as to us also, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. The part of a brave sailor is not to take to the boat, pull ashore, and leave the shrieking or sleeping passengers to perish; but to stick by the ship so long as there is a hope of saving her. And the part of a Christian is not to desert his post in the world, but to stay by it — to keep the ship afloat, the world from perishing. They fall well, and are saved who fall at the post of duty. He who gave Paul the lives of all on board, has given Christ the souls of all His people; and though the world should go down like a foundering ship, they perish not with it — sinking, it does not, whirlpool-like, suck them down into destruction. Those that Thou hast given me, says Jesus, I have kept — they shall never perish — no man shall pluck them out of my Father’s hand.

Look at these two illustrations of the difference between leaving the world, and remaining to leaven it.

In a beautiful town of Switzerland, there is a large convent belonging to an order of Dominican nuns. Ill-guided, but, let us hope in chanty, seeking the religion that, pure and undefiled, keeps itself unspotted, these timid women have fled from the world to devote themselves to what is called a religious life, and become candidates for the highest honours of their Church. Who visits the scene, and — having read of such convents as Le Vive Sepolte by the Tarpeian rock, where the living interred occupy themselves by incessant mortification, fast continually, never read, direct their constant meditation to death and corruption, never change their dresses, and their under garments only twice in the year, never see their connexions, nor yet hear their voices, nor even know anything about them, are not permitted to see the sacrament, but have it administered to them through a hole in the wall, through which, also, they make their confession and receive absolution — has associated such a life with severe austerities will be agreeably disappointed. Beautiful order, neatness, and a fine feminine taste, reign within the convent walls. The attire of the inmates, who occupy themselves to such an extent with works of chanty as to ward off ennui, is no doubt odd and funereallike, and not calculated to gratify female vanity. Still, their appearance betokens no rigid fasts, or painful mortifications. The apartments are small, but most tastefully adorned. The walls are hung with needlework and pictures; every couch is white as the snows of the neighbouring Alps; and at our visit, the summer breeze, as it whispered among the leaves of the vines, and stole in at the open window, filled the room with a sweet scent of beautiful flowers that grew on the window-sill. It was a sunny scene, where one could dream away life, remote from the battles and turmoil of the world, but remote also from its duties; and I could not but look on these fair devotees as deserters who, selfishly consulting their own safety, and distrusting the grace of God, had abandoned the post of duty. They were not keeping themselves unspotted from the world, but had fled from it.

Not in that, but in this other scene we meet the pure and undefiled religion which, while in the world, keeps itself unspotted. Go with me on a winter’s night into one of the worst quarters of London. Threading streets that here blaze with the gas and glare of lowest drinking shops, and now dark and dismal, are the walk of prostitutes, and the haunts of robbers, we reach a large, dingy building. Ascending by a trap-stair to a spacious loft, we find ourselves in the strangest scene of human woe and wickedness you could look on. It is a Night Refuge for houseless women — for the friendless, those who, thrown out like faded flowers to be trodden on in the streets, had sunk into dark depths of loathsomeness and degradation. The hour is late, and though a few lingered by the stove, the most, glad to stretch their weary limbs, had lain down on the pallets that, spread on the floor, were ranged along the bare walls. Every head was raised, and all eyes turned on us as we entered. And what looks they had! Here vice stared with her unblushing front Some had the look of fiends; treachery, brutal cruelty, falsehood, wrongs, and neglect, having turned whatever kindliness had once been in the heart into gall and wormwood; and now hatred both of God and man shot forth in their scowling looks. Others wore an expression of most touching sadness: one reclined with her back to the naked wall, gasping for breath, and dying of a raking cough; while another sat upright in a corner, a living form of death. The tide of night had floated in this wrack for the sake of a meal, a fire, the humblest of couches, and a roof to cover heads that otherwise had lain on the cold flags, or been pillowed on a doorstep.

In the centre of this scene, just risen from her knees, beside a table where the Bible still lay open, from whose pages, accompanied by prayer, she had been reading words of hope and peace to these wretched outcasts, stood a woman — I might say an angel. Leaving father, mother, brother, sister, pure associations, and a sweet home, to breathe this foul atmosphere, and take those forlorn creatures to her arms, she had become mother, nurse, physician, comforter, saviour guardian of those from whom all others shrunk as the filth and offscourings of the earth. When Carey and his associates contemplated a mission to the heathen, he, on condition that they would raise the means at home, volunteered to go abroad, boldly saying, “If you will hold the rope, I will go down into the pit.” Never had we seen this graphic speech so nobly illustrated. I stood rebuked in the presence of this noble woman. Pure, virtuous, and delicate, what a sacrifice had she made for Christ and perishing souls! It was one for angels to sing, and for Christ himself to reward with, Sister of mine, well done. More than any sight I ever saw, it reminded me of Him who left His Father’s bosom, and the honours paid by angels, to become the associate, and be called the Friend of sinners, to save us by His blood, and teach us by His example how to labour for the world’s good, and keep ourselves unspotted from its evil.