The Positiveness of the Divine Life

“This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh.” — GALATIANS v. 16.

WE very often forget, when we are wondering whether Christianity is really a religion for all men, capable of meeting all kinds of characters in every kind of age, how far that question went towards its settlement even in the times of the New Testament. We forget what a great variety of people became subject to the influences of the Gospel even then. We open one epistle after another, and always it is a different order and kind, often a wholly different race of men, to whom the new epistle is addressed. These Galatians, for instance, who were they? Years ago a party of Gauls from the Pyrenees had wandered eastward, and after many violent experiences had settled down here among the mountain fastnesses of Asia Minor. There were some Jews living among them, but mainly they were of another race, — a fierce, brave, generous, untamed nest of barbarians. It is strange always to light on a new company of men, and see how like they are to the men we know. Through the doorway of St. Paul’s epistle we enter into the homes of these wild mountaineers; and when we once get over the wildness of their life, how clear their human nature stands before us. No one can read the epistle without feeling sure that St. Paul liked them for the headlong and enthusiastic frankness which made the best part, as it made the worst part, of their character, and with which he had much in common.

What sort of people were they, then? “Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh.” The lusts of the flesh! Here they, are at work in Galatia, just as they are among us: the same temptations, the same vexatious, exacting, persecuting demands of this fleshly body in lhich we all live. And here are men who have so had their deeper nature stirred, their deeper ambition aroused, that they are trying not to fulfil the lusts of the flesh. That struggle to be a self-controlling man, and not a self-indulgent brute, which is the glorious thing in all human history, is going on here in Galatia. What multitudes of strugglers there have been in that struggle, in what multitudes of ways! Leave out that struggle in its various forms from the life of man, and what would the life of man be worth? Here are these Galatians fighting the everlasting human fight in their remote corner of the world, trying to be men and not brutes; and here is Paul, their friend, their teacher, trying to tell them how. “Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh.”

It is hardly possible to conceive any two human lots more different than that of the wild Galatian reading this epistle in his smoky hut, and that of us quiet Bostonians reading it in our quiet homes. But if our battle is the same as theirs, if the same lusts of the flesh are still here, as well as there, to be met and conquered, it is good for us, as well as for them, to try and see what help we can gather out of the words of St. Paul.

The point that strikes us in this passage, and the point which I want to make my subject of this morning, is the positiveness of Paul’s morality. It is so wonderfully bold and strong. There are two ways of dealing with every vice that troubles us, in either ourselves or others. One is to set to work directly to destroy the vice; that is the negative way. The other is to bring in as overwhelm ingly as possible the opposite virtue, and so to crowd and stifle and drown out the vice; that is the positive way. Now there can be no doubt about St. Paul. Here comes his poor Galatian fighting with his lust of the flesh. How shall he kill it? St. Paul says not, “Do as few fleshly things as you can,” setting him out on a course of repression; but, “Do just as many spiritual things as you can,” opening before him the broad gates of a life of positive endeavor. And when we have thoroughly comprehended the difference of those two methods, and seen how distinctly St. Paul chose one instead of the other, we have laid hold on one of the noblest characteristics of his treatment of humanity, one that he had gained most directly from his Lord. I should despair of making any one see the distinction who did not know it in his own experience. Everywhere the negative and the positive methods of treatment stand over against each other, and men choose between them. Here is a man who is be set by doubts, perhaps about the very fundamental truths of Christianity. He may attack all the objections in turn, and at last succeed in proving that Christianity is not false. That is negative. Or he may gather about him the assurance of all that his religion has done and sweep away all his doubts with the complete conviction that Christianity is true. That is positive, and that is better. A man has a grudge against you, inveterate and strong. You may attack his special grievance and try to remove it; or you may try not to show him that you meant him no harm, but by laborious kindness that you mean him every good, and so soften his obstinacy. A church is full of errors and foolish practices. It is possible to attack those follies outright, showing conclusively how foolish they are; or it is possible, and it is surely better, to wake up the true spiritual life in that church, which shall itself shed those follies and cast them out, or at least rob them of their worst harmfulness.

