Is It I?

“And as they did eat, Jesus said, Verily I say unto yon, that one of yon shall betray me. And they were exceeding sorrowful, and began every one of them to say unto Him, Lord, is it I?” — MATT. xxvi. 21, 22.

IT was a moment of dismay among the disciples of Jesus. Their Master, sitting with them at the supper, had just declared that one of them should commit an act of the basest treachery and betray Him to His enemies. There could be no deed more contemptible. Every obligation of duty and affection was violated by it. One who stood by, in the rude upper chamber where they ate the supper, might well have watched with curiosity to see how these plain men would take the words of Jesus. Will they break out in indignant remonstrance? Will they fall to accusing one another? Will each draw back from his brother apostle in horror at the thought that possibly that brother apostle is the man who is to do this dreadful thing? Instead of these, there is a different result from either, and one that certainly surprises us. Each man’s anxiety seems to be turned, not towards his brother, but towards himself, and you hear them asking, one after another, “Lord, is it I?” “Lord, is it I?” Peter, Bartholomew, John, James, Thomas, each speaks for himself, and the quick questions come pouring in out of their simple hearts, “Lord, is it I?” “Lord, is it I?”

Certainly there is something that is strange in this. These men were genuine. There could not be any affectation in their question. A real live fear came over them at Jesus’s prophecy. And it was a good sign, no doubt, that the first thought of each of them was about the possibility of his own sin. When a man foresees a great temptation that is coming, it is always better that, instead of turning to his neighbors and saying, as he searches their faces, “I wonder who will do this wicked thing,” he should turn to himself and say, “Is it possible that I am the man who will do it?” When the wind is rising it is good for each ship at sea to look to its own ropes and sails, and not stand gazing to see how ready the other ships are to meet it. We all feel that we would rather hear a man asking about himself anxiously than to see him so sure of himself that the question never occurred to him. We should be surer of his standing firm if we saw that he knew he was in danger of a fall. Now, all this is illustrated in Christ’s disciples. It must have been that their life with Him had deepened the sense of the mystery of their lives. They had seen themselves, in their intercourse with Him, as capable of much more profound and various spiritual ex perience than they had thought possible before. And this possible life, this possible experience, had run in both directions, up and down. They had recognized a before unknown capacity for holiness, and they had seen also a before unknown power of wickedness. Their sluggishness had been broken up, and they had seen that they were capable of divine things. Their self-satisfied pride had been broken up, and they had seen that they were capable of brutal things. Heaven and hell had opened above their heads and under their feet. They had not thought it incredible when Christ said, “I go to prepare a place for you, and I will come again and receive you to myself,” and now they did not think it incredible when He said, “One of you shall betray me.” The life with Christ had melted the ice in which they had been frozen, and they felt it in them either to rise to the sky or to sink into the depths. That was and that always is Christ’s revelation of the possibilities of life. To one who really lives with Him the heights above and the depths below both grow more profound. A new goodness and a new badness become possible. He makes men know that they are the children of God, and that as God’s children they have a chance to be far better or far worse than they could be when they thought them selves only His slaves. All this Christ did for those first disciples and the same change of life, the same deepening of its possibilities, has come to all who have really lived with Him since then.

There are times in the lives of all of us, I think, when that comes to us which came here to Christ’s disciples. Of such times and their position in our lives and their effect upon our lives let us speak this morning. Beneath us as beneath them the worse possibilities of our nature sometimes reveal themselves. There are times when it seems to us not impossible that we should commit very great sins. Just as there are some times when we catch sight of the possibility of holiness which lies above us, and comprehend with rapturous hope how good it is in our power to become; so there are these other times when the mysteriousness of our nature opens its other side, and the crimes and vices, at which we and all men tremble, seem to be not wholly impossible to us. Such times are not our worst times certainly. Often they are times which, by their very sense of danger, are the safest and strongest of our lives. But they are often moments that dismay us. They come in upon our self-complacency and shock it with their ominous presence, these moments when we suspect ourselves and see that inevitably to the power of being very good if we will, is linked the other power of being very bad if we will, too. Let us consider what some of the times are which waken this darker self-consciousness, this sense of our own possibilities of sin.

