The Grace of Charity

“Now abide th charity; The greatest of these is charity.” — i COR. xiii. 13.

version of the Bible, like the men who made it and those also who use it, is not faultless. It cannot be so, for “who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean 1” The web must ever, more or less, partake of the imperfection of the loom. Still, the good and learned men to whom King James committed the work of translation, take it altogether, have done it well j so well, that all succeeding attempts to produce a better have failed. And perhaps the time and labour which some authors have spent in detecting and exposing the small faults of our version, would have been as well employed in correcting the large faults of their own creeds and conduct. Could I form a better wish than that the errors of our heart and life were as insignificant as those that have been detected in our English Bible j and that Christians, in their spirit and life, were as faithful copies of Jesus Christ, as it is of the* divine original!

Beside those mistranslations which make our version somewhat erroneous, but which are hardly in any case of the smallest practical importance, a fewpassages of Scripture are liable to misunderstanding, in consequence of the change of meaning which some English words have undergone in the course of time. We have an example of this in the first chapter of St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. He says, “I would not have you ignorant, brethren, that oftentimes I purposed to come unto you, but was let hitherto.” Now, /<?/, in modern language, means permitted; but there, with its old meaning, it expresses the very opposite, hindered. And of such change, my text also affords a very striking example. Charity is a term now limited almost entirely to mean kindness bestowed on the poor. So by a charitable man, we understand one whose name is a household word in their homes; and who of his substance, be it great or small, gives liberally to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to instruct the ignorant, to house the homeless, and to supply the need of widows and orphans. This chap ter itself proves that that application of the term does not exhaust, or at all come up to the meaning of the word as employed by Paul; for he supposes, as quite a possible case, a man who, though very charitable in the common sense of the term, is yet destitute of charity — declaring, “Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.” Be fore, therefore, setting forth some of those features of charity which led Paul to exalt her over all the other graces, awarding her the palm and crown, let us consider —

I. What we are to understand by charity.

It is an old word for love, that inner fountain of which kindness to the poor is but one of many streams; and where, when neither ruffled by passion nor polluted by sin, God, who is love, sees his own face, the reflection of his features, as we see ours on looking into a draw-well. I need not tell you who have been familiar with love from your earliest days what it is. At our birth she received us into her arms and welcomed us into the world. Love is associated with the first face our opening faculties recognised, with the first name our infant lips ever lisped, and with the pure, deep affection of one who pressed us, new born, to her happy bosom; and nursing us from the fountains of her breast, forgat all the world in the helpless creature cast upon her care. Flowing through the earth like streams amid desert sands, shining in life’s darkest nights like stars in a wintry sky, throwing a bright bow over every cloud of fortune, to love, more than to anything else, this world owes what blessedness it enjoys. Life without it would not be worth the having; and without it, though we had a house, and that house a palace, we could not have a home.

Of this tenderest and strongest passion, what beautiful illustrations lie, shining like diamonds, in Bible ii2 The Grace of Charity.

story! In Rizpah, lone woman, who by seven gibbets guards the bodies of ‘her sons, nor rises by night or day for weeks but to scare away the vulture or front the hungry wolf, love forgets herself — her only care the rotting dead. In Judah, yonder, she pleads for Benjamin, and offers, so he be set at liberty, to wear a brother’s bonds. In that wronged though guilty mother, who, on seeing her babe in the hands of the executioner, raises a piercing shriek, and, casting herself at the king’s feet, cries, O my lord, give her the living child, and in no wise slay it, love consents to part with her dearest object to save its life. Nay: in David, who, forgetting all Absalom’s crimes at the news of his death, bursts into this cry of wildest, deepest grief, O my son Absalom! my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son! love would buy another’s life at the expense of her own. In the graves of the dead she buries all their crimes, and waters with her tears the memory of their virtues. In the garden where Peter sees his Lord betrayed, beset, and ready to be bound, she takes no count of numbers; but, casting prudence to the wind, rushes on the foremost foe, striking for her master. In Paul her hand trembles while she writes the doom of the ungodly, her eyes blot the page with tears, and she is willing to be herself accursed from Christ, so that countrymen and kindred are saved. One example more! You have anticipated it, and your thoughts, outrunning my words, have fixed on that amid whose transcendent glory these all are lost — like stars swallowed up in the blaze of day. Love, perfect, divine, hangs on the Cross of Calvary; and speaks in him who, turning an eye of pity on his bloody murderers, cries, Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. Well may Paul say, Now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

