"I Abhor Myself"

Sy x self and exalted himself till the time Cin BYOB loved himself and defended him-

) came to him when he began to see and to understand something of God. But when he once saw something of God, ever after that Job simply abhorred himself and repented every day in dust and ashes. Now why was that? Why did a dawning sight of God produce such a deep change and such a lasting change in God’s servant? It was because he now began to see something of God’s great goodness, and something of the beauty of God’s great holiness, and something of His essential and everlasting love, and something of His boundless grace and truth. And in all that God’s servant saw what he ought himself to have been all along but was so far from being even in his old age. When, having once seen something of God, Job turned to look at himself — from the sole of his foot even to his head, he saw himself to be full of wounds and bruises and putrefying sores. And all his self-righteousness, about which

— — at one time he had been so eloquent, was all turned now to so many filthy rags, and to that dunghill on which he sat clothed in sackcloth and ashes ever after.

And as a matter of fact all God’s greatest servants in all lands and in all languages have been like God’s great servant Job in all that. And in no land and in no language more than in our own. I do not need to speak to you of David, and of Asaph, and of Heman, and of Isaiah, and of Jonah, and of Joshua, and of Peter, and of Paul. You all have by heart all that those great servants of God saw and felt and said concerning themselves in every psalm and prayer and sermon of theirs, as soon as they saw something of God and something of themselves. I will come down at once to our own land and to our own Church and to our own day and I will tell you about some men who were more or less like ourselves. John Calvin is not much given to autobiography, unless it is in his golden commentary on the Psalms. But in one place and with all his directness and with all his plainspokenness and with all his laconicness, Calvin says that ever since he has seen God he has seen that his own self-love has made him to be a malicious man to other men. Now, if you know what it is to be a malicious man to other men yourself, you will see in that one word how that great servant of God has made the most damning of admissions about himself. For to be a malicious man to other men is neither more nor less than to be, in that, a child of the devil. ‘ Myself am hell!’ said the devil himself in an outburst of autobiography when he looked up into God and then looked down into himself. But all this time the point is not about Job, nor about John Calvin, nor about the devil, but the whole point is about you and me. Well, has our self-love made you and me to be malicious to other men? The most malicious of us are not malicious at all times and in all circumstances and to all men. O no! The most malicious of us are sometimes, and to some men, as soft as butter and as sweet as honey. For let a man be fortunate enough to be on our side; let him pass over into our party; let him become profitable to us; let him be clever enough to see through us, and let him be mean enough to flatter us to the top of our appetite for praise, and we will Jove that man as our own soul. But let that man cease to be on our side; let him leave our party; let him become disgusted with our fawning hunger for his flattery; let him in any way go against us; and then let us look up into God and down into our own hearts! Did you ever do that? I have, and I know what I am saying. Paul also did that; and, as often as he did it, he again uttered the heartbroken cry that you all know so well. Poor Paul! And poor Job! And poor John Calvin! It was his own malicious heart that made Paul a Calvinist. And it was his own malicious heart that made Calvin a second Paul. But from their example and their experience we are happy to learn that neither great saintliness nor great service is denied to the truly penitent, however malicious they may have found themselves out to be. And, therefore, neither you nor I need be wholly without hope.

