"Why Could Not We Cast Him Out?"

“Then came the disciples to Jesus apart, and said, Why could not we cast him out?” — Matthew xvii. 9.

Man’s perpetual surprise at his own weakness is one of the most significant and pathetic sights in human history. Sometimes it seems as if the human race, always struggling with evils which it never overcomes, taking up in each new generation the unfinished fights with want and woe and sin and folly, often appearing to lose the ground which the old generations won, and slipping back to the bottom of the hill to begin the toilsome climb again — sometimes it seems as if man must accept failure as his fate, and frankly say, “I cannot do this which I have dreamed of doing. I was made too weak,” and so abandon the attempt. But no! That time never comes with the race, and hardly ever with the individual. Sometimes

1 Preached in Wells Cathedral, Sunday morning, 17th July i So” WHY COCLD XOT IVE CAST HIM OUTV ix.

the wondering question loses its energy and dwindles into a weak querulousness. But still it continues to be asked; still man, though prostrate on the ground, keeps sight of his ambitions; still, though he lets himself grow weak and little, he wonders why he is not strong and great; still, though he treasures in his heart the bad spirits of idleness and sensuality and selfishness and cruelty, something about him always bears witness that he knows they are intruders there; still he about asking, “Why can I not cast them out?” never ceasing to be surprised at his own weakness and to seek for its explanation. It is the most significant and pathetic fact in all our history; it shows how native and how persistent in man is his conviction of his essential greatness. The boy starts on his first conscious moral struggle as if it were a bit of play, the wrestling with an adversary who was just strong enough to give him the glow of exercise, but whom he was certain to cast down to the ground at last. By and by he looks up panting and puzzled, amazed to find that the struggle has apparently settled down into the law and habit of his life, and cries with half-exhausted breath, “Why cannot I cast him out?” Three score and ten years later the old man, with unabated hope but with unfinished struggle, steps down into the river through which he must cro to reach the peace of God, and his last murmur is a repetition of the same old surprise, as he makes one last effort to throw his sin away — “Why cannot I cast him out?” And all the way between, the struggle has been going on, and man, always weak, has never ceased to be surprised at his own weakness. It is the most significant and most pathetic sight in his history.

The words belong, as you remember, to the story of what immediately followed Christ’s transfiguration. The Lord comes down from the mountain on which he has been glorified and finds a poor lunatic boy in convulsions at the mountain’s foot. His disciples are trying to cure the unhappy child. How we can see their helplessness! Their association with Jesus had taught them to believe that such affliction could be cured, but when they tried they could not do it. Still the poor boy raved on. At last, when they are ready to give up in despair, their Master comes in sight. The father of the child turns eagerly to Him; he tells Him how the disciples had failed; and then Jesus “rebuked the devil; and he departed out of him: and the child was cured from that very hour.” Then it was that “the disciples came to Jesus apart, and said, Why could not we cast him out?” They could not accept their own failure. They must have an explanation of their 182 “WHY COULD NOT WE CAST HIM OUT?” [ix.

weakness. And Jesus tells them that the reason of their failure is their unbelief. He says, “If you had had faith you could have done it. You were weak because you did not fill yourselves with the power which stood behind you. If you had faith you could remove mountains, and nothing could be impossible unto you.”

In all this story I think there is a graphic parable of that truth concerning human life which I have tried to state. Man is surprised at his own weakness. He tries his strength and fails. How the whole history of humankind is like that scene which took place at the foot of Tabor while Jesus was being transfigured on the top. You remember how, in Raphael’s great painting of Christ’s Transfiguration, the whole story is depicted. Up above Christ is hovering in glory, lifted from earth and clothed in light and accompanied on each side by His saints. Down below, in the same picture, the father holds his frantic child, and the helpless disciples arc gazing in despair at the struggles which their charms have wholly failed to touch. It is the peace of divine strength above; it is the tumult and dismay of human fecbU below. But what keeps the great picture from being a mere painted mockery- is that the puzzled disciples in the foreground are pointing the distressed parents of the child up to the mountain where the form of Christ is seen. They have begun to get hold of the idea that what they could not do He could do. So they are on the way to the faith which He described to them when they came to Him with their perplexity.

