Unspotted from the World

“And to keep himself unspotted from the world.” — JAMES i. 27.

MEN and women grow older in this world of ours, and as the years advance they change. Of all the changes that they undergo those of their moral natures are the most painful to watch. The boy changes into the man, and there is something lost which never seems to come back again. It is like the first glow of the morning that passes away — like the bloom on the blossom that never is restored. Your grown up boy is wise in bad things which he used to know nothing about. He has a hard conscience now, instead of the soft and tender one he used to carry. He is scornful about sacred things, instead of devout as he was once. He is no longer gentle, but cruel; no longer earnest, but flippant; no longer enthusiastic, but cynical. He tolerates evils that he used to hate. He makes excuses for passions that he once thought were horrible. He qualifies and limits the absolute standards of truthfulness and purity. He has changed. His life no longer sounds with a perfectly clear ring, or shines with a perfectly white lustre. He is no longer unspotted.

And then when a grown man sees and knows all this either in himself or in another, he is sure also that the change has come somehow from this boy having grown up to manhood in the midst of his fellow-men. We all have a dim kind of belief that if we could have taken that life and isolated it, it would not have grown so bad. We could have kept its freshness and its purity in it if we could have kept it to itself. We grant that there is evil in the heart, but we do not believe that the mere fermentation of that evil in itself could have come to all this. The manhood has had to grow here in this greab universal mass of things, this total of many various influences which we call “the world.” Home, school, business, society, politics, human life in general in all its various activities, — out of this have come the evil forces that have changed and soiled this life. It has not been himself. He has walked through mire, and the filth has gathered on his skirts. He has walked through pestilence, and the poison has crept into his blood. We all think of ourselves, and in our kinder moments think of our brethren, as victims. We have not cast away the jewel, but we have fallen among thieves, and it has been taken from us. Not merely the evil heart within us has shown its wickedness, but the evil that is around us has fastened to us. We have not merely been spotted, but “spotted by the world.”

There is something very sublime, I think, in the Bible conception of “The World” which we are always meet ing. It seems to bear witness to the Bible’s truth when we are able to gather from it such a complete conception of this mass of things which we know in fragments, and of whose unity we are forever catching half-glimpses. The Bible touches us because it seems to know all about this “World,” — this total of created things, this cosmos, this aggregate of disorder with purposes of order manifest all through it, this sea of tempest with its tides of law, this mixture of insignificant trifles with the most appalling solemnities, this storehouse of life and activity and influence which we are crowding on and crowded by every day, out of which come the shaping forces of our life, which we call the world. The Bible knows all about it, and so we listen when the Bible speaks.

Here then we have our fact. Our own experience discovers it. The Bible steps in and Describes it. “Lives spotted by the world.” The stained lives. Where is the man or woman who does not know what it means? There is the most outward sort of stain — the stain upon the reputation. It is what men see as they pass us, and know us by it for one who has struggled and been worsted. What man has come to middle life, and kept so pure a name that men look at it for refreshment and courage as they pass? When we remember what a source of strength the purest reputations in the world have always been, what a stimulus and help, then we get some idea of what the world loses in the fact that almost every reputation becomes so blurred and spotted that it is wholly unfit to be used as a light or a pattern before the man is old enough to give it any positive character or force. Then there are the stains upon our conduct, the impure and untrue acts which cross and cloud the fair surface of all our best activity. And then, far worst of all, there is the stain upon the heart, of which nobody but the man himself knows anything, but which to him gives all their unhappiness to the other stains, the debased motives, the low desires, the wicked passions of the inner life. These are the stains which we accumulate. We set out for the battle in the morning strong and clean. By and by we catch a moment in the lull of the struggle to look down upon ourselves, and how tired and how covered with dust and blood we are. How long back our first purity seems — bow long the day seems sometimes — how long since we began to live. You know what stains are on your lives. Each of us knows, every man and woman, as we are here this morning. They burn to our eyes even if no neighbor sees them. They burn in the still air of the Sabbath even if we do not see them in the week. You would not think for the world that your chil dren should grow up to the same stains that have fastened upon you. You dream for them of a “life unspotted from the world,” and the very anxiety of that dream proves how you know that your own life is spotted and stained.

