The Christian City
“And there was great joy in that city.” — ACTS viii. S.
The city was Samaria, and the great joy was the fruit of the first preaching of Christ there. The disciples had been scattered by persecution from Jerusalem; and one of them, Philip, had come down to the city which the Jews despised, and there he had told the people the truth which the Jews rejected. All around him was the misery and sin of a great city. He offered them Christ. He told them of Him who had come to relieve misery and forgive sin. As a symbol of the new life which he told them of, he touched some of their sick people, and their health came back to them: many that were taken with palsies and that were lame were healed; into many a house where there had been only darkness he brought light The brightness ran along the streets. Not merely
1 Preached in St Paul’s Cathedral, London, on the morning of Hospital Sunday, lothjune 1883.
a few scattered souls caught the new inspiration; it seemed to fill the air and flow through all the life of the whole town. And there was great joy in that city!
There is something clear and peculiar in this joy of a whole city over the new faith. We can all feel it when a thought or an emotion which has lingered in a few minds starts up and takes possession of a whole community. It is as when a quiver of flame which has lurked about one bit of wood at last gets real possession of the heap of fuel, and the whole fireplace is in a blaze. There came a time when Christianity, which had lived in scattered congregations and in the hearts of devout believers, at last seized on the prepared mind of the Roman Empire, and all Europe was full of Christianity. So it is something new, it is a phenomenon possessing its own interest and demanding its own study, when beyond Christian souls you have a Christian city — a whole community inspired with the feelings and acting under the motives of Christianity. It may or may not embody itself in laws or institutions; it may or may not be recognised in terms in the constitution or charter; that is of little consequence. But a city as well as an individual is capable of a Christian experience and character. It is more than an aggregate of the experience of the souls within it, as a chemical compound has qualities which did not appear in either of its constituents; it is a real new being with qualities and powers of its own.
I should like to speak this morning of the Christian city, the city filled with the joy and regenerated by the power of Christ. The subject falls in with the purpose to which this morning is devoted: the hospital collection, the contribution of this whole Christian city to the sick and needy, a municipal act of Christian charity. That purpose implies a Christian city. No heathen city ever did such an act. It is the utterance in a broad and simple way of that true Christianity which, in spite of all the heathenism that is still among us, is yet the power of our corporate life, and runs in the veins of our community.
Christianity is primarily a personal force, and only secondarily docs it deal with bodies of men, whether with churches or with states. That is a critically important truth. The souls of men must be converted; and out of those converted souls the Christian Church or the Christian State must grow. It is fatal to Christianity to try to reverse that truth. To begin by making the structure of a Church or a State, and expect so to create personal character, is as if you began to build a forest from the top, making a wilderness of leaves and branches, and so expecting to strike downward into trunks and roots. This is the error of all merely ecclesiastical and political Christianity. But none the less is it true that when the right beginning has been rightly made, when souls have believed in Christ, and then a great multitude of personal believers, who have been fused together by the fire of their common faith, present before the world the unity of a Christian Church or a Christian nation, that new unity is a real unit, a genuine being with its own character and power.
I am not sure how intelligible this is. I am not sure that it is possible to state it so that it shall be clear to every mind. It needs some familiarity with the idea, some power of abstraction, perhaps something of a poetic power, to realise the true existence of a Church or a city as a being with its own capacities and responsibilities; but when it is once apprehended it is very real — it is no figure of speech. We see the Church possessed as a whole of qualities which she must gather, of course, from her parts, but which we can find in no one of her parts. She is more permanent, more wise, more trustworthy than the wisest and most trustworthy of the men who compose her membership. The city is a being dearer to us than any of the citizens who compose it. Many a man goes out to war and gives his life gladly for his country who would not have dreamed of giving it for any countryman. There are indeed some men who seem to be incapable of any such thought, who never can get beyond the individual. But the extent to which these ideas of what we ma)- call the corporate personalities, such as the Church, the State, the City, have prevailed, and the depth to which they have influenced the feeling and action of mankind is a testimony that they are not imaginary but real. The Bible is full of them. The Old Testament deals with bodies of men supremely: Israel is more than any Israelite; Jerusalem is realcr and dearer than any Jew. The New Testament reverts to the individual, who, as we said, must always be primarily conspicuous in Christianity; but it too advances towards its larger personality, and leaves the strong figure of the Christian Church and the brilliant architecture of the New Jerusalem burning upon its latest pages. But leaving these general thoughts, let us come to our subject. What is a Christian city? Is such a thing possible? Is anything more to be expected than that here and there throughout a city men and women should be Christians, believing Christian truths, living Christian lives, and looking forward to ineffable rewards beyond the skies? Can we conceive of Christianity so pervading the life of a community that not merely the souls shall be Christian, but the city shall be Christian, distinctly different in its corporate life and action from a heathen city which knows nothing about Christ?