Let the picture help to interpret them to us, and is not the meaning of Christ’s words to His disciples this? He claims the disciples for Himself. He tells them that the reason of their failure is that they have been trying to do by themselves what they can only do when He is behind them, when their natures are so open that His strength can freely flow out through them. That, I think, is what He means by faith. Indeed, I think that there is hardly any word of Christ’s in which the true spiritual nature of faith shines out so clearly. The man who is so open Christvvard that Christ is able to pour His strength out through him upon the tasks of life has faith in Christ. The man who is so closed Christward that nothing but his own strength gets utterance upon the tasks of life has not faith, and is weak because of his unbelief. That is really Christ’s description of the interesting and pathetic sight of which I have spoken — of the undying wonder of man at his own weakness. This is the subject of which I wish to speak to you to-day and to make it plain to you if I can.

There are, then, two different ideas about the way in which the problems of the world are to be solved and the salvation of the world, whatever it is, is to be brought about. Pure irreligion looks to man to do it. Let man go on thinking, inventing, planning, governing, and the result must come. Evil will be legislated or engineered out of the world, and all the better possibilities of man attained. Upon the other hand, a certain kind of religion looks to God to do it. Let man lie still, purely submissive, without a movement or a will, and God in His good time will bring the happy end. The first of these two ideas has no faith, and it fails. By and by the self-sufficient man is seen looking round perplexed upon a world in which all the old evils keep their places in spite of all his legislations and contrivances, turning up always in new forms when he thinks that they have been destroyed; and his voice is heard full of wonder why it is that he has failed. Then comes the failure also of the other idea. Man standing aloof, and expecting to sec God redeem the world, sees no such thing. No flash out of the open sky blasts wickedness away; no tempest comes to do the work of purification which man has failed to do. There too there is a lack of faith. Man learns that simply to trust God with expectation that lie will do everything while we do nothing is not faith. Then, in the ix.] “WHY COULD NOT WE CAST HIM OUT?” 1S5

failure of these two ideas about the world’s salvation, comes another which is distinctly different from either. Not man alone, and not God alone, is going to purify this world. But man and God, made one by perfect sympathy, by the entire openness of life between them, by perfect love and free gift of himself upon the part of God, by perfect obedience and receptivity upon the part of man, they are the two together — nay, they two together are not two, they are the one which is to make the old world into the new world by the driving out of sin. The principle which makes God and man to be one power is faith. When man has faith in God his nature so opens itself to be filled with God that God and he make a new unity, different at once from pure heavenly divinity and from pure earthly humanity, the new unit of man inspired by God; and by that new unit, that new being, it is that the evil is to be conquered and the world is to be saved.

Can we understand that? Let us take two simple illustrations which may make it plain. Look at the artist’s chisel. Most certainly it carves the statue. The artist cannot carve without his chisel. And yet imagine the chisel, conscious that it was made to carve and that that is its function, trying to carve alone. It lays itself against the hard marble, but it has neither strength nor skill; it has no force to drive itself in, and if it had it does not know which way it ought to go. Then we can imagine the chisel full of disappointment. “Why cannot I carve?” it cries. And then the artist comes and seizes it. The chisel lays itself into his hand, and is obedient to him. That obedience is faith. It opens the channels between the sculptor’s brain and the hard steel. Thought, feeling, imagination, skill flow down from the deep chambers of the artist’s soul to the chisel’s edge. The sculptor and the chisel are not two, but one. It is the unit which the)- make that carves the statue.

Look at the army and its great commander. The army tries to fight the battle, and is routed. Then its scattered regiments gather themselves together, and put themselves into the hands of the great general and obey him perfectly, and fight the battle once more and succeed. “Why could not I succeed?” the army cries, and the general answers, “Because of your unbelief. Because you had no faith. You separated yourself from me. You are but half a power, not a whole power. The power which has won the battle now is not you and is not I; it is made up of you and me together, and the power which made us a unit was your obedient faith.”

In both these illustrations we can see, 1 think, how it is that the condition comes of which I spoke at first, the condition of man ever surprised at his own failures and haunted by visions of success. Must not that be just the condition of the chisel out of the sculptor’s hand, if we let our imagination clothe it with a dim tool-like consciousness? It feels what it was made for; its sharp edge hungers for the marble; it dreams of statues; it is bewildered when it finds it has no power to fulfil its dreams. And so the army dreams of victories, and wonders why it lingers in the camp, or why, if it goes into the fight, it is driven routed from the field. Are they not perfect pictures of the faithless man, of man, that is, out of the hand of God, who yet feels in himself the unaccomplished purpose of his life, who dreams of moral triumphs, and after a thousand moral failures is still surprised for ever that he does not succeed.