It is strange how far and wide this necessity of choosing between the positive and negative methods of treatment runs. In matters of taste, for instance, there are two distinct ways of trying to perfect the tasteful man. One is by the repression of what is in bad taste; the other is by the earnest fostering of what is good, — the method of repression and the method of stimulus. And every body knows that no great effect of human genius was ever yet produced except in the latter, larger way. A cold and hard and limited correctness, a work “faultily faultless,” weak and petty and timid, is all that the other methods make. For, whether in manners or in art, that which appears at first as coarseness is very often the strength of the whole work. To repress it for its coarseness is to make the whole feeble while we make it fine. To keep its strength and fill its strength with fineness, this is the positive method of the truest taste.

We are witnessing constantly the application of the same principle to the matter of reform, the breaking up of bad habits in an individual or in a community All prohibitory measures are negative. That they have their use no one can doubt. That they have their limits is just as clear. He who thinks that nothing but the moral methods for the prevention of intemperance and crime can do the work is a mere theorist of the closet and knows very little about the actual state of human nature. But, on the other hand, the man who .thinks that any strictest system of prohibition, most strictly kept in force, could permanently keep men from drink, or any other vice, knows little of human nature either. That nature is too active and too live to be kept right by mere negations. You cannot kill any one of its appetites by merely starving it. You must give it its true food, and so only can you draw it off from the poison that it covets. Here comes in the absolute necessity of providing rational and cheap amusements for the people whom our philanthropists are trying to draw off from the tavern and the gambling-house. Pictures, parks, museums, libraries, music, a healthier and happier religion, a brighter, sunnier tone to all our life, — these are the positive powers which must come in with every form of prohibition and restraint before our poorer people can be brought to live a sensible and sober life. Look at the lives that our rich people live. It is not any form of prohibition, legal or social, that keeps them from disgusting and degrading vice. It is the fulness of their lives, the warmth, glow, comfort, and abundance of their homes, the occupation of their minds, the positive and not the negative, the interest and plenty which the poor man never knows. Before you or I dare blame him, or despise him, we must, in imagination, empty our lives like his, and ask what sort of people we should be in the squalor of his garret, and the comfortlessness and hopelessness of a lot like his. We see the same principle, the superiority of the positive to the negative, constantly illustrated in matters of opinion. How is it that people change their opinions, give up what they have steadfastly believed, and come to believe something very different, perhaps its very opposite? I think we all have been surprised, if we have thought about it, by the very small number of cases in which men deliberately abandon positions because those positions have been disproved and seem to them no longer tenable. And even when such cases do occur, the effect is apt to be not good, but bad. The man abandons his disproved idea, but takes no other in its stead; until, in spite of their better judgment, many good men have been brought to feel that, rather than use the power of mere negation and turn the believer in an error into a believer in nothing, they would let their friend go on believing his falsehood, since it was better to believe something, how ever stupidly, than to disbelieve everything, however shrewdly. But what then? How do men change their opinions? Have you not seen? Holding still their old belief, they come somehow into the atmosphere of a clearer and a richer faith. That better faith surrounds them, fills them, presses on them with its own convinc ingness. They learn to love it, long to receive it, try to open their hands and hearts just enough to take it in and hold it along with the old doctrine which they have no idea of giving up. They think that they are holding both. They persuade themselves that they have found a way of reconciling the old and the new, which have been thought unreconcilable. Perhaps they go on thinking so all their lives. But perhaps some day something startles them, and they awake to find that the old is gone, and that the new opinion

has become their opinion by its own positive convincing power. There has been no violence in the process, nor any melancholy gap of in fidelity between. Dear friends, if you have any friend who believes an error, and whom you want to make be lieve the truth, for his sake, for your own sake, for the truth’s sake, I beg you deal with him positively and not negatively. Do not try only to disprove his error. Perhaps that error, because no error is wholly erroneous, is better for him than no faith at all. But make your truth live and convincing. Through every entrance force its life home on his life. Let him hear it in your voice, see it in your face, feel it in your whole life. Make it claim its true kinship with the truth that is lying somewhere in the midst of all his error. Who would go a hundred miles merely to make a Mohammedan disbelieve Mohammed? Who would not go half round the world to make him believe Christ and know the richness of the Saviour?

