Nature and Circumstances

“Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: n<>tw ithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” — Matthew xi. 11.

It is Jesus who is talking about John the Baptist; and the question of which lie is speaking is one that must have almost necessarily arisen with regard to two such teachers. Jesus had come to establish on the earth a higher life for man. 1 had been telling men that they must enter into the new spiritual culture, which, while it was the sequel and fulfilment of the education of the world which had gone before, was yet indeed new” in Him, was the creation of His personal nature and His revelation of God. He was engaged in setting up the kingdom of God, into which all the servants of God were to be gathered, and where their lives were to be trained. And in the midst of this

1 Treached in Lincoln Cathedral, Sunday morning, 24th June 1S83.

great work it could not be but that men would look around and would look back. Jesus was telling them that the true greatness of human life must come by following Him. It was inevitable, then, that men should ask, “How is it about those great men who are not His followers; those great men who have gone before Him; those great men who are wholly outside of His influence — are they not truly great? And if they are, what has become of His saying that true greatness lies only in Him, and in the kingdom of God to which He is so earnestly summoning us?” This was the question that must have come into many minds as Jesus spoke. To this question Jesus gave His answer — “Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” Because the question which brought forth this answer is not obsolete, but is on men’s minds in many shapes to-day, I propose to you that we should study Christ’s answer for a while this morning.

And notice, first, that it is a question which belongs not to the things of Christ, nor to religious things alone. All life suggests it; for in all life there are these two ways of estimating the probable value of men — one by the direct perception of their characters, the other by the examination of the institutions to which they belong, and the privileges which they enjoy. Think of the schoolboy who is just graduating from one of our public schools, and of Socrates who died more than two thousand years ago in Greece. The schoolboy represents the privileged condition which is the result of centuries of civilisation. Knowledge has been offered him every day, on every page of his school-books, of which the great Greek sage never dreamed; facts arc trite commonplaces to him, before whose slightest suggestion Socrates would have stood and laughed at their impossibility. The privilege of the schoolboy’s life is manifest enough. The dullest boy in all the class cannot help knowing things which were utterly out of the power of the ancient philosopher. And what then? Is the schoolboy greater than Socrates? In one sense certainly he is: greater in the richness of circumstance, in the opportunity of knowledge, in the profusion and luxuriance of life; but the moment that we ask the question, there stands out at once the personal greatness of the great man, which no distance of time can dim, and no inferiority of circumstances can disguise. The schoolboy dwindles to a grain of sand beside the mountain of his lofty genius. These arc the two evident facts. The schoolboy belongs to a higher order, a higher range of life, and so is greater in his circumstances, in the necessity of his condition; but the philosopher is greater in himself, unspeakably, immeasurably greater in his personal genius. How shall we describe it better than in some echo of the words which Jesus spoke about John the Baptist. The philosopher is among the very greatest of historic men; but the least of modern men has that which he, with all his greatness, could not have.

Here, then, we see the two elements: there is the greatness of nature, and there is the greatness of circumstances. They are distinct from one another; they do not make each other. A man may be great in nature and yet live among the meagrest surroundings. A man may live in the most sumptuous profusion of privileges, and yet be a very little man. They are distinct. One does not make the other; and yet the two have close relations; each has a tendency towards the production of the other. The higher plane of living is always trying to make the man greater, so that he may be worthy of it; and, on the other hand, the more the man grows great, the more he struggles to discover and attain some higher plane of life. In every fullest picture of human life the two combine; the great man in the fullest atmosphere alone entirely satisfies our imagination. But if they must be separated, as to some degree they always must, nothing can destroy the honour which belongs to personal character struggling under the most adverse circumstances to assert its greatness and to do its work.

