So Did Not I: A Word to the Young

Nehemiah v. 15

So dui not I, because of the fear of God.

EPH ERE arc few nobler characters, even among the many noble ones of the Old Testament, than Nehemiah, the leader of the restored exiles. He was no prophet — he was no priest — he made no pretension to possessing a Divine commission, but he was a devout, resolute, sagacious man, with the fear of God in his soul and Jerusalem graven on his inmost heart! Prompt and practical, and with a strong dash of organizing, govern mental instinct, there was yet a vein of poetry in him. He was bold and cautious, prudent yet daring, full of ready resource, able to hold his tongue and bide his time; and deep down below all this, there was a great fountain of enthusiasm, which was called forth by the thoughts of God and of his land lying in desolation and ruin.

These touching words from his autobiography which I have read to you have immediate reference to a very •mall matter, but yet they let us into the secret of a great “SODWNOTI.” 95

part of his character. His predecessors, the represents tives of a foreign dominion, had been in the habit of making a gain of their office, or at least charging the maintenance of the cost of their court and household to the people already impoverished and ground down by exactions. Against this practice he makes a stand. It was a little thing, but Neherniah brought a great principle to bear upon it; and though, says he, it was a legitimate source of gain and a recognized custom, though all my predecessors had done it, and though there was nothing but a sentiment to stand in the way of my doing it, yet / could not do it because — I feared God

And thus we get from the simple words such great thoughts as these. How the loftiest motive may regulate the smallest duties. How religious principle, as we call it in our abstract way, or “The fear of God,” as Neherniah called it, how that may interpenetrate, will interpenetrate, and run through all life, and find a field for its noblest exercise in the midst of commonplace and secular duties! How, wheresoever that principle is strong and vigorous, a man will have to make up his mind to sturdy non-compliance, to dare to be singular, to be unlike the maxims and examples of the people round about him, and how every good man will have to make up his mind to give up a great many sources of gain and profit and pleasure and advantage for no more tangible reason than because a more sensitive conscience makes that which other men can do without winking, if I may so say, a crime intolerable to him.

It ii possible, young men and women, to” make the

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most of both worlds; *’ but all true religion will keep a man back from a great many things which “the world” thinks “the best “that it has.” So did not I, because of the fear of God/1 I think, then, I may venture to take these words, dismissing altogether now any further reference to their immediate occasion, as the basis of some very simple and matter of course, but, I hope, earnest and sincere appeals and exhortations to my younger friends who have come here to-night to listen to me.

I. First, let me put the main principle that lies here in these words: Nothing will go right unless you dare to be singular. “So did not I.”

Howsoever common the practice, howsoever innocent and recognized the source of gain, the multitude that approved it, and adopted it, was nothing to me; I had to stand on my own feet, and look through my own eyes, and be guided by my own conscience, and make my own choice, because I had to answer for it at the last Every thing will be wrong where a man has not learnt — and the sooner you begin to learn it the better for your lives here and yonder — the great art of saying “No.”

I suppose I need not remind you that in all regions of life, and in many into which I have not the slightest intention of going to-night, that habit, in various forms, lies at the bottom of all that is worthy and noble and great and good, and its opposite leads to all that is ignoble, weak, and erroneous. In the field of opinion, the lazy acquiescence with which men hand their ready-made cutand-dried theories and thoughts from one to another, and never “look the gift-horse in the mouth,” but swallow the thing whole, for no better reason than that contained in the cowardly old proverb that ‘* What everybody says must be true,” is the fruitful source of error, hypocrisy, weakness, and misery. Youth is the time to form opinions — or rather to learn truth. It is meant that you should now, with the honest use of all the power you can command, canvass and decide upon the Babel of varying beliefs around you. That spirit of inquiry which is so often condemned in you, may, indeed, degenerate into self-conceited rejection of things ordinarily believed, or into mere love of singularity, or into contented doubt of all high truth; but if it be absent in youth there will be no real certitude in age. No man has any belief but what he wins for himself as the captive of his own spear and his own bow. If we are building on traditional opinion, we have really no foundation at all. Unless the word received from others has been verified by ourselves, and changed, as it were, into a part of our own being, we may befool ourselves with creeds and professions to which we fancy that we adhere, but we have no belief whatsoever. You must learn to look with your own eyes, and not through the spectacles of any human guides, authorities, or teachers upon the mystic, awful verities of this strange life, and upon the light that falls on them from the far-off empyrean above.

