The Willing Surrender

“Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then shall the scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?” — Matthew xxvi. 53.

In his epistle to the Philippians St. Paul gives a very earnest exhortation to his disciples, setting the example of their Master before them in a wonderful way. “Let this mind be in you,” he says, “which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men.” The glory of Christ is in His willing surrender of that which belonged to Him, and which He might have always had and enjoyed. It is certainly interesting to find Christ Himself dwelling on this same fact in His history of which His disciple speaks. It is

1 Preached at the church of St. Peter -at -Arches, Lincoln, Sunday evening, 24th June 1883.

in the Garden of Gethsemane. The multitude whom the chief priests had sent was just arresting Jesus. Then one of His disciples drew his sword and showed resistance. But Jesus bade him put his sword into its place again. He tells His eager follower that if He wants to He can protect Himself: “Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and He shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?” But then He thinks of how the work He has to do makes such escape impossible. He waves the thought aside: “But how then should the scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?” For a moment it seems as if the helpless prisoner, held tight there between His enemies, looked up and saw the air thick with angels hurrying down to His relief. The grip upon His arms grew loose; He heard his Father’s voice behind the angels commanding them to save Him. Their bright swords flashed around Him, and he was free and safe. All this was not an impossible dream; it was something that might be true. A word of His might summon it. For an instant the word seems almost to be trembling on His lips. But then He says to Himself, “No, I must not. I came to do things which I could not do if I should let myself do this. I have the power, but I will not use it;” and so He shuts His eyes upon the vision of the angels, and goes on to the trial and the scourging and the cross.

“Let this mind be in us,” said Christ’s apostle, “which was also in Christ Jesus.” I want you to think this evening of the nobleness of this surrender of Jesus, and of the way in which no man becomes really noble who has not somehow its repetition in himself. The act itself which I have pictured must stir any generous soul. Christ, with freedom and honour waiting at His call, quietly shutting His lips and refusing to call them, and going on into suffering and shame, — that is one of the scenes which we may make a test-scene of human character. The man who calls that voluntary self-surrender foolish shows that he is himself ignoble. Everything that there is noble in a man’s nature leaps up to honour it; and everywhere, where the mind which was in Christ Jesus has been in any other man, that other man’s brethren have felt his nobleness. To give up some precious thing which is legitimately yours; to shut your eyes upon visions of glory or safety or luxury which you might make your own without a shade of blame, that is so truly one of the marks of nobleness that no man is accounted by the best standards truly noble who is not doing that in some degree. The man who is taking all that he has a right to take in life is always touched with a suspicion and a shade of baseness. There is a paradox in it, no doubt; one of those moral paradoxes which make the world of moral study always fascinating. Man has no right to take his full rights in the world; he is not wholly noble unless he sees the higher law which declares that all is not his to take which is his legitimately to own. Let us try to study this nobleness of voluntary surrender a little while to-night.

And first, we want to feel how definite and distinct it is. There are base imitations of it with which we must not let it be confounded. There are two different kinds of renunciation of things which we have the right and power to possess which have their origin in motives which arc unworthy of our human nature and degrade it. Let us look at each of them for a moment or two before we turn to the noble and ennobling renunciation from which they must always be distinguished.

The first of the two is the renunciation which comes from idleness or lack of spirit. There will always be people, there arc people among us, who might be rich or learned or famous, who despise wealth or fame or learning simply because of the trouble which they involve; and such a man often seems to himself, and seems sometimes to his friends, to be doing something fine and heroic in standing outside of the rush and hurly-burly of human life, and with the superior air of a spectator who is on the other side of the ropes watching and criticising the wrestlers who are struggling in the race. In the curious world of college life, one of the constant characters is the man who might do anything, and does absolutely nothing. He is in every class; he always has been, and he always will be — the man who is supposed to be voluntarily withholding the hand which, if he chose to stretch it out, might easily pluck the highest honours. He is probably always more or less of a fraud. If he exerted himself he would be found to be very much like other men; and the reason why he does not exert himself is not that he is above, but that he is below the ambitions which incite his fellows. In the world of faith there are always men who abandon thinking, that they may escape the disturbance of their opinions. They praise themselves, other men perhaps praise them, because they have no doubts, but surely the surrender which they make is a loss and not a gain, a disgrace and not an honour. Everywhere we must discriminate. Such renunciations as these have nothing in common with the divine relinquishment of Jesus. Vastly, vastly better is the most eager, headlong, passionate pursuit of reputation, comfort, learning, truth, than

Q this abandonment of struggle, which means nothing but laziness and torpor.