But now, if these definitions have made the conditions of the problem plain, we are ready to go on to the truth which is included in what Christ says about John the Baptist. Christ recognises the two elements of personal greatness and of lofty condition, and He seems almost to suggest another truth, which is at any rate familiar to our experience of life, which is that personal power which has been manifest in some lower region of life seems sometimes to be temporarily lost and dimmed with the advance of the person who possesses it into a higher condition. What really is a progress seems, for a time at least, to involve a loss. Think how this appears in our observation of the world. The college student graduates next week, and from the calm seclusion of scholastic life he goes out into the wrestling with business forces or the eager rivalry of his profession. He has really passed up into a higher life; but sometimes he looks back and sighs for the peace and dignity which the old life enjoyed. The thinker, anywhere, tries to apply his thought, and though the contact with men, into which that effort brings him, disturbs his equanimity and throws him into perplexities which he knew nothing of before, he too has really mounted to a higher life. The aesthetic student tries to be useful; and it is only through painful shocks to his sensibilities, and a disturbance of the symmetry of life in which his soul delights, that he passes into the loftier condition where he can help his fellow-men. Everywhere that which seems to have perfected itself in the lower sphere displays its imperfection when it passes up to higher tasks. Thought, which has grown clear and self-complacent in the study of the physical world, bewilders itself and is baffled when it attempts to study God. Government, which seems to have mastered the problems of despotism, loses its equilibrium and is feeble once more when it attempts the higher tasks of freedom.

You remember, perhaps, the noble and beautiful verses in which Robert Browning, standing among the great pictures in Florence, speaks in their behalf across the centuries of the Greek statues which have confessedly a perfectness, an absolute completeness, in their own domain of beauty which the great Christian pictures cannot boast. It is the finiteness of view and purpose of the great classic works which gives them the chance to be complete: —

“To-day’s brief passion limits their range,

It seethes with the morrow for us and more.

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They are perfect — how else? they shall never change: We are faulty — why not? we have time in store.

The Artificer’s hand is not arrested

With us — we are rough-hewn, no-wise polished:

They stand for our copy, and, once invested

With all they can teach, we shall see them abolished.’’

It is a strange perplexing fact of life, this fact that as a being or a work, which has seemed perfect in some lower region, goes up to some higher region, it seems to grow imperfect; at least it manifests its imperfection. We can see at once what a temptation it must offer to the human powers to linger in some lower sphere, in which they seem to be equal to their work, instead of going freely up into a loftier world where they shall learn their limitations and their feebleness. There is reason enough to fear that man’s power of thought, revelling to-day in the clearness with which it seems to see the lower world of physical existence, will refuse some of the higher duties which belong to it, the duties which most tax its capacity and show its feebleness, the duties of understanding the soul of man and reaching after the comprehension of God. Sad will it be if it is so; if studious humanity, delighted with its achievements in the mere region of physical research, shall turn its back on the lofty tasks in which man’s intellect finds its greatest glory as well as its most complete humility — the struggle to know God.

In ordinary life the power of this temptation, the temptation to be satisfied with greatness in some lower sphere and not to aspire to the highest sort of existence, is constantly appearing. What multitudes of men there are all through society who seem to have limited and shut in their lives to some little range of occupations which they can fulfil with reasonable credit to themselves, and never seem to think that there is any call for them to do more than to complete themselves in that poor little scheme of life, never seem to dream that they ought to go up to a distinctly other life with higher tasks and more difficult exactions. An idle, good-natured creature, who has accepted his place and fills it, who amuses and is amused, who keeps the world about him in good -humour, and is great in the adornment of his own person and the management of petty etiquette; one of the coolest things on earth, I think, is the quiet effrontery with which such a man rests absolutely satisfied with his insect greatness, and criticises the blunders and feebleness which men of course develop who are setting themselves to do some really useful work in the world. He treats them and talks of them as if they belonged to a different world from his, and there could be no possible call for him to undertake the same effort with all its risks and exposures. One of the most wonderful things in the world is this power of men to draw themselves a line beyond which they never dream of counting themselves responsible, across which they look and judge with cruellest criticisms the men who are really fighting the world’s sins and troubles on the other side, as if of them there were no more to be asked than just that they- should be perfect in their own self-limited world of elegant uselessness. Never a brave reformer tries to break down a popular sin or to build up some new and needed progress, taking on himself the responsibility which a true man ought to take, but these self- satisfied critics gather around him to criticise his methods and to ridicule his blunders, but never lift a hand to show how they too would blunder if they let themselves step outside of their safe and limited and petty life.