Take next the great Atlas of Independency who was Calvinior Calvino in everything but in the immaterial matter of Church government. All true Independents have that master in their Israel by heart, especially in what he says about himself when once he has seen something of his God and Saviour, and then in that piercing light has seen something of himself. ‘Myself, he says, “is the most disingenuous and abominable principle that ever was... And where Paul says that by nature we all live in malice and in envy, hateful and hating one another, our Atlas adds to that this terrible comment of his — homo homini lupus. And again in this fierce self-condemning passage: ‘Self-love is the very devil himself in us. It is the prince of the devils in us. It is the deepest root and the ultimate bottom of all our sin and all our iniquity. And to dethrone this house-devil from any man’s inmost heart will take all God’s almighty power to do it, and with all His almighty power He will not be able to do it wholly in this world.’ ‘Yes, he exclaims against himself again, ‘the predominant principle in us all is that we love ourselves more than we love our neighbour, or even our Maker and our Redeemer; and in this abominable self-love lies the bottom of all our original sin, if you study original sin a thousand years. And again: ‘There is one great lust, and it is the greatest of all the rest. When holiness held the heart of man the love of God subjected the love of a man’s self unto God. But take this love of God away and then self-love is the next heir to the throne, and it steppeth up immediately into the royal seat.” And again, in his agony over himself, the same truly Pauline man demands of all his hearers: ‘Do you know or can you imagine what multitudinous shapes this Proteus, this monster of self-love, will be turned into on occasions and in circumstances? Unto what depths of wickedness it will sometimes be broached forth, and into what infinite varieties of operations? Look about you throughout the whole world, read the histories of all ages, but above all,’ he demands, ‘read your own heart.’ All rightly read Independents will tell you where I have read all that and more than I have told you. It is all to be read with a broken heart under Goodwin’s index on ‘Self, and ‘ Self-love,” and ‘Self-seeking.’ I am not an Independent in Church government because I was born a Presbyterian. But I have been a lifelong student of the Atlas of that sister Church. And what I owe him in the knowledge of my Saviour and of myself I may have an opportunity of telling him in that land where self-love in him and in me shall have been transformed into love to God and to our neighbour for everlasting.

All this time Bishop Butler has been standing within arm’s length of me. And I do not for a moment forget what that great moralist has said in some of his stateliest pages. ‘ Your self-love,’ he tries to calm and to comfort me by saying: ‘All your self-love is originally and naturally good. Yourself, and your love of yourself, is coincident with the principle of virtue. And, indeed, is part of the very idea of virtue. And it is a proper and an indispensable motive for you and for all men.’ But the deepest of English bishops in saying all that is away back at the creation-scheme and Eden-state of our human nature. He has not yet come down to our poor human nature in its present state of overthrow and dismemberment and dislocation and self-destruction. But when Butler does condescend to come close to the mind and heart of man as all men now are, even he becomes as outspoken and as full of pathos and passion as if he were an evangelical Puritan. But let us be open-minded and truly catholic in all our studies, and above all in our study of God and of ourselves. And that we may be so this evening let us pass on to take two or three great Roman Catholics who are all at one with Job and with Paul and with Calvin and with all the Puritans when they come to see first God and then themselves. Did you ever come across the saintly Abbé Grou? If so you will remember this passage on the matter in hand. ‘ Myself is my worst enemy, says the Abbé. That is to say, we may have enemies who would hurt us even

fatally if they only could. But the Abbé’s point is that they cannot. And he is entirely right all through his home-coming argument. For no enemy of mine has ever hurt me as I have hurt myself. I know that there are enemies of mine who would poison my life of all its peace and of all its usefulness if they only could. But they cannot. At the same time let them not be too much cast down on that account. For there is one who can do and who is daily doing what they cannot do. A man’s foes to be called foes are in his own house; that is to say they are in his own heart. ‘Know thou,’ says another Catholic, ‘ that the love of thyself doth do thee far more hurt than anything else in the whole world.’ Yes, Thomas, but we shall never know that by merely reading the Imitation. We must read ourselves. We must study, as we study nothing else, our own self-rent and self-distorted hearts. And then Pascal, that so powerful and so far-shining genius in the things of the soul: ‘Of all hateful things, says Pascal, ‘ myself is the most hateful to me.’ We begin life by hating the men and the things that hurt us. We hate the men who oppose us and resist us and hinder us: the men who speak and write and act against us. We bitterly hate all the men who humble us and despise us and trample upon us and in any way ill-use us. But afterwards we come round to forgive, and not seldom to justify those men that we at one time so hated. For we come to see what at one time we could not have believed, that all our hurt, to be called hurt, has come to us from ourselves. And thus we are left with no one to hate, to be called hating, but ourselves. And then an Atlas of Episcopacy has a series of dialogues on this same subject which are far more interesting and far more valuable and far more pertinent to me to read than all the dialogues of Plato himself. You must not be too much offended at the strength of his language. For indignatio facit versus. I condense and water down several terrible passages into one page. ‘Pray, sir,’ said Academicus, ‘tell me more plainly just what this self of ours actually is. ‘Self, replied Theophilus, ‘is hell, it is the devil, it is darkness, it is pain, and it is all disquiet. It is antichrist. It is the scarlet whore, it is the fiery dragon, it is the old serpent of the Revelation.” ‘You rather terrify me than instruct me,’ said Academicus. ‘It is indeed a thing to terrify all men,’ returned Theophilus. ‘For it contains everything that a man has to. dread in this world and in the next. Because, there is no hell here or hereafter; no devil outside yourself; no furious beast, nor fiery dragon, apart from yourself that can do you any hurt. You are your own hell, you are your own devil, you are your own dragon that lives in your own heart’s blood. Die to yourself; and all your enemies on earth and in hell will be for ever overcome.’ ‘ But,’ said Theogenes a third party who: stood by, ‘I fain would understand what it is. that makes myself to be so full of sin and misery.” ‘Sir, said Theophilus, ‘it is your covetousness,.

