'--1 ''^rWHW-'-rWrn ■f 1 LIBE A^R Y Theo logical Seminary, PRINCETON, N. J. Gixe Shelf C,-vis,on.. J3 SZ^\8. . Sec.'ion _.:..: .. i Booh r.'o -4-:.-¥-.W» 'mi€m 4- -f^' ■ • THE RELATIONS OF THE KINGDOM TO THE WORLD. MUEEAT AND GIBB, EDINBTJBGH, PRINTERS TO HER MAJESTl'S STATIONEET OFFICE. THE RELATIONS OF THE KINGDOM TO THE WORLD. J. OSWALD DYKES, D.D. OvK IpuTu "va Upy,; avrous l» rov xoa-fiov, aXX 'noe, Tvpynrris avrovg ix Tou -TTor/tfou. — John xvii. 15. NEW YORK: ROBERT CARTER & BROTHERS. 187 4. PREFATORY NOTE. Deeply conscious of the imperfect success which has attended his attempt to open up that great Sermon which is the Lord^s own Manifesto of the Kingdom of God, the Author ventures, nevertheless, to offer this concluding pmiion to such readers as may have found any profit from the two preceding parts, on ' The Beatitudes,' and on *The Laws of the Kingdom.' INTRODUCTION, INTRODUCTION. THE main or central mass of our Lord's teaching intro- duction, in this Sermon has been already considered — by ns.^ It consists in a republication of Mosaic Matt. v. 17- law under its ' fulfilled ' form ; that is, with its literal precepts translated into spiritual principles of virtue, resumed under one comprehensive canon of godlike love, and animated by the supreme religious motive of regard for the approval of our heavenly Father. In laying down for His new kingdom such a ' fulfilled ' edition of Hebrew morals, Jesus could not escape a running polemic against those accepted teachers of His time who had done their best, not to fulfil, but to destroy, the ancient law of which they boasted to be the guardians, and were the recognised expositors. But the spiritual kingdom, whose foundations our Lord was here laying, though it grew out of the bosom of the Mosaic system, and, above all, drew from that system what had been its main glory — its ethical law — was yet destined to attain an in- 1 In a volume entitled, The Laws of the Kingdom. Nisbet & Co. 2d ed. 1873. 4 The Relations of the Kingdom. INTRO- dependent position, and to hold relations with a ' wider world than the little realm of Israel The Matt. vi. 19- last great section of the Sermon, therefore, on which we are now entering, contains a series of rules for christian life, which (though admitted to be less vigorously knit into a unity than what precedes) may be described as all bearing on the relations of the kingdom of God to the existing con- dition, not of Judaism only, but of every society on earth, — to the ' world,' as it is to be found at all times and in every land. From this point, therefore, the discourse shows less of its local and Hebrew colouring. It wears less the aspect of a rejoinder to the Eabbinical schools. It deals, not with Mosaic law or ritual, but with the great facts of catholic human life. How the christian disciple stands to this world as an object of desire or of possession ; what attitude he is to assume towards its sin, whether within or without the christian brotherhood ; by what means men may pass from the e\dl world outside into the little kingdom of the saved ; and how evil, which has stolen under disguise into the very kingdom of God, is to be detected : — such are the points with which this closing section is occupied. They all cluster round one central theme — the relations of the Kingdom to the world. Introduction. 5 Wherever men of very strong religious nature intro- have set themselves vigorously to the task of — gathering around them a select community of dis- ciples, who shall lead a purer and more pious life than is led by the bulk of mankind, there has been developed a strong tendency towards a literal and social segregation from common life. To sepa- rate from the sins of life without actually aban- doning to some extent its ties and duties, has never appeared possible, or at least sufficient ; and the crown of merit has therefore been in nearly every great religion reserved for those few ardent devotees whose zeal enables them to break with society. Vows of poverty or celibacy, re- treats, religious communities, and brotherhoods of every description, are only so many ways of accom- plishing that outward severance from the world, without which a spiritual deliverance from its temptations and impurities is despaired of ; and these have been the resource of the mistaken pious under every faith. In Buddhist monasteries, in the Fakirs of Brahminism and the Hadjis of the Moslem faith, not less than in Hebrew Essenes, Catholic convents, and Moravian settlements, we trace the widespread fruits of one profound con- viction of deep thinkers on religion, that to attain to the kingdom of God a man must needs go out The Relations of the Kingdom. INTRO- DUCTION. Of. 1 Cor. V. 9, 10, vii. 20, 31. John xvii. 15-18. of the world. It is one of the most striking peculiarities of the religion which rests on Holy Scripture, that, almost alone among the great faiths of history, it repudiates this maxim. Neither in its Hebrew nor in its Christian sacred books, do we find social separation proposed as an aid to piety. Moses framed his institutes for a common- wealth in which patriotism and religion became almost identified. Christ designed His Church to be a society standing aloof only in a spiritual sense from the world, while penetrating and in- habiting it. As little countenance as Essenism found in the Pentateuch, so little does coenobitic or celibate life, whether under Catholic or Pro- testant names, find in the Gospels. The king- dom of heaven, of which this Sermon is the earliest manifesto, was not to be of this world in its moral or spiritual temper ; but it certainly was to be, in the fullest possible sense, in this world ; ' ful- filling ' (here again), and not ' destroying,' those domestic, civil, and social moulds into which the original design of God meant human life to run. To such a society, its right relations to ordinary secular life become, it is obvious, of exceptional importance. Those relations must be mainly of two sorts. In the first instance, the world is a Introduction. 7' place to live in ; and the christian disciple, who intro- is not to abandon the possession of property, but — continues bound to provide the means of subsist- ence for himself and his family, finds himself at once face to face with a crowd of questions turning on the right or wrong acquisition, preservation, and employment of wealth. This is the large sub- Matt. vi. 19-34. ject handled by our Lord in the first paragraph of this section. In the next place, the world is a seat and source of moral evil. The heavenly vii. i-e. kingdom, if it exist in the presence of evil, must exist as a witness against it, striving to shame the evil, and win men from it ; and to do this wisely asks special prudence, Notwithstanding its wit- ness, the world will always number the vast majority of mankind ; and the effort of the few vii. 7-14. to attain for themselves super- worldly purity or nobleness must be proportionately severe. Be- sides, evil men and their evil influences cannot be vii. 15-23. wholly kept out of a society which is not to be locally separate ; and the danger of gradual deteri- oration or wholesale swamping of the little king- dom of good by such incursions from the great world of evil outside, is a danger which must be faced. On all these questions our Lord gives enduring instructions in the latter portion of this section. The links between its several minor 8 The Relations of the Kingdom. INTRO- paragraphs do not always lie on the surface; but - — ' the general drift of this third main division of the Sermon on the Mount seems to be hardly less obvious than that of the two earlier, which have already been considered in previous volumes. PART I. RELATIONS TO THE WORLD AS A POSSESSION. AGAINST COVETOUSNESS. 11 Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earthy where moth and rust doth corrupt^ and where thieves break through and steal; hut lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven^ where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt^ and where thieves do not break through nor steal: for where your treasure w, there will your heart be also. The light of the body is the eye : if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If there- fore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness! No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other ; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. — Matt. vi. 19-24 ; cf. Luke xii, 33, 34, xi. 34-36, xvi. 13. 12 AGAINST COVETOUSNESS. HOW a subject of the kingdom of heaven part i. ought to hold himself related to worldly first property, is the point determined for us by the King, in the paragraph which fills the remainder of this sixth chapter. Questions of detail are not discussed ; but the axe is laid to the root of two errors, lying on either hand of the christian dis- ciple. As, in the later-spoken parable of the Sower, cf. Matt, xiii those thorns which choke the seed in even the best leis. soil are described as of two species — the one ' the care of this world,' and the other ' the deceitful- ness of riches ;' so here, the lot of rich and poor is viewed as equally beset, though by an opposite peril On one side lies avarice, the idolatrous delight of the possessor in his possessions, and his strange craving to add to them. On the other, lies over-anxious fear for want, and the distrustful care about to-morrow. Opposed as they are, how- ever, and besetting opposite social classes, these two faults meet in this, that both alike obscure the spiritual sense for divine truth, and steal the Vers. 22-24. dominion of the soul from God. Both covetous- 13 14 Tlie Relations of the Kingdom. PAKT I. ness and anxiety make the inner eye evil, and set FIRST up a rival master over the will. Alike, therefore, and equally, they contradict the Christian's fun- damental relationship to his Father in heaven. Alike, and equally, they traverse the supreme 2 Cor. viii. 9 ; example of our Kincr, Who, when He was rich c. PMl. ii. 6, 7, , . -, ^ -,, -, . . Greek. euougu to DC Grod s equal, was so far from grasp- ing at that as His ' treasure,' that, for our sakes, He humbled Himself and became poor ; yet, in His day of poverty, had so little unworthy dread John iii. 35, of want, that He still knew how ' the Father had ' ^^* * given all things into His hands,' and was able to say : 'All Thine are Mine.' Neither of those social extremes, from which a wise old Hebrew Prov. XXX. 8, 9. prayed to be kept, will succeed in corrupting the simplicity of that man's piety, who not only hears the words, but also has imbibed the spirit, of Jesus Christ. Our Lord's first warning is against the over- prizing of earthly possessions. It is expressed Matt. vi. 19, with intentional largeness of language. 'Treasure not treasures for yourselves' is a phrase which need by no means be narrowed to money. It covers whatever men value most highly, and, be- cause they value it most highly, take most pains to increase, if it be capable of increase, or to pre- Greek. Against Covetoicsness. 15 FIRST WARNING. serve, if it stand in risk of loss. Nor need there be any reference intended to the intrinsic value of the thing ; for our human hearts have the most pathetic habit of clothing worthless objects with an ideal preciousness, and throwing away their love and care on that which is contemptible. A 'treasure' is simply each man's summum homim; his darling; that to which, be it noble or vile, he has elected to chncr as his best thincr, over which he hangs with doating pride, from which he tries to suck his chief delight, and for which, if you offer to rob him of it, he will do most desperate battle. Our Lord gives us the best insight into the wide meaning of His words, when He defines Ver. 21. a ' treasure ' as something which draws the heart after it. These words of the twenty-first verse, ' Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,' carry indeed some deeper lesson for us; but on the face of them, they do at least tell us what a ' treasure ' is ; and that no acquiring of posses- sions, nor amassing of them, will turn them into treasures, unless we consent to give them a too forward and large room within our affections. If we do, there is nothing so lofty or worthy of our love but Christ's words will smite it; just as there is nothing so sordid or paltry but men's love may over-prize it. • 1 6 The Relations of the Kingdom. PART I. There is, however, one species of possession FIRST on which people have agreed to bestow the ex- clusive name of ' riches ;' and our Lord's words about the rust and moth show of what sort of Cf. Ezra ii. 69 ; treasures He was most directly thinking. Such Neh. vii. 70 ; ^ ^ , ^ , . Job xxvii. 