One of them is the time when we see deep and flagrant sin in some other man. When some great crime is done, when through the community there runs the story of some frightful cruelty, or dreadful fraud, I think that almost all of us are conscious of a strange mixture of two emotions, one of horror and the other of a terrible familiarity. The act is repugnant to all our conscientiousness, but the powers that did the act, and the motives that persuaded the doing of it, are powers which we possess and motives which we have felt. They are human powers and human motives. It is a human act. If we could watch the sinning of another race with a wholly different nature, I think that it would stir no such self-consciousness. If we could stand by and see the wickedness of fiends or fallen angels, it might excite our hatred, our disgust, but it would make no such deep questionings as come when we recognize our own humanity in the sinning man, and find our nature bearing witness that it has in it the same powers by which he has been BO wicked. A being of a higher race might see our sin and sorrow with pity, with pain, with wonder; but the pain would be all free from self-reproach, and the wonder would all exhaust itself outside of him. It would be the innocent bewilderment with which I remember, in a picture by Domenichino at Bologna, an angel stands at the foot of the empty cross, and tries with his finger one of the sharp points in the crown of thorns which the Saviour had worn during His passion. It is all a sad inexplicable wonder to him. It appeals to no experience of wickedness and woe in his pure and angelic nature. But when you or I take the crown of thorns into our hands we know in our own hearts the meanness, the jealousy, the hatred which it represents. The possible Jew, the possible enemy of righteousness and crncifier of the Saviour, stirs to self-consciousness in us. When you read the story of yesterday’s defaulter fleeing to-day, an exile and an outcast, or sitting gloomily behind his prison bars, it is not with an angel’s innocent wonder what a sin like his can mean; it is with the understanding of a man who has felt the same temptation to which this poor wretch has yielded, that you deplore his fate. It is al ways the difference between an angel’s pity and a man’s pity. With simple wonder an angel might walk through our State Prison halls; but a man must walk there full of humbleness and charity; for, as the best man that ever lived finds something of common humanity in us which makes his goodness seem not impossible to us, so the worst of men stirs by the sight of his human sin some sense of what human power of sinfulness we too possess.

2. Another of the occasions which lets us see our own possibility of sin, which opens to us a glimpse of how wicked we might be, is when we do some small sin and recognize the deep power of sinfulness by which we do it. The Bible is full of this idea. Look at Adam with the forbidden apple. Is it only that one sin which terrifies him, and makes him dread the coming of God which had been once the joy of the garden day? Is it not that pressing up behind that sin he sees the long procession of sins which he and his descendants will commit? A boy paints his first stumbling, ill-drawn picture, and, as he gazes at it, he sees, already, the glowing canvas which he is some day to cover. It grows possible to him. A boy makes his first boyish bargain, and the trade-impulse rises in him, and, already, he sees himself a merchant. It is the same thing. A pure, honest boy cheats with his first little timid fraud, and on the other side, tht bad side of him, the door flies open and he sees the possibility that he, too, should be the swindler whose enormous frauds make the whole city tremble. The slightest crumbling of the earth under your feet makes you aware of the precipice. The least impurity makes you ready to cry out, as some image of hideous lust rises before you, “Oh, is it I? Can I come to that?”