But these are not the thoughts to which I especially wish to direct you. The chief field for the exercise of this resolute non-compliance with common practice is in the region of moral action, in the daily conduct of your lives. There it it most needful that 7011 should take this

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for your motto, “So did not I, because of the fear of God.”

Beginning life as you are, you have already found out, no doubt, how many people there are round about you, who are beacons rather than examples, and how many beckoning hands and enticing voices seek to draw you away. You have no doubt felt — and, perhaps, some of you have gone far enough away to smile at yourselves when you remember — the shock of surprise and pain when first, issuing, it may have been, from the sheltered nest of your father’s house and the companionship of a mother’s purity, you plunged into this rough world, and found yourselves in actual contact with people such as you had only heard of before — with profligates or scoffers, and when you heard with your own ears lightly spoken words of unbelief and wickedness, loose talk and unclean jesting. The shock cannot last long. What comes after it? Has it been compliance or resistance?

Let me remind you how surely he who yields is wrecked and ruined. The absolute necessity for this sturdy resistance is plain from the very make of our own natures. There is a host of inclinations and desires in every man, which will hurry him to destruction unless he has a strong hand on the brake. “God gave them to thee under lock and key” — and it is at our peril that we let them have sway. “I do it because I choose” is the fool’s reason, and it is as fatal as foolish.

The same necessity is enforced if you think of the order of things in which we dwell. We are set in the midst of a world full of things which are both attractive and bad, and which, therefore, alluring though they may be to some part of our nature, are sternly prohibited by wisdom and lovingly forbidden by God. And if you go careering among the flowers and fruits that grow around you in the life that is opening before you, like town children turned loose for a day in the woods, picking whatever is bright and tasting whatever looks as if it would be sweet, you will poison yourselves with night shade and hemlock.

But chiefly the need of saying” No n is enforced by the fact that every one of us is thrown more or less closely into contact with people who, themselves, are living as they should not, and who would fain drag us after them.

Young men! you know how much of that devil’s work is done in pretty nearly every counting-house and warehouse in Manchester, every day of the week! You know how many there are that curl up their lips to a sneer at you if you shyly venture to speak the maxims that your fathers’ teaching and your mothers’ entreaties may have written on your hearts.

You know how many there are that say to you, sometimes by articulate words, and still more frequently by example, “Come with us. Cast in your lot with us. Won’t you go with us to-night to the theatre? Won’t you go with us to-morrow to some other haunt of dissipation? What ’s the use of being straight-laced? Let’s have our fling. Time enough to be better when we get old. No harm in sowing your wild oats now. All those old women’s notions you have brought from home with you, get rid of them.” Must of you will understand what I mean when I say that, if a young man comes into this city, and takes his ptace at desk or counter, or on the benches of Owens College, and there forgets resistance, sturdy non-compliance, and heroic daring to be singular when evil tempts him, he is ruined body and soul

That is not exaggeration, as anybody who watches for a few years has sorrowful reason to know. I have no doubt that you could name instances of young men in your places of business — I could name many whom I have seen, some of them once occupants of these pews. I have seen them from the day that they entered their situations, fresh and buoyant, “innocent of much transgression,” and “simple concerning evil.” And I have watched them grow hard and reserved, gradually withdraw themselves from good and Christian influences, exchange their simplicity for knowledge which was bitter, sometimes become pale and haggard and old before their time — and then they have disappeared. “Where is he gone? n “Oh, he got into a bad set; he has lost his situation, and is gone abroad.” And sometimes the answer is: “Did you not know? he went home ill — and he is dead.” Like some pleasure boat that runs out of harbour with a careless crew, flags flying and laughter sounding, and before she has well cleared the port is smashed to pieces on the black shelf of rocks, half hid by the sunny waters as they break over it in dancing foam. The lesson that is read you by these sad careers cut so short is surely that one — “Resist” “My son, if •inner* entice thee, consent thou not9 “50 DID NOT /.* 101