And that dream for the children is almost hopeless. At any rate the danger is that you will give it up by and by, and get to expecting and excusing the stains that will come upon them as they grow older. The worst thing about all this staining power of the world is the way in which we come to think of it as inevitable. We practically believe that no man can keep himself unspotted. He must accumulate his stains. Hear how much there is of this low, despairing tone on every side of us. You talk about the corruption of political life that seems to have infected the safest characters, and the answer is, “Oh, there is nothing strange about it. No man can go through that trial and not fall. No man can live years in Washington, and be wholly pure.” You talk with a great many business men about some point of doubtful conventional morality, and they look at you in your professional seclusion, with something that is more than half pity. “That is all very well for you,” they say, “but that will not do upon the street. I should like to see you try to apply that standard to the work I have to do to make my bread.” And just so when you talk about earnestness to the mere creature of society. “It is a mere dream,” the answer is, “to think that socii’,1 life can be elevated and made noble. Whoever goes there must expect the spots upon the robe; and so, if he is wise, will go with robes that will show spots as little as possible, — robes as near the world’s color as he is able to procure.” It is not true. Men do go through political life as pure and poor as any most retired mechanic lives and works at his bench. And there are merchants who do carry, through all the temptations of business life, the same high standards, — hands just as clean, and hearts just as tender, as they have when they pray to God or teach their little children. And social life is lighted up with the lustre of the white, unstained robes of many a pure man or woman who walks through its very midst. But the spots fall so thick that it is easy for men to say, “No one can go there and escape them. It is hopeless to try to keep yourself unspotted from the world;” and then (for that comes instantly), “We are not to blame for the world’s spots upon us.”

I said this was the worst, but there is one worse thing still. When a man comes not merely to tolerate, but to boast of the stains that the world has flung upon him; when he wears his spots as if they were jewels; when he flaunts his unscrupulousness and his cynicism and hia disbelief and his hard-heartedness in your face as the signs and badges of his superiority; when to be innocent and unsuspicious and sensitive seems to be ridiculous and weak; when it is reputable to show that WQ are men of the wovld by exhibiting the stains that the world has left upon our reputation, our conduct, and our heart, then we understand how flagrant is the danger; then we see how hard it must be to keep ourselves unspotted from the world. The world’s stains do become matters of pride and choice. We compare ourselves with one another. We decide what stains shall be most honorable. We give conventional ranks and values to the signs of our own disgrace. It is more respectable to have learnt heartlessness from the world than to have learnt dishonesty; more honorable to have become miserly than to have be come licentious. As the Jews used to establish a rank and precedence between the commandments which God had given them, so we decide which of the laws of the world, our master, it is good to keep, and which others it is good to break.

And now, in view of all this, we come to our religion. We hear St. James, as true to-day as when he wrote to those first Christians. In his unsparing words he tells us what Christianity has to say to all this state of things. “Pure Religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” See how intolerant Religion is. She starts with what men have declared to be impossible. She refuses to bring down her standards. She insists that men must come up to her. No man is thoroughly religious, she declares, unless he does this, which it seems so hard to do, unless he goes through this world untainted, as the sunbeam goes through the mist. Religion refuses to be degraded into a mere means for fulfilling the purposes of man’s selfishness. She proclaims absolute standards, and will not lower them. She will not say to any man, weak and compromising with the world, “Well, your case is a hard one, and for you I waive a part of my demands. For you religion shall mean not to do this sin or that sin. These other sins, in consideration of your feebleness and temptations, I give you leave to do.” Before every man, in the very thickest oi the world’s contagions, she stands and says with her unwavering voice, “Come out. Be separate. Keep yourself unspotted from the world.”