16 ; treasures as the moth can eat — those rich suits V. 2, 3. ' of superfluous apparel with which the opulent Oriental has always been accustomed to fill his wardrobe ; such treasures as rust can fret — all rare or costly ornaments, like metals of price and splendour; treasures which thieves can dig for to steal, like jars of hoarded coin buried in the earth or concealed within the household safe: these, in a land where banks are unknown, and landed property not always to be had, are the natural equivalents for our modern forms of wealth. It indicates how prevailingly the heart of man is set on property, whether in kind or currency, that this wide word ' treasure ' has come to be almost exclusively appropriated by that one class of precious things which are material and of the earth ; just as we call our perishable and marketable merchandise by the name of ' goods,' as if nothing else were so good as they. To most men, nothing so readily be- comes a treasure as money. Nothing wields so wide a fascination, or subjects so many human Covetousness. 17 FIRST WARNING. souls to an abject servitude, as money. In no parti. age has the pursuit of money been made the end of life by a larger number of civilised men, or professed by them to be the end of their life with more frank audacity, than in this age. The words of Jesus are therefore so far from obsolete, that, spoken though they were long ago, and by an Oriental to Orientals, no words could possibly be more in place when addressed to the christian business men of England at this very moment than these words : Lay not up for yourselves such treasures as these ; of all objects of human desire or delight, make not wealth your treasure; ' take heed and beware of covetousness.' Luke xii. 15. Christ's popular didactic style rejected all saving clauses ; yet it need hardly be said, that though His words stand unrestricted, 'Treasure no treasures,' He cannot mean to forbid or blame every kind of hoarding and saving ; such, for ex- ample, as that ' laying up ' by parents for their children which St. Paul commends as a duty. 2 Cor. xii. 14 Eeasonable thrift, or a certain measure of economy in living, which, without degenerating into parsi- mony, makes prudent provision against the future, is not permissible only, but dutiful. The im- provement of one's means with a view to secure more than competence, even opulence, in the B WARNING, 18 Tlie Relations of the Kingdom, PART I. hope of thereby attaining a wider power to serve FIRST God and benefit society ; this also is, to say the least, permissible. For some men it may even be a laudable ambition. Wliat is in every case forbidden, is such amassing of money, or endea- vours to amass it, as must engross affections which ought to be fixed on nobler and diviner objects ; such amassing as makes of money the ' treasure ' of the heart. Perhaps few persons, who have not looked with some keenness into character, have any suspicion how strong and general is the fascination which is exercised over average natures by the sense of property. To call anything for the first time one's own, is to awaken to a new power, and ex- perience a vivid delight ; as you may see by the clutch of almost infant fingers on the coin you give them. To feel that what one has can grow; that money well used will breed money ; that in the process of gaining, there is opened a path of delightful activity practically endless : this is for many young men in our day the first seductive and perilous discovery of their lives. The stimu- lant of money-making, with its exciting hazards and the zest which competition lends to it, may be- come first delicious, then intoxicating, and at length indispensable, just like any other stimulant. The Against Covetousness, 19 growth of tliis appetite is no less easy or insidi- aus, and it is far more unobserved and unrebuked by public opinion, than the appetite for drink or gaming. Our own generation has witnessed the spectacle of whole communities driven to frenzy for a time by a gold fever. There is no genera- tion but has seen individual cases of moral in- sanity induced from the same cause. Those cases in which the love of money for its own sake has come to eat up all other loves which at the first were mingled with it, such as love of speculation, love of display, love of the deference men pay the rich, or love of the luxuries money can procure ; till the poor hoarder hardens and shrivels into that meanest of human creatures, whose wretched- ness and despicableness are both stamped upon the very name of ' miser ' which we give him ; — such cases, I say, are, happily for human nature, always rare. But the sin of avarice — the sin of erecting property into a ' treasure ' of the heart — assumes countless shapes less repulsive than that. In truth, it seldom appears alone, and never appears so all at once. Characters of men are not such simple things that you can describe them in a word. This particular vice enters readily into combination with vanity, with ambi- tion, with luxury, with mere delight in successful FIRST WARNING. 20 The Relations of the Kingdom. PART I. activity. It hides itself, too, under the specious FIRST cloak of diligence in business, or of foresight, or of a desire to be generous and bountiful ; and in such disguise, it may too easily escape detection by the man himself, whose soul it is darkening and enslaving. Yet even as thus modified or disguised, it is in its essence what St. Paul twice Eph. V. 5 ; Col. calls it, an ' idolatry,' and in its issue a fertile vi.' 10, Greek. ' root of all cvils.' He who, in an age like the present — almost in any age — would keep his soul from this poison, and yet conduct with dili- gence and success the business of life, has need both to watch narrowly the state of his own heart, and to study the workings of the evil in the men around him. To speak the truth, money, in every one of its bearings, is a thing of peril. To desire 1 Tim. vi. 9, cf. to gain it, especially to gain it fast, is perilous : 22.^^* ' because the rising man of business, who has his fortune to make, and is in haste to make it, is on a road strewn thick with lies and roguery, with tricks, conspiracies, and speculations which exceed the bounds of prudence ; and it is hard indeed to devote the energies of body and soul, by day and night, to one end with such intensity as the making of a fortune does now ordinarily demand, without coming to attach an altogether unreason- able value to the gains which have cost so much. Against Covetousness. 21 How easily does a hard- won fortune become the part i. ' treasure ' of the winner's life ! To have made first money is nearly as perilous as to desire it The merchant who has spent life in acquiring, ends it commonly in spendiug ; but having forgotten to learn how to spend it well, he runs the risk of either falling into self-indulgent luxury, like that of Dives in the parable, or of wasting his sub- Lukexvi. I9ff. stance in vulgar display. Designing to purchase for himself the reputation of a man of means and elegance, he may in reality earn only the charac- ter of a purse-proud upstart. Nor is it much less perilous to inherit than to gain a fortune. The complacency of the proprietor who reposes on the winnings of a dead ancestor, his pride of family, his envy of older or richer houses, and his chuckle of quiet contempt for the ' self-made ' man, betray an idolatry to his patrimonial treasures as deep as any. Take it how you will, in fact, with what varieties of surrounding your knowledge of the world may suggest to you, wealth is everywhere the most insidious and fascinating and dangerous of all those things which steal away the souls of men to become their 'treasure' and their idol. It were better for any man who finds himself entangled in that mesh whose threads are of gold, to alienate his superfluous gains by one supreme 22 The Relations of the Kingdom. PART I. FIRST WARNING. act of sacrifice, cutting off for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake the ' right hand/ which has learnt to clutch too eagerly or hold too fast the treasures of the earth. Nor is this idolatry even a very wise or noble one among the idolatries of mankind. Sundry reasons against making money our treasure are enforced by our blessed Lord in this strong dis- suasive of His ; but the first and simplest is in- sinuated in the very words of the warning itself It is a poor sort of treasure which perishes so soon, and perishes so meanly too, as do our earthly gains. Money has no manner of divine- ness about it, either inherent or representative. The ancient Greek or modern Hindu, who has conceived a divinity of some sort to be imaged for him by the statue in the shrine, does a nobler thing when he bows before that semblance or remembrancer of what is the highest, wisest, and best he knows, — the sum, to his belief, of super- human and unchanging excellence, — than they do, who, in the commercial idolatry of England, sacri- fice their spiritual capacities, and what is divinest in their hearts, to money-making. For what is this same money ? Not by any one supposed to be at all divine, or to bear any manner of relation to any Power holier than myself ; no emblem to Against Covetousness, 23 us of Him Who is worthy of worship : but a very part i. poor and swift-perishing bit of earth ; one of the fiest - - , , , • • . J .-I WARNING, meanest of the creatures made to minister to the physical necessities of the least of us. At its best, it is a slave ordained to serve the transient wants of the body, and then, like the body which it serves, to die and pass : no more. The moth which eats into the silken tissues of the East and makes out of their brilliant folds only a fret- work of decay ; the thief who digs an entrance to the ill-guarded pot of gold through the Oriental's house of clay, are emblems of that inevitable inse- curity which attaches to all earthly property, and of that waste which must one day dissipate its preciousness. What we moderns invest in trade or in the funds, is as liable to ' make itself wings ' Prov. xxiiL 5. as the treasures of an eastern home. It was the nature of such material property as men stored up of old, to lose by flux of time ; and although in modern mercantile affairs one may object that it is, on the contrary, a quality of wealth to in- crease itself, still it can only be increased by being risked. The faster you desire to make it grow, the greater likelihood you run of losing it through chance of trade or fraud of men. Make nothing by your capital ; it wastes, slowly but surely, by mere expenditure, or at any rate, by depreciation 24 Tlie Relations of the Kingdom, PART I. in its relative value : make much by it, and you FIRST chance the loss of all. You can only avoid the WARNING. . . 1 . A. .1 rust by exposing it to the ' thiei. Above all, it is to be remembered that we are more perish- able than our goods. If we could remain, they would go. If they remain, at least we go. We Job xiii. 28. are such creatures as ' consume like a garment that is moth-eaten ;' and each of us could name one crowned and sceptred thief, who shall ere Cf. 2 Cor. V. 1. long dig through the clay walls of our mortal house, to rob us of our treasures in robbing us of our life. When death takes a man's breath away, it takes his purse as well; disinherits him of his lands ; unrobes him of earthly raiment ; and despatches him, lonely, naked, shivering, a poor despoiled ghost, into the unknown. In that day, when the head which presses a pillow of down and is laved by jewelled fingers, lies no easier in its death-sweat than any other ; in that day, when the gathered treasures of a whole lifetime are slip- ping through the unwilling grasp, to go to other hands that are no less greedy, and a land must be entered where gold and purple are words un- heard : then, surely, in the desolation of all earthly delight and the scattering for ever of earth's hoarded gain, shall these words return, like a too-late reproach in dying ears : ' Lay not up for Against Covetousness. 