This love embraces not itself, but others — God, and all down from the throne of his majesty, to the lowest creatures of his hand. I have seen a plant with tendrils fitted to seize on any object within its reach, that, lying prostrate on the ground, had its leaves and flowers all soiled with mud, and its arms twined, and twisted, and tangled into each other — like a rope of many strands; and near by was another of the same species, with its arms flung lovingly around a tall and friendly tree, whose stem they held in close embrace, while they lent it, in return for its support, a robe of green leaves spangled all with flowers. Lying basely in its own embraces, the first was an image of selfishness; but in that which clothed and adorned the object to which it fondly clung, and from which no storm could tear its arms, I saw the love which, Queen of the Graces,” suffereth long, and is kind; seeketh not her own; beareth -all thfags, belie veth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.’’

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II. Let us look at some of the features of this grace.

i. It is a power of universal influence. Many powers of nature are not always or everywhere in action. There are lands where rain, and others where snow never falls; rivers of water which no winter freezes, of ice which no summer melts. There is a metal which fire cannot burn; there is life which water cannot drown; and the lightning that flashes along a thousand miles of iron is stopped by a film of glass. Happily for the world, the destructive powers of nature are not always active. Etna and Heckla exhaust their forces, and long ages may pass ere they recover them for a new eruption. It is at rare intervals that earthquakes shake our globe, or the skies flash with lightnings, or hurricanes sweep through ths troubled air, and lashing the sea into mountain bil lows, strew its shore with wrecks. Day leaves our world, and that light which paints its colours on every flower, and touches the clouds with gold, and wakes each morning the song of birds and hum of busy cities, departs with the setting sun. Winter ascends her throne, and waving an icy sceptre over fields and forests, stops all growth; once clothed in green, the trees are leafless; once enamelled with flowers, the meadows are bare. But the powers of winter in their turn cease; nature bursts her icy tomb; rising, she throws off her shroud of snow, while, their chains melted by the breath of spring, the streams, like happy children set loose from the constraint of school, rush off, laughing, dancing, singing on their way to their home and parent in the deep.

But while substances, and places, and seasons limit the action of many material agencies, there is a power — that which England’s greatest philosopher discovered — which neither substance, nor place, nor season limits. Universal in its action, it is everywhere, affecting everything. It determines the movements of the motes in a sunbeam, and of the planets in the firmament j it shapes the tear an your infant’s cheek, and has given its rounded form to the sun; it makes the rain-drops fall to the earth, and prevents the stars from dropping out of the sky. Most powerfully affecting every atom of matter on earth, and every planet and sun in heaven, amid all the agencies which science studies, art employs, and God has established, gravitation alone extends its empire from the centre to the circumference of creation. In a subordinate sense, indeed, we may say of it what is said of God, It reigneth over all.