The second of the two base forms of voluntary surrender is what we may call in general the ascetic form. It includes all those renunciations of legitimate employments and enjoyments which are made directly and purely for the effect of such renunciations on ourselves — either that we may be mortified and chastened by disappointment, or that an appetite for some desirable thing may be whetted by restraint. It is under this last motive that many people seem to feel as if even religion and the service of God would suffer if it were made too common, if it were brought close and kept close to human life, if it were made the power by which every least action were to be moved. This sort of renunciation, which really has its source in a certain doubt of the sufficiency of the best things to become a continual experience, is exquisitely expressed in one of the most beautiful of Shakespeare’s sonnets, where the withholding of the grasp from what is genuinely in its power is vividly portrayed: —

“So am I as the rich, whose blessed key Can bring him to his sweet up-locked treasure, The which he will not every hour survey, For blunting the line point of seldom pleasure. Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare, Since, seldom coming, in the long year set,

Like stones of worth they thinly placed are, Or captain jewels in the carcanet. So is the time that keeps you as my chest, Or as the wardrobe which the robe doth hide, To make some special instant special blest, By new unfolding his imprison’d pride.”

It is far from being a subject upon which good and thoughtful men are agreed. Probably it is a subject on which there will never be complete agreement. Probably the difference of men’s natures and temperaments will always make them judge differently regarding it. But to me it seems as if the simply ascetic renunciation of any good and healthy thing, — that is to say, the renunciation of it purely and directly for the effect which its surrender may have upon the character of the man who renounces it, or for the heightening of the value of the thing itself — had an essential unreality about the act, and implied a distrust of the relinquished object which must defeat its own purpose and make the self-surrender worthless.

These, then, are the two kinds of relinquishment which we lay aside and put out of the question. Now turn back again to Jesus. When He said, “I will not call the angels,” it was no pusillanimous submitting to His fate; nor was it any unnatural submitting of Himself to suffering that He might be cultivated and purified, or that the release from suffering when it came might be more sweet. There is no such refinement and self-consciousness as that in all His life. It is simply that He has a work to do, and that if the angels come and snatch Him out of the hands of the ruffianly Jews, His work will not get done. Therefore He shuts His eyes upon the angels and closes His lips and will not call them, and is dragged away, to Annas first, and then to Pilate, and then to the cross. It was the quiet surrender of what was truly His, because He could not have it and yet do His work and save the world.

Let us take at once two or three of the most familiar illustrations which we can think of in our ordinary life, and see how there this sort of surrender wins from us all the same sort of honour when we see it in our fellow-men which it has when we sec it in our Master Christ. There is one spectacle which never fails to impress a community like that of one of our modern cities, which is largely mercantile in its standards, — a spectacle whose constant recurrence is one of the perpetual illuminations and redemptions of the sordid tendencies of life, — a spectacle, indeed, which it is hard to see how we could spare from among the influences by which the life of a community is kept pure and high. When a man who might be rich deliberately gives up the chance of wealth that he may be a scholar, men whose object in life is wealth, and who know that he has the same power to get wealth which they have if he should give himself to its pursuit, must honour him and feel the influence of his renunciation. It is not laziness, for he goes to work harder than any of them. It is not asceticism, for he has no foolish sweeping abuse of wealth with which to insult his fellow- men’s intelligence. It is not incapacity, for he is as bright as the brightest. It is simply the power of a higher purpose. It is the calm, manly, uncomplaining choice to do this greater thing, and to surrender whatever would hinder the doing of it most faithfully and well. The man goes off into his study, and thinks that nobody sees him, — indeed, does not think for a moment whether anybody is seeing him or not; but his life and such lives as his are the salt of the society in which they live.