25 yourselves treasures upon earth, but lay up for part i. yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither first moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.' There is a better use, our Lord would have us understand, to be made of our wealth, than make a treasure of it. As He taught expressly in the parable of the Unjust Steward, so He probably Luke xvi. 1-12; desired to insinuate here, that money well spent 21 (words which occur in on earth for God and for His kingdom will be Luke's version .of our text : s. found at last to be weU-spent money indeed, xii. 33). Also 1 transmuted in the rewards of heaven into an im- perishable treasure. However this may be. He does at least set over against the precious things of this life another description of gains, the en- joyment of which is reserved for a life to come. It is not only by a conscientious and charitable administration of our income, but by every act of affectionate devotion to God and to His will, that we are to lay up for ourselves rewards against the heavenly state. That commendation by the Father Matt. vL 1, 4, in secret which our Lord has just been promising to every genuine worshipper, extends itself to all christian obedience and the whole service of a faithful life. ISTor is it to end in barren commen- dation, but to entail a rich, though as yet un- 2 6 The Relations of the Kingdom. PART I. known ' reward.' The sum of all siicli rewards FIRST of grace, laid up meanwhile in the just purposes WARNING. n ^ ^ i t i i i^ i i i 01 the heavenly Judge, shall be one day the ever- 1 Pet. i. 4. lasting possession, the incorruptible and unfading inheritance, of the sons of God. This is for man Luke xii. 21. the true riches — riches toward God ; and on such treasures Jesus would have His followers set their hearts. So to earn money as in the upright labour by which we earn it to please the Father ; so to save money as in the purpose and temper with which we save it to please the Father ; so to spend money as in the use to which we put it and the good we do by it, to please the Father ; but ever to keep it in its place as our servant and the Father's gift, a trust to be neither rejoiced in for its own sake nor squandered in its superfluity on vain personal delight, but diligently to be put to holy service in the honouring of Him and the com- forting of His children : this is the attitude our Master would plainly have us hold to this needful though perilous possession. This is to turn a base thing not only to honest, but even to noble use. This is to exchange earthly wealth for a heavenly treasure. It is only when a soul has become inflamed with a passion for those divine rewards which are as yet only promised, not tasted, and is up- Against Covetousness. 27 held by patient faith in such riches to come, that part i. it can afiford to spurn for the sake of God the fh^t . WARNING. seduction oi gold, lor men who are already rich, and have learned to pride themselves on their riches, it is so hard to enter the kingdom Mark x. 23-27. of God as to be the next thing to impossible. Even men like those whom Christ was addressing on the mount, who were as yet poor, and, while poor, had already entered that kingdom, were still in danger from a new-born lust to gain and to own a portion in this life. While He addressed them, He may have seen in the hearts of these peasants whom He had just made princes in the kingdom of the Messiah, a dawning of covetousness as well as of ambition — a hope stirring blindly within them, that to follow this King might prove to be the path to fortune not less than to honour. At any cost, such a seduction must be in chris- tian hearts withstood. During the course of His earnest dissuasive against laying up treasures on earth, He had insinuated one indirect argument in support of His prohibition, drawn from the perishableness of what is earthly. To any one who has so much as realized his own immortality, it must appear foolish, to say no more, and un- worthy of himself, to gather wealth which is cor- ruptible and transitory instead of such as shall 28 Tlie Relations of the Kingdom. PART I. last him for ever. But our Lord does not trust FIRST to the influence of this single consideration. The WARNING. . ^ 11- -i 1 1 T -1 11 passion lor gold wins its hold too easily and keeps it too tenaciously, even on christian hearts, to be subdued by an argument drawn from the remote, unworldly future. Therefore our Teacher pro- ceeds to adduce in quick succession no fewer than three additional and more express reasons against the amassing of earthly treasures ; reasons, every one of which is drawn from the damage which the treasuring of such treasures must inflict even now upon the spiritual life of a christian disciple. Our Lord is speaking to men who are already in His kingdom ; who not only look for the rewards of the Father in some better state after death, but who profess to care, more than for anything else, to have the Father's rule set up within them in this present life, to see God's face here below, to walk within His light, and to fill their hearts with His love. And He warns them, that to prize earthly gains for their own sake, or hunt after them and hoard them, is not only to forfeit the future rewards of heaven, but it is to drag the heart itself down from heaven to earth ; it is to cloud or distort the soul's vision of God ; it is to dethrone the Father, and become a vassal to a baser lord. That Jesus should have deemed it Against Covetousness. 29 wise to pursue this golden idol with so many- redoubled blows, proves how close and urgent was the danger of such idolatry even in the case of the apostles. The busy money-makers of this generation are at least no less exposed to such a danger than that handful of Galilean operatives can have been, who sat round a Galilean carpenter to hear these words ; and therefore it will be well worth our pains to look a little closely at those three evils to spiritual life which are here traced directly to the love, or even to the amassing, of money. PART I. FIRST WARNING. 1. I say, ' even to the amassing of money ;' for, Ver. 21. by His first objection to earthly treasures, I un- derstand our Lord to mean that the very heap- ing up of worldly wealth draws men to love it. > ' Where thy treasure is,' He says, ' there will thy heart be also.' ^ It is true that, in the pregnant ethical sense in which our Lord chiefly intends the word, a thing does not become a man's trea- See above, p 15 sure, no matter how much he may have of it, until it has drawn his heart to itself. At the same time, the word ' treasure ' only receives this pregnant ethical signification in the second place. ^ The best critical editions read (tou ; not vf^uv, as in Luke xii. 34. 3 The Relations of the Kingdom. PART I. It primarily means anything laid up or amassed ; FIRST any superfluous possession, stored for delight or for the future, rather than for immediate use. Now there is an important moral fact shadowed forth by this deepening of the word's signification. What one treasures, in the primary sense, tends to become his treasure in the deeper sense. It draws his heart after it. Every possession which a man likes to have without using it, and lays past for the pride of having it, and strives con- tinually to increase, may be a harmless enough treasure at first, so long as his interest in it re- mains quite subordinate ; but its tendency is more and more to draw him into itself, to engage his interest more deeply, and become more precious in his eyes. Of course, this proneness to doat upon any possession is strengthened by the pains we take to add to it, or the sacrifices we must incur in order to preserve it. The fortune which a busy man toils late and early to augment, and for the sake of which his head has been blanched with anxiety ; or the estate which is purchased at the expense of what ought to have been patri- mony to his younger children, only that he may feel the pride of proprietorship: these possessions have acquired a fictitious dearness through the heavy price which they have cost. But this is Against Covetousness. 31 not all. The mere laying up and keeping by us of anything which is superfluous, whether it cost much or not, whether we are adding to its costli- ness or not, has a certain quality of seductiveness about it, provided only we cherish either joy or pride in the possession of it. There is nothing wrong, then, in the joyful or proud possession of what is rare or lovely or for any reason precious ? No, not of necessity, by any means. But there must always be danger at least in the amassing of such property ; danger that the joy of posses- sion will come to intoxicate and seduce the heart. Only to have a very great deal of any precious thing ; to make a store of it, and be proud of it ; still more, to consult much how to secure it, or toil much to add to it; whether the treasure be so noble as influence or knowledge, or so petty, as a drawerful of curiosities, or so common as a little wealth: this is to run the risk of having the heart narrowed by degrees, and lowered to that region of life where the treasure lies. Against such a danger the Christian must be continually on his guard. It is taken for granted, what no Christian will question, that his supreme love, pride, joy, desire — in one word, his 'heart ' — is due to Him Who is above, and to those things of His which are above ; to God, and the pleasing of FIRST WARNING. 3 2 The Relations of the Kingdom. PAUT I. God, and the fulfilment of the will, and the in- FiRST crease of the honour, of God. What St. Paul in cf Col iii 2 • ^^^ companion letters to Colosse and Philippi has PhU. iii. 20. expressly insisted on, is here by St. Paul's Master still more strikingly assumed. The heart of a disciple of Christ will come to be with his trea- sures on the earth, if he once suffer himself to lay up for himself any such treasures ; and that, you feel that the Master feels, is a self-refuting and pre- posterous issue to a disciple's earthly treasuring. It belongs to the very idea of a Christian, that what he sets his heart on cannot be here at all, Cf. Eph. ii. 6. but must be above in the heavenly places, among the incorruptibles. There is no need in his case for any Sursum corda ! His heart is on high. But there is need still for the warning : Treasure no treasures below ; for earthly treasures drag down heavenly hearts. 'Where thy treasure is, there will thy heart be also.' The next two reasons for abstaining from stor- ing earth's precious things are expressed under a metaphorical dress ; and although in both cases the explanation of the metaphor is appended, yet the abruptness with which these sentences are introduced, and their apparent remoteness at first sight from the train of thought hitherto followed, Against Covetousness. 33 have occasioned some difficulty in determining the inner connection of the passage. Let it be kept in view, that the Preacher's design is to dis- suade His followers from amassing wealth, by tracing its evil effects on the spiritual life. Its first natural effect we have seen to be the down- dragging of the heart from its celestial object to settle around its earthly gains. Now, the central ideas in the next two sentences are, first the darkening, and then the enslavement, of the soul. But it needs no acuteness to perceive that these two are the most obvious of all consequences from such a degradation of the affections as He has just spoken of. Only let the heart be kept down to the earthl}^ sphere through those treasures which a man has laid up for himself, so that his chief interest is no longer in God, but in his gold ; and it must follow, (1) that his spiritual vision for divine truth will become obscured, and (2) that gold will take the place of God as the real master of the man's practical life. In other words, the displacement of God from the seat of the affections acts injuriously, both on the faculty of spiritual insight, and on the loyalty of the wiU to duty. FIRST WARNING. 2. The amassing of money, then, has led to the Vers. 22, 23. love of money ; and the first thing which the love c 34 The Relations of tJie Kingdom. PART I. of money does is to put out the eye of the soul. FIRST For the spiritual nature, as our Lord everywhere taught, has its own faculty of vision, just as the See Joiin i. 9, body has. What the sun does for the enlighten- xii.''^5,'36,"46; ment of our physical life, so that we can recog- v!^5; Eph.?.^' nise the objects by which we are surrounded in 4^ ;^i^Johir'i. this world and order our movements with regard 5-7, u. 8-11. ^^ them, God, revealing Himself to us in His Son Jesus, does for the moral and religious life of men. By the truth which shines in the face of Him Who is ' the Light of the world,' each one who will may always realize divine facts and things, which are none the less real for being immaterial, and may walk no longer, as a spiritual being, in the dark, but in the light. Only the condition of such spiritual illumination, as of physical, is, that the organ by which we see God be kept healthy. Faith is the spiritual equivalent of vision ; and See Matt. v. 8. it is the pure heart alone which so believes as to see God. In other words, this faculty of spiritual insight, or receptivity of the soul for moral and religious truth, depends upon the simplicity or integrity of the man's spiritual nature, that is to say, upon the whole-heartedness with which he loves and desires God. To love God is to be able to see His light ; to let one's love fall upon a base earthly treasure, is to hurt the most sensitive and Against Covetousness. 