3. And yet another occasion when we become aware of our own bad possibility is the expression of any suspicion about us by another person. Perfectly unwarrantable and false we may know the charge to be which is brought against us, but the mere fastening of the sin and our name together, the fact that any man could mention the two in the same breath, must turn our eyes in upon ourselves and set us to asking, “Is it impossible?” *’ I did not do this thing indeed. My conscience is all clear. I did not commit this cruelty. I did not prove is IT i? v 253

BO ungrateful and treacherous as this charge would make me. Perhaps I could not, perhaps I know I could not do this special villainy. But can I blaze up into fiery indignation at men’s daring to suspect me without remembering what badness I am capable of. Can I resent suspicion as an angel might, who, standing in the light of God, dreaded and felt no sin?” I think that for you or me to find our names linked to-morrow in this community with some great crime, of which we knew that we were to tally innocent, must stir the mystery of our inner life, and make us see what capacity of sin is lying there. I think our disavowal of the sin that we were charged with would be not boisterously angry, but quiet and solemn and humble, with a sense of danger and a gratitude for preservation. I think that ought to be the influence. And even the boisterousness with which some men deny a charge against their characters is still a sign in a worse way of how their conscience has been touched. Would you want the clerk in your store to be charged with dishonesty, and not go back to his work, when the charge had been disproved, with a deepened perception of temptation, and a quickened watchfulness and care?

4. Or yet again. By a strange but very natural process, the same result often comes from just the opposite cause. Not merely when men suspect us and charge us with wrong doing, but when men praise us and say that we are good, this same recognition of how bad we have the power to be often arises. Suppose that you are going on in a dull and lifeless way, not conscious of anything about yourself except just the practical powers by which you do your work from day to day. You have forgotten the mystery of your spiritual life. You have grown wholly unaware of the moral extremes whose folded capacities are in you. You never think how wicked you may be, or how good you may be. “Take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.” You have come to that. And then suppose that some fellow-being, under the influence of some delusion, begins to praise you. He takes some little thing which you have done; he conceives for it lofty motives which you never dreamed of: he purifies it of all selfishness; he holds it up and says, “See what a true deep spiritual man it must have been that did this thing.” What is in your heart as you see your poor little deed held up above the world, shining with the light that this friend’s imagination has thrown into it, and with the eyes of all men fastened upon it? Is there no shame? You must be a very poor sort of man if there is not. Is there no breaking up of the dead equilibrium of self-content? Is it not as if the net in which a bird had been held, with its wings helpless and useless, were torn to pieces, and the bird had either to fall to the ground or to fly to the sky. Its danger and its chance were revealed to it together. A man comes up to our life and looking round upon the crowd of our fellow-men, he says, “See, I will strike the life of this brother of ours and you shall hear how true it rings.” He does strike it, and it does seem to them to ring true, and they shout their applause; but we whose life is struck feel running all through us at the stroke the sense of hollowness. Our soul sinks as we hear the praises. They start desire but they reveal weakness. No true man is ever so humble and so afraid of himself as when other men are praising him most loudly.

5. I must name one time more. Is it not true that every temptation which comes to us, however bravely and successfully it may be resisted, opens to us the sight of some of our human capacity of sin. To resist temptation is never, I think, an exhilarating experience. We remember too vividly how near we came to yielding. We come out of battle thankful that we are safe and sound, but the night after the battle is not a light-hearted or jovial time. There are too many vacant places in the tent which only yesterday were full. The shriek of the bullet and the sight of the bursting shell are still too fresh and vivid. We are too much surprised to find that we are safe. Our escape has been too narrow. Job, as his wealth rolls back to him, takes it with thankful hands, but he cannot laugh over it when he remembers how from the heights of his misery he looked over into the possibility of cursing God. Simeon, when the child Christ is brought to him, thanks God that he has lived to see the fulfilment of his hopes; but he may well have remembered how often he had been almost ready to despair and give up his long watch. Nay, even Jesus Him self, what shall we think was the kind of step with which He came down the mountain? He had seen Satan. He had seen with what greedy and confident eyes Satan looked at that humanity of his, as if it were something that belonged to Him. Nay, in His own humanity He had felt a treacherous something, that was ready to respond to Satan and to own his mastery. Strong and victorious He came away. But was there no new solemn insight into this humanity which He had taken? Was not the Incarnation more than ever awful to the Incar. aate One? He, the sinless, had gone up and looked over the edge into the deepest depths, of sin. He needed the ministry of angels, and He surely came down the mountain serious and sad. And so it is with you, when you follow your Lord into that experience. It may be that you come out by His grace pure and thankful, but you come out like Him, serious and sad, for you have looked down as He looked into the possibility of sin. The man who dares to laugh at a temptation which he has felt and resisted is not yet wholly safe out of its power.