Do not let yourselves be laughed out of your reverence for this book, and the God that it tells you of 1 Do not let yourselves be coaxed or ridiculed into touching forbidden pleasures! Do not let yourselves be talked, or frightened, or swayed by the mere mass of evil example out of your true path, as the remoter planets may be perturbed in their orbits by that huge body which moves where the light is feeblest on the outer verge of the •ystem! Stand fast on your own ground. If need be, take the grand old words for yours, which may be as nobly illustrated in the privacies of our narrow lives as they were in the Diet of Worms: “Here I stand, I can do naught else. God help me. Amen.” And if all around be unfriendly and it be hard to resist alone, remember — “I am not alone, for the Father is with me.”

And there are others of my congregation this evening less advanced in life to whom I would say the same thing. I see boys and girls here, home from school, perhaps, on whose hearts I would fain leave the same impression. You, children, know how in your little world — little as it seems to us, big as it seems to you — it is often very difficult not to follow companions and schoolfellows when they are doing wrong. I believe that it is harder for you than for us older people to bear being laughed at, and not to do what everybody else is doing. It is harder for you than for us to look past what is round about you. But you know quite well that there are things done and said at school and in the playground that you would not like your father or mother to hear. Your Father in heaven hears them though, and that is worse. Do not you be ashamed to say “No” when you are asked to make one in such things. When any body says to you, “Come, there ’s no harm in it,” you may, generally, be sure that there is harm. You, too, have to fight a good fight, and to begin early to refuse to follow a multitude to do evil. You cannot begin too soon.

For us all, then, in every period of life, the necessity is the same. We must learn to say “No.” We must dare, if need be, to be singular. Like the young Joseph, when you are tempted astray by seducing voices, let your answer be, “How can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?” Like the young Daniel, when forbidden pleasures and questionable delights are urged upon your appetites, be “purposed in “your” heart that “you” will not defile * yourself with them, and choose pulse and water with the relish of a good conscience rather than such dainties. Like the same Daniel, when the crowd are flocking at the sound of the sackbut and psaltery to worship some golden image, keep your knees unbent amidst the madness, learn to stand erect though you alone are upright in the midst of a grovelling multitude, and protest, “We will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.” Like Nehemiah, dare to lose money rather than adopt sources of profit which others may use without a thought, but which your conscience shrinks from; and to all the various enticements of pleasure, and gain, and ease, and popular loose maxims for the conduct, oppose immovable resistance founded on a higher law and a mightier motive — “So did not I, because of the fear of God.”

But still further, remember that not only does easy yielding to these enticements bring all sorts of moral confusion and failure into a man’s life, but that such compliance is in itself weak and unworthy.

The appeal which I have been making to conscience may fall comparatively powerless on some of you. Perhaps one of another sort may have force. Surely, then, I may urge this consideration — what a shame it is that a man possessed of that awful power which, within limits and subject to conditions, God has given him, of shaping and determining his character, should let himself be shaped and determined by the mere pressure of circumstances and accidental associations! What a shame it is, that a man should have no more volition in what he does and in what he refrains from than one of those gelatinous creatures that float about in the ocean, which have to move wherever the current takes them, though it be to cast them upon the rocky shore with an ebbing tide I Surely you are fit for something better than that 1 Surely it was not meant that you and I should passively receive and yield to any outward impulses. Modern theorists seem to think so — “Circumstances make character!” The theory has its vindication, alas! in the actual lives of the great bulk of men; but that that should be so is only another proof of the weakness and depravity of humanity, in which the will is paralyzed, and the conscious choice is so seldom exercised, and a man lets the world do what it likes with him. How many of us are conscious of yielding ourselves up to the influences round boat us, with no better reasons than because they are there! You take on the colour of what you feed on I Is that what God gave you a will for? You yield to the maxims that are common. Is it for that that God put a pair of eyes into your head and a brain into your skull? You take the course of life that is forced upon you. Is that what you have got a conscience for, that you should be like those creatures in the lowest region of organized life, whom the microscopist makes visible by feeding with some coloured material which absorb and tinges their whole filmy unsubstantial organization? And so you get the colour of what you live upon. The world is your mistress and makes what it likes of you, “With her much fair speech she causeth him to yield. He goeth after her straightway, as an ox goeth to the slaughter, or as a fool to the correction of the stocks; till a dart strike through his liver; as a bird hasteth to the snare, and knoweth not that it is for his life.” Surely there is nothing walks the earth more contemptible, as well as more certainly evil, than a man that lets himself be made by whatever force may happen to be strongest near him, and, fastening up his helm and unshipping his oars, is content to be blown about by every vagrant wind, and rolled in the trough of each curling wave.