There is something sublime in this unsparingness. It almost proves that our religion is divine, when it undertakes for man so divine a task. It could not sustain itself in its great claim to be from God unless it took this high and godlike ground, that whoever named the name of Christ must depart from all iniquity. My dear friends, our religion is not true unless it have this power in it. Unless the statesman taking it to Congress, the merchant taking it into business, the man or woman carrying it with them where they go in all their ordinary occupations and amusements, do indeed find it the power of purity and strength. We must bring our faith to this test. Unless our Christianity does this for us, it is not the true religion that St. James talked of, and that the Lord Jesus came to reveal and to bestow.

Let us be sure of this. We go for our assurance to the first assertion of the real character of Christianity in the life of Jesus. It is terrible to see with how much qualification and misconception the plain first fact of Christianity has been weakened and covered up — the clear first fact that the life of Jesus Christ was meant to be the pattern of the lives of all of those who called themselves His followers. Even our devout reverence of His divinity haa often been allowed to hide the certainty that that life of the Gospels was a real human life, capable of being pattern and inspiration to these human lives of ours. The very sinlessness of Jesus has made Him seem to many not to be man, instead of standing as it was meant to stand, the type of what all manhood had been made at first, and of what all men must come to be. But the very principle of the Incarnation, that without which it loses all its value, surely is this, that Christ was Himself the first Christian; that in Him was first displayed the power of that grace by which all who believed in Him were after wards to be helped and saved. And so the life of Jesus was lived in the closest contact with His fellow-men. The strange temptation in the desert was only the typal scene of all His life. He was always “seeing the kingdoms of the world, and all the glory of them,” so realizing the highest temptations to which our nature is open; always “feeling an hungered,” so entering into the lowest enticements that tell upon our human flesh. If He had soared like an angel over this troubled city of humanity, up above its smoke and dust, and then had stood with white garments on the hills beyond, His purity would have been only a mockery, and His Incarnation would not have been spiritually real; but if He walked through the same muddy streets of sordid care and penetrated the same murky atmosphere of passion that we have to go through, and thence came out pure and unspotted from the world, then He is really God manifest in the flesh. You say His victory was too easy to be a type of ours. But how do you know? Can you read the story of the temptation, and give any reality to it, without feeling that there may have been there a struggle as far beyond any of ours in its intensity as the triumph outwent any of ours in its perfectness. But make it as divinely easy as you will, still that very ease is set before us as the thing we are to attain to, without which we are not to be satisfied. Christ is tolerant of any feebleness and slowness, but not of any abandonment of the desire and design. No prospect short of this must bound our view. As He came forth spotless, so by His power we must come out unstained at last, and “walk with Him in white.”

Filling ourselves with this idea, then, that the spotlessness of the Saviour’s life is the pattern of the spotless life to which we must aspire, — if we begin to study it, I think the first thing that strikes us about it is its positiveness. I feel, at once, as I read the story of Jesus, that he was not continually on the defensive. He was not continually standing guard over his own purity, and defending it from attack. There are two ways of defending a castle: one by shutting yourself up in it, and guarding every loophole; the other by making it an open centre of operations from which all the surrounding country may be subdued. Is not the last the truest safety? Jesus was never guarding himself, but always invading the lives of others with His holiness. There never was such an open life as His, and yet the force with which His character and love flowed out upon the world, kept back, more strongly than any granite wall of prudent caution could have done, the world from pressing in on Him. His life was like an open stream that keeps the sea from flowing up into it by the eager force with which it flows down into the sea. He was so anxious that the world should be saved that therein was His salvation from the world. He labored so to make the world pure that He never even had to try to be pure Himself. Health issued from Him so to the sick who touched His garments that He was in no danger of their infection coming in to Him. This was the positiveness of His sinlessness. He did not spend His life in trying not to do wrong. He was too full of the earnest love and longing to do right, — to do His Father’s will.

