Twenty-Five Village Sermons Part 4

GEN, ix. 8, 9.

"And G.o.d spake unto Noah, and his sons with him, saying, And I, behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you."

In my last sermon on Noah I spoke of the flood and of Noah's faith before the flood; I now go on to speak of the covenant which G.o.d made with Noah after the flood. Now, Noah stood on that newly-dried earth as the head of mankind; he and his family, in all eight souls, saved by G.o.d's mercy from the general ruin, were the only human beings left alive, and had laid on them the wonderful and glorious duty of renewing the race of man, and replenis.h.i.+ng the vast world around them. From that little knot of human beings were to spring all the nations of the earth.

And because this calling and destiny of theirs was a great and all- important one--because so much of the happiness or misery of the new race of mankind depended on the teaching which they would get from their forefathers, the sons of Noah, therefore G.o.d thought fit to make with Noah and his sons a solemn covenant, as soon as they came out of the ark.

Let us solemnly consider this covenant, for it stands good now as much as ever. G.o.d made it "with Noah, and his seed after him," for perpetual generations. And WE are the seed of Noah; every man, woman, and child of us here were in the loins of Noah when the great absolute G.o.d gave him that pledge and promise. We must earnestly consider that covenant, for in it lies the very ground and meaning of man's life and business on this earth.

"And G.o.d blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth; and the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every living creature. Into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you, even as the green herb have I given you all things. But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof shall ye not eat. And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of men; at the hand of every man's brother will I require the life of man.

Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of G.o.d made He man."

Now, to understand this covenant, consider what thoughts would have been likely to grow up in the mind of Noah's children after the flood. Would they not have been something of this kind: 'G.o.d does not love men; He has drowned all but us, and we are men of like pa.s.sions with the world who perished, may we not expect the like ruin at any moment? Then what use to plough and sow, and build and plant, and work for those who shall come after us?' 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.'

And again, they would have been ready to say, 'This G.o.d, whom our forefather Noah said sent floods, we cannot see Him; but the floods themselves we can see. All these clouds and tempests, lightning, sun, and stars, are we STRONGER than them? No! They may crush us, drown us, strike us dead at any moment. They seem, too, to go by certain wonderful rules and laws; perhaps they have a will and understanding in them. Instead of praying to a G.o.d whom we never saw, why not pray to the thunderclouds not to strike us dead, and to the seas and rivers not to sweep us away? For this great, wonderful, awful world in which we are, however beautiful may be its flowers, and its fruits, and its suns.h.i.+ne, there is no trusting it; we are sitting upon a painted sepulchre, a beautiful monster, a gulf of flood and fire, which may burst up any moment, and sweep us away, as it did our forefathers.'

Again, Noah's children would have begun to say, 'These beasts here round us, they are so many of them larger than us, stronger than us, able to tear us to atoms, eat us up as they would eat a lamb. They are self-sufficient, too; they want no clothes, nor houses, nor fire, like us poor, weak, naked, soft human creatures. They can run faster than we, see farther than we; their scent, too, what a wonderful, mysterious power that is, like a miracle to us! And, besides all their cunning ways of getting food and building nests, they never do WRONG; they never do horrible things contrary to their nature; they all abide as G.o.d has made them, obeying the law of their kind. Are not these beasts, then, much wiser and better than we? We will honour them, and pray to them not to devour us--to make us cunning and powerful as they are themselves. And if they are no better than us, surely they are no worse than us. After all, what difference is there between a man and a beast? The flood which drowned the beasts drowned the men too. A beast is flesh and blood, what more is a man? If you kill him, he dies, just as a beast dies; and why should not a man's carcase be just as good to eat as a beast's, and better?' And so there would have been a free opening at once into all the horrors of cannibalism!