Christianity, then, or the change of man’s life by Christ, has three different aspects in which it appears — three ways in which it makes its power known. It appears either as Truth, as Righteousness, or as Love. Every soul which is really redeemed by Christ will enter into new beliefs, higher ways of action, and deeper affections towards fellow -men. Belief, behaviour, and benevolence, these are the fields in which Christ works. By a change in these He changes the whole man. In every Christian Christianity will show its triple power. Each man made Christ’s man will believe more truth and do more righteousness and overrun more with love than when he was his own selfish servant. There will be difference in different Christians. In one belief will be most prominent, in another integrity, in another benevolence, as the fruit of his conversion; but in all three will still be present a truer faith, a purer righteousness, and a more bounteous charity.
Now take these one by one, and ask if a city is not capable of them as well as an individual. Again I say, as I reminded you before, that they must exist primarily in individuals; all spiritual 14o THE CHRISTIAN CITY. [vil.
character must reside ultimately in single souls; but still I think that it is manifestly true that an aggregate of individuals may possess in its own peculiar way the spiritual character which the individual possesses, and a city, like a man, have and exhibit Christian faith and Christian righteousness and Christian love.
i. Look first at Faith. Perhaps this seems the hardest to establish. There was a time perhaps, we say, when cities had their beliefs. There was a time when no man could live comfortably in Rome without believing like the Pope, or in Geneva without believing like Calvin, or in England or New England without believing like the king or like the magistrates. Then it might seem perhaps as if each city had its faith; then every proclamation was based upon a creed. But see how that is altered now. A thousand different beliefs fight freely in our streets, and it is almost true that no man is the less a citizen for anything that he believes or disbelieves. When these old times come back then you may have a believing city, a city with a creed; but not till then; and these old times are never coming back. But this is surely somew hat shallow. This implies that the only exhibition of a faith must be in formal statement. It ignores for the city what we more and more accept for the individual, that the best sign that a man believes vn.] THE CHRISTIAN CITY. 141
anything is not his repetition of its formulas, but his impregnation with its spirit. It may have grown impossible, at least for the present, that cities should write confessions of faith in their charters, or even make the simplest acknowledgment of the most fundamental truths in the headings of their statutes or in the inscriptions on their coins; but if it is possible — nay, if it is necessary — that the prevalence through all a city’s life of a belief in God and Christ and the Holy Spirit should testify of itself by the creation of certain spiritual qualities in that city, recognisable in all its ways of living and government, then have we not the possibility of a believing city even without a written creed or a formal proclamation. Just look at this city where you live. This is a Christian city — a believing city. And why? how do we know it? It is not because an occasional document is solemnised with the name of God. It is not because a few verses of the Bible are read each morning in your public schools. It is because that spirit which has never been in the world save as the fruit of Christian faith prevails in and pervades your government and social life, the spirit of responsibility, of trust in man, and of hopefulness. These are the spiritual results of Christian believing: they are not found in heathenism. When Christianity enters into heathenism the new faith of a converted country 142 THE CHRISTIAN CITY. [vn.
is testified to by a pervading sense of responsibility, a more confident and cordial trust in man, and an expectant hopeful enterprise, which together make up that spirit of vigilant and serious liberty which belongs to the best civilisation and under which you live. This is the Christian faith of your community, showing in all your public actions. It has not come by accident. It has entered into you through the long belief of your fathers which you yourselves still keep in spite of all your scepticisms and disputes, the belief in a humanity, created by God, redeemed by Jesus Christ, inspired and pointed on to indefinite futures by a Holy Spirit.
If we doubt this, if we doubt whether a city can have and show a Christian faith, we have only to ask ourselves what would be the consequence if a heathen belief were prevalent everywhere among us. We have some men who disbelieve intensely and bitterly in every Christian doctrine. They disbelieve in God, in immortality, in anything like spiritual influence. They believe in no redemption of humanity opening the prospects of eternal life. To them man is an animal, God is ;i fiction, immortality is a dream. The spirit of these men we know: it is hopeless, cynical, despairing. If they arc naturally sensual, they plunge into debauchery; if they arc naturally refined and fastidious, they stand aside and sneer at or superciliously pity the eager work and exuberant feeling of other men. Such men we know. Now fancy such men’s faith made common; fancy their disbelief spread like a pestilence through all the blood of your city. What would be the result? Would it be merely that souls would be blighted and cursed? Would not the city grow weak? Would not public confidence be smitten to the ground and enterprise be paralysed? Would any generous work be done? Could either popular government or an extended system of business credit still survive, since both are based on that trust of man in man which is at the bottom a Christian sentiment? Would you not have killed enterprise when you had taken hopefulness away, and given the deathblow to public purity when you had destroyed responsibility?