Let us say, finally, on this part of my subject, that another very solemn consideration may be suggested, en forcing the need of this vigorous non-compliance with the temptations around us, from the remembrance of what a poor excuse for wrong doing they will be found to be at last!

“The inducements were there, and I yielded to them.”

It is the old story. “The woman tempted me, and I did eat.” Yes, and the woman has to bear part of the blame. But how about “/ did eat f” Was there anything in the temptation to compel that? Was there any such mingling up of the two wills, as that because she was wrong you must needs be so too? Was there any confusion of individuality in that fashion? Is there any such a transference of responsibility as that a man can truly say, “Oh, it was not my fault — I was tempted?” Yes, you were tempted. Of course, we are all that “It was not my fault!” Whose was it? Did this profligate fellow-clerk at the next desk make you go into that public house? Did that other one make you stain your purity? Did these associates compel you, young man or woman! to run with them into the paths of evil? Did that classmate, schoolboy or girl! force you to do wrong? “Every one of us shall give account of himself to God,” and as for the companions and tempters, “They shall flee every one of them to his quarter” (as the prophet has it about the evil allies of the evil city, when it came to its ruin) — “and none shall save thee!” Every man shall bear his own burden. Alone we shall stand before God! Let us have the courage to be alone here, and, when necessary, say, “So did not I, because of the fear of God.”

II. And now there is another consideration to which I ask your attention. If such thoughts as those I have been submitting to you, imperfect as they are upon so great a subject, may yet be taken as something like sufficient vindication of the principle, that for all worthy, noble life, sturdy non-compliance and resistance is an

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absolute necessity, then there comes a second consideration:

You cannot resist the evil around you unless you give your* selves to God. “So did not I, because of the fear of God”

I need not dwell upon the explanation of that phrase. I suppose none of us will misunderstand what is meant by it No slavish dread, no mere far-off reverence, but a living regard for Him, which is at once fear and love, which sways, and fills, and purifies the soul. We put it, as I said, into more abstract form, but gain nothing thereby, when we say this resistance must be based upon “religious principle.” We put it into a more distinctly New Testament form (not in the slightest degree varying the essential force and meaning), when we say this resistance must be based upon, and flow from, faith and love directed to Jesus Christ. The fear of God in the Old Testament corresponds precisely to the more fully developed faith and love to Christ, who is the express image of the Divine person and the communicator to us of the Divine strength, upon whom we have to cast ourselves I God in Christ, trusted in, loved, reverenced, obeyed, imitated, — God in Christ alone strengthens a man for this resistance and non-compliance!

I need not spend your time in pointing out to yon what we all know well enough already, how “by strength shall no man prevail.” How, in our own power we can not successfully nor completely resist the evil influences that pour in upon us. We never have been, and so we may safely conclude that we never shall be, able to do so by our own power. You have tried it, how have you got

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on? Each man’s experience in this matter is a transcript of every other’s, as face answereth to face in a glass. And each man’s experience is the same dreary record of partial success in checking some single specific manifestation of evil, and of entire failure in dealing with the deep source from which these come. The first lesson taught by all honest attempts to put in practice that common place of all morality on which I have been insisting, is the need of a firm anchorage without us, if we are not to drift on a lee shore. We must be made fast to some thing that is fast, if we are not to be swept like thistledown before the wind. It is easy to say “resist,” but the command is bitter irony unless we go on to say with the New Testament, “Whom resist steadfast in the faith.” No man, my dear brother, can stand in the slippery places where we have to go, unless he have the grasp of a higher and stronger hand to keep him up. No man will ever for a life-time resist and repel the domination of evil unless he is girded about with the purity of Jesus Christ, as an atmosphere in which all poisonous things fade and die, and through which no temptation can force its way. The only means for this steadfast resistance is a steadfast faith in Jesus as our Saviour. He has assured us that He will give us the victory. “Yea, he shall be holden up, for God is able to make him stand.” In the strength of this promise I have the right to come to the feeblest here and say, “However you may be encompassed by evil, however you may be drawn aside by evil example and harming associations, however difficult it may be for you to keep io8 “SO DID NOT I.n [SERM.