It seems to me that there is something so sublimely positive in Nature. She never kills for the mere sake of killing; but every death is but one step in the vast weaving of the web of life. She has no process of destruction which, as you turn it to the other side and look at it in what you know to be its truer light, you do not see to be a process of construction. She gets rid of her wastes by ever new plans of nutrition. This is what gives her such a courageous, hopeful, and enthusiastic look, and makes men love her as a mother and not fear her as a tyrant. They see by small signs, and dimly feel, this positiveness of her workings which it is the glory of natural science to reveal more and more.

And now, if we have illustrated enough, and understand our principle, let us come to St. Paul and his Gcwpel. In Him, and in all the New Testament, there is nothing more beautiful than the clear, open, broad way in which the positive culture of human character is adopted and employed. If you have ever really entered into sympathy with your New Testament, you know, you certainly have sometimes felt, the thing I mean. We can conceive of a God standing over His moral creatures, and whenever they did anything that was wrong, showed any bad temper or disposition, putting a heavy hand on the malignant manifestation and stifling it; and so at last bringing them to a tight, narrow, timid goodness, — the God of repression. We conceive of such a God, and we know as we read the New Testament that the God of the New Testament is not that. We can conceive of an other God who should lavish and pour upon His children the chances and temptations to be good, in every way should make them see the beauty of goodness, should so make life identical with goodness that every moment spent in wickedness should seem a waste, almost a death, should so open His fatherhood and make it real to them that the spontaneousness of the father’s holiness should be reechoed in the child, — not the God of restraint, but the God whose symbols should be the sun, the light, the friend, the fire, everything that is stimulating, everything that fosters and encourages and helps. We conceive of such a God, and when we read in the New Testament, lo, that is the God whose story is written there, the God whose glory we see in the face of Jesus Christ. The distinction is everywhere. Not by merely trying not to sin, but by entering farther and farther into the new life, in which, when it is completed, sin becomes impossible; not by merely weeding out wickedness, but by a new and supernatural cultivation of holiness, does the saint of the New Testament walk on the ever-ascending pathway of growing Christliness and come at last perfectly to Christ. This is the true difference between law and grace; and the New Testament is the book of grace. Oh, that the richest and livest and most personal word in all the language did not sound so meagre, dead, and formal.

And this character of the New Testament must be at the bottom in conformity with human nature. The Bible and its Christianity are not in contradiction against the nature of the man they try to save. Let us never believe they are. They are at war with all his corruptions, and, in his own interest, though against his stubborn will, they are forever laboring to assert and reestablish his true self. And in this fundamental character of the New Testament, by which it is a book not of prohibitions but of eager inspirations, there comes out a deep harmony between it and the heart of man. For man’s heart is always rebelling against repression as a continuous and regular thing. Man is willing to make self-sacrifices for a certain temporary purpose. The merchant will give up his home, the student shut his books, the mother leave her household for a time, to do some certain work. The world is full of self-sacrifice, of the suppression of desires, the forcing of natural inclinations; but all the while under this crust the fire is burning; all the time under this self-sacrifice, there is a restless, hungry sense that it is not right, that it cannot be final; there is a crying out for self-indulgence. All the time there is a great human sense that not suppression but expression is the true life. Every now and then, in the most guarded and self-sacrificing men, thai restlessness breaks out, and through the strictest moral prohibitions, which have been growing hard and strong for a whole lifetime of obedience, the imprisoned spontaneity bursts forth; and some wild, flagrant act is the man’s assertion that no law or practice of self-sacrifice can kill or has a right to kill the man’s live self. This I see everywhere in man’s history, and this it seems to me as if the Gospel so exactly met. It comes to a young man who is just becoming aware of what a forced and artificial and arbitrary state of things there is in this world where his work is just beginning. He has just found out that he has a heart full of passions and de sires; and he is just growing half indignant and half perplexed as all the moral laws of life, all the decencies of society, all the proverbs and traditions of his fathers gather up about him and give him their good advice. “You will find in yourself,” they say, “this passion. It is there simply to be sacrificed and killed.” “You will find that appetite. It is never to be gratified.” “You will find such and such a desire. Your duty in life is to watch for that desire’s rising, and every time it shows its head to smite it and drive it back.” “You are full of the lusts of the flesh. They are put into you that you may not fulfil them.” He takes this programme for his life and starts out to perform it. It is not very inspiring surely. Its hard negations little suit the eager desire to be doing something strong and positive which belongs to his eager years. It is taking a brave young sol dier who wants to be out in the very front scaling the enemy’s ramparts, and setting him to guard the baggage in the rear. That is the low and spiritless tone of BO much of the negative morality which rules all the way up from the teaching of the nursery to the doctors of