35 necessary of our spiritual faculties ; it is to trouble part i. the eye of the soul, to confuse its vision of divine first things as they are, and in the end to destroy the action of that ' faith ' which is ' the evidence/ the realizing perception, of things unseen. Heb. xi. i, Our Lord's parable becomes now, by the help of His use of similar imagery elsewhere, very clear indeed. ' The eye,' He says, ' is the lamp of the o xy;^,6f,ver 22. body ;' not the ultimate source of its light, but its centre of enlightenment ; a kind of miniature and second-hand luminary, or light-bringer, to all the rest of our physical organs, without which, as in blind people, all the bodily life is darkened, like a house by night without a candle. The condition of enlightenment is the soundness of this little tender organ : if it be ' right,' or in a iTXej;?. normal state, the whole body is, as it were, lit up ; whereas if it be ' bad,' in a diseased condition, it T«r/i«k. matters not what sunshine may flood the earth, your body will be all darkened, like a house with- out a window. Now, then, comes the application of the parable. ' In thee,' says Jesus to His christian disciple, there is also ' light,' through the organ « ?*?. of spiritual vision, whose powder depends upon its moral soundness, singleness, and simplicity. By it, when in spiritual health, thou canst see God, and in His light canst see all things clearly. cf.Ps xxxvi 9. WARNING. 36 The Relations of the Kingdom. Then the naturally dark appetencies and passions FIRST of thy lower nature are illuminated, and guided to their proper service, along their bounded paths ; and all the inner life is made orderly, conscious, bright, and healthful. But if even this divine light that is in thee be turned again to darkness, through the disordering of that spiritual organ, how great, alas! shall be the darkness of 'the dark' itself ; of that lower animal nature, whose blind appetites are no longer ruled by the insight which was wont to guide, or checked by the illumination which was wont to shame them ! Our Lord has not said here^ that it is the de- gradation of a Christian's affection to earthly pro- perty which, by destroying the singleness, impairs the sensitiveness of his spiritual vision ; and per- haps He has only not said so, because it does not really matter what idol divides our affections with the things above. ^N'o divided or impure heart whatever can clearly and steadily see the light of God. But we do not need to be told what a darkening influence is exercised over christian men by the love of money in particular. We are unhappily too familiar with its ravages in the modern church : with disciples, genuine enough, zealous sometimes to a fault, and loud in their profession of Christianity, who nevertheless be- Against Covetousness. 37 PART I. FIRST WARNING. tray, "by the stationariness of their moral charac- ter, or by their unconscious perseverance in faulty habits which every one notices but themselves, or by overlooking very obvious duties lying in their path, that they cannot be walking open-eyed in the light of God. Christians who throughout the greater part of life remain unchastened, un- gentle, unmellowed, hardly distinguishable from the utter worldling by reason of their petty, grasp- ing, saving ways, are frequent enough everywhere. Were the cause of such blear-eyed religion to be faithfully inquired after, or could it be plainly told, how often would it prove to be just this — that the real desire of their heart is not bent with single-minded longing upon the attainment of God's approval or of His celestial rewards, but has be- come diverted to an excessive degree on temporal objects, chained down to earth and made earthy by the over-eager pursuit of success, or by an over- warm delight in such perishable gains as they have been able to win for themselves in the scramble of business ! With such Christians a reverse process has been going on from that which happened to the converts of Ephesus. The eyes Eph. i. 18, of those hearts at Ephesus were enlightened, so rected text, that they saw the riches of God's own inheritance — the celestial wealth destined for children of 38 FIRST WARNING. The Relations of the Kingdom. God in the everlasting kingdom of their Father. But we suffer the dazzle of corruptible gold to fall across our vision, and draw after it the worship of the heart ; then our eyes which were full of heaven's own light grow dim again, the celestial glory fades away, the shining crown suspended over christian heads has leave to hang there un- seen, and we toil on to rake together in the dark what is but dust after all, though it be the dust of gold.^ 3. There is a more disastrous fate still in store for the disciple who falls under the fascination of gain. Loss of sight, or a gradual obscuring of that eye of the heart which looks upward and sees God, is accompanied, on the practical side of life, by captivity of the will. The image here used by our Lord is transparent enough ; and yet the force of His language has been a good deal lost in translation, through that happy change which since He spoke has lightened the condi- 1 * The Interpreter takes them apart again, and has them first into a room where was a man that could look no way but down- wards, with a muck-rake in his hand : there stood also One over his head with a celestial crown in His hand, and proffered him that crown for his muck-rake ; but the man did neither look up nor regard, but did rake to himseK the straws, the small sticks, and the dust of the floor.' — Pilgrim's Progress, Part II. Against Covetousness. 39 tions of servitude, and made all words to describe the obedience of man to man less grievous to the ear. We are so far removed from every associa- tion with slavery, that when we read, ' No man can serve two masters,' we think only of such voluntary service as one free-born Englishman may contract to pay another. The language carries a vastly harsher sense. The service of which Jesus spoke, and which His hearers under- stood Him to mean, was the utter subjection of a bond-slave to the mere will — the almost un- checked caprice — of a slave-lord. This impossi- bility which He so sharply emphasizes, is that which any domestic^ slave would encounter who should endeavour to hold himself at the beck of two different lords, each at the head of a separate and independent household. That the two lords are assumed to have contrasted jurisdictions, and to issue contrary orders, is obvious. In fact, if the orders of both coincided, there would in reality be only one lordship, one rule. Let it be noticed, however, that this alleged impossibility of execut- ing the will of two contrary masters is not made to depend on the physical obstacle, that a slave cannot be in two households or do two diverse PART I. FIRST WARNING. 1 Cf. oixirns in tlie parallel passage in Lnke (xvi. 13) under a different connection. 40 The Belations of the Kingdom. PART I. FIRST WARNING. tHngs at the same moment. Sucli a physical obstacle might scarcely hold in the spiritual ser- vice of the Christian's will. There is a deeper moral obstacle on which Jesus fastens our atten- tion. Man's moral service does not rest, like a slave's, on compulsion, but on choice. It is de- termined by the likings of the man. And where two rival moral masters are issuing contrary be- hests, it is simply out of the question that his own inclination should fall in with the will of both. He must either like what A prescribes, and in that event he will hate B for prescribing the opposite ; or else, on the other hand, if he cleave by preference to the orders of B, he must practi- cally despise or set aside the authority of A.^ Thus, then, the case stands with a christian disciple who is falling under the sway of covet- ousness. He must in the end renounce entirely the service of God, and become in soul and will the very bond-slave of money. By choosing here an unusual Chaldee word for wealth, Jesus has marked a little more firmly His personification of all worldly property as wielding a power over men antagonistic to the authority of God Him- ^ I have taken the liberty of following (with Alford, in loc. ) Meyer's ingenious and simple way of representing the dual alter- native of V. 24 by letters. See his Commentary. WARNING. Against Covetousness. 41 self. But so bold a personification can mislead no one. That money is a hard master has been first the testimony of multitudes, who, after slaving all their days to get it, cursed it at last in the bitter- ness of death for a worthless cheat. But money has no mastership save over him who loves it. It sways men by their hearts. It comes at last, if you will let it, not simply to divide your alle- giance with God Himself, but to detach you from God's household altogether, and reduce you to a slavery which degrades you. Such abject slavery to gold, however, is the miserable issue of a down- ward progress. It began when the man began Ver. 19. to heap up for himself treasures upon earth. It laid the foundation of its power, when it seduced ^er. 21. the man's heart, and drew down his love from heaven to earth. It has detached him from its heavenly rival and secured him for its own, by putting out his eyes that he should no longer see Ver. 22. the better wealth of eternity. And now, it alone fiUs his narrowed vision ; it alone is loved by his earthly heart ; and because gold he will have, and gold he takes joy in, therefore is he become a willing servant to his own covetousness, a wor- shipper and a slave of mammon. Let no one ask how that can be called bondage which a man does because he likes to do it. For 42 The Relations of the Kingdom. FIRST WARNING. Lovelace : From Pinson. it is precisely here, in the fettering of any one's heart to a base or insufficient thing, in the subju- gation of his higher nobler self, his reason, his conscience, and his love, to something which was made to be his servant, not his master, that moral slavery, the only slavery which reaches or de- grades the man himself, must be sought for. * Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cacre : ' as little can the manacle on the wrist or the lash on the shoulder make a slave. But when a man's own pride sways him against his reason, or lust proves stronger than temperate resolution, or the foolish longing to be soon rich drags a soul after Cf. 1 Tim. vi. 9. it to perdition, in defiance of wisdom and of piety ; then it is the very man himself who is yoked to the car of his own vices, and taken captive in a most base, because a willing captivity. ' Every one that doeth sin is a slave of the sin.' And the test of such slavery lies in this, that he is no longer able to do the will of God. Against the structure of their own moral nature, people are continually flattering themselves that it is pos- sible to live in a divided allegiance. It is possible, to be sure, that for a moment of indecision, while two opposite impulses stand in conflict, a man may hover betwixt the two. But no man can John viii. 31, Greek. Against Covetousness. 43 live so. His own choice decides his service. He part i. gives himself to the work which he likes best. first TT • T ' If WARNINI He cannot do that, and also give himseli to oppo- site work which he likes less. Still less can he continue to do that, and yet retain the power of giving himself to its opposite. It is not the will only, but the whole nature of a man, from the heart outwards, which gets so wedded to the service to which he has once devoted his strength, that it comes to be in the long-run a thing inconceivable by him, and utterly unattainable, that he should transfer to any novel master the settled labour of his life. This is the abyss to w^hich Jesus points His followers, that they may shun the beginnings of the incline. In this world His kingdom must be ; and by the gains of this world His servants must live ; and the hand of diligent Christians Prov. x. 4. wiU make rich. But in such incessant contact with wealth and acquisition of it, the eye of our King foresaw an incessant peril. How serious that peril proved to be to the Church after she outgrew persecution, and began to suck the wealth of kingdoms, may be read in a whole millennium of Western Church history. How great it has always proved to the individual Christian, may 44 The Relations of the Kingdom. PART I. be seen on every hand of us at this hour. There FIRST is no safeguard but to follow with fearful and averted faces the warning of our King : ' Lay- not up for yourselves treasures upon earth.' All needless superfluous storing — storing for vanity, not for prudence, for delight, not for use — is pregnant with spiritual danger. Scatter your Luke xvi. 9. treasures rather ; buy heavenly friends with earthly mammon ; sell and give alms ; for though the little heap may be but small, experience warns us that it can steal the heart. And when a heart which ought to have its eye on God, its home above, its wealth in eternity, has been allured to settle on its heap of gold, alas for the bhnding of the eyes and the enslaving of the will ! How great is that darkness ! How hopeless that cap- tivity ! AGAINST ANXIETY. 