This is our principle, then. The unit of power for moral victory — in other words, for goodness — on the earth is not man and is not God. It is God and man, not two but one, not meeting accidentally, not running together in emergencies only to separate again when the emergency is over; it is God and man belonging essentially together, God filling man, man opening his life by faith to be a part of God’s, as the gulf opens itself and iSS “WHY COULD NOT WE CAST HIM OUT?” [ix.

is part of the great ocean. Is that a fancy and a theory? I pity the man whose life has not made him see two things: first, that if such a union of God and man could come to pass; if man could open his feebleness by faith for God to fill with strength; if God could find in man the perfectly obedient fulfiller of His righteousness, the work would all be done; the problem of evil would be solved; sin, wretchedness, war, lust, would vanish from the earth, and man’s imperfectness remain only as the bright road, not yet travelled but full of certain promise of delight, by which man should for ever and for ever come nearer to his God. And second, that man surely has a power of faith, a power of opening his life and being filled by G< d, which he has thus far used just enough to prove that it exists, but whose wonderful capacity he has yet to discover. When a man’s life has given him profoundly these two convictions, then he must look forward and dream of, even if he does not clearly anticipate, a time in which man, with his whole nature wide open to God, shall make with God a unity which shall subdue the world for goodness, when not man’s wish to make the world a more convenient place to live in, but the higher and diviner wish to make the world a mirror of the righteousness of God, shall at last cast out the devils which have rent the

IX.] “WHY COULD NOT WE CAST HIM OUT?” 1S9

world so long. And when a man lets his soul even dream of such a consummation there come to him reassuring glimpses of its possibility in the light of many a faithful life which, just in proportion to its faith, is seen to be filled with the power of God and casts the devils out of the little world in which it lives.

I know that it may seem as if in speaking thus I seemed in some way to dishonour God; but it is not so. “Man does need God,” some one will say; “but is it also true that God needs man?” And yet, in saying that, we must remember that we are only saying what the Bible says continually. God has so built his world that it is through man as the normal and ordinary means that He does much of His work upon fellow-man. He no doubt still keeps in His own hands the power of direct influence. By means of miracle He may step in and do without man that which man is not faithful enough to allow to be done through Him. But still the Bible rings with the call of God to man, bidding him come “to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord against the mighty.” We may dismiss that thought, I think. The man who submissively puts himself in God’s hand to be an instrument of His designs will certainly become so humbly conscious that the power is in God and not in him, that he will igo “WHY COULD XOT WE CAST HIM OCT?” [ix.

never think that God is dishonoured by using such an instrument as he is for His work. It is he that is glorified, and not God who is degraded or accounted weak.

And if we really want to realise the relation, surely it is not hard. We have its picture in the relation which man holds to Nature. In its degree, so far as it is in its power, the relation of man to Nature illustrates perfectly the relation which man holds to God. Just as man, even the feeblest man, works in conformity with the laws of Nature, he is strong. Just as man, even the strongest man, tries to work in disobedience to the laws of Nature, he is weak. The little child brings flame to wood and the wood kindles; the wisest scholar or the strongest giant brings flame and stone together, and the stone will not burn. The ignorant doctor comes to the sick man and tries to cure him. All his unskilful treatment fails; the fever still continues; the hot blood will not cool; the angry pestilence still rages. Then (is it not the story of Mount Tabor over again?) Nature, sublime and calm, comes down out of the mountain and touches the sick man, and says to the disease, “Begone,” and the sick man is well. And then the doctor, if he be as wise and as humble as the Lord’s disciples, goes to Nature apart and asks the old question, “Why could net

I cast it out?” And Nature answers just as Jesus answered, “Because of your unbelief. You had not faith in me. You worked by yourself. You were shut up by ignorance or self-content, so that I could not flow into you. You and I together ought to have cured that man. You could not do it without me. It might be that I could do it without you; but the true force that should have done it should have been you and I together, you filled with me, I operative through you; you and I making one force.” Lift that discourse out of its crude impersonality; let the dream of Nature be turned into the reality of God, and is not all our doctrine there? The power which is to subdue the world and drive the devils out is made of God and man, united perfectly by love and faith, and made one power, speaking strong words before which no monstrous usurper on the earth should dare to stand a moment.