And so we see,- by contrast, how many of our attempts at purity fail by their negativeness. A man knows that drink is ruining him, soul and body, and he makes up his mind that he will not drink again. How soon the empty hour grows wearisome, and his feet, having no other direction given to them, and tired of mere standing still, have carried him back to the old corner, and he is at the bar with the full glass in his hand again. I do think that we break almost all our resolutions not to do wrong, while we keep a large proportion of our resolutions that we will do what is right. Habit, which is the power by which evil rules us, is only strong in a vacant life. It is the empty, swept, and garnished house to which the devils come back to hold still higher revel. And even if we could resist the evil by merely holding out against it, still should we not be like castles protecting themselves, but conquering and enriching no country around their walls? Some people seem to be here in the world just on their guard all the while, al ways so afraid of doing wrong that they never do any thing really right. They do not add to the world’s moral force; as the man, who, by constant watchfulness over his own health, just keeps himself from dying, contributes nothing to the world’s vitality. All merely negative purity has something of the taint of the impurity that it resists. The effort not to be frivolous is frivolous it self. The effort not to be selfish is very apt to be only another form of selfishness.

This seems to me to be really what has often been meant when people have drawn strong contrasts between morality and religion. Morality is apt to be conceived as negative. Religion is, by its very nature, positive. Morality is to religion what the Old Testament is to the New, what the Law is to the Gospel. And so religion is higher than morality, as manly virtue is nobler than child-like innocence. It is a delusion and a weakness for you, O man of forty, to be wishing back again your boyhood, before the world had stained and spotted you. Manhood is better than boyhood, and the true old age than the truest youth. Of course the building was strong and beautiful before the fire on Saturday morning; but to have stood through the fire, and to give up its treasures, unhurt, out of the safe, on Monday morning, after the fire, that was the real beauty and strength. So we are sure at once, and we learn it certainly from Christ, that the true spotlessness from the world must come, not negatively, by the garments being drawn back from every worldly contact, but positively, by the garments being so essentially, divinely pure that they fling pollution off, as sunshine, hurrying on its mission to the world, flings back the darkness that tries to stop its way.

And what then? Is any such purity as Christ’s, so positive, so strong, possible for us? As I said a few moments ago, if our religion cannot help us to it, then ’ our religion fails of its task. Now let me try to show you what the faith of Christ can do for us, if we will lot it, to make us so strong that the contaminations oi the world cannot affect us. I am sure that there are some of us who have come here, conscious of stains and wounds from the hard conflicts of the week, who do indeed desire to know how they can be stronger and purer.

In the first place, Christianity is a religion of the supernatural, and, to any one who is thoroughly in its power, it must bring the presence of a live supernaturalism, and make that the atmosphere of his life. You cannot bring Christ’s religion down, and make it a thing of this world. That first truth of the Incarnation is the controlling truth of the Christian faith. Behind, before all knowledge of why Christ came into this world, what He came to do, there must always be the fact that He did come, that the wall between the two worlds was broken, the gulf between God and man was bridged, and that to the soul of every mortal who saw Christ the spiritual world, with all its higher standards and impulses, became visible and powerful. Other religions you may bring down to mere codes of worldly wisdom. Christianity is supernatural, or it is nothing. The Incarnation is its essential heart, by which it lives and moves and has its being. And what then? What the poor creature needs who is standing right in the midst of the world’s defilements, catching them on every side, is it not just this: the clear, sure certainty of another world, of a spiritual world with spiritual purity for its law? It is very much as if you went out of the pure, sweet, sensitive home-life in which you have been bred, into the lowest, grossest, filthiest pollution of the city. Suppose you had to live there a week, a month. What would seep you pure from its defilement? Would it not be the constant sense, the ever-present vision of that higher realm of life that you had come from, making your pres ent home seem dreadful to you? Would not the very knowledge that such a higher realm of life existed be your strength and protection? Nay, to alter the illustration a little, would not your presence, if you were really radiant with the purity of the better life you came from, exalt and help some poor creature there with the knowledge of the existence and the possibility of better things? And that is just the power of the Incarnation. It opened the spiritual, the supernatural, the eternal. It was as if the clouds were broken above this human val ley that we live in, and men saw the Alps above them, and took courage. For, remember, it was a true Incarnation. It was a real bringing of God in the flesh. It was a real assertion of the possible union of humanity and divinity; and by all its tender and familiar incidents, by the babyhood and home life, the hungerings and thirstings of the incarnate Christ, it brought the divinity that it intended to reveal close into the hearts and houses of mankind. It made the supernatural possible as a motive in the smallest acts of men. I do not be lieve that there could be a God in heaven and men not know it by some movement of their hearts, and fear Him in their more solemn actions, in their governing of the nations, and their thinking about life and death; but what the Incarnation did was to bring God so near that no slightest action could hide away from Him; that every least activity of life should feel His presence, and men should not only lead their armies and make their laws, but rise up and go to sleep, walk in the street, play with their children, work in their shops, talk with their neighbors, all in the fear and love of the Lord.