Now, such place Love holds in the kingdom of grace. In representing it as the ruling principle which should shape and influence all our conduct to God, in our families, to our friends, ay, and also to our foes, for, followers of him who died for his enemies, we are to love* ours — blessing them which curse us, and praying for them which despitefully use us — I do not exaggerate its importance. Love was the dominant power in St Paul, and the principle of his whole obedience; “The love of Christ,” he says, “constraineth us.” And did not our Lord himself assign it such an imperial place? Those ten commandments from which all duties branch, like the boughs of a tree from the parent stem, he brings into the compass of a word, a single, simple word; that word — Love. Thou shalt love thy God, and Thou shalt love thy neighbour, are the whole duty of man. It is this that makes a re ligious, a happy life. With love, a dinner of herbs is better than a stalled ox; obedience is liberty with it; and without it slavery, call it by what name you may. And as it is earthly love, not its walls, however lofty, nor its furniture, however costly, nor its inmates, how ever great or beautiful, that makes a home below; so it is holy love that makes a heaven above, not its crowns, or palms, or harps, or robes; no, with reverence be it spoken, not God, or Christ, or saints, or angels, but love — their love. And as if by some strange power we could leave this nether world, and, winging our way upward, alight on a distant, starry sphere, we should find that we had not left that gravitation behind us, which binds all things and holds this world together; so saints shall find, on rising from the bed of death, and entering heaven, that they have but ascended into a region of purer and more perfect love.

“Faith, Hope, and Love now dwell on earth,

And earth by them is blest;
But Faith and Hope must yield to Love,
Of all the graces best.

“Hope shall to full fruition rise,

And Faith be sight above;
These are the means, but this the end,
For saints for ever love.”

2. Love is a mighty power. Take Paul’s description of it.

First, It “beareth all things.” So I thought, on seeing a woman who presented a blessed and, though clad in rags, a beautiful contrast to those mothers who, committing most revolting murder, lay bloody hands on their new-born babes. To appearance she was one of those homeless creatures who are tossed about our city like the sea wrack that, torn by the rude storm from its native rocks, goes floating about the shore, washed in and washed out with each flowing tide. A threadbare shawl fell in scanty folds from her shoulders, and covered something held on her left arm. As, struck by her forlorn aspect, I was watching her movements, she suddenly stopped and raised the shawl. Then, as when a flood of golden sunlight, bursting through a rift in the clouds, and suddenly falling on some field, or hill side, or lake, or village, lightens up the scene, such change came over her face when she turned its earnest gaze on an infant that lay asleep, nestling in her bosom. You never saw a smile of more ineffable delight than this poor, perhaps guilty creature threw on her helpless charge. It was plain thst she would have died for it — true to nature as the bear, who protects her young by offering her shaggy breast to the

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hunter’s spear; and there, where love was turning wluit others might deem a burden into the one joy and blessing of the outcast’s life, I thought of the words, it “beareth all things.”

Second, It “believeth all things, hopeth all things.” What will not parents bear from their children, and believe and hope of them? Did not Augustine’s mother pray twenty long years for his conversion1? And what is it but the hope that love breeds which still sustains the arms of praying fathers and mothers 1 You may quench the hopes of reason, but not those of love. It hopes against hope, and will soar like an eagle, which, rising with the rising tempest, mounts highest in stormy skies. Such hope sustained the mother, whom I saw intently gazing on the stone walls that immured her boy. Opposite the prison gate, raised on the steps whence she could see the windows of the upper cells, her tall form clad in the attire of humble but honest life, and stooping under the burdens of grief and age, she stood, oblivious of all around, while her body went rocking to and fro with that swaying motion which bespeaks the deepest grief. An hour thereafter, rooted to the spot, there still she stood; her eyes, that swam in tears, and were fixed on an iron-barred window, telling as plainly as if her choking words had told it, that within those gloomy walls lay one that had once been cradled in her happy arms, and to whom, hoping all things, believing all things, her love yet clung, like ivy to a crumbling ruin.

Third, It “endureth all things.” Take this example of that the last of those things which, according to Paul, love has the mind and also the might to do.

A ship, named the Golden Gafe, takes fire some fifteen miles off the shores of America. Then rises a scene of the wildest and most terrible confusion. It is a battle now for life. Between the flames and the sea, it is every man for himself. While the roar of the fire, which rapidly gains on the fatal bark, is mingling with the prayers of some and the imprecations of others, a lady, with one child in her arms and another three years old at her knee, approaches the narrator of the story. I believe, she said, addressing him by name, that you are Mr Holloday? On being told that he was, she cried, Can you save my children? Madam, he replied, I do not know that I shall be able to save myself. Whereupon, pointing with a solemn air to the flames as they raged furiously in the centre of the ship, she exclaimed, Oh! if my children can be saved, I will consent to be burned in that fire! — they were saved, and she perished, an example of the might of love. It “endureth all things.”