Oh, how the history of the world has lost this truth! Now with a faithless manhood which felt no need and claimed no presence of Divinity, the fight against misery and sin has been carried on. Now, thinking that God would do it all and that man had no place in the great work, an impractical religion has stood by and waited for a miraculous cleansing of the earth which never came. Some day the perfect power — God using an entirely obedient manhood, man perfectly obedient and only asking to be used by God — these two together, not two but one, God in man and man in God, shall come, and then the world’s salvation draweth nigh, — nay, is already here!

As I say this, do I not know whither the hearts of many of you leap at once? Do I not hear you say, “That has come. That has been on the earth already, and is here now in Him who, once living, is alive for evermore. God in man and man in God! Why, that is the Incarnation! that is Jesus Christ!” Indeed it is, my friends. Oh, how it lifts us away above the often petty discussions of the marvellous nature of Christ when we come clearly to the sight of this, that in Him certainly there was the fulfilment of that which, when men try to conceive of what the world needs most, is the complete expression of their fullest dreams — man in God and God in man: the Divine and human perfectly reconciled, perfectly united — not two forces, but one force! That was the Christ who went from haunt to haunt of the devils and bade them flee; and the)’, the devils of hatred, cruelty, lust, selfishness, brutishncss, superstition, — they all fled at His presence. And now to fill the earth with Himself, that is His wish and purpose, that is what He is labouring for through all these slow discouraging centuries in which, beneath the turmoil and distress upon the surface, the watchful ear can never fail to hear below the sounds which tell us that He is still at work. What is the real meaning of His purpose? Is He not trying to make His brethren what He was, to assert in them as it was asserted in Him, that it is an Incarnation, a God in man that is to save the world? We talk about Christ’s second coming. Whatever else it may include, must it not certainly include that — the Incarnation realised throughout all the world — man everywhere with his life opened by faith and filled with God, able to take to himself the words of the Incarnate Christ: “I and my Father are one;” “My Father worketh and I work;” “Whatsoever things the Father doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise “? The Incarnation of God in Jesus repeated and fulfilled in the occupation of a faithful and obedient humanity by God, that is the promised salvation of the world.

I want to turn, in what time now remains, to a more personal application of all that I have been saying to the immediate lives of those who hear me. There are many men here, many young men, who know something of what it is to struggle with their sins. It is strange how the aspect of that struggle changes as a man goes on in life. Here is a man who year by year has been growing aware that some sin was getting possession of him.

Whatever it might be — intemperance, untruthfulness, impurity, selfishness, idleness — whenever he has looked up across his character in self-survey, he has seen the tents in which that vice was encamped grown a little more abundant and more bold, just as a farmer on his great western farm might see the huts of the intruders growing thicker on his land. The vice has grown bolder and more familiar. It has not hid itself away in the valleys; it has climbed more and more to the hill-tops of the life, and taken possession of its richest fields. All the time the man has been saying to himself, “Some morning I will rouse myself and drive this intruder out. I know this vice is wicked and disgraceful; it shall not be always there. Some day I will gather up my manly strength and sweep the whole base thing away.” Well, at last the day came. Something or other, some more than usually flagrant insolence of the intrusive vice, some yet more audacious attempt to occupy some choicer and more sacred fields, some momentary glimpse of what the end must be, some revelation from the best judgment of his fellow-men — something or other opened the man’s eyes and made him say to himself that now that vice must go. Do you not know the easy confidence with which he made his resolution? Can you not sec him starting out upon his expedition as if he went forth to a summer’s frolic? And then, oh, my friends, do not many of you know perfectly, by your own experience, what came next? Can you not remember the surprise, the disappointment, the dismay with which you found that the vice had become a part of your very life, and would not be ordered away? The tree which you thought you could pluck up and cast over the fence in an instant had its roots around your very heart. It is wonderful what that discovery brings to a man. If he is not much in earnest, if he is only playing at self-reform, it brings an end of all his effort. “Well, let it stay,” he says; “if it really is a part of me, I cannot help it. Perhaps it is not so bad as I thought it was.” But if he is in earnest, then the very persistency of the vice makes it seem all the more dreadful. The discovery of how hard it is to give up drink makes the brutality of drink look all the more horrible. Never did purity appear so precious as when the libertine finds how the poison of impurity has entered into his very soul. Along with his horror there is a strange surprise. The unnaturalness of sin is felt all the more as the intense hold of sin on him grows clear. It seems every moment as if he must be free and yet every moment the struggle grows more hopeless. Surprise and fear blend in the soul’s cry as it perseveres in its almost desperate wrestling with the

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sin which has fastened itself upon its life — “Why cannot I, oh, why cannot I, cast him out?”