No, the city has its Christian faith. It believes in and is influenced by its belief in the great Christian truths. Its belief is far from perfect: it is all stained and broken with scepticism. That disbelief to which many of our educated men have brought themselves creeps down in ignorant and half-unconscious ways, and saps the strength out of the belief of the uneducated masses. But still the Christian faith is the true faith of our cities. It is vastly more strong than many of you who spend your life in a little circle of people with the affectation of doubts upon them are ready
144 THE CHRIST/AX CITY. [vn.
to believe. Every now and then comes a revival. Such scenes as we have witnessed in England and America are surely the most explicable, the most intelligible sights that it is possible to imagine. “What does it mean?” we say; “when all seemed quiet, and men seemed settling placidly down into unbelief and indifference, all of a sudden this great outbreak? People crowding by tens of thousands to hear some homely preacher, the city shaken with the storm of hymns, thousands confessing their sins and crying out for pardon?”’ Is it not clear enough what it means? Here many of the men to whom the people most looked up have been sending down to the uplooking people the barren gospel of their scepticism. They have taught them that there is no God whom the)- can know; they have bidden them not dream of immortality. These teachings have sunk into the people’s heart; they have gone down there heavy and cold. But by and by they have pressed too terribly upon the spiritual consciousness; the sense of God, the certainty of immortality, has risen in rebellion; the great reaction comes; the wronged affections reassert themselves.
“A warmth within the breast would melt
The freezing reason’s colder part,
And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answer’d ’ 1 have felt.”
One must rejoice in such a healthy outburst. To complain of its extravagances or faults of taste is as if you complained of the tempest which cleared your city of the cholera because it shook your windows and stripped the leaves off your trees.
It is then possible for a city to have a Christian faith. The methods by which it may be perpetuated and kept pure are open to endless discussion,. No doubt the city in which a Christian faith is liveliest stands the most in danger of ecclesiasticism on the one hand, and of dogmatic quarrelsomeness on the other; but about this one fact we are most clear, that a city may believe, and as a city may be blessed by its belief. It seems to open an appeal to any generous and public -spirited young man, to which he surely ought to listen. Not only for your own soul and its interests you ought to seek the truth, and not be satisfied till you believe something with a clear and certain faith. For the community in which you live, because these streams of public and social life which run so shallow need to be deepened with eternal interests, because your faith in God will help to make God a true inspiration to the city’s life; therefore, in addition to all the motives that belong to you alone, therefore you ought not to be satisfied without believing. Seek for the truth and find it. Not for yourself alone, but for the men about you,
J.
for the city that you love. Remember the simple old parable in the book of Ecclesiastes: “There was a little city, and few men within it; and there came a great king against it, and besieged it, and built great bulwarks against it: now there was found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city. Then said I, Wisdom is better than strength.” And wisdom in the Old Testament means what faith means in the New.
2. The second aspect under which Christianity presents itself is Righteousness. A man who is a Christian holds certain truth, and then he docs certain goodness; there is a new moral character in his activities. We pass on to the question of this righteousness. Is it too something that can belong to this gathering of men which we call a city, or must it be confined wholly to individuals? In this aspect can there be such a thing as a Christian city? The answer is not difficult. Certainly every city has a moral character distinguishable from, however it may be made up of, the individual character of its inhabitants. This is seen in two ways. First, in the official acts which it must do, the acts of justice or injustice, of deceit or candour by which it appears as a person acting in its official unity among its sister cities. But even more its moral character appears in its capacity of influence, in the moral atmosphere which pervades it, and which exercises power on all who come within it. You send a child to live in some village of the South Sea Islands, some heathen brutal community where vice is in the very atmosphere, and he is certainly contaminated. What is it that contaminates him? Not this man’s or that man’s example, but the whole character of the city where he lives. The brutality is everywhere, in all its laws, its customs, its standards, its traditions. It is not merely in this or that cannibal group who hold their frightful revel in its streets; the streets themselves are steeped in it; the very houses reek with viciousness. You send him back to live in old Pompeii, where the abominations which modern times have uncovered and made the subject of cool archaeological study were live things, the true expression of the heathen city’s spirit, the outward and visible signs of her inward and spiritual grace. As he enters in you see his soul wither and grow spotted with corruption. It is a bad city, and its badness taints him. We know what we mean when we say that it is a bad city; it is not the badness of one man or another of which we are thinking; the city is a real true being in our thought — lustful and scornful and godless. Then bring your boy and put him here in Christian London. It is not only this or that Christian whom he meets. It is a 148 THE CHRISTIAN CITY. [vn.
