Destruction and Fulfilment

“J am not come to destroy f but to fulfil.’1 — MATTHEW v. 17.

IT was necessary that Christ the Son of God, manifesting His Father to mankind, should live at one special point in human history and at one special spot in the world’s geography. There had to be some one age whose peculiar circumstances should give shape to the events of his life. There had to be some one land which should become forever memorable and sacred as that on which his feet had walked. But yet, while this is true, everybody who understands Christ, knows that what took place visibly in Palestine is taking place spiritually every where and always. Christ is always coming. And that coming of the gracious presence which men BOW and touched, and whose words fell with warning or exalting power on their ears, while it had its own separate and unshared value, was also representative of what is continually going on. What Christ was then, he always is; what Christ did then, he is always doing. And so if we want to know how

Christ works to-day, we have the Gospel for a perpetual guide. The phenomena of that first coming must be the phenomena of all Christianity. Take out of them that in their tone which is manifestly local and temporary, and the words which Jesus spoke of and to the Judaism of his time are the same words which he is always speaking to the Judaisms of all times. So long as His salvation is not yet complete, He walks unseen in the world, as once he walked seen in Jerusalem, and speaks to men’s attentive souls as once He spoke to their listening ears.

The words which I have chosen for my text this morning illustrate this. When Jesus came into the world to establish the perfect religion, he found here an imperfect faith. The old faith of the Jews, into the very heart of which the Lord was born, and where his life was lived, knew much of God; indeed knew more of God than any other religion which the world possessed. Jesus knew still more. He brought a higher and diviner presence. He came with a complete salvation. How should he treat this partial, this imperfect faith which was already on the ground? He might do either of two things. He might sweep it away and begin entirely anew, or he might take this imperfect faith and fill it out to completeness. He might destroy or he might fulfil. With the most deliberate wisdom he chose one method and rejected the other. “I am not come to destroy, out to fulfil,” he said. Those are most critical, decisive words. They declare the whole fundamental method of the Master’s ministry. They have their root and necessity, as I think we shall SIM-, in the Master’s nature. It is right that we who live in a world where Christ is still at work, should understand his method and see what it means, both for the world and us; that he who comes to save the world and to save men declares that it is as a fulfiller and not as a destroyer that he comes.

A fulfiller and a destroyer. Let us first clearly understand the difference; and that we may understand it best, it will be well to look at it in regions with which we are familiar.

Look at it in nature. What is the truly majestic power of the earth? Surely not destruction! Surely not the forces which sweep out of being the things which are harmful and mischievous! There are such forces, but the thought about the world which made those forces seem the venerable and admirable forces, the forces to which men’s worship and admiration ought to be given, would be horrible! It is the forces of fulfilment, the forces which are always crowding every process forward to its full activity, crowding every being and structure out to its completest realization of itself, the forces of construction and growth; these are the real vital forces of the world. Nature takes hold of every capacity of living which she finds anywhere, and turns it into life. Her rain and dew find out the least vitality and feed it. To make each imperfection a little less imperfect, to bring each partial being a little near completeness, to minister growth and not decay, to minister decay only as an incident and a means to growth, not to destroy but to fulfil, that is what nature comes lor with her orderly seasons and recurring years.

Let this serve us for an illustration. Go further on and think of what man does to his fellow-man. We are BO often set to be, as it were, natures to each other. Lives bend over other lives as the sky bends over the earth. Influences come from man to man as the dew and sunshine come from the bounteous heavens to the ready ground. There is no one of you who has not some other nature which lies under your nature, as the field lies under the rain-cloud to receive its richness. When you think of that other nature waiting for your ministry, are you not aware of two different treatments, either of which you may give it? Your child, your scholar, your servant — you may fulfil him or you may destroy him. You destroy him if you fasten on everything that is bad and crude and ridiculous about him, and pour out upon it rebuke and contempt. You destroy him if you make him feel himself weak and insignificant, and drive him to despair. You destroy him if you make his great feeling about his own life to be shame. On the other hand you fulfil him, you fill him out to his full, to his fullest, if you catch everything that is good about him and water it with judicious encouragement and praise. You fulfil him if you recognize every feeblest and clumsiest effort to do right, if you inspire him with hope, if you make him seem to himself worth cultivating and watching and developing.