There is another picture which, when one has his eyes open to discover it, gives a pathetic beauty to many a quiet household with its family life. The land is full of households where the father and mother have no ripe cultivation, have never been able to take time or thought for study and its blessings and delights, but out of which the children come forth furnished with all that the most careful cultivation can bestow, radiant with the happiness and helpfulness of culture. What does it mean? It is not that the father and mother had not the capacity or that they had not the love for learning. They appreciated it; perhaps they lived all their life long in hunger for it. The very careful care with which they provided it for their dearer selves, their children, sending their boys to college while they stayed and worked upon the farm or in the shop at home, shows how they knew the worth of what they did not take themselves. Many a time they looked up and saw the angels only waiting for a word to lift their wings and come; many a time their lips opened impatiently to speak the word; and yet every time they left the word unspoken and turned back to their meagre work again, saying in their hearts, “How then should the scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?” “Is it not written in the scripture of my fatherhood that I must make my child a way into the richest knowledge, even though my own life be laid level with the ground that he may walk over it?” Is there a more beautiful sight in all the earth than that? What triumphant life standing upon the summit of human knowledge and looking wide over all the vast expanse has half the real glory which belongs to the father-life working hard in the darkness at the mountain’s foot, and by his hard work making possible that climbing of his son into the celestial light.

In Thomas Carlyle’s delightful Reminiscences of his father, which have been published since the great writer’s death, there are these beautiful words about the rude and sturdy stonemason from whom he sprang: “I feel to my father — so great though so neglected, so generous also towards me — a strange tenderness, and mingled pity and reverence peculiar to the case, infinitely soft and near my heart. Was he not a sacrifice to me? Had I stood in his place, could he not have stood in mine, and more? Thou good father! well may I for ever honour thy memory. Surely that act was not without its reward. And was not nature great, out of such materials to make such a man?” It is a beautiful and noble tribute, but as we read it we are ready, I think, to feel that the man who could deserve it was even greater than the man who could write it.

No man in this world has a right to all his rights; that is the paradox which states our truth. It often seems as if the highest and profoundest truths could not be stated except in paradox. “If one is always claiming his rights,’” says a German author, “the world is like a hell.” Here is really the key to that question about voluntary abstinence from certain innocent indulgences for the sake of other people, which is a very pressing question to many people in our time, a question whose prominence indeed in our time is one of the most interesting symptoms of the moral condition which the world has reached. We may be sure that it is no low condition of moral life in which men are constantly urging upon themselves and upon one another abstinence from pleasures which in themselves are perfectly legitimate, because of the influence which free indulgence in those pleasures might have upon other people. And it is hard to think that any person of awakened moral sense in days like these does not recognise this duty of the sacrifice of things to which, looking only at themselves and at him, he has a most indisputable right. It is in the matter of temperance, so called (though there arc serious objections to the restriction of the name of temperance to the restraint which is exercised with reference to the one indulgence of strong drink), — it is in the matter of so-called temperance that the principle of which we are speaking has grown most familiar. And there is a quiet beauty which I think nobody can help feeling in the fact that there arc thousands of people in England and America to-day who are unostentatiously restricting or refusing themselves in an indulgence which they more or less desire, and which they know would be for them wholly innocent, lest they should do harm to the lives and characters of any of their brethren. There is a moral beauty in such a voluntary act which, in its small degree, is of the same kind with the sacrifice of Christ. Only we always must remember that the beauty of such an act is in its voluntariness, and that to make such relinquishment obligatory either by statute law or social edict is to rob it of its essential character. The beauty of it is gone so soon as the relinquishment becomes not a man’s willing surrender of what he might retain, but the forced yielding of that which a state law or the despotism of a public opinion has forbidden.