your footing in the midst of the rush and swirl of that great tide of sin, here is a hand that you may grasp, and grasping will be strong.” And that, for three reasons, each of which is mighty, and all of which, taken together, are omnipotent.

In Christ we have an all-sufficient pattern. I have been saying it is at our peril that we imitate men. There is a man whom it is safe and blessed and noble and peace and love and perfectness to imitate — the man, Christ Jesus. There is a man to whom all the instincts which lead us to follow the example of men around us, and which so often lead us astray, may be directed without fear, yea, rather with the happiest results. There is no need why we should seek in any other a pattern when we can read, “Leaving us an example that we should follow His steps.” “So did not I, because of the fear of God.” So did I, because my Master had done it before me. The one command which contains the whole of Christian duty, the whole law of moral perfectness attainable by man, is, “Be ye imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk as Christ hath walked.”

That fear of God, which is all transfused and mingled with the love of Him, gives us, next, all-powerful motive. Love delights to please; fear dreads to disobey; and when the pressure strong and constant of these examples round about us is forcing itself in upon us, we have but to think of a mightier Companion, whose smile is better than all other approbations, whose condemnation is a pain that no other approval can ever efface. “He endured as seeing Him who is invisible.”

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And, finally, the fear of God strengthens us for resistance, because it gives us an omnipotent power within ourselves whereby we resist “The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.” We are not left to the following of an example that is set us from afar. That is the baldest notion, a mere humanitarian notion of the influence of Christ and His work. We are not left to the influence of the motives of love and fear built upon the recognition of His sacrifice, great and blessed as these motives are — that is a less imperfect, but still an imperfect, conception of the Gospel. The whole truth embraces both of these, and adds to them that mighty fact that we have a Divine helper breathing His grace and strength into us We have, therefore, not merely to urge you to imitate the example of Christ, nor only to commend to your faith the love of Christ as manifested on the cross, that it may subdue by its constraining influences the hardness and loftiness of our own evil hearts, but we have to point to Christ who died for us as the source of all our hope and the sacrifice for all our sins, and the all-powerful motive of loving obedience; to Christ who lived among us as the perfect Ideal of manhood; to Christ who is exalted at God’s right hand as shedding forth this wondrous gift, of a sanctifying Spirit, in whose strength we are strong, and by whose help we can resist There fore, because, apart from Christ, we have no wholly trustworthy guide for even the most honest efforts, nor any motive powerful enough to counterwork the baser inducements which the world offers to drag us down by, nor any inward power to lift ourselves by ourselves — a feat as impossible in moral as in bodily gymnastics — therefore, if we seek to resist, we must be “strong in the Lord and in the power of his might” “The love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead: and that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them and rose again.”

Do not you go on this warfare at your own charges, nor while you are but putting on the armour boast yourself as he that putteth it off. If you do, you will certainly be beaten, and led away from the field a prisoner. Forsaking self) trust yourself wholly to Christ, and having yielded your soul to Him as a sinful creature who needs pardon for the past as well as power for the future, let His love sway your heart, and His example be your mark, and His Spirit your strength. As the secret of all negative forbearance from evil take for your watchword, “So did not I, because of the fear of God” As the secret of all positive allegiance to God, let your motto be, “The love of Christ constraineth me.” Then the noble picture of what a youthful soul may be will be fulfilled in you — “Ye are strong, and the word of God abideth in you, and ye have overcome the evil one.”

Wilt thou not from this time say, “My Father I Thou trt the guide of my youth “?