I name these times then in which the possibility of our own great wickedness appears to us. No doubt the list might be made longer, but these are enough. When other men sin flagrantly; when we sin in any degree; when men suspect us although we are innocent; when men praise us; when we are tempted and resist, — at all those times the ground opens under our feet, and, though we stand safe and firm, we see whither we might have fallen. What is this but saying that in every serious moment of life the possibility of sin stands up before us? None but the man who has no serious moments, none but he who makes all life a play, escapes the sight. To every other man, nay, may we not say to every man, since no man is literally always a trifler, to every man at some time the clouds roll back, the spell is broken, and he sees what a power of being wicked as of being good belongs to him just as man. And now is it good for him to see this? Will it help him or harm him? Perhaps it is a question that is needless. He cannot help himself. He must see it. When it has once opened on him, he cannot shut his eyes and forget it if he would. He will see it still behind his folded lids. But still we may ask the question, Will it help or harm him? And that will depend upon the way it works in him. It may become in him either paralysis ts IT I? 257

or inspiration. One man sees his danger and stands powerless. Another man sees his danger and every faculty is strung to its intensest strength. It is like the way in which the knowledge of the shortness of life may affect a man. One man it fills with dismay; another man it turns into a hero. What you want in both cases is to realize the conviction as a motive, and not as a mere emotion. I remember reading of how some one once asked a veteran surgeon what was the effect of the constant sight of human pain which filled his life, — how he could bear it. And his answer was wise and philosophical. He said that, as near as he could state it, the sight of pain ceased with the surgeon to act as a source of emotion, but continued to be effective as a motive for action. The misery at seeing it passed away, but the desire to re lieve it grew stronger and stronger. So I think it is with the best sense of our danger of sin. Not as an emotion, not as something that we sit down and weep over, but as a motive, as something that makes us watch and work and pray, does it do its best work for us. The kneea need not tremble, northe heart grow sick. If the feet are set more resolutely toward goodness, and the hand a lay hold more firmly upon help, it is good for us to know how wicked we may be, how great our danger is.

And what is it that makes that difference? How is the consciousness of our danger prevented from becoming a depressing emotion and turned into an inspiring motive? It must be by opening the life upon the other side. It must be by realizing the possibilities of our human life for good as well as for evil, by seeing and never forgetting how good we have a chance to be, as well as how bad we may become. This is the power of hope; and hope is the true master of fear. Hope uses fear. It demands its service by a natural right. It is fear’s essential superior. Under hope fear works well. But in a life that has no hope fear is a surly tyrant. Now our human nature cannot bear being shut up in its present condition. No man’s nature can. Your nature feels its own mysterious capacities too much to believe for a moment that it can be nothing different from what it is. It crowds and presses for an outlet. If it can find an outlet only on the lower side, toward its possibility of sinfulness, it will go forth there and contemplate the evil that lies within its power until it grows into stony hopelessness. But if it finds an opening on the upper side of its present condition, it prefers that, and going out there, aspiring instead of despairing, it is simply driven on toward that which it is already seeking, by the knowledge of what lies behind it if by any chance it should fall back. This is always the relation between hope and fear in healthy life. A merchant hopes to be rich, and the fear of be ing poor, instead of being a vexing anxiety, becomes the humble servant of his expectation, and helps him on toward wealth. The fear of death is terrible to a sick man until the hope of life and strength and activity opens before him; and then in his convalescence the fear of death has ceased to depress him as a feeling, and only remains with him as a motive to caution and watchfulness. Thus fear is always good when it has hope to rule it. And now if you saw a young man overwhelmed with the sight on which our eyes have been fixed to-day; if you saw him so full of the consciousness of the power of sin in his life, the possibility of the badness that ha might do and be, that he was wretched and paralyzed, what would you do for him. Would you try to make him forget what he had seen? Would you try to shut out the mystery of his life from him, and make him live again the life of narrow satisfaction in the present which he lived before he looked down into the deep gulf? You could not do it; but if you could would it be well? Surely not. What you need to do for him is to make him lift up his eyes and see the heights above him. You want to make him like the climber on a ladder, who looks up and not down, who climbs not to escape the gulf be low him, but to reach the top above him, and who feels the gulf below him only as a power that makes the hold of foot and hand on every round of the ladder which they strike more firm. Now it is the glory of the Christian Gospel that in the treatment of man’s spiritual nature it preserves this true relation between hope and fear perfectly. Christ is the very embodiment of what I have just now been saying. Read your New Testament. Aa the man who feels its influence leaves his sin and strives towards holiness, what is the power of his progress? Is it the fear of what he leaves behind? Is it not always primarily the desire for the holiness he seeks? And yet the saved of the Saviour as He is borne onward into His salvation never can lose the sense of the great deep below him, into which he must fall if he lets the Saviour go. But that sense only tightens more closely the grasp of the hands which have first seized the hope that was set before them out of ardent desire. This, I am sure, is always the proportion of the