and it is your envy, and it is your pride, and it is your wrath and your ill-will. These are the five elements of hell in your heart. As long as a sinner lives among the vanities of this world, his wicked heart may be in a tolerable state. But when death has put an end to all his earthly blinds and cheats, then that soul which is not washed in the blood of the Lamb, and is not filled with His Holy Spirit, that soul will find itself gnashed and devoured by its own cruel and remorseful teeth. It will find itself shut up for ever in its own unsatiable, unchangeable, and self-tormenting covetousness, and envy, and pride, and wrath.” ‘God bless you! Theophilus, said Theogenes. ‘For I shall never forget what you have said to me to-night about myself!”

One midnight well on toward the end of his life Thomas Shepard was found lying on his face in his study in a swoon of sweat and tears, and with a copy of the Mew England Gazette crushed together in his lockfast hands. The reason of all that was afterwards discovered to be this. Mr. T. H., Thomas Shepard’s bosom friend, was wont to have a sermon of his printed in the Gazette time about with a sermon of Shepard’s. And both the manager of the journal and all its readers were well known to Shepard to put his friend’s sermons far above his for their eloquence and for their English. It is not told how Mr. T. H. took that praise of himself and that depreciation of his friend. But Shepard made no secret to God and to his own soul how he took it- For the copy of the paper that Shepard held crushed in his hands that midnight contained a specially beautiful sermon of Mr. T. Hs. And as Shepard tried first not to see that sermon, and then turned in prayer to try to read it aad could not, he quite lost all power over himself and actually fell on his face on the floor as if his New England study had been the Garden of (zethsemane. Now unless you have fallen on your face in that same way and from that same cause, or from some similar cause, I do not want to hear your judgment on Job, or on John Calvin, or on Thomas Goodwin, or on Bishop Butler, or on Abbé Grou, or on Blaise Pascal, or on William Law, or on Thomas Shepard. Your day for passing a right judgment on all such;men and all such matters is coming, so I both Jalbour and hope and pray. Hold your peace then on this whole subject till that prostrating day comes; that day of days to you when, like all those great men, you shall see yourself to be the most to be abhorred, the most malicious, ty1e most wolf-like, the most inwardly rent and distorted, the most hateful and the most hating, thei most self-tormenting, and the most Shepard-likje sinner on this side hell. And, when that all-rey’ealing day comes, I for one will submit to your juglgment, first on yourself, and then on all other men), and all other matters, both sacred and secular, Meantime do your best to sing and in tune e all those men the Forty-ninth Paraphrase from the fifth verse which runs

thus : — Love suffers long: love envies ot:
But love is ever kind:
She never boasteth of herself,
Nor proudly lifts the mind.

And so on for five golden verses.