46 Therefore 1 say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink : nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns ; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? Which of you, by taking thought, can add one cubit to his stature ? And why take ye thought for raiment ? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow ; they toil not, neither do they spin : and yet I say unto you. That even Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the f eld, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall He not much more clothe you, ye of little faith ? Therefore take no thought, saying, ' What shall we eat f or, ' What shall we drink f or, ' Wherewithal shall we be clothed f For after all these things do the Gentiles seek: for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness ; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof — Matt. vi. 25-34 ; cf. Luke xii. 22-32. 46 WAEyi>'G. AGAINST ANXIETY. COYETOUSNESS is the temptation which lies pa_et i. nearest to persons whose worldly fortune second is sufficient for their need, and beHeved to be safe or assured ; anxiety, that which besets all those whose means are either uncertain or insufficient. This division does not exactly coincide either with that between wealth and poverty, as we commonly use these terms, or with the distinc- tion between a narrow and an easy income : for in the humbler classes of society, a man in good health may be sufficiently raised above fear of want to stand in gjreater dancrer of makinc; even o o o his slender gains a treasure, than of any anxiety about his future ; whereas there are plenty of opulent business men whose capital, ample as it is, is exposed to such incessant hazard through the speculations of trade, that so far from resting in the joy of possession, they live unhappy days through the apprehension of loss. To be raised above this new foe — anxiety — one's income must in the first place be at least adequate to meet 47 48 The Relations of the Kingdom. PART I. SECOND WARNING. Atra cur a: Horace. without strain that expenditure, be it great or little, which has become necessary to one's happi- ness ; and in the next place, there must be a fair prospect that it will continue to meet it. It does not depend on the amount a man has, but on the proportion between what he has and what he desires to spend, together with the security with which he believes he may count upon a similar proportion in the future. When, therefore, we have discounted all persons in any position of life who are reasonably assured of continuing to have enough for their requirements, we shall find that we have set aside only the fortunate and envied few, and that we have still to reckon with the vast bulk of mankind, rich or poor, on whom sits a dismal comrade, a black shadow, whose name is Care. It is true indeed that covetousness itself, even before it has reached its full limit and become the confirmed moral disease which we term avarice, is a prolific mother of cares. Wealth has its anxieties as well as poverty; and the cares of the wealthy are far less excusable than those of the poor. There even comes a point in the growth of a soul's bondage to money at which its delight in what it possesses becomes feebler than the torturing fear of losing it; and then Against Anxiety. 49 PART I. SECOND WARNING. ensues the shocking spectacle, so often pictured by the moralist and the literary artist, of a human being consumed with the incessant alarms and the sordid anxieties of penury in the very midst of unused money-bags. But this appears to me to be only a vivid, because an extreme, illustration of the profound spiritual afiinity which subsists be- twixt these two sore abuses of worldly substance. Though contrasted in their surface manifestations and besetting opposite social classes, these two — idolatrous delight in possession, and faitliless fear for want — are yet at bottom kindred vices. Trace them to their root ; and you find that they spring from the same religious apostasy, — a preference of the earthly before the spiritual, of what this life can give before the rewards of our heavenly Father. Indeed, I take it to be a note, pointing us to this inner kinship betwixt the two, when our Lord passes from the first of them to the second with the word ' Therefore.'-^ Because the Si^i «:Ta, ver. 25. diversion of one's supreme affection from celestial and future rewards to settle on the treasures of earth, leads to such disastrous spiritual results as blindness to the divine and slavery to mammon, cf. vers. 21-21 1 The parallel passage in St. Luke (xii. 22-32) actually occurs in connection with a warning, not against anxiety, but against ' covetousness. ' Cf. ver. 15 of that chapter. D 50 The delations of the Kingdom. PART I. SECOND WARNING. ' therefore ' avoid it in every shape ; not only in that shape of covetous idolatry which leads men to amass wealth and delight themselves in its possession, but not less also in that still more frequent shape of carking care which frets one's days by a disquieting apprehension of want. For this, too, is a sort of bondage to money ; this, too, shows that the eye for divine things has been darkened ; this, not less than the other, springs from, and in its turn confirms, the degradation of the heart to rest upon treasures that are perishable. The whole force, then, of such considerations as Jesus has already urged in support of His first admonition to ' treasure no treasures,' is transferred by this connecting word 'therefore,' to enforce His second admonition as well : ' Take no anxious thought.' At the same time, every one must be struck by the different tone which marks His address to the anxious-minded. What He says to them, indeed, is not less urgent, or insistant, than what has been said to the covet- ous ; yet it is mixed with a certain unmistake- able gentleness, and passes almost insensibly from expostulation into words of comfort. To the rich, who prided themselves on riches and were greedy for more, Jesus spoke with a severity which, in Against Anxiety. 51 WARNING. its hard exposure of gold's darkening and enslav- part i. ing influence, bordered upon threatening. To the poor who toil for to-day's bread, and are fearful of to-morrow's hunger, He speaks with a kindli- ness which does not border upon promising, but abounds in it. He bids them be confident ; He reasons down their fears ; He cheers them by the liberal bounty of Providence to flower and bird ; He repeats expostulations with a sweet persua- siveness ; He does everything to encourage them to a more generous confidence in their heavenly Father. There is good reason for this. Such slavery to the perishing gains of earth as grows out of one's treasured abundance is a vice of the lofty, the idle, the prosperous, and the pampered classes. It is a ' superfluity of naughtiness.' It Jr^s. i. 21. is bred of the misdirected pride and misused de- lights of mankind. It deserves little sympathy, and needs no encouragement. Whereas such care as comes to knit the forehead of earth's hard-pressed toilers and darken all their hours with fear of want, is born of the feebleness and joylessness of our curse. It is the portion of the lowly, the unfortunate, and the poor. It argues infirmity, not pride, in us ; and is best cured by the sympathy of a Son Who became poor, and the encouragements of a Father Who cares for His 52 The Relations of the Kingdom. PAUT T. SECOND WARNING. little ones. It was quite in tlie temper of the older prophets of His people, that Jesus of Nazareth thus changed His tone to mildness when He turned from the covetous rich to the careworn poor : and we may be sure that, in this as in all things, He faithfully reflected the mind of the Father above. But from His lips such a change of tone wore a special propriety. Mary's Son was a poor man from the day of His birth to the day of His death. The eldest-born of an artisan's widow, early experience had made Him familiar with the narrow resources of poor people and their shifty economy, often on the brink of straitness whenever disease comes to cripple the working hand, or fear of death is made bitterer by the fear of penury. Since He abandoned Nazareth for an itinerant life, He had already begun to taste the trials of a still more hand-to-mouth dependence upon Heaven for daily bread, and the emergencies of one who subsists upon the chance offerings of friendship, and knows not sometimes where to lay his head. Granting that the glitter of Judea's crown was cast once S; Jo nvi. . ^^ twice across His path with sufficient clearness to make Him understand what fascination an earthly treasure may have for the few ; still it was out of a more habitual fellow-feeling He Cf. Luke viii. 3, ix. 58. Matt. Against Anxiety. 53 could turn to the hard-worked and ill-paid thou- sands of His countrymen, and bid them trust their heavenly Father for daily food. He surely knows to this hour how bitter a trial it is for any honest labouring man, to see his small savings wear done while the hands which ought to be toiling lie white and wasting on the coverlid ; to watch the decent raiment of wife and little ones turn tattered with no hope of new, and the tiny face that was pale before grow punier and more pale day by day ; to miss one little article after another from the room, and say nothing, but let the hidden dread of destitution gnaw the sick heart with silent misery. When He bids such a man trust God, He surely means no mockery, but effectual help. Jesus of lN"azareth was and is the poor man's best friend ; nor have any words been ever spoken on this earth better suited to the lot of the toiling masses, or so brimful of real, wise, effectual sustaining strength for faint-hearted humanity in its mean and e very-day necessities, as these blessed words of Jesus. SECOND WARNING. Let us first try to fix what that fault precisely is, which Jesus has here chidden with such gentle urgency. Everything will depend on the sense which we affix to one word only ; for although 54 TJie Belations of the Kingdom. PART I. our Lord has repeated His exhortation no fewer SECOND than three times, He has adhered in every in- stance to the use of the same verb. The render- /LC£g est ita curare ut sollicitus sis ne res defutura sit in tempore. Tittmann, de Synonymis, p. 137. 5 6 Tlie Relations of the Kingdom. PART I. to think out, and his hand steady enough to work SECOND through, whatever it lies in his power, guided by WARNING. „ • 1 J 1 1 1 111 • 1 . 1 loresight, to do ; he has reached the point at which his own duty ends, and the unknown dispensa- tions of Providence enter. At that point reason and piety alike enjoin that solicitude should be arrested, and that trust should take its place. Eeason condemns further solicitude regarding that which no thoughtfulness or care of ours can affect, as useless ; piety rebukes it as distrustful. The reward which is to crown human industry or fore- thought is to be of God's bestowing ; the inci- dence upon individual history of those numberless events which men call accidental, because they cannot forecast them, must lie in God's hand ; the region of the future, like that of the unknown, is His ; and the office of an intelligent faith is humbly to wait on Him for the fruits of past labour and the falling out of our lot. It is distrust of God, therefore, which lies at the root of unlawful anxiety. A feeble appre- hension of God, as the Agent Who overrules everything, and determines those causes which lie outside of our reach and those events wliich escape our foresight ; this it is which shakes the soul with vague uncertainty, and fills with cause- less alarms the darkness of to-morrow. The doubt Against Anxiety. 