And in the same principle we see what necessary and impassable limits there are to the moral power of any prohibitory legislation. It may be very necessary; it often is; but they who urge it most ought to feel deeply that it is always superficial and always temporary. With regard to all things not essentially and necessarily wrong, with regard to all things which a man has a right to do until some higher obligation comes in to control his right, you stand on no sure ground till you have brought your fellow-men to self-control. All saying to a man, “You shall not do that,” is of little use unless it is leading on to a time when he shall say of himself, “I will not do that. I might do it if I would, but I will not do it. I have a right to do it, but I have no right to use my right.”

You see how voluntariness lies at the root of it all. It is in the power which was in us to be something else that the moral beauty of being any good thing which we are resides. There is a beautiful life conceivable which should have been made involuntarily — by a compulsion which it could not have resisted — obedient and perfectly harmonious to the eternal goodness. Such a life would be indeed beautiful: a thing for men and angels to admire; a thing for God to look down on with delight as the sun looks down upon its own image in a crystal lake. But its beauty would not be moral beaut)-. Its beauty would be like the beauty of a strain of music or the beauty of a statue — not the true beaut)- of a character, not the beaut)- of a man; for there can be no true beauty of character where there is not voluntariness. We talk about the glory of resignation to the inevitable; and it is glorious. To stand with a smile upon your face at a stake to which you arc chained, and from which you cannot get away, that is heroic. But the true glory is in resignation to the cvitablc. To stand unchained, with perfect power to go away, with perfect certainty that no man would drive you back — to stand held only by the invisible chains of higher duty, and, so standing, to let the fire creep up to the heart — that is the truer heroism. And there are men and women whom we meet every day in the streets, by whose side we sit every Sunday in our pews, who are doing that. Men call them fools. No man would blame them; many men would praise them if any day they gave up the self-imposed duty of their life and went through the gate that stands wide open into the unrestrained enjoyment of life. If the mother stopped being a slave to her ungrateful son, if the merchant let go the hopeless struggle to pay his honest debts, if the brother shook off his shoulders the weight of his worthless brother’s life and sprang forward to the honours that seem to be within his grasp, there is no voice that would say a word of blame. The world of successful men would welcome with a shout this wise man who at last had broken through the hedge which had been shutting him up to failure and set himself free to take his rights. But what would the man’s soul say to itself about it all? Would any success make up for the concession with which the man had won it? Would not the brightest fields of his new prosperity be haunted by the cry with which that hapless worthless brother sank into the waves when he shook him off as he struggled toward this golden shore? He has claimed his right to success; and everybody except himself owns that he had a right to claim it; but he himself knows that it was a right which he had no right to claim.

Oh, my dear friends, you know little of life if you do not know that there is always a sadness at the heart of every success. To have done anything in the way which men choose to call successful must always bring revelations of how imperfectly it has been done. Men who have watched your climbing send their cheers up to you as if you were standing on the summit; but you, from where you stand, can see how, peak beyond peak, the mountain range stretches away from you into the clouds. To succeed is always sad; but to succeed by the casting away of any of the chances of goodness and of useful work which God offered us, not merely to find that we have not reached the mountain’s top, but to have climbed to where we arc only by casting off the bundles of responsibility that God gave us to earn-, that is beyond all things wretched.

I always like to trace how the laws which apply to action apply also to thought. Let me remind you very briefly of the way in which there are voluntary surrenders of mental comfort and peace which the truest minds often are ready to make, and out of which, if they make them, there comes in the end a richer and completer wisdom. A man deliberately turns his face to the hard problems of the universe. “If God is good, what means this world full of pain?” “If Christ has saved the world, why all this endless uproar and strife of sin?” “If God is light, why are His children walking in darkness?” “How could God have made men who He knew would be wicked?” “What is the future of the souls that obstinately sin?” You ask yourselves these questions; you carry them about upon your heart. Of course, in all the pews around you there are people enough, good friends of yours, who say to you, “Why need you think about those things? Are you not safe? Are you not sure of happiness? You have a right to peace, rest, comfort, the assurance of entire faith; take it, and do not worry over questions which are too high or too deep.” But all your heart responds, “I cannot rest; I must know all I can know;” and so you deliberately give up the peace of unquestioning repose and go out into the sea where the questions cross and recross, and beat one another like the beating of the waves.