Gospel. “Flee from the wrath to come” is always an ally and humble servant of the great “Come unto me.” “Come unto me” might stand alone, even if there were no “Flee from the wrath to come.” But what would “Flee from the wrath to come” be without “Come unto me “? One is almost ready to say: Better lose sight of the mysterious ca pacity of life altogether, than to see only one side of it. Hide your eyes. Forget that you are a sinner; never dare look down and see what a sinner you may be, if there is no Saviour from your sin. But if there is, and if you see Him, then feel the depth below you and let it make you cling to Him more closely; realize the power of sinfulness, which has in it the cruelty and falseness and impurity of the worst men that have lived, that you may realize also the power of holiness which has in it the truth and bravery and gentleness of all the saints; let the gulf under your feet measure for you the sky over head. Know what a sinner you might have been only that you may know more deeply and gratefully the sal vation which has saved you.

I suggested just now the analogy between our physical and moral consciousness, between our consciousness of the power to be sick and the consciousness of the power to sin. It is an analogy which illustrates what I have just been saying. There is a nervousness about health which is all morbid. It is full of imaginations. There are people who can never hear a disease described without thinking that they have it. They never hear a sick man talk without feeling all his symptoms repeated in themselves. Y”ou think of such a person and realize his wretchedness. Then you look away from him to a perfectly healthy man who seldom thinks aboui being sick at all. But yet he is something different from what he would be if there were no power of sickness in him. Unconscious for the most part, but now and then coming forth into con-Bciousness, there is always present with him a sense of his humanity with all the liabilities which that involves. He does not do what a man would do who had literally a frame of iron. And that is just the condition of the man with the healthy soul. He does not nervously be lieve, when he hears of any flagrant crime, that he is just upon the brink of that crime himself. He lives in doing righteousness, but all the time he keeps the consciousness that sin, even out to its worst possibilities, sin even to the cruelty of Cain, the lust of David, the treachery of Judas, is open to him. This consciousness surrounds all his duty. His righteousness is not an angel’s righteousness. It is always a man’s righteousness, always pervaded, solemnized, strengthened, ay, sweetened to him by the knowledge that there is a bad corresponding to every good, and that he might do one instead of the other just because he is a man.