This, I think, is the way in which most men of the world look at Christianity and at the efforts of their brother men to live a Christian life. “I am no Christian,” says the practical man; “I do not pretend to be pious or religious.” And then he looks up in your face as if he had settled the whole question, as if his entire business thenceforth were just to stand by and sec what sort of a

Christian you were and how your piety came on. “I do my duty as a plain unreligious man,” he says; “I make no professions.” There is a tone of scornful pity as he speaks. He realises — but not more keenly than the poor Christian realises himself — how the believer in Christ, the man who is trying to honour and obey a Divine Master, stumbles and blunders in his attempt to keep company with the Infinite. For himself he has abandoned any such attempt, and seems by some strange self-delusion to have brought himself to feel that his abandonment of the attempt has released him from any responsibility about it. You see how foolish and how base such a position is. It is the soldier who has shirked the battle criticising the torn uniform and broken armour and bleeding limbs of his comrade who comes staggering out of the fight. It is the ship which has lain snugly and uselessly beside the wharf jeering at the broken bulwarks and torn sails with which its sister ship comes reeling in from her long voyage. He who lingers in some lower life because there he is able to keep his complacency and not to fall so far short of his manifest duty as to cover himself with shame, has no right to compare himself with the feeblest and most unsuccessful of the children of God, who, unable to be satisfied as long as there is a spiritual life

P which he is not living, has set boldly forth and entered at least into the outskirts of the kingdom of heaven, into the determination and struggle to live a religious life.

There must be some such people here to-day. There must be some men here who are satisfied with doing their duty in some lower sphere of life and leaving the higher spheres entirely untouched, satisfied to be honest in business and kind to their families and pure in their daily lives, and leaving unattempted the whole effort to know God and to live in communion with Him, as if they had no more call to deal with that region of life than they have to go up and walk among the stars. Surely they must sec that that is not a perfect life. Surely, when they have once caught sight of it, that higher unappropriated region of living, that unentered kingdom of heaven must entice them with an invitation which will not let them rest. No true man can live a half life when he has genuinely learned that it is only a half life. The other half, the higher half, must haunt him. God grant that it may haunt every one of you until he arises and insists on the fulfilment of his life by the cordial and enthusiastic acceptance of the obedience of God.

One puzzles himself sometimes in the attempt to grasp the entire meaning of those great words of Christ to Nicodemus. “You must be born again,” the Master said. Does not the substance of its meaning lie in the truth of which I have been speaking? Nicodemus wanted Christ to meet him in a lower world, a world of moral precepts and Hebrew traditions, where the Pharisee was thoroughly at home. But Christ said, “No, there is a higher world; you must go up there; you must enter into that; you must have a new birth and live in a new life, — in a life where God is loved and known and trusted and communed with. Not merely a better life of the old kind, but a new kind of life. Except you be born again, you cannot see the kingdom of God, which is that new kind of life; and he who is least in that kingdom, he who has in any degree begun to live that higher kind of life has something which the best and noblest soul in the inferior life has not, is greater than the greatest who is not in the kingdom.”

The progress from one kind of life into a higher kind, from one realm into a yet deeper and more central region of God’s kingdom, is always pressing; it can never be outgrown. Not merely when a man becomes a Christian, but always afterwards when some deeper and holier and maturer region of Christian life opens before him, the summons comes to move on. to advance into that higher realm. When the religion which has been living on mere authority is called upon to become a religion of clear personal conviction; when to the religion of sentiment is offered the test and privilege of active duty; when the religion of the single experience is bidden to graduate into a wide human sympathy, — in all these cases, the same sort of thing occurs which occurs when the man of the world is first summoned to enter into the kingdom of heaven, to become a Christian. The door of a new room of life is thrown open, and the soul which has lived faithfully in the first room is bidden not to rest satisfied with that faithfulness, but to pass on into the second. May God give us grace and faith and courage and ambition always to be ready for that call, and to pass on and up to higher kinds of life, to new kingdoms of heaven as He shall open them to us for ever.