Christian goodness everywhere: in the just dealing of the streets, in the serene peace of the homes, in the accepted responsibilities and obligations of friends and neighbours, in the universal liberty, in the absence of cruelty, in the purity and decency, in the solemn laws and the courteous ceremonies, — everywhere there is the testimony of a city wherein dwelleth righteousness. So true is the character in the city itself that you might clear the streets of London of all their present population and pour into their places the inhabitants of the South Sea Island town or of old dissolute Pompeii, and though of course before long the new population would be too strong for the old city and give it their character, yet for a time the character of even the inanimate city, of the stone and brick, would assert its strength, and the wild savages and classic sensualists would be unconsciously refined or sobered as they went among the houses where years of Christian purity and uprightness had left their influence. What is it that has made the difference? It must be Christianity; it can be nothing else. It is Christ in the city — the Christ who has been here so many years. And when we think how imperfectly Christ has been welcomed and adopted here — how only to the outside of our life lie has penetrated, then there opens before us a glorious vision of what the city might be in which
He should be totally received, where He should be wholly King.
We dwell on the iniquity of city life in modern times. Indeed there is enough of it. But it is not the riotous and boastful wickedness of heathen times. Men have at least seen clearly enough the Christian standard, the Christ, to be ashamed of what they are not willing to renounce, and hide in secret chambers the villainies which used to flaunt upon the public walls. It is one stage in every conversion of the converted city as of the converted man. The next stage is to cast away the wickedness of which one has become ashamed. Of cities in the first stage there are instances everywhere through Christendom. Of the second stage — of the city totally possessed by Christ and so casting all wickedness away, there is as yet no specimen upon the earth, only the glowing picture of the apocalyptic city, the New Jerusalem, of which Christ is the Sun and Light, and into which there can enter nothing that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination nor maketh a lie; a city so full to the very gates of righteousness that it casts out sin as light casts out darkness. That sounds very visionary and far away; but consider that to bring about that city so different from your London you need only vastly more of the same power that has made your London so different from Pompeii. The Christian city is not all a dream. Already we have a city which has enough of Christ in it feebly to turn away from its gates some vices which once came freely in to the old cities. Very far off, but still in the same direction, we can see the city so completely filled with Christ that no sin can come in, nothing that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination nor maketh a lie.
There is, then, such a thing as a city Christian in point of righteousness. That old Jewish conception of a holy city is not all a dream. Purity and truth may belong to a city as well as to a man. Again we come to a lofty ground of appeal. If you are pure and true, you who are privileged to make part of a great city, remember — oh, remember! — that your righteousness is not for yourself alone, nor for the few whom you immediately touch; it is for your city. I am speaking to business men, who, if they will be really Christians, may help to put a more Christian character into business life. I am speaking to women of society, who, if they will be really Christians, may make the social character of the town more Christ-like, more true, serious, lofty, pure and intelligent — less sordid, sensual, and ignorant. I am speaking to young men, on whom it rests to develop or to destroy for their city the character that their fathers gave her. If you fail, you Christian men and women, what chance is there for the city? Not for yourselves alone, not for your happiness alone, here or hereafter, but for the city of which you are proud; for her character, which will become the character of thousands who are gathered into her, who shall be born in her hereafter, is there not a new motive to be earnest and pure Christian men and women in the love of God, in the service of Christ, by the power of the Holy Ghost?
3. There are only a few moments left me in which to dwell upon the third development of Christianity, which is in Charity. Truth, righteousness, and love, we said; faith, hope, and charity, and the greatest of these is charity. When a man becomes a Christian, he believes right, and then he does right; and then he tries to help his fellow-men. That is the old highway of grace, trodden by the multitudes of Christian feet for ages. And now again the question comes, can a city too have Christian charity? Can it do good as the issue and utterance of its Christian character?