Again, Noah's descendants would have said, 'Our forefathers offered sacrifices to the unseen G.o.d, as a sign that all they had belonged to Him, and that they had forfeited their own souls by sin, and were therefore ready to give up the most precious things they had--their cattle, as a sign that they owed all to that very G.o.d whom they had offended. But are not human creatures much more precious than cattle? Will it not be a much greater sign of repentance and willingness to give up all to G.o.d if we offer Him the best things which we have--human creatures? If we kill and sacrifice to Him our most beautiful and innocent things--little children--n.o.ble young men--beautiful young girls?'

My friends, these are very strange and shocking thoughts, but they have been in the hearts and minds of all nations. The heathens do such things now. Our own forefathers used to do such things once; they were tempted to wors.h.i.+p the sun and the moon, and the rivers, and the thunder, and to look with superst.i.tious terror at the bears, and the wolves, and the snakes, round them, and to kill their young children and maidens, and offer them up as sacrifices to the dark powers of this world, which they thought were ready to swallow them up. And G.o.d is my witness, my friends, when one goes through some parts of England now, and sees the mine-children and factory- children, and all the sin and misery, and the people wearying themselves in the fire for very vanity, we seem not to be so very far from the same dark superst.i.tion now, though we may call it by a different name. England has been sacrificing her sons and her daughters to the devil of covetousness of late years, just as much as our forefathers offered theirs to the devil of selfish and cowardly superst.i.tion.

But see, now, how this covenant which G.o.d made with Noah was intended just to remedy every one of those temptations which I just mentioned, into which Noah's children's children would have been certain to fall, and into which so many of them did fall. They might have become reckless, I said, from fear of a flood at any moment. G.o.d promises them--and confirms it with the sign of the rainbow--never again to destroy the earth by water. They would have been likely to take to praying to the rain and the thunder, the sun and the stars; G.o.d declares in this covenant that it is HE alone who sends the rain and thunder, that He brings the clouds over the earth, that He rules the great, awful world; that men are to look up and believe in G.o.d as a loving and thinking PERSON, who has a will of His own, and that a faithful, and true, and loving, and merciful will; that their lives and safety depend not on blind chance, or the stern necessity of certain laws of nature, but on the covenant of an almighty and all-loving person.

Again, I said, that Noah's sons would have been ready to fear, and, at last, to wors.h.i.+p the dumb beasts; G.o.d's covenant says, "No; these beasts are not your equals--they are your slaves--you may freely kill them for your food; the fear of you shall be upon them. The huge elephant and the swift horse shall become your obedient servants; the lion and the tiger shall tremble and flee before you.

Only claim your rights as men; believe that the invisible G.o.d who made the earth is your strength and your protector, and that He to whom the earth belongs has made you lords of the earth and all that therein is. But," said G.o.d's covenant to Noah's sons, "you did not MAKE these beasts--you did not give them life, therefore I forbid you to eat their blood wherein their life lies; that you may never forget that all the power you have over these beasts was given you by G.o.d, who made and preserves that wonderful, mysterious, holy thing called life, which you can never imitate." Again, I said, that Noah's children, having been accustomed to the violence and bloodshed on the earth before the flood, might hold man's life cheap; that, having seen in the flood men perish just like the beasts around them, they might have begun to think that man's life was not more precious than the beasts'. They might have all gone on at last, as some of them did, to those horrors of cannibalism and human sacrifice of which I just now spoke. Now, here, again comes in G.o.d's covenant, "Surely the blood of your lives will I require.

At the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of every man's brother will I require it. Whoso sheddeth man's blood by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of G.o.d made He man." This, then, is the covenant which G.o.d made with Noah for perpetual generations, and therefore with us, the children of Noah.

In this covenant you see certain truths come out into light; some, of which you read nothing before in the Bible, and other truths which, though they were given to Adam, yet had been utterly lost sight of before the flood. This has been G.o.d's method, we find from the Bible, ever since the creation,--to lead man step by step up into more and more light, up to this very day, and to make each sin and each madness of men an occasion for revealing to Him more and more of truth and of the living G.o.d. And so each and every chapter in the Bible is built upon all that has gone before it; and he that neglects to understand what has gone before will never come to the understanding of what follows after. Why do I say this? Because men are continually picking out those sc.r.a.ps of the Bible which suit their own fancy, and pinning their whole faith on them, and trying to make them serve to explain every thing in heaven and earth; whereas no man can understand the Epistles unless he first understand the Gospels. No man will understand the New Testament unless he first understands the pith and marrow of the Old. No man will understand the Psalms and the Prophets unless he first understands the first ten chapters of Genesis; and, lastly, no one will ever understand any thing about the Bible at all, who, instead of taking it simply as it is written, is always trying to twist it into proofs of his own favourite doctrines, and make Abraham a high Calvinist, or Noah a member of the Church of England. Why do I say this? To make you all think seriously that this covenant on which I have been preaching is your covenant; that as sure as the rainbow stands in heaven, as sure as you and I are sprung out of the loins of Noah, so surely this covenant which binds us is part of our Christian covenant, and woe to us if we break it!

This covenant tells us that we are made in G.o.d's likeness, and, therefore, that all sin is unworthy of us and unnatural to us. It tells us that G.o.d means us bravely and industriously to subdue the earth and the living things upon it; that we are to be the masters of the pleasant things about us, and not their slaves, as sots and idlers are; that we are stewards and tenants of this world for the great G.o.d who made it, to whom we are to look up in confidence for help and protection. It tells us that our family relations.h.i.+ps, the blessed duties of a husband and a father, are sacred things; that G.o.d has created them, that the great G.o.d of heaven Himself respects them, that the covenant which He makes with the father He makes with the children; that He commands marriage, and that He blesses it with fruitfulness; that it is He who has told us "Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth;" that the tie of brotherhood is His making also; that HE will require the blood of the murdered man AT HIS BROTHER'S HAND; that a man's brothers, his nearest relations, are bound to protect and right him if he is injured; so that we all are to be, in the deepest sense of the word, what Cain refused to be, our BROTHERS' KEEPERS, and each member of a family is more or less answerable for the welfare and safety of all his relations.

Herein lies the ground of all religion and of all society--in the covenant which G.o.d made with Noah; and just as it is in vain for a man to pretend to be a scholar when he does not even know his letters, so it is mockery for a man to pretend to be a converted Christian man who knows not even so much as was commanded to Noah and his sons. He who has not learnt to love, honour, and succour his own family--he who has not learnt to work in honest and manful industry--he who has not learnt to look beyond this earth, and its chance, and its customs, and its glittering outside, and see and trust in a great, wise, loving G.o.d, by whose will every tree grows and every shower falls, what is Christianity to him? He has to learn the first principles which were delivered to Noah, and which not even the heathen and the savage have utterly forgotten.

SERMON XII. ABRAHAM'S FAITH

HEBREWS, xi. 9, 10.

"By faith Abraham sojourned in the land of promise as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise. For he looked for a city, which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is G.o.d."

In the last sermon which I preached in this church, I said that the Bible is the history of G.o.d's ways with mankind, how He has schooled and brought them up until the coming of Christ; that if we read the Bible histories, one after another, in the same order in which G.o.d has put them in the Bible, we shall see that they are all regular steps in a line, that each fresh story depends on the story which went before it; and yet, in each fresh history, we shall find G.o.d telling men something new--something which they did not know before.

And that so the whole Bible, from beginning to end, is one glorious, methodic, and organic tree of life, every part growing out of the others and depending on the others, from the root--that foundation, other than which no man can lay, which is Christ, revealing Himself, though not by name, in that wonderful first chapter of Genesis,--up to the FRUIT, which is the kingdom of Christ, and Gospel of Christ, and the salvation in which we here now stand. I told you that the lesson which G.o.d has been teaching men in all ages is faith in G.o.d-- that the saints of old were just the men who learnt this lesson of faith. Now this, as we all know, was the secret of Abraham's greatness, that he had faith in G.o.d to leave his own country at G.o.d's bidding, and become a stranger and a pilgrim on the earth, wandering on in full trust that G.o.d would give him another country instead of that which he had left--"a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is G.o.d." This was what Abraham looked for.

Something of what it means we shall see presently.

You remember the story of the tower of Babel? How certain of Noah's family forgot the covenant which G.o.d had made with Noah, forgot that G.o.d had commanded them to go forth in every direction and fill the earth with human beings, solemnly promising to protect and bless them, and took on themselves to do the very opposite--set up a kingdom of their own fas.h.i.+on, and herded together for selfish safety, instead of going forth to all the quarters of the world in a natural way, according to their families, in their tribes, after their nations, as the eleventh chapter of Genesis says they ought to have done. "Let us build us a city and a tower, and make us a name, lest," they said, "we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole world." Here was one act of disobedience to G.o.d's order. But besides this they had fallen into a slavish dread of the powers of nature--they were afraid of another flood. They set to to build a tower, on which they might wors.h.i.+p the sun and stars, and the host of heaven, and pray to them to send no more floods and tempests.

They thus fell into a slavish fear of the powers of nature, as well as into a selfish and artificial civilisation. In short, they utterly broke the covenant which G.o.d had made with Noah. But by miraculously confounding their language, G.o.d drove them forth over the face of the whole earth, and so forced them to do that which they ought to have done willingly at first.

Now, we must remember that all this happened in the very country in which Abraham lived. He must have heard of it all--for aught we know he had seen the tower of Babel. So that, for good or for evil, the whole Babel event must have produced a strong effect on the mind of a thoughtful man like Abraham, and raised many strange questionings in his heart, which G.o.d alone could answer for him, OR FOR US. Now, what did G.o.d mean to teach Abraham by calling him out of his country, and telling him, "I will make of thee a great nation?" I think He meant to shew him, for one thing, that that Babel plan of society was utterly absurd and accursed, certain to come to naught, and so to lead him on to hope for a city which had foundations, and to see that ITS builder and maker must be, not the selfishness or the ambition of men, but the will, and the wisdom, and providence of G.o.d.

Let us see how G.o.d led Abraham on to understand this--to look for a city which had foundations; in short, to understand what a State and a nation means and ought to be. First, G.o.d taught him that he was not to cling coward-like to the place where he was born, but to go out boldly to colonise and subdue the earth, for the great G.o.d of heaven would protect and guide him. "Get thee out of thy country and from thy father's house unto a land which I will shew thee. And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse them that curse thee."

Again; G.o.d taught him what a nation was: "_I_ will make of thee a great nation." As much as to say, 'Never fancy, as those fools at Babel did, that a nation only means a great crowd of people--never fancy that men can make themselves into a nation just by feeding altogether, and breeding altogether, and fighting altogether, as the herds of wild cattle and sheep do, while there is no real union between them.' For what brought those Babel men together? Just what keeps a herd of cattle together--selfishness and fear. Each man thought he would be SAFER, forsooth, in company. Each man thought that if he was in company, he could use his neighbours' wits as well as his own, and have the benefit of his neighbours' strength as well as his own. And that is all true enough; but that does not make a nation. Selfishness can join nothing; it may join a set of men for a time, each for his own ends, just as a joint-stock company is made up; but it will soon split them up again. Each man, in a merely selfish community, will begin, after a time, to play on his own account as well as work on his own account--to oppress and overreach for his own ends as well as to be honest and benevolent for his own ends, for he will find ill-doing far easier, and more natural, in one sense, and a plan that brings in quicker profits, than well-doing; and so this G.o.dless, loveless, every-man-for- himself nation, or sham nation rather, this joint-stock company, in which fools expect that universal selfishness will do the work of universal benevolence, will quarrel and break up, crumble to dust again, as Babel did. "But," says G.o.d to Abraham, "I will make of thee a great nation. I make nations, and not they themselves." So it is, my friends: this is the lesson which G.o.d taught Abraham, the lesson which we English must learn nowadays over again, or smart for it bitterly--that G.o.d makes nations. He is King of kings; "by Him kings reign and princes decree judgment." He judges all nations: He nurtureth the nations. This is throughout the teaching of the Psalms. "It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are His people, and the sheep of His pasture;" for this I take to be the true bearing of that glorious national hymn the 100th Psalm, and not merely the old truism that men did not create themselves, when it exhorts ALL nations to praise G.o.d because it is He that hath made them nations, and not they themselves. The Psalms set forth the Son of G.o.d as the King of all nations. In Him, my friends,--in Him all the nations of the earth are truly blessed.