Make, then, this Incarnation the one pervading powei of a man’s life. Let his first feeling about this world al ways be, “God has been here, and so God is here still,” and have you not made him strong to walk unpolluted and unscorched through the furnace of the world’s most fiery corruptions? It is the low system, the constitution that is broken down and depressed in tone, that takes the contagion. The strong, really well man, walks by the house where disease is rioting, and his healthy vitality flings the distemper back. And a deep, living sense of God is the true vitality of a human soul which quenches the poisonous fires of corruption, as powerless to be hurt by it as the cold, calm sea is to be set on fire by the coals that you may cast burning into its bosom. Think of the day after Jesus had called John and Peter and Nathanael to be his servants. They had begun to hear his words of eternal life. They had become dimly conscious of so much above and beyond. Do you think it was as hard for them to pass unspotted by the places of temptation in Chorazin and Capernaum? They had tasted the powers of the world to come. And the true way, the only true way, to make any man who is a slave to this world, catching its corruption, free and pure, is to make him see an other world, the supernatural world, the world of spirit ual life above him and below him and stretching out before him into eternity, made visible by Christ’s Incarnation.

2. But this is not enough. No mere sense of the supernatural ever saved a soul. Christ must come nearer to the soul than this before it can really by Him “escape the corruption that is in the world.” Then there cornea in all the personal relation between the soul and its Saviour. Now we must mount to think what was the purpose of the Incarnation. We must get sight of that divine pity which saw us in our sins and came to rescue us. We must understand how clear-sighted the Creator is to see and feel the need of every one among his creatures. We must grasp the bewildering thought of a personal love for our single souls. And then all must be emphasized and condensed into the world’s tragedy. We must find the meaning, so unintelligible to multitudes, so precious to every soul that really has laid hold of it, in those strange words, “The Lord Jesus Christ died for me.” We must see the Jesus of the cross on the cross. And what then? Do you not see? Full of profoundest gratitude the soul looks round to see what it can give to the Saviour in token of its feeling of his love. And it can find nothing. It has nothing to give. And hopeless of finding anything, it simply gives itself. It is its own no longer. It is given away to Christ. It lives His life and not its own. Can you imagine that becoming real to a man and not changing his relation to the temptations that beset him. He feels now with Christ’s feeling, and corruption drops away from him as it drops away from Christ. Shame, love, hope, every good passion wakes in the soul. It walks unharmed, because it walks in this new sense of consecration. That seems to me to be the perfect ransom of a soul. When I am so thankful to Christ for all He suffered in my behalf that I give up my life to Him to show Him how I love Him, and by my dedication of myself to Him am saved from the world’s low slaveries and stains, — then, it seems to me, my heaven is begun, its security and peace I have already entered. I am already safe within its sheltering walls, and all my happy restful life takes up already its eternal psalm. Alread) I have “washed my robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”