THE POSITI^ENESS OF THE DIVINE LIFE. 363

moral philosophy in their college chairs. It makes all enthusiasm of virtue impossible, and instead of letting the effort to be good become, as it ought to be, the brightest, keenest, and most interesting search that man can undertake, it makes it the dull, heavy thing which we all see it and all feel it, — the dreary, hopeless trying not to be bad which drags so heavily and fails so constantly.

The young man accepts this theory of life, this negative theory of pure repression for a while; but by and by there comes a great explosion and remonstrance. “It cannot be,” he says. “These passions cannot have been given me just to be killed. These strong desires are not in me only to be sacrificed. Why am I living this guarded life of circumspection? Here I am saying No! to all my strongest appetites, and for what? to make this poor, tame, colorless, half-animate conventionality of virtue which is worth nothing after it is made. It is not right. The law of life cannot be endless self-restraint, endless self-disappointment. I must try something freer and more natural. Let me let myself go. Let me give up restraint and try indulgence. Let every passion have its way.” And then what comes? Ah, you all know: that wild unbridled life that seems so free and is such a slavery; that endless cheating of one’s self to think that he is happy in his dissipation when he knows that he is wretched; that reckless flinging away of health and vitality till they are all gone, and the worn-out young man settles down into a middle age of enforced and dreary decency, and expects an old age of imbecility and pain. And yet at the back of that young man’s outbreak there was a certain clutching at what really is a truth. He could not believe that self-mortification was the dreary law of life. He did not believe that the killing of the powers and appetites which He had given them was the education God intended for His children. And now what has the New Testament, what has Christianity, what has Christ to say to that young, hot, and rebellious soul? Any thing? Remember, his is just the soul that is running its career of ruin in our schools, our colleges, our stores, along our grandest and our meanest streets. It seems to me I can see Christ approach that man, that just rebellious boy. I do not hear Him use such words of utter andunsparing rebuke as I have many a time heard lavished on youthful dissipation, and yet his face is sadder over that poor boy’s wandering than father’s or mother’s face ever grew. My brother, I can hear him say, you are not wholly wrong. Nay, at the bottom, you are right. Self-mortification, self-sacrifice, is not the first or final law of life. You are right when you think that these appetites and passions were not put into you merely to be killed, and that the virtue which only comes by their restraint is a poor, colorless, and feeble thing. You are right in thinking that not to restrain yourself and to refrain from doing, but to utter yourself, to act, to do, is the purpose of your being in the world. Only, my brother, this is not the self you are to utter, these are not the acts you are to do. There is a part in you made to think deeply, made to feel nobly, made to be charitable and chivalric, made to worship, to pity, and to love. You are not uttering yourself while you keep that better self in chains and only let these lower passions free. Let me renew those nobler powers, and then believe with all your heart and might that to send out those powers into the intensest exercise is the one worthy purpose of your life.

Then these passions, which you are indulging because you cannot believe that you were meant to give your whole life up to bridling them, will need no forcible bridling, and yet, owning their masters in the higher powers which come out to act, they will be content to serve them. You will not fulfil your passions any longer, but the reason will not be that you have resumed the weary guard over your passions which you tried to keep of old. It will be that you have given yourself up so utterly to the seeking after holiness that these lower passions have lost their hold upon you. You will not so much have crushed the carnal as embraced the spiritual. I shall have made you free. You will be walking in the spirit, and so will not fulfil the lusts of the flesh.