The Christian character of charity is very apt to elude us. If a Christian man gives alms to a poor friend, it is laid down to impulse; and if a Christian city provides for its own sick and needy and homeless, it is laid down to economy. In either case the connection of the charitable act with Christian faith is lost. But this is very shallow. You say it is all impulse when you give your money to the poor; but what is the impulse? Is there no Christianity in it? Is it uniform? Is your impulse the same as the savage’s? Has Christianity done nothing to keep down the other impulse to harm, and to strengthen this impulse to help your brethren? And so you say the city’s charity is all economy; her hospitals are merely expedients for saving so much available human life. But, tell me, who taught her this economy? who told the city that a human life was worth the saving? If the hospital has nothing to do with Christianity, but is a mere expedient of organisation, how is it that the most highly organised among un-Christian nations have had but the merest rudiments of hospitals? No! The charity of a city is a distinct testimony to one thing which has been wrought into the convictions of that city. That one thing is — the value of a man; and that conviction has come out of the Christian faith. The city may not know where it has come from, as very few of us trace our deepest convictions to their source; but the)- have none the less sprung out of that gospel which has proclaimed for eighteen hundred years that man is the child of God the Father, that he has been redeemed by God the Son, and that his body is the temple of the Holy will THE CHRISTIAN CITY. 153
Ghost. A poor neglected creature drops in the crowded street; a horse strikes him, and the heavy waggon crushes him as he lies; or in the blazing summer sun he is smitten to the ground insensible. Instantly the city — not this pitying man or that, but the pitying city — stoops and gathers him up tenderly, and carries him to the hospital, which it has built. It lays him on the bed which it has spread for him; it summons the best skill to set the broken bone or soothe the fever; it watches by his sleep, feeds him with dainties, finds out the potent medicines, cares for him tenderly until he goes out strong, or until the weary frame finds rest in death. Is there no Christ there? Is not this a Christian charity? Is there no connection between that strange devotion, so impersonal yet so instinct with all the love of personality and the truth which is in the city’s heart and soul, that that poor man, in virtue of his humanity, is the child of God, the fellow-heir with Christ of heaven. Once there was a city which, when Christ came to it, hated and scorned Him; it seized Him brutally, dragged Him before the judgment-seat, and crying “Crucify Him! crucify Him!” would not be satisfied till it had nailed Him on the cross and seen Him die in agony. To-day here is a city which, if Christ came to it in person, would go out and welcome Him, would call Him Lord and
Master, and hang upon His words and glory in the privilege of giving Him its best. In that first city there was no hospital: the poor sick man dropped and perished; the children’s lives vanished, and no man even counted them; the wretched leper was cast out to die among the tombs. In this new city the hospitals stand thick for every kind of misery: the poor fall sick, and the city’s great hand is under them. Is there no connection between the rejection of Christ and the rejection of His poor; between the acceptance of Christ and the reception of His suffering brethren? Has not the Christian city a right to hear the Saviour’s words as if He spoke to her: “Inasmuch as thou hast done it to the least of these my brethren, thou hast done it unto Me”?
I know the perfunctory and heartless treatment with which occasionally the methods of our public charity disown the spirit to which it owes its birth; but that is rare, and still the fact of the Christian city’s Christian charity remains. Who doubts that if the city were tenfold more Christian than she is, if Christian truth and Christian righteousness were tenfold more the inspiration and law of her life, the hospitals would be multiplied and enriched till it should be an impossibility for any sick man to be left unhelped. Deepen the city’s Christianity and the city’s charity must deepen and vn.] THE CHRISTIAN CITY. 155
widen too. If we could imagine any poor, sick, weak man, still sick and weak, in the midst of the overrunning health of immortality, finding his way into the heavenly city of which we spoke, and sinking lame and exhausted on the pavement of the New Jerusalem, only think how the faith and righteousness of the celestial community must leap into charity, and the poor sufferer be borne to the banks of the river of the water of life, and tended in the softest chambers of the holy city, where God Himself shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and where there shall be no more pain.
Truth, righteousness, and charity — I beg you, fellow-Christians, who are also citizens of London, to think of your goodly city as a being capable of all of these. Never fall into any low way of counting her a mere mass of houses or a mere machine of trade. Honour her and love her, and try to make her more and more worthy of your honour and your love by faithful, upright, charitable lives, which shall contribute to her truth and righteousness and love.
You know why I have spoken thus to-day. To-day your Christianity and charity clasp hands, and the mother knows and claims her child. Not by a mere appeal to feeling, but by asserting the reality and responsibility of a Christian city, I have tried to make you ready for the solemn and beautiful act of Hospital Sunday. The sick and suffering are all around us; their cries are in our ears. They are the children of our Father, the brethren of our brethren. To-day your Christian city owns their claim. We forget our differences, and try to do the duty in which we are all one. If you will do it as you can, there shall be great joy in this city; not only because many a poor sufferer will be relieved, but because you shall have borne witness that Christ is verily among you — that this is indeed a city of the living God.