He the Saviour of a few individual souls only? G.o.d forbid! To Him ALL POWER is given in heaven and earth; by Him were all things created, whether in heaven or earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions, or princ.i.p.alities or powers;--all national life, all forms of government, whether hero-despotisms, republics, or monarchies, aristocracies of birth, or of wealth, or of talent,--all were created by Him and for Him, and He is before all things, and by Him all things CONSIST and hold together. Every thing or inst.i.tution on earth which has systematic and organic life in it--by HIM it consists--by Him, the Life and the Light who lighteneth every man that cometh into the world. From Him come law, and order, and spiritual energy, and loving fellow-feeling, and patriotism, the spirit of wisdom, and understanding, and prudence-- all, in short, by which a nation consists and holds together. It is not const.i.tutions, and acts of parliament, and social contracts, and rights of the people, and rights of kings, and so on, which make us a nation. These are but the effects, and not the consequences, of the national life. THAT is the one spirit which is shed abroad upon a country, whose builder and maker is G.o.d, and which comes down from above--comes down from Christ the King of kings, who has given each nation its peculiar work on this earth, its peculiar circ.u.mstances and history to mould and educate it for its work, and its peculiar spirit and national character, wherewith to fulfil the destiny which Christ has appointed for it.

Believe me, my friends, it takes long years, too, and much training from G.o.d and from Christ, the King of kings, to make a nation.

Everything which is most precious and great is also most slow in growing, and so is a nation. The Scripture compares it everywhere to a tree; and as the tree grows, a people must grow, from small beginnings, perhaps from a single family, increasing on, according to the fixed laws of G.o.d's world, for years and hundreds of years, till it becomes a mighty nation, with one Lord, one faith, one work, one Spirit.

But again; G.o.d said to Abraham, when He had led him into this far country, "Unto thy seed will I GIVE THIS LAND." This was a great and a new lesson for Abraham, that the earth belonged to that same great invisible G.o.d who had promised to guide and protect him, and make him into a nation--that this same G.o.d gave the earth to whomsoever He would, and allotted to each people their proper portion of it. "He (said St. Paul on the Areopagus) hath determined the times before appointed for all nations, and the bounds of their habitation, that they may seek after the Lord and find Him." Ah!

this must have been a strange and a new feeling to Abraham; but, stranger still, though G.o.d had given him this land, he was not to take possession of a single foot of it; the land was already in the hands of a different nation, the people of Canaan; and Abraham was to go wandering about a sojourner, as the text says, in this very land of promise which G.o.d had given him, without ever taking possession of his own, simply because it belonged to others already.

How this must have taught Abraham that the rights of property were sacred things--things appointed by G.o.d; that it was an awful and a heinous sin to make wanton war on other people, to drive them out and take possession of their land; that it was not mere force or mere fancy which gave men a right to a country, but the providence of Almighty G.o.d! Now Abraham needed this warning, for the men of Babel seem from the first to have gone on the plan of driving out and conquering the tribes round them. They seem to have set up their city partly from ambition. "Let us make us a name," they said, meaning, 'Let us make ourselves famous and terrible to all the people around us, that we may subdue them.' And we read of Nimrod, who was their first king and the founder of Babel, that he was a mighty hunter before the Lord, that is, as most learned men explain it, a mighty conqueror and tyrant in defiance of G.o.d and His laws, as the poet says of him,

"A mighty hunter, and his game was man."