How should such cases of natural affection confirm God’s people in their trust that he will not forget or forsake them; and others in their hopes that he will not refuse to forgive, but open wide his loving arms to every penitent, returning sinner! “Thus saith the Lord,” speaking of his Church, “Behold, I will extend peace to her like a river, and the glory of the Gentiles like a flowing stream: then shall ye suck, ye shall be borne upon her sides, and be dandled upon her knees. As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.” What a depth is there in that love which God chooses as an image of his own! and yet the love of a mother’s heart is but a drop from that illimitable ocean into which our sins, though great as mountains, once cast are lost for ever — buried out of sight. I be lieve that his love as far exceeds a mother’s, when it is deepest and strongest, as does the strength of his almighty arm that of the infant which hangs help less on her breast. She may forget — a fact which the blood of murdered infants proclaims, as, unheeded by a justice that wears her sword in vain in this guilty land, it cries aloud to heaven for vengeance: “yet,” he says, “will I not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands.”

Now, as it is by his love, seen in the face and form of a dying Saviour, that God melts the stony heart and subdues sinners to himself, so to this power also, under God, we must trust if we would bend stubborn wills, reclaim the vicious, and save the lost. The voice that grates harshly on the ear, the eye that does not glisten with tears but glares with anger, never made the bad good, or the good better. Men are not to be scolded into the love of God; nor can the terrors of hell frighten any into the love of heaven. Who would revive dead souls, let him learn his lesson in the chamber where the prophet, to restore the Shunamite’s son, rose from his knees, and took the boy into such loving, close embraces, that the heart of the living beat against the heart of the dead. Deal not with ungodly children, or careless and irreligious friends, without taking care to shew that you love the sinners as much at least as you hate their sins. Cultivate true, gentle, Christ-like love. What good may you not do, what stubborn hearts may you not melt, what hatred and hardness may you not subdue by the outgoings and expression of that love which is averse from censure but prone to praise; which pities while it blames; which, unselfish, “seeketh not her own;” which touches wounds with a tender hand; and which, ready to cover a multitude of sins, spake through him who, purest of the pure, and holiest of the holy, said, as he looked with pity on the guilty woman, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more 1

3. Love is the grand principle of the gospel.

A child had strayed from its mother’s side, and, gathering buttercups and daisies, had approached the edge of a precipice. On raising her head, what was the mother’s horror to see her darling tottering on the dreadful brink! If she cries, alarmed or in gleesome play, he takes another backward step, and perishes. With prompt, instinctive wisdom, though with trembling hands, she bares her bosom; and caught, to use St Paul’s words, by guile, the infant, seeking its accustomed pleasure, runs into her arms. She saved her child by addressing its self-love. And so also was one saved who, where a bridge thrown from rock to rock spans a yawning chasm, was wont to lie over watching the waters that, ground into snowy foam, rushed, and whirled, and roared below. A servant found the urchin on his way from school hanging over the dizzy ledge, and so absorbed in the strange pleasure as not to notice the other’s approach. Clutching him, as the hawk her prey, he seized the boy, and raising, held him out for a moment at arm’s length over the brink of death. The dreadful experiment had the desired effect. The fright cured him; and, indeed, when that boy had grown into a man he used to tell that he never passed the place without recollections that made him shudder.