And now, in the remainder of this sermon I want to dwell upon another application of our truth which I cannot help hoping may throw some light upon a question which I know has puzzled many of us. I want to see how it applies to the explanation and understanding of a true and noble life lived in a false faith. Many of you recognise that question, I am sure. You have encountered its bewilderment. Perhaps you are encountering it now. Here is a creed which you know to be false, or to be wofully imperfect: it either denies or it ignores the truths which you know are supremely true. And here is a man who holds this false or this imperfect faith: he either asserts what you are sure is bitter error, or else he denies what you are sure is precious truth. And that man is a good man. He is a great deal better man than you are. His life makes you ashamed. He is generous, brave, pure, unselfish. His character shines like a star. Every one who sees it is better and stronger for the sight. Do you not know the bewilderment which comes? Do you not know the questions which such a sight suggests? Is, then, my faith mistaken, or is all faith a matter of no consequence? Are faith and character totally indifferent to each other? Has faith no influence on life? These are the first questions. They are full of darkness. The lighting-up comes when we see that there are really two elements, the man’s own personality and his conditions. To make the highest man both of these must be complete. In the case we have supposed, the personality is noble, but, if you are right, the conditions are very faulty. The real question concerning that friend of yours is not, How does he in his unbelief compare with you in your belief? but, How does he in his unbelief

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compare with what he, the same man, would be if he believed? Ask yourself that question about your noble atheist, or your pure-minded, loftyhearted heretic, and I think you will surely give yourself the answer that, however beautiful that soul may seem to you now, you know that, touched by the faith of Christ, there is a distinct new beauty, another kind of grace and exaltation which it certainly would win.

It seems to me to be very much like the question of the place of a man’s residence. You, an Englishman, full of the sense of privilege which belongs to your country’s place in the front rank of civilisation, send your pity across the seas to Africa or Asia. To live there seems to you a dreadful thing. The ignorance of barbarism or the corruption of decaying civilisation are dreadful even to the thought. But as you congratulate yourself upon your privilege, you happen to hear the story of some savage life. You arc told of one of those rare natures which shine every now and then in the heart of barbarism: a man brave, generous, tender, conscientious, true. What is tinresult? Do you throw away all your claims? Do you say England is no better than Africa? What ought to be the result? Is it not very clear? A new and deeper honour for this humanity of ours which will not wait for favourable circumstances, but even from the most unfavourable soils will throw up here and there its choicest flowers; a deep shame at the thought of how our civilisation has failed of very much which it ought to have done; but at the same time a clear sense that the best influences of civilisation might have made of that noble savage a far nobler being even than we see him now, and a renewed conviction, enforced even by the sight of this notable exception, that civilisation on the whole makes finer men than barbarism. The sight of the savage’s nobleness enlarges my thought of humanity, awakens my shame for the defects of civilisation, but does not make me want to turn African myself, nor to call upon the world to go back into the jungle.

Now why should it not be just exactly so when I see the noble life of a man whose faith I believe is all wrong, or is wofully imperfect. Let me not dare to say that his is not true nobleness. That confuses my moral standards and throws me into the worst hopelessness. Let the sight of him give me a new faith in the power of human nature to be generous and good, which can break through the most oppressive circumstances, and open into flower out of the most barren soils. Let it make me ashamed of the small show of generosity and goodness which I with my better faith am able to display; but let it not delude me into saying that

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what I know is my better and fuller faith is a thing of no consequence; let it not hide from me the fact that my infidel friend with all his excellence would be a finer and nobler man than his own present self if he believed in the truth and lived in the power of that which I know to be the faith of God; let it not lead me to forget that the real power of a faith is to be estimated not by the influence of its presence or its absence in individuals who may be exceptional, but by its effect upon broad stretches of human history over wide areas of time and space.