The Jews, indeed, have an old tradition that Nimrod cast Abraham into a fiery furnace for refusing to wors.h.i.+p the host of heaven with him. The story is very likely untrue, but still it is of use in shewing what sort of reputation Nimrod left behind him in his own part of the world. We may thus see that Abraham would need warning against these habits of violence, tyranny, and plunder, into which the men of Babel and other tribes were falling. And this was what G.o.d meant to teach him by keeping him a stranger and a pilgrim in the very land which G.o.d had promised to him for his own. Thus Abraham learnt respect for the rights and properties of his neighbours; thus he learnt to look up in faith to G.o.d, not only as his patron and protector, but as the lord and absolute owner of the soil on which he stood.

Now in the 14th chapter of Genesis there is an account of Abraham's being called on to put in practice what he had learnt, and, by doing so, learning a fresh lesson. We read of four kings making war against five kings, against Chedorlaomer, king of Elam or Persia, who had been following the ways of Nimrod and the men of Babel, and conquering these foreign kings and making them serve him. We read of Chedorlaomer and four other kings coming down and wantonly ravaging and destroying other countries, besides the five kings who had rebelled against them, and at last carrying off captive the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Lot, Abraham's nephew. We read then how Abraham armed his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen men, and pursued after these tyrants and plunderers, and with his small force completely overthrew that great army. Now that was a sign and a lesson to Abraham, as much as to say, 'See the fruits of having the great G.o.d of heaven and earth for your protector and your guide,--see the fruits of having men round you, not hirelings, keeping in your company just to see what they can get by it, but born in your own house, who love and trust you, whom you can love and trust,--see how the favour of G.o.d, and reverence for those family ties and duties which He has appointed, make you and your little band of faithful men superior to these great mobs of selfish, G.o.dless, unjust robbers,--see how hundreds of these slaves ran away before one man, who feels that he is a member of a family, and has a just cause for fighting, and that G.o.d and his brethren are with him.'

Here, you see, was another hint to Abraham of what it was and who it was that made a great nation.

And now some of you may say, 'This is a strange sermon. You have as yet said nothing of Christ, nothing of the Holy Spirit, nothing of grace, redemption, sanctification. What kind of sermon is this?'

My friends, do not be too sure that I have not been preaching Christ to you, and Christ's Spirit to you, and Christ's redemption too, most truly in this sermon, although I have mentioned none of them by name. There are times for ornamenting the house, there are times for repairing the wall, there are times, too, for thoroughly examining the foundation, because, if that be not sound, it is little matter what fine work is built up upon it; and there are times when, as David says, the foundations of the earth are out of course, when men have forgotten sadly the very first principles of society and religion.

And, surely, men are doing so in these days; men are forgetting that other foundation can no man lay save that which IS laid, which is Christ; they laugh at the thought of a city, that is, a state and form of government, "not made with hands, eternal in the heavens;"