These are the profound ways in which men’s souls are kept unspotted from the world by Christ. Do you not see how far they go beyond the feeble, fitful resolutions to resist and to reform with which we are always cheating our eager souls? But there is one more principle which seems to me so important and so true that I must take your time to tell you of it. When I ask somewhat more minutely into the method which Christ uses to keep his servants free from the world’s corruption, I seem to come to something like this, which seems, like so much besides in the Gospel, at first surprising, and then sublimely natural and reasonable, that it is by a Christ-like dedication to the world that Christ really saves us from the world. Do you see what I mean? You go to your Lord, and say, “O Lord, this world is tempting me, and I fear its stains. How shall I escape it? Shall 1 run away from it?” And the answer comes, as unmistakable as if a voice spoke out of the opened sky, “No; go up close to this world, and help it; feel for its wickedness; pity it; sacrifice yourself for it; so shall you be safest from its infection; so shall you be surest not to sacrifice yourself to it.” They say the doctors and the nurses are least likely to catch the epidemic. If you have a- friend who is dishonest or impure, the surest way to save yourself from him is to try to save him. More pure and more secure in purity than the Pharisee, man 01- woman, who draws back the spotless skirts from the reach of the poor fallen creature who clutches at them, is the pitying man or woman who in the nearest brotherhood or sisterhood goes close to the wretched sinner and takes him by the hand to lift him. I am not surprised to hear that the man who despises the sinner and gets as far away from him as possible has become, after all, the sharer of his sin. I am surprised if the tender sympathizer who goes to the poor slave of sin, and says, “My brother, my heart bleeds for you; let me help you,” — I am surprised if he is not armed by his pity against the contagion of the sin he tries to help, and if he does not save both his brother and himself together.

Is not this one of the most beautiful principles in all the realm of truth? I open the book of the dear and holy life again, and there I see its illustration. What was it that saved Jesus from the infection of the world? Was it not the same divinity which made him the Saviour of the world? Was He ever so strongly and purely pure as when he stood there in the temple and looked down upon the wretched woman at His feet, and said, “Neither do I condemn thee?” Was He ever so perfectly true to His Father as when He sat and sorrowed over apostate Jerusalem? It is the ineffable union of Christ with the sinner that most bears witness to Christ’s sinlessness. and is there not something in your own experience which testifies that the Saviour never seemed so perfectly above you in the assurance of His holiness as when He was the nearest to your side in loving pity for your sin, — never so perfectly sinless as when He was “made sin” for you?

I am sure that as we grow better and better Christians this will become more and more the source and fountain of our strength. We shall come so close up to all the world’s wickedness that it cannot strike us. We shall be saved from it by our pity for it. We shall be far from its contagion the closer that we come to its needs. We shall be as pure as the angels the more completely we give ourselves up to the ministering angels’ work. This is the true positiveness of the Christian’s purity the real safety of the loving and laboring life.

These, then, are the powers for our preservation. I cannot recount them without feeling anew how deep they go. Is it then true that none of us can keep himself unspotted from the world unless his life be full of reverence for God and trust in Christ and tender pity for his fellow-men? What is that but to say, that “Except a man be born again he cannot enter into the kingdom of God?” Oh, what poor makeshifts all our laws and decencies and proprieties appear beside the live power of the new manhood of grace. Oh, how hard and hopeless seems the prudent, watchful, timid man, who is trying to save himself by constant self-denials, beside the new freeman of the Lord Jesus Christ, full of the high ambitions and sure hopes of the heavenly life.

Some of the world’s dangers change from age to age. Our own time has its own forms of danger, and it is free from some that once beset our fathers. But so long as the world is still the world, the great mass of its corrupt influence is still the same. Lust, falsehood, cruelty, in justice, selfishness, these are about us as they were about Noah and Abraham and Moses. But it is possible to be so given up to Christ and to fellow-man that they shall not hurt us. It is possible for us to walk through the £rc and not be burned; but it depends always and wholly upon whether He walks there with us. Let us not trust ourselves, for we are weakness. Let us trust Him, and work for all who need us, for so shall we go pure through all impurity, and come at last home, where the children shall be safe forever in the Father’s house, the sheep gathered forever into the Shepherd’s fold.