57 whether God, Who counts for so much in the con- part i. tincrencies of life, be One Whose attitude to us second . . WARNING. may be wholly trusted, or the suspicion that we may have really as much to dread as to hope for from His superintendence ; this it is which can- not but unsettle a man's stedfast outlook into the coming days, and toss his spirit to and fro in the restlessness of distraction. Because we are ' of little faith,' therefore are we not content to plan Yer. 30. and work, and having planned and wrought, to sit and wait ; but must fidget ourselves about that which may be, until impatience gnaws us like a worm, and our imagination, picturing disasters in the dark, burns us like fire. Why is it that popular proverbs attest how much worse are fancied ills than real ones, and how the evils which we most dread never overtake us ; but just because this distrustful human heart of ours is so prone to prophesy, and so lively to exaggerate, misfortune ? Like a soothing, cooling breath from a serener world, there comes down upon the feverish, self-tormenting spirits of men this word of One Who was the messenger of Him Whom we distrust : ' Be not anxious about your life : be not anxious about to-morrow ! ' Distrustful anxiety, in the sense now ex- plained, is far from being confined to any single 58 The Relations of the Kingdom. PART I. set of human circumstances. Just as the human SECOND heart may make a treasure to itself of any precious thing as well as oi money, so men may indulge a sinful solicitude respecting any other appre- hended calamity as well as destitution. Again, therefore, the spirit of our Lord's w^ords goes far beyond their immediate and literal scope'. A timid or desponding nature is constitutionally prone to expect the worst ; it peoples to-morrow with its fears, and lives under the shadow of what may never be ; while just in proportion as our love' has learned to prize and live upon any treasured possession, will its instinct be quick to divine the approach of that which threatens to rob us of it. What is so jealous of loss as love ? or seems to itself to stand more continually in jeopardy ? But just as, in the preceding half of this paragraph, superfluous riches stood for all such objects of delight rather than of need as men are ready to store up for their pride ; so here the simplest provision for bodily wants is put for whatever men conceive to be indispensable to life, — that is to say, for whatever ministers, not to superfluous delight, but to absolute necessity. The ' life ' for which Jesus entreats us to take no anxious thought, is that life whose primary requirements are food and raiment ; not as if the most elementary con- Against Anxiety. 59 ception of our physical and social existence in a part i. civilised state did not include a multitude of second , . -, -,•/>. •. • T WAENING. other desiderata, nearly, it not quite, as indispens- able as even these ; but only because in these you have the earliest and typical examples of what earth must yield to man, if his life on earth is to be maintained. With that large class of our fellow-creatures to whom life has become in the strictest sense a struggle for the means of sub- sistence, the questions which before every other press for instant reply are just such questions as Jesus has here put into the mouth of the anxious : * What shall we eat ? what shall we drink ? where- Cf. /*£?/A/.*««f withal shall we be clothed ? ' And however far Luke xxi. 34. we may be placed above the risk of literal star- vation, we shall hardly be able to excuse our excessive apprehensions for the future, unless we can plead that the things we fear to be deprived of deserve to be ranked by us in the same im- perative category with meat and drink and rai- ment. It is true that there are other necessities which do deserve to be ranked with these — ne- cessities not all of them of a material kind. Even as an earthly creature, ' man doth not live by Deut. viii 3, bread only.' The deeper hunger of the intellect iv. 4. for knowledge may crave as imperiously as the ^-f; ^^^^ ^^• bodily appetite. Strip a human soul of all re- WARNING. 6 Tlie BelaMons of the Kingdom. spectful or compassionate fellowship from his SECOND fellows, and you leave him to the stony loveless stare of society and the inclemencies of fortune, in a nakedness more to be pitied than that of the body. To be threatened with such loss as that s literally to be in anxiety for one's life, even though bread and water may not fail. But surely it were quite enough to put to shame the myriad ignoble and paltry anxieties with which our easy lives are daily vexed, to ask : Are these, then, matters of so great moment to our ' life,' that to want them, though we should want them for ever, would be to us like the extremity of hunger or the shame of nakedness ? Our Lord has been careful to enforce His warning against anxiety about the means of living by a variety of arguments, partly ad- dressed to reason and partly to piety : drawn, too, in part from the lessons of nature, and in part from the Kingdom of Heaven. The whole pas- sage thus becomes a precious specimen of the harmony which unites the teachings of God in His natural creation with those of His christian revelation; a specimen the more precious, that it comes from His lips Who is the Author of both. This speaker Who finds in God's natural provi- Against Anxiety. 61 dence the same lesson which Christians have more part r. plainly learnt through the revelation of our second Father s grace, is that very Word, or expression of the Godhead, by Whom in the beoinnino^ all Joim i. 1-3 ; XT v., ' O O things were made, and by Whom also in the end of the world we have been given to know the Father. Of nature He speaks as its Framer ; of the gospel as its Eevealer : and the one mighty lesson — cure for all sordid cares — in which He finds the voices of nature and revelation to unite, is that God's providence on man's behalf is abso- lutely to be trusted. In nature it is God as our Maker Whom we come to know, and what as our Maker He may be expected to do for such crea- tures as we are. In the gospel kingdom, we find God to be more than Maker, a Father in heaven ; and receive a measure by which to esti- mate how much as a Father He is likely to do for His children. But the two discoveries coin- cide. The Framer of nature is 'a faithful Creator,' cf. i Pet. iv. into Whose hands His human creatures may safely hartiiTdoubre ' commit the keeping of their lives ' in well-doing. or^'Tives.'^^^ ^ The Eevealer of the gospel is a tender Father, Who, not having 'spared His Son' for us, ' wiU with Him also freely give us all things.' The Eom. viii. 32. meeting-point of the two teachings lies in the personal trustworthiness of God as the provider 6 2 The Relations of the Kingdom. PART I. for man's life. As the cure for covetousness was SECOND found in an eager and satisfying delight in God WARNING. _ - T T -,. as the present treasure of our souls, leading to a hopeful anticipation of His rewards in the remoter and eternal future ; so the cure for anxiety is found in a childlike confidence upon God as the author and maintainer of our life, leading to a most restful expectation that He will provide for us in the near and earthly to-morrow. We have er. 30. seen that the parent of all culpable anxiety about the future is named ' Little-faith.' It is eminently a heathenish sin, of which christian people ought er. 32. to be ashamed ; although even the heathen might learn enough from the fowls of the air and the flowers of the field to save them from seeking after their daily bread under the burden of a painful fear lest they should never find it, as though they had been sent into this world like uncared-for foundlings, or the step-children of niggardly and partial Nature. Heaven's bounty to the meanest thing that lives rebukes the dis- trust even of the pagan. How much greater cause have we, who know ourselves to be in the king- dom of our heavenly Father, to leave on His charge, with a generous abandonment, the care of OUT bodily requirements, while we devote our- er. 33. selves with supreme concern to the accomplish- Against Anxiety. 63 ment of His will, and the practical establishment part i. of His sovereignty ! second WARNING. I. The first class of dissuasives from anxiety are those which are drawn from reason and the natural dealings of God with His creation. (1.) Of these the first is given in these words : ' Is not the life more than meat, and the body Yer. 25. than raiment V It is an argument from the greater to the less ; from the end to the means for that end. Food and raiment are not ends in themselves ; they become needful to man only for the sake of that physical life which, if imfed, must cease, and that material body whose natural condition is one of imperfect protection. But this body, made so wonderfully, yet left so unde- fended, and this life that cannot live without assistance from the vegetable and animal creation, are not of our own making or getting. They are God's unsolicited gifts, wrought by His skilful workmanship, and quickened, no man can discover cf. Ps how, by the secret might of His wiU. The author of so strange and precious a piece of mechanism as this living body may be trusted to care for His own handiwork. Since He must mean that the covering which He has denied to it by nature shall be supplied by human art. He will not with- CXXXIX. 14-16. WARNING. 64 The Relations of the Kingdom. hold the material for garments, nor fail to bless SECOND the spinner and the weaver. If it is by bread we are to sustain life, then He Who gave the life will help us to sow the seed and reap the grain. It cannot be the purpose of our Maker that His pains in making us what we are should fail of their design through want of such minor aids and ministers to existence as our state requires. To feed and clothe, is a less thing than to make, a human being. On our side, therefore, our de- pendence on God for existence warrants our trusting Him for subsistence ; since, on God's part, His having cared to create us at all is a pledge that He will take care to provide for us. To reason thus concerning God, is to take for gTanted that the analogy of human action is in such a case a safe guide to the discovery of the divine. It proceeds on the assumption that, as men, if they are wise, will not do a great deal for any end, and then refuse to do the little more which that end requires, so neither will He Who made men. Jesus not only confirms such rea- soning as just, but implies that reasoning like this ought always to have saved the multitude of the poor from distrustful solicitude about the means of living. (2.) Such an a priori inference, our Lord argues Against Anxiety. 65 in the second place, is very abundantly confirmed by our observation of inferior nature. What we may conclude beforehand that it would be reason- able in our Maker to do for us, is just what we find Him doing for other creatures. Man is part of a larger whole ; a fellow-denizen of this fair earth with a multitude of less noble inhabit- ants. His physical frame, which needs to be fed and clothed, is precisely that which links him so closely to the rest of the material creation, as to make him, though its ruling member, yet a true member of it, subject, like other organisms, to its laws of growth, support, and decay. He Who made man a material creature, in need of nutriment for his life and decorous covering for his body, made also those other organized crea- tures with which he shares such mean necessities in common. If they, acting after their kind, are neither abandoned nor neglected by their Maker, why should he alone be suffered to want ? Nay, far less will he be suffered. By how much man excels other animals through the higher develop- ment of his nature and the dignity of his station upon earth, above all by that distinguishing image of his Creator which links him to the spiritual and divine ; by so much the rather is it to be presumed that God, Who leaves no humbler thing SECOND WARNING. 6 6 The Relations of the Kingdom. PART I. untended, will care for His princely and surpass- sEcoND ing creature, on whose head there rests the crown WARNING. ^ , , . , , . Cf. Ps. viii. 0^ terrestrial creation. This mode of reasoning is put with homely Ver. 26. concretcness. A teacher sitting out of doors in Palestine in a populous neighbourhood, would seldom be able to point to any undomesticated animals within sight, except birds ; and of course domesticated animals, for which man provides, could not be so fitly adduced in proof of God's direct care for His creatures. But of ' fowls of the air ' there could never be any lack. Not to Luke xii. 24. speak of the raven, which, on a parallel occa- sion in St. Luke, our Lord specially named, it is well known that flocks of pigeons, field-sparrows, and other small birds are everywhere to be found in Palestine, to-day, as well as in Bible times. To these light wanderers of the air, therefore, as they flew past on careless wing in search of food, Jesus directed His audience with peculiar felicity. These offered the best example of a creature for whose wants man does not care, and which no instinct of its own teaches to lay up any store, which lives in- fact from day to day on the casual bounty of nature, yet lives of all creatures the freest and lightest-hearted life. The swallow chatters on the wing while it chases its food, as Against Anxiety. 67 though it were to be always summer. The lark part i. shakes rapture from his throat in such abandon- second ment of glee, as if men beneath were never full of care. Why not ? He Whose eye rests on their lowly loves, forages for their frugal meal. Sum- mer by summer, God hangs on every hedgerow and wild bramble bush an ample store of berries by which, through severe dead months, the field-birds are to be kept from starving. Autumn by autumn, He sends them to glean the leavings of man's harvest-field. No sowing or reaping has He asked from them ; not even such garnering as He has taught to the squirrel and the ant ; but will keep them in close dependence on the provision of His own hand, set forth on His large earth-table, ready for their picking. That which He giveth them, Ps. civ. 28. they gather. The gathering of it, as they need it, is all that is in their care ; except, indeed, the glad song of thanks which the full heart of the little creature trills on the spray when the meal is done. These field-birds are but specimens indeed, but they are very near and touching and vocal speci- mens, of that wide family of unlabouring and careless creatures, which in earth and sky and Said of the sea ' seeks ' everywhere ' its meat from God.' Ps!