And now, what shall we say about all this — this voluntary surrender of that which is legitimately ours, because of some higher duty which can only be done in and by such renunciation? What can we say but this: it is the law of God, that wherever there is duty there is also possible joy. Just as the man who sees foliage knows that somewhere there must be water, although his eyes or ears cannot discern it, and the trees seem to grow out of the sand; so the man who is sure that in any spot there is duty for him to do knows that there is a happiness for him somewhere in the doing of that duty, even though for the present it seems to be a dreadful drudgery. In the expectation of that joy he works. The expectation of joy is joy; and so the man who in his voluntariness surrenders some delight or privilege, finds that there is a subtler mastery of happiness which is to be gained only by giving it up and seeking something higher, though for the time it seems to separate us from the happiness we love. Many and many an experience there is in this world which gives us the right to believe that happiness is something very coy and wilful, which, when we chase it, runs away from us; but, when we turn away from it and seek for something better, and forget to seek it, changes its mind and chases us. You remember, perhaps, in Tennyson’s EuocJi Arden — which whole poem, indeed, is a picture of the truth which I have tried to state to-night — how, when Enoch has made his resolution and deliberately determined that he will not claim the home to which he has a right, and has settled down to his solitary life, these lines describe his condition: —

!< He was not all unhappy. His resolve Upbore him, and firm faith, and evermore Prayer from a living source within the will, And beating up thro’ all the bitter world, Like fountains of sweet water in the sea, Kept him a living soul.”

What are such words as these but an echo of the strong words of Jesus, which declared that if a man lost his life for the highest purposes, “for my sake and the gospel’s,” he should find it. Indeed there are various half-mystic words of Christ which explain and illuminate this truth, of which our own experience bears witness, that when a man voluntarily surrenders that which is legitimately his for some sublimer claim, he does not really lose it; its spiritual essence, its precious soul, remains with him, and is still his. Think of these words in which the Lord described the recompense of those who abandoned everything for His sake — “There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the gospel’s, but he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life.” The thing he gives away, that very thing, in its real substance, in its true value, he shall have.

Shall we not think that Christ spoke all His deep words out of His own experience. He Himself had known what it was to gain the life He lost, to have the thing that He surrendered. When He gave up the home of the foxes and the birds, it was to find a home all the more deeply in His Father’s love. When he refused to call the angels to His help, the strength which was the meaning of the angels was surely entering into Him, and making Him ready for the battle which He was just about to fight.

This, then, is the sum of the whole matter. There will come to every manly man times in his life when he will sec that there is something which is legitimately his, something which he has a right to, something which nobody can blame him if he takes and enjoys to the fullest, and yet something by whose voluntary and uncompellcd surrender he can help his fellow-man and aid the work of Christ, and make the world better. Then will come that man’s trial. If he fails, and cannot make the sacrifice, nobody will blame him; he will simply sink into the great multitude of honourable, respectable, self-indulgent people who take the comfortable things which everybody owns that they are entitled to, and live their easy life without a question. But if he is of better stuff, and makes the renunciation of comfort for a higher work, then he goes up and stands — humbly, but really — with Jesus Christ. He enters into that other range, that other sort of life, where Jesus Christ lived. He is perfectly satisfied with that higher life. He does not envy, he does not grudge, the self-indulgent lives which he has left behind. He does not count up what he has lost; he does not ask whether he is happier or less happy than he would have been if he had kept what everybody says he had a right to keep. It is not a question of happiness with him at all; but gradually, without his seeking it or asking anything about it, he finds that the soul of the happiness which he has left behind is in him still. Like fountains of sweet water in the sea, it rises up and keeps him a living soul. He has left the world’s pleasures and its privileges only to draw nearer to its necessities, which are its real life. So what he gave he keeps, a thousandfold even in this present time, and eternity is all before him, in the end everlasting life.

If there is any young life here which wants to be its best, let it be ready, not to throw away its privileges in cynical contempt of them, but to let

R any of them go when God reveals to it some purpose of a noble service, or an exalted suffering in which He may have made it possible for that young life to follow in the footsteps and to carry on the work of Christ.