A friend told me the other day of walking along the crowded street close by two young people who were evidently coming home from work, ami how he necessarily overheard their talk with one another. And one of them said, evidently referring to some act of an employer, “It was only a little thing, but I was so tired and discouraged that nothing ever did me so much good.” Some word hud been spoken, some deed had been done which had fulfilled that tired and discouraged life a little. How easy and simple it appears, and yet how rare it some times seems. To say “well-done” to any bit of work that has embodied good effort, is to take hold of the powers which have made the effort and confirm and strengthen them. But if you have nothing to say to your child or to your scholar except (what mav U« perfectly true) that much of his work is badly done, that he is wasting opportunities and losing the value of his life, then you are coming to him not to fulfil but to destroy.

I beg you to think of this, you who are set in positions of superintendence and authority. Make a great deal more of your right to praise the good than of your right to blame the bad. Never let a brave and serious struggle after truth and goodness, how ever weak it may be, pass unrecognized. Do not f>«- chary of appreciation. Hearts are unconsciously hungry for it. There is little danger, especially with us in this cold New England region, that appreciation shall be given too abundantly, Il-r — and there, perhaps, in your shops and schools and households, there is some one who has too lazily sunk down upon the praise he has received for some good work, and rested in sluggish satisfaction on it; but such disasters hardly count among the unfulfilled lives which have lived meagrely and stuntedly for the lack of some simple cordial human approval of what they have honestly, however blunderingly, tried to do.

Upon a larger scale do we not know how in the world at large there are the two kinds of men, the fulfilling and the destroying men? There are some men who call out the best of their brethren every where. There are men in history whose whole work has been of this sort. They made the better parts of human life seem possible and seem worth while. They were like sunshine; and the plants under their influence lifted themselves up and hoped to live. When such men died, they left the world more vital and complete because they had lived in it. There are other men whose whole mission is to destroy. The things which they destroy are bad and ought to be destroyed, but none the less the issue of the work of such men is for disheartening and not for encouragement. We are rich in such men now-a-days, perhaps never more rich. They count the tares so loud that the field grows ashamed of itself, and forgets to tell itself that there is wheat. Alas, for the city, the state, the nation or the church where mere destructive criticism has possession of men’s tongues and ears.

If any of you who are trying to do right are overcome sometimes by the abundance of criticism on your failures and the absence of recognition of your struggles, what shall you do? Rejoice that behind all your fellow-men is God! Rejoice that there is one soul so sensitive to good that no poor struggler, no weak child in any corner of this universe can make the slightest struggle after goodness without that great good soul’s feeling it instantly and recognizing it with eagerness and joy. If I can know that I am strong, let all my brethren, it they will, see only the bad in me and not the good. I will not be indifferent to what they see. I will regret it and deplore it; but every effort which I make for righteousness shall fly past their indifference, and find God, and report itself to Him. Fixed in His sympathetic recognition, every such effort becomes a mark of attainment from which I cannot after wards recede, and so with each such effort the gradual fulfilment of my life grows more complete.

The nobility and dignity of any work is measured by the powers which it demands and uses. And so, I think, that the greatness of the work of the fulfiller, as compared with the work of the destroyer, is indicated by the faculties and qualities which it requires. Destruction calls for nothing but hatred and vigor. Fulfilment calls for sympathy, intelligence, patience and hope. It is so easy to give the bruised reed one blow and break it, to put a summary hand upon the smoking flax and quench it. Just to stand up in the community, and abuse its meanness, or its irreligion, just to arraign some sinner and upbraid his drunkenness or his licentiousness, that is so easy. But to take the latent generosity, or the half-conscious religion of a community and educate it and encourage it, to take the remnants and the seeds of good which are in the poor, broken, besotted life of the wretched libertine, or drunkard, and rebuild them into a new career, that is so hard. The one needs only hatred and vehemence; the other needs love and intelligence and patience and hope. I know that the second is the nobler work, because of the nobler powers it demands. I know that it is better not merely for the soul which I try to fulfil, but also for my soul, that I should be the fulfiller and not the destroyer of my brother.