NOAV, dealing with us not as angels, which we are not, not as unfallen, but as sinful, disobedient, headstrong, and foolish children, God does employ means like these. He addresses himself to our self-love — to our taste for pleasure, and our dread of pain. Unwilling that any should perish, like a father or mother in such circumstances, he loves us too well to leave any argument untried; therefore heaven has been revealed, that its palms, and crowns, and thrones, might draw us to God; and the pit also has opened, that the worm that never dieth, and the flames that are never quenched, and poor wretches gnawing their tongues and gnashing their teeth might scare away the thoughtless and turn them from the paths of sin. Therefore Jesus

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also, lover of our souls, presents salvation in the form of a matter of profit and loss. Making such an appeal as does a father who implores his son, if he will not regard h’s father’s and mother’s feelings, to look to his own interests, and think of the misery and ruin which his sins and follies will bring on himself, Jesus asks, and I would urge you all to consider and answer the question, “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own souH” Therefore God also puts these solemn, awful questions, “Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings’?” Would God men would look these questions in the face, and flee to Christ’s open arms, hasting from the wrath to come — nor long, perhaps, to come! There is but a step between us and the grave.

There is a fable of a tree, which, as it fell groaning to the earth, discovered that out of its own timber the woodman had hafted the axe which entered its heart and felled it to the ground; and there is another of an eagle that, pierced by an arrow as it soared in the skies, discerned, while it lay dying on the ground, that its own wing had furnished a feather to the shaft that drank up its blood. Well, sceptics, abandoning the weapons with which Hume, Gibbon, Tom Paine, and Voltaire vainly attempted to overthrow our faith, have thought to find in the Bible itself that which would feather their arrow or haft their axe. Because the Bible, in addressing itself to our self-love, appeals to the lowest principle of our nature, it cannot, they say, be divine. An objection this that only proves the darkness of their understandings, or the malignity of their hearts! Restrained within proper bounds, self-love is a right feeling; one that, divinely implanted, is not a vice but a virtue which — winning the drunkard, for example, to practise sobriety and respect himself — would gladden many a wretched home.

Nor is it to this only, or chiefly, that our heavenly Father appeals. Take the apostle Paul as a type of the Christian! His strongest passion was the love of Christ. Gratitude for his salvation, affection for his person, admiration of his character, regard to his will and honour, his crown and kingdom, these constrained him to love, not himself, but him who died for him and rose again. And what motive nobler, tenderer, than that love to God, to Christ, to saints, to sinners, to friends, to foes, under the influence of which all come on entering into a state of grace. In leaving sin we leave selfishness; the less sinful we become, in that very proportion we become the less selfish. The whole case is related in the story of the prodigal. The pangs of hunger, his shame, his ragged misery, death in prospect, with no gentle forms by his side, or kind hands to wipe his brow, and close his eyes, and give his poor body decent burial, these troubles, no doubt, turned his thoughts homeward, and, blessed of God, led to the reflection, “How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants.” As ships run before the storm to anchor-ground and sheltering bay, he made for home, if I may say so, through stress of weather; and, as when the tempest-tossed have reached the desired haven, how sweet the change — fatted calf for swinish husks, that goodly robe for rags, the flowing bowl, and merry music, and gay dancers for the neglect and wretchedness to which his harlots and boon companions had left him — first their slave, and then their victim! Yet it was not these home-pleasures that kept him there; but love for that loving father, who, forgiving all, had folded him to his bosom, and bathed his face with tears of overflowing joy, and, glad to have a long-lost son restored, had assembled the neighbours to share his happiness; for the grave had given up its prey — he that was dead was alive again, he that had been lost was found.

Love is the chain that binds us to the throne of God, each to all and all to each. May its golden links be strengthened! Gift to be coveted above all others, rather than eloquence lofty as angels’ speech, than power to pluck mountains from their roots and cast them into the boiling sea, than knowledge that penetrates into the deepest mysteries and climbs to the heights of heaven, than the courage that wins the

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martyr’s crown at a burning stake, than the faith thai tramples death beneath its feet, than the hope that, stretched on a dying bed lays a mortal hand on an immortal crown, rather far than these, give me the love that dwells, dove-like, in many a lowly bosom, and turns the rudest cabin into a little heaven. “Now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” St Paul crowns her queen; and so I say, with this apostle elsewhere, Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, long-suffering; forbearing one

another, and forgiving one another And

above all these things, put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness.