Thankfulness, and Other Essays

“Ten thousand thousand precious gifts
My daily thanks employ;
Nor is the least a cheerful heart,
That tastes those gifts with joy.”

A THANKFUL Christian is a happy man, and brings peculiar glory to God. Thankfulness is something better than mere cheerfulness. It is a pleasant sight to see a merry, gleesome child, or a placid, contented man; but pleasant as it is to see, it scarcely needs a soul to make a creature cheerful. You may see cheerful sights by cottage-fires and on village-greens, on the harvest-field and amid the vintage-heaps; but you may see the exact equivalent as often as you look on a bright summer’s day at a flock of sheep, or a dancing minnowpool, or a cloud of insects swinging maziiy to and fro in a field of balmy air. If you reckon the mere gladness, the sensation of delight, beasts are as capable of it as ourselves; and, for anything I know, the swift shrieking out his ecstasy as he glances round the steeple, or the bee murmuring all his noontide musings into the ear of an opening flower may be as full of gladness as you ever were when your pulse was bounding bravely, and the joy of felt existence was swelling every vein. I believe that God can fill the tiniest and most transient thing as full of its proper happiness as he can fill the heart of man; for he can fill it brimful, and human bosom can hold no more. What advantage, then, has man in his enjoyments over the beasts that perish? Why this: his best joys should be spiritual and intellectual — a domain peculiar to himself. They should be more lasting, also; a tinge of immortality should run through them; and as they are sublimer and more enduring, so they should awaken gratitude. Our gladness should take the form of thankfulness. Gratitude is the grace which hallows gladness, and by giving it an upward Godward direction, makes it both noble and safe. A joy in which gratitude does not mingle is a dangerous thing, for it is atheistic and God-provoking.* And it is a degraded thing; for nature’s high-priest, that spokesman and interpreter who should embody in articulate praise the homage of a voiceless universe, and whose adoring capacity is only lower than the angels, ingratitude makes him lower than the oxen; for the ox knoweth his owner, and feels his own kind of thankfulness; — and duller than the stones; for rocks and mountains have their silent anthems, and rather than that none should utter “glory in the highest,” the stones would cry aloud.t That man leads the most angelic life whose life is fullest of adoration, and thankfulness, and praise; but none except the Lord’s redeemed can lead that life. None will cry, “O give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good,” who have not first tasted

* Isa. V. 12. t Ps. cxlviii. 9; Luke xix. 37-40.

that “mercy which endureth for ever.”* And just as there is no real gratitude which does not come down from above, so there is no acceptable thank-offering which does not go up through a mediator. “Giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”t “Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up a spiritual sacrifice, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.”| Christ is the altar which sanctifies the sinner’s gift; and in order that a thank-offering be accepted, it must be laid on this altar. Cain thought that he was thankful. He presented to the Lord the produce of his fields; and perhaps it was more than a complimentary acknowledgment. Perhaps he felt a gush of emotion as he eyed God’s goodness in his ripening acres. But he thought his own hands pure enough to convey the tribute, and on a bloodless altar he laid his elegant oblation. Abel was thank-

* Ps. cxxxvi. 1. t Eph. V. 20. 1 1 Peter ii. 5.

ful also; but besides the fruit of the ground, he brought the firstling of his flock, and with hands washed in its innocency, presented his more excellent, his more abundant and acceptable offering. And while the sacrifice of faith received the fiery sign and vanished, fragrant in flames of Heaven’s own kindHng, the mellow heap of corn and glossy fruit, the deist’s offering, remained unnoticed and untouched. “The Lord had respect unto Abel and his offering; but unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect.” That offering alone arrests the eye of God which is laid on Abel’s altar.

The grand ultimatum of the Christian economy is just to evoke abundant thanksgivings. And with this end in view, it has provided at once the mightiest topic and the fittest ministers — the unspeakable gift, and the royal priesthood. And a believer is never so truly what his Lord would have him to be, nor so like what he shall hereafter be; he never brings more glory to God, nor does more to commend the gospel, than when others see in his spirit and demeanor, in what he gives, and what he says, and what he does, a Kving sacrifice, a holocaust of praise. “In everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Jesus Christ concerning you.”

In the hope of promoting this most desirable grace, I would mention —

I. Some hinderances to a thankful spirit.

II. Some topics or materials for thanksgiving.

III. Some appropriate expressions of Christian gratitude.

I. Some Christians are not eminent for thankfulness. They are on the right side; but they have scarcely got the right spirit. Their complainings and murmuring are a deep spot on their Christian character, or rather a thick veil over it. Their heavenly citizenship could never be gathered from their benign and joyful mien, or from their cordial, thankful words; for, even with the cup of salvation in their hand, you never hear them asking, “What shall I render to the Lord for all his gifts?”

Three things mainly hinder Christians from being thankful: selfishness, peevishness, and heedlessness.

Some are very selfish. Unless the blessing alight on their actual self, it matters not where it comes down. It can occasion no gladness to them. They can not joy in beholding the faith of other men. They can not exult in beholding the order of other churches. They do not glorify God for the graces of their believing brethren. The husbandman who sees a cloud melting over the adjacent fields, while not a drop comes down on his own thirsty furrows, is more likely to envy his favored neighbor than to indulge in patriotic congratulations; and so when a blessing comes down on neighbor Christians or neighbor churches, there are some who, instead of indulging in that wise congratulation which of all things would be the likeliest to bring the blessing to themselves, instead of rejoicing with the patriotism and public spirit of a citizen of Zion, exulting in the general good, they grudge as if they lost what other members of the body get; and by a most unlovely selfishness, defraud themselves of that joy which no man could keep from them — the joy of rejoicing with them that do rejoice — the joy of admiring the wonderful work of God. There are some so grievously selfish, that they take as matters of right, or as things of course, every good and perfect gift; and being little accustomed to view all things in the surety, viewing themselves more frequently from the little hill of their own self-love than from the great mountain of God’s free grace, no gift is so great as to surprise them, no mercy is so amazing as to make them thankful. Like the Caspian sea, which has some unseen way of disposing of its waters, so that whatever rains come down, and whatever rivers flow in, its great gulf never fills, and never a rill runs out from it again; so there is a greedy, all-devouring selfishness, which, whatever rivers of pleasure flow into it, and whatever mighty bursts of heaven-descended bounty exhaust their fulness over it, always contrives to dispose of the whole in the caverns and subterraneous passages of its capacious egotism — the vast mare internum of self, without one drop overflowing in kindness to man or gratitude to God. And if the sudden advent of some unhoped-for or overwhelming mercy stagger them into a moment’s tenderness, they recover their presence of mind before they are betrayed into the liberality of imprudent gratitude, or the vehement expressions of an over-ardent thankfulness.

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