My dear friends, I do believe that this is the simple truth which a good many puzzled people among us need to know. The Christian, with his unbelieving friend, whose daily life, so pure, upright, and honest, shames the poor, half-discouraged believer every day, — what can you say to him? First bid him rejoice that his Christ can and does do for that friend of his so much even while that friend denies Him. Then bid him sec that if that friend of his could consciously know and cordially acknowledge the Christ who is doing so much for him already, he would give that Christ a chance to do still more which now He cannot do. Then let him for himself be filled with an inspiring shame which shall make him determined to be worthier of his higher faith. This is the true ministry which ought to come to any Christian from the presence of a man who believes far less than he does, and is a far better man than he is.

You can see at once how all of this must tell upon the whole idea of Christian missions. There may have been a time — though I think more and more that nothing is so delusive as the attempt to realise and restate the religious notions of our fathers — there may perhaps have been a day when, in order to make it seem right for the Christian world to send missionaries to the heathen, it required to be made out that all heathen virtue was a falsehood and delusion. That day is past, if ever it existed. But one of the first results of a cordial acceptance of the idea that human nature even in the depths of pagan darkness does feel the power of God and send forth noble lives, has been to stir the question whether, if that were so, we need, or even whether we ought, to send them Christianity. There have, beyond all doubt, been glorious self-sacrifices, saintly embodiments of purity, shining instances of spiritual aspirations in classic heathenism, and even in barbarian idol-worship. Shall we to systems out of which such lives can come offer our Christianity as their necessary hope, their one complete salvation? Is there not light upon this question in our thoughts of this morning? May not the Christian world stand glorying in every outbreak of the heathen’s goodness as a sign of the power with which his Christ, even unknown, may fill a human life which in the very darkness of its ignorance is obedient to whatever best spiritual force it feels? May not that very sight reveal to him what that aspiring heathenism might become if it could be made aware of the Christ whom it is in its unconsciousness obeying — as the very sight of the dim beaut)’ in which the earth lies before the sunrise fills us with hopes and visions of what it will be when the glory of the noon is all ablaze upon it? May not the Christian, even while he goes out to tell the heathen his completer gospel, be filled with an inspiring shame at his own poor use and exhibition of the power of that gospel which he offers to the heathen world? This is the true attitude of Christendom to paganism. It is not arrogant; it brings no insult; it comes like brother to brother, full of honour for the nature to which it offers the larger knowledge of the Father’s life. To such broad missionary impulse as that let us be sure that the increase of rational and spiritual Christianity will only add ever new and stronger impulse and inspiration.

The truth which underlies all that I have said this morning seems to me to be very clear and most important. It is the truth that behind every system or dispensation for the education of human life and character lies human life and character itself; and that, however the dispensation may be needed to bring man to his best, his powers and so his responsibilities are there before the dispensation comes to do its work. This is true even of the supreme dispensation of the manifestation of God in Jesus Christ. By that alone can man fulfil his life, and yet before that comes, man in the twilight has the capacity for noble living, and so is bound to attain it. And yet his attainment of noble living anterior to Christianity does not relieve him of the duty or deprive him of the privilege of taking the full revelation of God which is offered to him when at last Christ comes. This is, I think, the teaching of the Saviour when He says, “Of them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”

It would be easy to see how this truth applies to the relation which man holds to all the highest institutions and dispensations for his spiritual life. It applies to the Church, to the Lord’s Supper, to the attainment of assured and certain faith about religious things. I must not dwell upon these special applications, but only in one last word beg you to see how true and strong, how satisfied and yet how expectant a life in general this truth involves. No blindness or deprivation of opportunity in which you live, oh, my friend, deprives you of the right and duty of being a good man. Remember that, and never dare forget it. And yet no power to be a good man in the darkness gives you a right to shut your eyes to any light which God may offer you to lead you to the heights of some new land of goodness where you may be a better man. That is the faith which makes a man work earnestly and joyously upon the earth, yet never losing out of his sight the promised heaven, and so being ready for every summons to come up higher which the Master sends — always ready for the final welcome: “Thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over man)- things: enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”