^fv/2r ^ When one comes to think of it, it seems surpris- ravens in Job ing how rarely, under ordinary circumstances, any ^^^^^^^^ • 6 8 The Relations of the Kingdom. PART I. of the wilder beasts are found to starve. Earth SECOND is full of competing life ; and the history of the WARNING. . 1 1 . 1 11 1 animals which crowd and swarm and prey upon each other is but a ' struggle for existence.' Yet, under the adjustments of divine law, that which they seek, they do for the most part find ; and live out their appointed time, careless of to-morrow, yet secure of food for to-morrow's hunger. The meanest servant in our Father's house has ' bread enough and to spare.' ' Are ye not much better than they V 'And why take ye thought for raiment ?' If it was in the time of spring that our Lord dis- coursed this Sermon, the fields around Him would be gay with the numerous wild-flowers of Syria, and the hill-side grass on which His hearers reclined might offer to His hand the lesson of the lilies. Science has failed as yet to fix for us the exact species of lily to which Jesus pointed as more gorgeous than an oriental monarch's robe ;^ ^ The reign of Solomon was in all outward prosperity by far the most memorable which Hebrew annals could boast. It was, in fact, the only time at which the little Hebrew state could claim to be the centre of an empire on the oriental scale ; and the magnificence of that opulent and splendour-loving monarch so impressed the national imagination, that it continued to stand for a type of all earthly greatness. See the inspired account in 2 Chron. ix. 13-28 ; and compare Rawlinson, Anc. Mon. ii, 80, with note, and Ewald, Gesch. d. Volkes Israel, B. iii. Against Anxiety. 69 but the wild-flowering plants of His land, like those of our own, are rich enough in lovely hues and tender texture to furnish us with more than one example of His general lesson. They grow up among the lowly pastures ; they hide themselves beneath the budding woods ; they mix with the neglected spikes of flowering grasses by the way- side. To be trodden under foot, or cut down in a timberless land for fuel to feed the domestic oven, is their most frequent fate ; while the best fortune they dare hope for is only to be plucked by the fickle hand of childhood, toyed with for an hour, then flung aside for their too speedy withering. These are not the costly products of cultivation, which lend themselves to deck the saloons or share the revels of the wealthy ; these stand, in the prodigality of God, where the hus- bandman plies his scythe and beside the poor man's cottage door. Yet not the meanest of them all but is clad in raiment fit for a king ; nay, their soft petals are woven with a fineness of fibre and closeness of transparent texture such as no loom can rival, in tints whose delicacy and purity sur- pass the dyes of Tyre.' For the dress of man, being artificial and his own, can be nothing more than borrowed as to its material, and imitated as to its colouring; borrowed from the plant's SECOND WARNING. 70 The Relations of the Kingdom. PART I. stem or from the worm's cocoon ; imitated from SECOND the radiant colours which gleam upon the wood- bird's breast, or glow among the grass in the wild-flower's crown of splendour. The garments en. iii. 7. which men need for their shame, they are fain to decorate for their pride. To be clothed is not enough; they must be clothed in gay attire. Yet, when they have done their utmost, they only strive, but strive in vain, to emulate that profuse and fairer loveliness which God has scattered over His whole creation. ' Consider ' this ; watch the silent growth of lilies, so unlike the clash and hurry of man's spinning factory ; and as each one uprears its tender stem of green, and unfolds above its glorious coronet of purple or of gold, think whether He Who cares to make so fair the grass of the field that blossoms for a day, may not be trusted to drape in needful garments the unshel- tered and ashamed flesh of His immortal child ! Such a generous confidence in the providential care of God for to-morrow's provision both of food and of clothing, rests as a matter of course on our own diligence and careful prudence to-day. To act as if we were fowls or lilies, and needed as little as they to sow and spin, would be no less insolent than preposterous. It is only after God's noblest creature and proper child has done all Against Anxiety. 71 that lies in the child's part to do, according to his constitution and place in creation, — has sown his field where the birds are picking up their portion from the furrow, and woven his garment in imita- tion of the splendour of lilies, — that man, the sower and the reaper and the spinner, comes to stand in the same position of immediate depend- ence upon the care of God which the lower creatures occupy. By nature he is a provident animal ; they improvident by nature. It is the privilege of his nobility that he can be, up to a given point, a fellow-worker with God in that needful toil, and in that moral forethoughtfulness, and even in that artistic skill, by which creature existence is both sustained and adorned. Here, therefore, and up to this point, every true child who prizes his place of fellowship with the Father, will work where the Father has wrought before him and still is working with him. All effective profitable labour of man, whether for use or for beauty, — for the culture of the soil or the decora- tion of the robe, — rests on a child-like comprehen- sion first, and then a child-like imitation, of the w^orks of God. We are the students and the coadjutors of the Divine Worker in those natural processes by which His earth is made to minister to its inhabitants ; and we can have no right to PART SECOND WARNING. WARNING. 72 The Relations of the Kingdom. PART I. expect that He Who invites the attention of our SECOND intellect and the aid of our hand, will do for His heedless or slothful children what they will not do for themselves. But when the human faculties have been fairly employed in their legitimate sphere, and man has striven, as he could, to enter into this honourable place assigned him as his distinction over inferior creatures, is it to be thought that He Who caters for the birds and clothes the grass, will forget to bless the labour, or refuse to provide for the wants, of one w^hom He has associated with Himself in a nobler fellow- ship of intelligence and of toil ? Before I pass from this exquisite appeal to the providence of God in His inferior creation, I can- not but notice how significant it is of our Lord's eye for nature. In contrast to ancient systems of nature- worship, it was characteristic first of Juda- ism and then of Christianity, that they fastened attention on the exceptional dignity of man as the only moral and immortal creature upon earth, on sin as the supreme fact in human experience, and on the rectification of our spiritual relations with God as our supreme need. In Christianity especially, the salvation of the soul becomes the one thing of transcendent moment in man's earthly existence. It is not wonderful that the effect of Against Anxiety. V3 such teaching was at first, and has often been, to part i. quench the delight of Christians in natural beauty, second . WARNING. to discourage science as a waste of time and art as a vain idolatry, and to lead devout minds to feel as if nothing else on earth deserved a mo- ment's thought save the eternal interests of man himself. How little countenance any such un- natural or one-sided excess of religious earnest- ness derives from our Master, this present passage is enough to teach us.^ The interests of human spirits could not but be the one matter on earth cf. for ex- of supreme consequence to Him Who had come l^\i-u. ^ to earth on purpose to ransom them ; yet His spirit was so healthily balanced, that He could spare time and thought not only for men's bodies, but even for the inferior animals. To note the habits of the birds, and watch with kindly eye their happy carelessness upon the wing, was a portion of His duty and delight Who walked His Father's earth as the Son of God ; and it was not a forgotten portion. When science shall have learnt to observe and examine nature in the same spirit of child-like joy in God, in hope to draw from its researches a profounder and more intelligent ac- 1 Our Lord's close observation of nature and delight in it may- be inferred from such incidental notices in the Gospels as the following : Matt. xvi. 2 ; Luke xii. 54 ; Matt. xxiv. 32 ; John XV. 1-6 ; Matt, xxiii. 37, xxvi. 34 ; and others. 74 The Relations of the Kingdom. PART I. quaintance with the thoughts of God, on which SECOND to rear a more perfect trust in Him, science will WARNING. - ,.,..,., „ . -,-» . -n be accomplishing its highest function. But it will then walk in the footsteps of Christ ; by patient investigation and in exacter methods following up the hint which is really offered to us by His popular interpretations of nature. It is quite the same with art. The moral and reli^^ious res^ene- ration of mankind was the task which consumed the labours and drunk up the spirit of our Master ; yet He could pause on His way to admire the colour of a lily. The law which regulates all decorative art is, that it shall apply to the adorn- ment of whatever is required for human conveni- ence, such principles of beauty in form and colour as have been reached by the study of beauty in nature. This is just the law which underlies our Lord's comparison and preference of the flower to the royal robe ; while the evident love He has for the simple loveliness of form and colour in a wild-flower is precisely the root out of which all great art has ever sprung. A docile and delighted affection for the workmanship of God's hand, is in truth the christian attitude to every natural phenomenon. Out of this root it is that these fair twin growths come forth : the study of natu- ral facts and laws, so that from what He does we Against Anxiety. 75 may learn what God thinks, whicli is science ; part i. and the study of natural beauty, so that from second what He has done joyfully, we may learn what God admires, which is art. (3.) For convenience' sake, I have treated to- gether the lessons of the bird and of the lily ; • but between these two our Teacher interjects a Ver. 27. third argument to show the unreasonableness of anxiety. Perhaps it is inserted immediately after the lesson of the fowls which God feeds, just because it attaches itself to the idea of food rather than to that of clothing. But the question, ' Which of you, by taking thought, can add one cubit unto his stature V covers what is really a new argument. What that argument is, comes out quite clearly from the words (awanting in St. Matthew) with which St. Luke, in a parallel place, continues the reasoning : ' If ye then be not able Luke xii 26. to do that thing which is least, why take ye thought for the rest V Wliat, then, is this ' least ixixttrr*,. thing' which no one can do ? The words of our English version suggest of themselves some sus- picion of error in the rendering ; for, to add a ' cubit' (which can hardly mean less than a foot and a half ^) to the height of a man would be so far from a ' least' thing, that it would be an enor- 1 Some uncertainty obtains as to the longer and shorter 76 The Belations of the Kingdom. PART I. mous and unheard of thing. The word our Lord SECOND uses, however, means strictly the period of life WARNING. ... fiXiKU when a man is at his maturity; embracing, of course, the two connected ideas of the years he has lived and the physical development he has attained. John ix. 21, 23.1 In at least one passage of the Gospels, it carries this sense. Here we are certainly guided by the connection to the idea of age or period of life, rather than to that of height or personal stature. It is of the food by which life is prolonged Jesus has been speaking ; not yet of the body, its stature or its dress. And though the use of the word ' cubit ' in relation even to the length of one's life sounds in our ears a little harsh, it is really quite as natural a metaphor as when David Ps. xxxix. 