But there is one more truth, which we must remember, to make our statement with regard to fulfilment and destruction entirely complete. And that is, that fulfilment of itself involves destruction. The fulfilment of the good involves the destruction of the bad. Make anything in the world complete and perfect after its true nature, and you must there by drive out whatever there is of falsehood and positive corruption in it. That statement does not deny the fact, nor change the clwiracter of sin. God forbid! I have no patience with the foolish talk which would make sin nothing but imperfection, and would preach that man needs nothing but to have his deficiencies supplied, to have his native goodness educated and brought out, in order to be all that God would have him be. The horrible in competency of that doctrine must be manifest enough to any man who knows his own heart, or who listens to the tumult of wickedness which rises up from all the dark places of the earth. Sin is a dreadful, positive, malignant thing. What the world in its worse part needs is not be developed, but to be destroyed. Any other talk about it is shallow and mischievous folly. The only question is about the best method and means of destruction. Let the sharp surgeon’s knife do its terrible work. Let it cut deep and separate as well and thoroughly as it can, the false from the true, the corrupt from the uncorrupt: it never can dissect away the very principle of corruption which is in the substance of the blood itself. Nothing but a new reinforcement of health can accomplish that. There is the whole story. Tear your sins away. Starve your tumultuous passions. Resist temptations. Aye, if you will, punish yourself with stripes for your iniquities. Cry out to yourself and to your brethren, with every voice that you can raise, “Cease to do evil;” but all the time, down below, as the ‘deepest cry of your life, let there be this other, “Learn to do well.” If you can indeed grow vigorously brave and true and pure; then cowardice and falsehood and licentiousness must perish in you. O wondrous silent slaughter of our enemies! O wondrous casting out of fear as love grows perfect! O death to sin, which comes by the new birth to righteousness! * 0 de struction, which is but the utterance of fulfilment on the other side! O everlasting assurance, that evil has of right no place in the world: and that it’ good would only lift itself up to its it might claim the whole world and all of manhood for itself!

Therefore with all the strength which God has given us, let us be fulfillers. Let us try to make the life of the world more complete. What can we do? First, each of us can put one more healthy and holy life into the world, and so directly increase the aggre gation of righteousness. That is much. To fasten one more link, however small, in the growing chain that is ultimately to bind humanity to God beyond all fear of separation, is very much indeed. And besides that, we can, with sympathy and intelligence, patience and hope, bring up the lagging side in all the vitality around us, and assert for man, the worth, the meaning and the possibility of this his human life. If all the men and women here were doing these two things, what a bright corner of the world this town, this church would be!

I have dwelt long on this most general statement of our truth, and my sermon is more than half done before I come to trace in several particulars how the method of fulfilment as distinct from the method of destruction, is, and always has been distinctively the method of the Christian faith. Let me do this as briefly as I can.

Christianity from the beginning adopted the method of fulfillment for its own propagation. It has wandered from it sometimes, but the inherent genius of its character has always brought it back to the idea that it was not directly to fight with and destroy the other religions of the world, but to satisfy

22O Destruction and Fulfilment.

the longings which these other faiths expressed, ami to lead on the powers which those faiths were using, to their fuller development and loftier employment. Christ, in the eyes of the first preachers of Christianity, Christ in his own eyes, was so completely the Master of this world, so thoroughly the sum and culmination of all good in the world, that every good work was capable of being taken up into him and made to open in his light into before unconscious and unsuspected power. St. Paul, preaching at Athens, is the representative speaker of that truth; but it is everywhere in the New Testament. In its more vivid re-appearance, in its more unhesitating re-assertion, lies the hope and prospect of the future triumphs of the Gospel.

And as with regard to other religions, BO with regard to that which does not call itself religion at all, o with that which, rejecting the very name of religion, calls itself simply morality. Here is a man who is trying to do right He does not talk of God, he does not think of God. He simply tries to do right. That man is somewhere here this morning. What does Christ say to him? We need not be in doubt, for something very like his story is written in the Gospels. John said one day to Jesus, “Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name, and we forbade him, because he followeth not with us.” And Jesus said, Forbid him not; for he that is not against us is on our part.” “He that is not against us is on our part.” There are only two parties in this world, tlic party of the right and the party of tin r

He who is not for the wrong is for the right. The crudest, the least educated, the least developed, the most mistaken of the pleaders for the right, of the men who want to do right, is on the same side with the deepest soul, the most spiritually minded child of God, with Christ himself.

We can well imagine that Jesus afterwards found out this half-instructed easter-out of devils, and displayed Himself to him, and fulfilled his partial power, and made him one of his disciples. Certainly to the secular moralist He is forever going. That perpetual tendency of morality to become religion, to which all history bears witness, is but the continual effort of Christ to fulfil the imperfect. It fails again and again, but somewhere, sometime, it must succeed. If not here, then in some world of larger freedom and more light, the soul which has here earnestly struggled to do right simply because it is right, must see God and recognize face to face the power which it has always been dimly feeling, in blind obedience to which it has heroically lived. Surely there shall be no more touching or impres sive sight upon the borders of the eternal life, than this, the unreligious doer of duty seeing God, under standing, perhaps in a lightning flash, whose is the authority which he has been obeying, whose is the strength on which he has been really resting all these years: and in one instant made religious, finding his imperfectness fulfilled with God, and casting himself in adoration and in love before the throne.