Is not this Christ’s method? Is not this the tone of His encouraging voice? “Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin,” but “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” It is the positive attainment and not the negative surrender. It is the self indulgence of the highest and not the self-surrender of the lowest that is the great end of the Gospel. And yet I know that there comes up to you at once very much in the teachings of Christ and in the whole spirit of Christianity which seems to contradict what I am saying. Has not the religion of Jesus always been called the very religion of self-sacrifice? Is not self-surrender exalted into a virtue and crowned with glory as it never was in any other faith? That certainly is true! But we want to read the Gospels far more wisely than we have read them yet unless we see that in Christ’s teaching self-sacrifice is always temporary and provisional, merely the clearing the way for the positive culture which alone is creative of those great results of spiritual life which the Lord loved. The right hand is to be cut off, the right eye is to be plucked out, some part, some organ of the body is to be put to death, but it is only that the man may “en ter into life.” The life, and not the death, is the object. And just this is the reason why self-sacrifice in Christianity has acquired a glory that it never had before; because it has looked beyond its own negations, and ministered to, and caught some of the splendor of, the positive culture that was to follow it; as John the Baptist ministered to and caught some of the beauty of the coming Christ. Indeed, the negative discipline, the discipline of prohibitions, is the John the Baptist who merely cries, “Make straight in the desert a highway for our God, “and then the positive Christ comes. The negative decreases that the positive may increase. How easily we see the difference. Two young men restrain their passions. You ask one of them, “Why do you deny your self this dissipation?” and his answer is, “Because it is wrong. I must not do it.” And you respect him for his self-control. You ask the other and he says some thing different, though the course of life to which it brings him is just the same. He says, “lam so busy about other things that I love better. I have greater and more beautiful work to do and cannot come down. It is my doing of duty that helps me to resist temptation.” When a man simply, honestly, unaffectedly, without cant or hypocrisy, by lip or life, says something of that sort, then there is something more than respect for him in our hearts, — there is a spontaneous affection and enthusiasm.

The self-sacrifice of the Christian is always an echo of the self-sacrifice of Christ. It is true just in proportion as it copies that perfect pattern. The Christian’s self-surrender is called a being “crucified to the world,” taking its very name from the crucifixion of our Lord. When, then, we turn to Christ’s crucifixion to get there the key to the character of the crucifixion of the Christian, we see, I am sure, what I have just been speaking of. How different, how utterly different that sacrifice of Calvary is from all the most heroic sacrifices that heroic men have made under the pressure of hard necessity. How its positive power shines out through it. It is not sim ply the giving up of something, it is the laying hold of something too. He who suffers is evidently conquering fear by the present power of a confident hope, a triumphant certainty. It is because He is walking in the Spirit that He is able so victoriously not to fulfil the lusts of the flesh. It was because He clung to His Father that he came strong out of Gethsemane.

I think that no one reads the story of the Saviour’s crucifixion without feeling underneath it all a certain undertone of triumph, a latent joyousness which is never lost through all its horror. Here are the fearful circumstances, the brutal soldiers, the cowardly governor, the mocking dress, the nails driven through the quivering hands, the groans, the taunts, the weeping women, the darkness, — everything to make it horrible, — and yet, underneath it all there runs a current of confident and expectant joy. What does it mean? No doubt, in part, it is the accumulated sense of joy which has gathered there from the subsequent experience of the multitudes who, in all ages, have found at that cross salvation. But it is not all this. Even those who stood around and witnessed the crucifixion must have felt it. It surely was in the mind of that centurion. It is the clear conviction that we are witnessing there upon the cross, not merely the murder of a body, but the triumph of a soul; not merely the humbling and wounding and lacerating of a flesh, but the exaltation, the coronation of a spirit. Dear friends, the New Testament talks about our being crucified with Christ. Have you never, in your own suffering or in some suffering you watched, had opened to you strange new glimpses of the complete meaning of those words? Have you never been surprised by detecting beneath your sorrow that undertone of triumph, that latent joyousness which makes the wonder of your Lord’s? “•Put to death in the flesh, but quickened in the Spirit,” have you never found your cross too a lifting-up, the everlasting parable of the thorns that made a crown repeating itself for you.

Indeed, how through the whole life of Jesus the subject that I am preaching to you about to-day, the positiveness of the Divine Life, found its abundant illustration. He was the sinless man. Yet in Him, just as in you or me, were all these lusts of the flesh, all these passions and appetites, that make our sins. Who can be thankful enough for that story of the Temptation, the story of the Saviour in the wilderness with the Devil, and that other story of Gethsemane, both of which tell us so clearly that the same weaknesses that are in us were in their germs, the self same things, in Him? And yet He never sinned. His sinlessness, even if He had done nothing else for our salvation, would stand out still for the most saving fact for man that the world ever saw. There is something very touching in the way in which the world of men, so full of sin and of the consciousness of sin, has clung about that certainty of the one sinless man. Whatever else they believed or disbelieved about Him, men could not let it go, this assurance that there has been once here a man like us who did not sin. And yet a large part of the fascination which has kept men’s eyes fastened upon Him certainly comes not from the mere fact of His sinlessness, but from its quality. It is of just the kind that holds men’s hearts and kindles their enthusiasm. And its quality is positiveness. If Jesus had lived a guarded, cautious life, forever trying merely not to do wrong, His character might have been described in lectures on moral philosophy from a professor’s chair; but it would never have been taken home as it has been taken into the world’s very heart of hearts. It was be cause His sinlessness was holiness that the world seized on it. The reason why He did not serve the Devil was the Godhood of which He was full. Nothing can be more unlike the repressive theories of virtue in their methods and results than the way in which Christ lived His positive life, full of force and salvation.

Think back one moment from the God incarnate to the God revealed, from Jesus to the Father. What shall we say about the dear and awful life of God our Maker and our King? He does no sin. And why? Is it a blasphemy to ask the question? Is it not good for us to ask it, if in trying to answer it we have to realize the supreme and awful positiveness of the life of God? He does no sin because of the completeness of His infinite goodness, because from end to end of His unmeasured nature holiness and love fill completely His every ca pacity and thought.

And now how shall we bring all this to our own lives and fix it there? Shall we not say to one another, Let us pray God for a positive life. Not merely a life that is not bad, but a good life, truly and spiritually and deeply good. You are tempted to steal. Do not stand over the object which you covet, making perpetually resolutions not to touch it; but go, throw yourself into some honest, brave, healthy work, that shall establish for you right and fair relations with your fellow-men, and then the mean life of the thief will lose its enticement for you so entirely that you will wonder how you ever could have tolerated the thought of stealing for an hour. If you are tempted to skepticism, do not spend your time in trying not to disbelieve, do not study too many books of answers to objections. Even if they solve your doubts, they keep your religion in a low tone. But set yourself where the manliest faith is living its bravest life. Set what little faith you have to doing its best work, so it will grow into more. Make more of what you do believe than of what you do not believe. I have heard men say, “I believe nothing!” “Well,” I ask them, “and what is it that you don’t believe?” And then they specify some minor point, some comparative trifle. “But,” I say to them, “do you not believe in God and in his help, and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and the everlasting life?” “Oh, yes,” the answer is, “I believe all those.” And yet the man has been so busy thinking about what he did not believe that all these which he did believe have gone for nothing, and have grown into no earnest faithful life.

So everywhere positives, not negatives. The way to get out of self-love is to love God. Do we not see what Paul was teaching the Galatians when he said,” Walk

THE POSITIVENESS OF THE DIVINE LIFE. i>(

in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh”?

And to help us to this positive life we have this positive salvation, these positive things fairly revealed to us, God’s will, Christ’s love, and the eternal life. It is no hard master that stands over us. It is the King in His beauty. Before Him repentance and faith become but one perfect act. When we really get the scales off our eyes and see Him, the struggle of life will be over. We shall not have to leave our sins to go to Him, as if they were two acts. The going of the soul to Him will be itself the easy casting away of sin, the easy mastery of this world which masters us so now. May God grant it for us all.