I do not care, to go one step into the theological mysteries of compelling grace and final perseverance. I do not care to ask whether it is possible for man, still being man, to come to such a point that this of which I have spoken to-day, this possibility of flagrant and terrible sin, should utterly and absolutely be left behind and pass away. I think that what I have been saying lately shows us that a man, as the power of the hope of holiness takes stronger and stronger hold upon him, does pass more and more out of the fear of sin. And since his hope of holiness always comes to him as the gift of God, and depends on his dependence on God, we can see that as man by ex perience grows sure of God, and morally certain that he never can be separated from Him, he passes to a profound belief that he will not fall into the flagrant sin, which yet, because he is a man, remains possible for him. This moral certainty of his comes from his confidence in God. It is not confidence in himself. Here it seems to me is the true escape from whatever has seemed harsh or hopeless in the truth which I have preached to you to-day. The disciples heard Jesus tell of the coining treason, and each of them thought with horror that he might be the traitor. “Lord, is it I?” and “Is it I?” they cried. They knew that they loved their Lord, but they dared not be sure that they would not desert Him. Sufficient spiritual light had come to them to make them see the mystery of their own hearts. Once, before they had this spiritual light, they would have cast aside such a suspicion as an insult. “Am I not an honorable man?” “Is not such a mean act impossible for me?” Now Christ in showing them their higher chance has shown them their lower chance, their danger too, and each wonders whether it can be he who is to do this dreadful thing. Now open a later page of the apostolic history and hear St. Paul writing to his Romans: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.” See what a change. Here is confidence! Here is a moral certainty! Whoever else may turn traitor, Paul is sure that it will not be he. But it is confidence — not in himself nor in his manliness or honor — only in Christ and in the power of His grace and love. “More than conqueror,” but “more than conqueror through Him who loved us.” Is there not here the beautiful progress of a moral nature as regards the whole matter of confidence? At the first a pure blank self-reliance, the solid and unbroken self-content of a man who thinks himself able to meet and conquer all temptations. Then an insight into the mysterious capacity of sinning, which breaks and scatters the confidence in self, and leaves the poor soul full of fears and doubts. Then an entrance into Christ and His love and power, where the soul, given to Him, finds a new confidence in His strength, and is sure with a surenesa which has no warrant but its trust in Him. Have you ever watched one of the waterfalls that come over the perpendicular side of a steep mountain? Do you remember how it changes from the top to the bottom of its fall. At first where it comes over the brink it is one solid mass of dark-green water, compact and all sure of itself. Then half-way down the perpendicular face over which it descends, see what a change has come. Its soliiness has gone. It is all mist and vapor. You can hardly find it. Only like a thin haze it hangs in front of the dark rock behind it. But once more, as it gets farther down, see how it gathers again. The mist collects, and is once more a stream; a new solidity appears; and at the mountain’s foot the brook,

restored out of its distraction, starts singing on its way down the bright valley, white still with the memory of the confusion into which it has been thrown. So is it with the confidence of man. It begins full of self-trust. It scatters and seems lost as his experience deepens and he learns his own possibility of sin. It is gathered anew and goes out in happiness and helpfulness when he finds Christ and gives his poor bewildered and endangered soul into His love for keeping.

This is the Bible picture of human life. Where shall we look for any other that is as reasonable or as complete? The fearless truster of himself; the distressed doubter of himself; the faithful truster of Christ I They are all here. We lay the Bible picture down beside our human life and it explains everything. In life, too, there is the stout believer in himself, the frightened disbeliever in himself, and the sure believer in God. As a man comes into Christ, that experience deepens itself around him till he has fulfilled it all. First, a stripping away of his own righteousness, and then a clothing with the righteousness which is in Jesus. First, a light thrown upon himself, till it seems as if there were no wickedness he might not do, and then a drawing of his self into Christ’s self till he sees there is no holiness which he may not attain. First, the weakness which comes of self-knowledge, and then the strength which is “strong in the Lord and in the power of His might.” First, the fear which cries, “Is it I?” as it hears the announcement of some dreadful sin; and then the wondering faith which cries, “Is it I?” as the doors are opened and they who are Christ’s are called to enter in to His everlasting life.