God sees our wickedness and pities it, through all his anger. God also sees our emptiness, and who can tell what is the feeling with whi<:h he looks at that. Our emptiness is our falling short, of that which it is possible for us to be. It is not emptiness for us to be without that which it does not belong to our nature to possess. The pint measure is not empty that it does not hold a quart. The eagle is not empty of the power of running, nor the horse of the power of flying. Emptiness is defect. There is no defect where there is not a falling short of some original design. If you were not made to serve God out of love, the implanting in your life of lov ing service would not be the fulfilment of your life. It would be an addition to it. It would be as if you tied wings to the horse’s shoulders, not as if you bade them spring out of the eagle’s sides.

Do you not see the value which this gives to the declaration of Christ that he comes to be the fulfiller of the life of man? He comes to give us divine enthusiasms, celestial loves. But it is not as strange, unnatural things that he would give them. It is as the legitimate possessions of our human natui the possessions which, unconscious, undeveloped, are ours already. The kingliness of nature which the human side of the Incarnation declared to be man’s possible life, the divine side of the Inc-anialiun makes to be the actual life of every man who really enters into its power.

The same is true about that experience often so perplexing and distressing, in which one passes from a lower and a narrower to a higher and a broader form of faith or belief. These too Christ fulfils and does not destroy. Evidently such progress is possible. ]Jany of us humbly rejoice in the belief that we have made such progress. And we believe in no portion of our lives have we more truly been under Christ’s im mediate guidance than in the making of that progress. But what became of the old faith? Did Christ destroy it as a useless thing, a poor delusion, too false for any soul to live in? Alas, for any one of us who sees no more in what he did for us than that! He who thinks so must look back on the years in which he lived in his old faith, and call them years of waste. How could it be that God let the soul of his child live so long in prison? But what if it were not a prison? What if I can think of the advance which God has made possible for me into a larger faith, not as the setting free out of a dungeon, but as the movement forward from the imperfectness of youth into the riper life of manhood? Call youth a prison, if you will. It is a prison whose walls are transparent hopes, and whose window -bars are sun beams. There was no waste in those years of immaturity. It is easy to see that the years in which we believed narrowly and waited for the fulfilment which in part has come, were not wasted years, and it is not strange that God let his children remain in them so long!

I hate to hear a man who has passed out of a narrower into a larger faith, upbraid and revile the faith in which he used to live. It is making the Christ who has led him, to be not the fulfiller, but the destroyer. It is shutting the flood-gat- s U-twen the past and the present, so that what the man isjn help from what he used to !><•. What shall tin- man who thinks so about the past make <>i’ tin- i’litim-? Does he think there are no changes still awaiting him? Does he think he has attained all truth? If not, if there are new advances for him still to make, will the time come when on this which he is now, he will look back with the same hatred and scorn with which he looks back at this moment on his childhood’s creed? The man who talks so is at heart a dogmatist. He has not learned the great truth of our Christianity, the truth of Christ, that that to which we belong is not an idea, however true, not a creed, however broad or narrow, but a friend, a father, God. Wherever God has given himself to us, that must be to us forever sacred ground. Whenever he has led us out from more imperfect into less imperfect truth, it has been fulfilment, not destruction of that in which he kept us living for awhile before we made the progress and saw the fuller light. God never destroys any real belief. When the Hindoo becomes a Christian, when the moralist becomes a Christian, when the narrow Christian becomes a broader Christian, it is a deeper heart in the old life that opens. The old creed, the old experience lives more truly, and does not die, as it gives “place to the new.

How often, as you grow more earnest in your n« w faith, your old faith, which you seemed to have quite done with, re-appears and grows more sacred to you, and you are sure that it has not perished, but is living in the heart of what you now believe. You become sure that in the perfect earnestness of heav en, all that you ever thoroughly believed on earth will come back to you, and you will see that, how ever in your after life you rejected it, it was not in vain that you had once believed it. It will .make part of your eternal faith. As I grow more and more earnest, I expect that my dead faiths will rise and show they are not dead. Let true faithfulness walk over the graves of a buried belief, and the dust of the long silent faith

“Would hear her and beat,

Had it lain for a century dead — Would start and tremble under her feet.”

They are not dead but sleeping, all that our hearts have ever truly, thoroughly believed.

Let us fill ourselves with Christ’s conception of him self, and how full of richness and peace life becomes. Christ is always fulfilling us, while we wake and while we sleep, in work and rest, in joy and sorrow. He is always leading us forth into new and richer rooms of character and life and truth. Obedience, docility, perfect readiness to be led, that, that alone is what we want May He give us that, and then fulfil us with Himself more and more, as our emptiness opens wider and His grace abounds more and more richly through all eternity.