5. sighs : * Thou hast made my days as an hand- breadth.' So read, the reasoning becomes at least intelligible. Experience teaches that such anxiety as Jesus reproves is a useless thing. To what serves all our fretting and fidgeting over the future, when we cannot so much as prolong by the least bit the measure of our own days, or the scriptural measures known under this name, and their exact lengths. See art. in Smith's Diet. , ' Weights and Measures. ' ^ On the other hand, it certainly means * stature ' in Luke xix. 3 ; probably also in ii. 52. In Heb. xi. 11 it undoubtedly has the sense of ' the child-bearing period of life ;' and in Eph. iv. 13 it may possibly be 'full manhood' (as the age of military service ?). Against Anxiety. 77 period of manhood's unbroken strength ? You fear for coming years ; but no carefulness on your part can so much as secure that you shall live to see them. You would fain control beforehand those myriad influences of nature and of human fortune which threaten beforehand to overwhelm your life with calamity ; how vain a craving in a creature so impotent that, were all the resources of nature, together with every human assistance, at your command, you could not avert by one hour the disabling stroke of sickness or the fatal shaft of death I Why need men vex themselves in vain over the great and far-off things of the world's providence and of its future, since so near and small a matter as their own fragile existence is from moment to moment suspended upon the will of Another ? So long as he is content to move within the narrow room allowed him, man can do something to help himself ; but it is by respect- ing those bars of creature limitation which so closely fence him in, not by dashing his feeble- ness against their iron strength. SECOND WARNING. II. Thus by argument after argument, open aU of them to the eye of natural reason, did the Son of God intend His earthly works and providence to persuade men to live dependent lives, confiding WARNING. 78 The Relations of the Kingdom. PART I. in their Creator's bounty. Thus from the first it SECOND had been a lesson of creation that He Who made us living men might be trusted to care for the perishable life He has kindled in our frames ; and a lesson of providence, which lets no creature want, that much less shall we be left without any Eye to oversee or any Hand to provide for us ; and a lesson of our own daily experience that anxiety is futile, since we are impotent to control events, or so much as secure for ourselves one hour of lusty life. But, forasmuch as these voices of nature had proved too low to be caught, or too inarticulate to be understood, or too unwelcome to be remembered ; so that, in point of fact, the nations of mankind had not been preserved from the most distressing and faithless anxiety in their struggle for existence : therefore is the Son of God come down to interpret into human speech these unheard or unheeded lessons ; and not to rehearse them only in our hearing, but to add to them the far more cogent persuasive of a new revelation. The Gentile nations of the world had failed to learn from natural reason and religion this lesson of confidence in God. Two main causes led to their failure, both of them lying very deep in the character of heathenism. For one thing, they had received no adequate revelation of God as their Against Anxiety. 79 SECOND WARNING. spiritual Father; and for want of that nearer, tenderer, and more reassuring tie, they forfeited even such assurance as they might reasonably have felt in His kindness as a faithful and pro- vident Creator. Sinful man, it is not too much to say, cannot continue to confide even in the common providence of his Maker, so long as he knows Him only as a Maker, and not as a recon- ciling pardoning Father. The result, therefore, in the experience of heathens, was to banish the gods from any hearty or benevolent superintend- ence over the every-day affairs of private men; to put chance in the room of providence, and destiny in the seat of Deity ; or, at least, to ascribe to such far-off divinities as were still supposed to take some interest in mundane affairs, a tendency to interfere with humanity in ways so capricious, partial, or mischievous, that it would have been better for them not to interfere at all The other cause which helped to fasten down heathendom Ver. 33, to an anxious pursuit of whatever might minister to the body, was that it had no better object set before it to pursue. Cut off from any present intercourse with the Godhead, shut in by uncer- tainty respecting any life to come, this life only remained to the pagan, and this life, too, on its earthly and perishing side. If the gods dwelt 80 The Relations of the Kingdom. SECOND WARNING. aloof, they had left to men at least the earth for an inheritance. If no one could say what might be after death, what could be more needful to win, or better worth enjoying, than those earthly goods which sustain and comfort this fleeting life ? After all these things, therefore, did the nations of the Gentile world seek ; sought them as their chief end and as the best reward of all their labour. How could the heathen spirit raise itself above an eager, sordid, and life-consuming search after things to eat or drink and raiment to put on, when there had not yet been revealed to it any Kingdom of God to be sought after ? The anxious pursuit of earthly gain, then, is simply heathenish. It consorts with a state in which man knows of no Father in heaven and no Kingdom of God on earth. But to say that, is, in the most absolute and emphatic terms, to forbid it to the Christian. Jesus addressed a company who, both as Jews, and now much more as His own pledged followers, stood on another level than the ' Gentiles.' They knew that they had a heavenly Father, a living, seeing, loving, over- ruling Parent, Who knew what they needed, and felt for them in their straits, and was too good to let them go without. We are no longer left to gather by the cold inferences of a creature's reason Against Anxiety, 81 what such a Creator as we can trace by His part i. footprints in beast and plant, may be presumed second WARNING. to do for us. God has spoken, not simply by nature, but across it (so to speak), and the voice that pierces the silences of creation is the voice of a Father. God has drawn the veil aside to let us see Him face to face, and the countenance we discover in Jesus Christ is the countenance of a Father. God has called us to His feet in peni- tence, washed us from our guilt in blood, folded us in the bliss of pardon to His heart ; and the heart of which we feel the pulses beat against our own is the heart of a Father. Whoever has re- ceived a revelation like this can never more fear neglect, or starvation, or the vicissitudes of adverse fortune. Shall He Who sacrificed so much to save the souls of men, forget their bodies ? He broke His Son's flesh to be a bread of life for us: will cf. Joim vi. 27-58 He deny us the meat that perishes? Our naked spirits, stripped of their honour through our sin. He has robed in that fair marriage-robe of linen, dazzling white, which ' is the righteousness of Rev. xix. 8. saints;' and need we fear for earthly raiment? What ! shall a child want in his Father's house ? Nay, let St. Paul expand for us in reply the splendid reasoning which lurks beneath his Master's words : ' He that spared not His own Rom. viii. 32. F 8 2 The Relations of the Kingdom. PART I. Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall SECOND He not with Him also freely give us all things ? ' !N"or is this all. Our Father has expressly re- leased His christian family from every anxious question about earthly provision, by finding for them another and a nobler interest to care for. After food and raiment the heathen seek with absorbing eagerness, because they know no more urgent care in life than how to live. ' But seek ye first,' says Jesus, 'the kingdom of God and Ver. 3?. His righteousness.'^ Before the soul of His dis- ciple, this divine Eestorer of the rule of God over human lives sets His own mighty task, and invites him to become His associate in the enterprise. Rom. xiv. 17. ' The kingdom of God ' is ' righteousness ' first of all. It means the practical re-establishment of the divine authority over man's will, so that each subject returns to his allegiance, and submits to God's perfect law. It reaches this, indeed, through the manifestation of so supreme a love on God's part, love dying to reconcile and stoop- ing to regenerate, as captures the affections of the cf. 2 Cor. V. redeemed heart. But captured affections ' con- 14 15 ' " strain' to service. The pardoned rebel becomes ^ If the reading of the Vatican MS. , ' His righteousness and kingdom, ' which is preferred by Tischendorf and Lachmann, be adopted, the sense will not be materially altered. The Sinaitic reads, ' His kingdom and righteousness. ' Against Anxiety. 83 a loyal and law-abiding citizen under the righteous part r. Prince. Nay, so long as his steps are among the second -r^- , n . -. . 11 • 1 WARNING. King s foes m this revolted province, he must even be a soldier on the side of lawful authority and divine order, against anarchy, self-will, and dis- affection. As yet, the Prince of Peace is a belli- gerent. As yet, the Prince of Eighteousness Cf. i Cor. xv. labours to recover His kingdom to the Father ; and no man can be deemed a true subject or honest follower who has not become inspired with an enthusiastic longinc^ to see his Prince's mission achieved, and the Father's government re-estab- lished. Over himself, first of all, to be sure ; for it is with the miniature kingdom of his own nature and the subjugation of it to the law of right, that each man has most nearly to do. He who is content to leave his private passions in- subordinate, or his own life at variance with God, has no call to set himself up as the censor of other cf. below on Matt vii 5 men. That is a cheap kind of loyalty to Christ which goes abroad to seek its work — preaching a kingdom of God to the world, while the inner kingdom of the heart is in the hands of lawless selfishness. Still, no one lives for himself alone. The kingdom of righteousness is struggling to get . itself set up here in the midst of us — at the heart of our domestic, social_, and even political arrange- 8 4 The Relations of the Kingdom. PART I. ments ; and there rests on each subject of Christ SECOND a summons to do his little share on the right side, WARNING. n r^T • i T /-N T) 1 -J on the side oi Christ s truth and Gods authority and man's salvation. Now, by his acceptance of this diviner mission, each child of God is discharged from paltry cares about meat and drink. There is, in truth, a most generous and blessed exchange of obligations be- twixt Father and child. The Father's chief earthly concern, that of which, we may say with rever- ence, His heart of love hath most ' need,' and in which the honour of His name is most deeply engaged, is the restoration of His defied authority over His redeemed human children. With a mysterious craving for intelligent sympathy and co-operation in such an enterprise, God has charged each one who loves Him to 'seek' this 'first;' and the childlike love of each son will make ardent response. To throw himself into the thoughts of his Father, to bend his strength to the Father's work, to sacrifice personal likings, to fling aside whatever would embarrass or divert See John iv. 34. him, and make it his meat and drink to finish the work thus given him to do, must be the ideal of any generous child ; and just as any child approaches to this ideal, will he approach the image of that perfect Child Jesus. But in Against Anxiety. 85 order to give himself with anything like such part i. single-mindedness and devotion to the kingdom second of God, a man must be set free from the distrac- tion of ignoble cares, and those mean anxieties about daily bread and to-morrow's evil, which nibble away the very pith of the soul. These, therefore, let him cast, with a c^enerous abandon- ment, on God. You have need, while you do God's will, of food and raiment ; and God knew it when He called you to His work. It is fair, that while He expects you to seek first His heavenly kingdom, you should expect Him to seek for you an earthly provision. Should the child's heart even forget its own need to cumber o itself exclusively with the glory of its Father's name and the coming of His realm, that blessed Father will not be less generous in His turn, but will take most sure care that His child shaU never want. The heart which hungers after Matt. v. 6. righteousness shall be fed with it ; the soul athirst for God shall be 'watered' with His See i Cor.^xii. Spirit abundantly, and find It to be a water of ^vk^^c, 'Jorla-Ov- life. But the bread and water which the Father iy' i.f^ 'vii.^38. knows to be needfal to these frail and mortal in- struments through which alone we can meanwhile work His will or seek His kingdom, they also shall not fail. Ptather they ' shall be added unto' isa. xxxiii. 86 The Relations of the Kingdom. PART I. us ; thrown in along with the heavenlier things SECOND w^e seek, as a make-weight to turn the scale, or an Ver 33 t o