And then what comes? Oh, it is noble and pathetic, it is an everlasting testimony of the essential childship of the human heart, that always then man turns to God. Overcome with surprise and terror at its own defeat, the heart takes its task and carries it and lays it upon God. “Thou, O God, must save me, for I cannot save myself.” It is a noble impulse. Its perpetual recurrence is the most significant thing in all the life of man. It is not strange if sometimes — very often — it should be distorted; it is not strange that very often the poor man, baffled and defeated in his own attempt to cast his sins away, turns to God, as if in Him there were some power on which the whole work could be laid, and which, without the man’s co-operation, might do for him what he had so failed to do for himself. But there is no power such as that in God; not even God can cast a man’s sins away except with the cordial co-working of the sinful man himself. I dare not preach to any sinner here that there is nothing for him to do — nothing but to stand still and watch, as if it were another man’s experience that he were watching, while God takes his sin out of him and makes him pure. Sin is too true a part of the soul which has once let sin into it for that. And what then?

ix.] “WHY COULD NOT WE CAST HIM OUT?” i Not by our own struggle, and not by a purely external help of God. What then? Only by the new unit of power which is made of you and God in reconciliation and co-operation. Do you not see? Just as the world is to be saved at last by a humanity perfectly united with God through obedience, of which the Incarnation of Jesus Christ was both the type and the means, so you are to be saved by the confederacy of your nature with God’s nature in the true submission of your will to His. You want to escape from the slavery of drink. You cannot do it by mere resolution, as if you and the power of drink were the only two beings who came at all into the question; you cannot do it by simply calling on God to come and release you, and standing by yourself to see Him do the miracle; but by lifting up yourself until you can put your will into the hands of His will as an instrument, by putting yourself into His revelation of what you really are, by saying, “Lord, save me; here am I to save myself with; oh, use me for my own salvation!” So, my dear friends, so, and so alone, you can be saved.

One man comes and says, “I have been very wicked; now I am going to turn over a new leaf and make myself very good.” Another man comes and says, “I am very wicked, but I have prayed to God, and He will make me good.” Oh, how often we have heard them both; how often both of them have failed. Then comes another man. Already, before he speaks, you can see in his face a mingled determination and humility in which you recognise the real strength. He says, “I have given myself to Christ, that with me He may save me. I have put my will into the power of His love and holiness, that, wielded by them, it may be fit to fight with and to kill these sins of mine.” There is the man, you know, who will succeed. Before him the glorious new life of freedom from sin already opens with sure promise.

True, in our story Christ, when He came and found the disciples helpless before their task, did put forth His hand and healed the sick boy with no help of theirs. But that was an exceptional event, what we call a miracle. The great method of His operation when it was thoroughly established was to work through obedient men. And here, it was not for the disciples themselves but for the poor lunatic that the healing was required. When he had work to do in them their own wills always must co-operate. It was Matthew’s obedience in the hand of Christ’s commandment that saved Matthew. It was Paul’s consecration in the hand of Christ’s grace that did the work of Paul.

So it must be in any world which our imagination can conceive or which Revelation has revealed. No world can there be anywhere where God can purify or save a soul by mere omnipotence; none where the soul must not itself give itself up in labour for its own salvation before it can be saved; none also, we dare to believe, where, as long as sin shall last, all that shall not be possible; none where souls may not turn and, giving themselves to God, give Him the chance to save them.

But not for any future world let that conversion be delayed. Now is the time! Now is the day! Oh, my dear people, if any of you are struggling with your sins, I beg you to learn the truth and see it wholly. You cannot cast them out, but if you will give yourself to Him He can cast them out with you. Hate your sins for His sake; hate them not merely because they make you poor and wretched, but because they do Him dishonour; crave holiness because it is both His will and your own truest nature; let His love fill you with love, and then the conquering of your sins by His help shall be in its course one long enthusiasm and at the end a glorious success. That is your hope, and that hope, if you will, you may seize to-day.