they have forgotten that St. Paul tells them in the Hebrews that we HAVE "a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is G.o.d," a kingdom which cannot be moved. Yes, men who call themselves learned and worldly wise, and good men too, alas! who fancy that they are preaching G.o.d's gospel, go about and tell men, 'The men of Babel were right after all. What have nations to do with G.o.d and religion? Nations are merely earthly, carnal things, that were only invented by sinful men themselves, to preserve their bodies and goods, and make trading easy. Religion has only to do with a man's private opinions, his single soul; the government has nothing to do with the Church: a Christian has nothing to do with politics.' And so these men most unwittingly open a door to all sorts of covetousness and meanness in the nation, and all sorts of trickery and cowardice in the government. Tell a man that his business has nothing to do with G.o.d, and you cannot wonder if he acts without thinking of G.o.d. If you tell a nation that it is selfishness which makes it prosperous, of course you must expect it to be selfish. If you tell us Englishmen that the duties of a citizen are not duties to G.o.d, but only duties to the constable and the tax-gatherer, what wonder if men believe you and become undutiful to G.o.d in their citizens.h.i.+p? No, my friends, once for all, as sure as G.o.d made Abraham a great nation, so if we English are a great nation, G.o.d has made us so--as sure as G.o.d gave Abraham the land of Canaan for his possession, so did HE give us this land of England, when He brought our Saxon forefathers out of the wild barren north, and drove out before them nations greater and mightier than they, and gave them great and goodly cities which they builded not, and wells digged which they digged not, farms and gardens which they planted not, that we too might fear the Lord our G.o.d, and serve Him, and swear by His name;--as sure as He commanded Abraham to respect the property of his neighbours, so has He commanded us;--as sure as G.o.d taught Abraham that the nation which was to grow from him owed a duty to G.o.d, and could be only strong by faith in G.o.d, so it is with us: we, English people, owe a duty to G.o.d, and are to deal among ourselves, and with foreign countries, by faith in G.o.d, and in the fear of G.o.d, "seeking first the kingdom of G.o.d and His righteousness," sure that then all other things--victory, health, commerce, art, and science--will be added to us, as the first Lesson says. For this is your wisdom and understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people! For what nation is grown so great, that hath statutes and judgments so righteous as these laws, this gospel, which G.o.d sets before us day by day?--us, Englishmen!

And I say that these are proper thoughts for this place. This is not a mere preaching-house, where you may learn every man to save his own soul; this is a far n.o.bler place; this building belongs to the National Church of England, and we wors.h.i.+p here, not merely as men, but as men of England, citizens of a Christian country, come here to learn not merely how to save ourselves, but how to help towards the saving of our families, our parish, and our nation; and therefore we must know what a country and a nation mean, and what is the meaning of that glorious and divine word, "a citizen;" that by learning what it is to be a citizen of England, we may go on to learn fully what it is to be a citizen of the kingdom of G.o.d.

For this is part of the whole counsel of G.o.d, which He reveals in His Holy Bible; and this also we must not, and dare not, shun declaring in these days.

SERMON XIII. ABRAHAM'S OBEDIENCE

HEBREWS, xi. 17-19.

"By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac; and he that had received the promises offered up his only-begotten son, of whom it was said, That in Isaac shall thy seed be called: accounting that G.o.d was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from whence also he received him in a figure."

In this chapter we come to the crowning point of Abraham's history, the highest step and perfection of his faith; beyond which it seems as if man's trust in G.o.d could no further go.

You know, most of you, doubtless, that Isaac, Abraham's son, was come to him out of the common course of nature--when he and his wife, Sarah, were of an age which seemed to make all chance of a family utterly hopeless. You remember how G.o.d promised Abraham that this boy should be born to him at a certain time, when He appeared to him on the plains of Mamre, in that most solemn and deep-meaning vision of which I spoke to you last Sunday. You remember, too, no doubt, most of you, how G.o.d had promised Abraham again and again, that in his seed, his children, all the nations of the earth should be blessed; so that all Abraham's hopes were wrapped up in this boy Isaac; he was his only son, whom he loved; he was the child of his old age, his glory and his joy; he was the child of G.o.d's promises.

Every time Abraham looked at him he felt that Isaac was a wonderful child: that G.o.d had a great work for him to do; that from that single boy a great nation was to spring, as many in mult.i.tude as the stars in the sky, or the sand on the sea-sh.o.r.e, for the great Almighty G.o.d had said it. And he knew, too, that from that boy, who was growing up by him in his tent, all the nations in the earth should be blessed: so that Isaac, his son, was to Abraham a daily sacrament, as I may say, a sign and a pledge that G.o.d was with him, and would be true to him; that as surely as G.o.d had wonderfully and beyond all hope given him that son, so wonderfully and beyond all hope He would fulfil all His other promises. Conceive, then, if you can, what Abraham's astonishment, and doubt, and terror, and misery, must have been at such a message as this from the very G.o.d who had given Isaac to him: "And it came to pa.s.s after these things that G.o.d did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am. And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of."