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Title: The hour before the dawn
An appeal to men
Author: Josephine Elizabeth Grey Butler
Release date: September 29, 2026 [eBook #79681]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Trübner&Company, 1876
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79681
Credits: Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Books project.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HOUR BEFORE THE DAWN ***
_PUBLISHED FOR THE SOCIAL PURITY ALLIANCE._
THE
HOUR BEFORE THE DAWN.
=An Appeal to Men.=
“_Nox præcessit, dies autem appropinquavit._”
LONDON:
TRÜBNER & CO., LUDGATE HILL.
1876.
[_All rights reserved._]
PREFACE.
The Social Purity Alliance is designed to promote the practical
application of two radical principles—namely, the sacredness of the
home, and the duty of men to live and to suffer women to live in purity.
The members of this Alliance (from whom no formal pledge is required)
may do true service by endeavouring to establish these principles by
every means in their power; by privately using their influence to
elevate the moral tone of the society with which they come in contact;
by personally, according to their opportunities, helping to bring back
into the paths of purity those who have strayed therefrom, whether men
or women; and by lending their aid to combined effort for reinstating,
in honest industry, those women who have been the victims of profligacy.
Some suggestions for carrying into practical effect these
recommendations are given in the following pages, and are in some cases
illustrated by personal experience. These pages are designedly of the
character of a general appeal to men, but it is hoped that they may be
followed by other publications, addressed specially to various classes
of readers, such as workmen and employers of labour, soldiers and
sailors, the medical profession, students and members of the
universities, &c.
It is intended also that the Alliance shall work by means of lectures
and meetings, and by organisation of personal charity, in order to
assist its members or others in practically carrying out the principles
on which the Alliance is based.
The Alliance is open to all, men and women alike, who concur in its aims
and objects. Those who desire to inscribe themselves as members may
obtain forms for this purpose from the Honorary Secretary, 8 Bedford
Row, London, W.C., where also may be had the Address and Reports already
issued by the Committee.
CONTENTS
PREFACE.
PART I.
PART II. POST NAUFRAGIUM TABULA.
PART III. BAPTISMUS LABORIOSUS.
PART IV. AMA, ET FAC QUIDQUID VIS.
THE HOUR BEFORE THE DAWN.
=An Appeal to Men.=
“Watchman, what of the night?”
“The night is far spent; the day is at hand.”
PART I.
The language of this appeal will be incomprehensible to many; it is the
language of one who mourns for sin, and is addressed to all who mourn
for sin, in whatever degree.
There are those among us who, through some moral lapse, have forfeited
the esteem of their fellow-men, and whose consciousness of misery is
aggravated by the sense of the reprobation of society. There are others
who are secretly conscious of actual guilt and shame, while preserving
externally an honourable walk and reputation. There are others, who,
guiltless of any actual wrong done to their fellow-men, are full of a
deep and tender sorrow for the sins of the soul against God. And others
there are who have served well their fellow-creatures throughout their
holy and self-denying lives, and yet for whom also there are times of
trouble and darkness; they have fallen exhausted in the strife, though
the sword of God was in their hand; they saved others, but themselves
they cannot save; poor and in trouble, tempest-tossed and beaten by the
waves, their seeing eyes are darkened for a season, and there is a
wandering of feet, and a stretching forth in the dark night of praying
hands for the Father’s help, and, it may be, a need of a summons from
some fellow-soul assuring them that that help is at hand.
To some of these this appeal may perhaps bring revival of hope, or at
least the sense of companionship in conflict. To men of the world it
will appear morbid or exaggerated; for there are thousands whose eyes
are never lifted higher than the path they are daily treading, who are
unconscious of any aspirations beyond the present life, whose souls no
ray of true self-knowledge or spiritual light has visited. They have no
consciousness of sin; hence they cannot know the meaning of sorrow for
sin. To such, although the heart of the speaker may yearn over them in
deep pity, as over men born blind, these words are not addressed, for to
them they would convey no meaning.
There are different degrees of sorrow for sin. There is a sorrow full of
fear, and there is a sorrow springing from the sense of the love of God
mingled with the sense of our own unworthiness and ingratitude. There
is, however, another word which is more expressive, and has a
distinction more clearly marked than that of sorrow or repentance. That
word is _compunction_, which signifies a piercing, and a piercing
together with our Lord Jesus Christ, a partaking in his wounds. This
sorrow, once conceived, is a sorrow which will last as long as life
lasts, for the contemplation of the love of God is inexhaustible. And
this gives us the key to what has been so often seen, namely, that the
purest souls are they which have sorrowed most for sin; the greatest
saints are they who have known the deepest compunction, because they
have known most of the love of Christ. Such was the illuminated
compunction of St Paul when he called himself the chief of sinners. In
the measure in which the enlightenment of the soul is increased, the
sorrow for sin is deepened. That which hinders sorrow for sin is sin
itself. The more sin is cast out, the more a holy sorrow enters.
Therefore those who have been drawn the nearest to God, and learned the
most of his secrets, have always had the greatest sorrow (but not an
unconsoled sorrow), both for their own sins and the sins of others. Many
who are covered with a multitude of sins know nothing of this holy
sorrow. “It is a perception depending on what we are, and the most
saintly hearts are the most illuminated. St Paul’s language is no pious
exaggeration, no rhetorical overstatement, but is the true expression of
his inward consciousness. The sorrow of Jesus in Gethsemane is the type
of perfect contrition. It was a sorrow for the sin of the world and for
the love of God. His contrition was as the sea, profound, overwhelming,
and immense.”[1] “It is not so much the remembrance of sin as the love
of God which causes the pain of holy souls. Their sorrow, ascending to
God, is like his own sorrow; it is like the divine displeasure with
which the Holy Spirit looks upon our sins, when, as the Scripture says,
we ‘grieve him,’ and he ‘mourns.’ True contrition begets a hatred, not
only of actual sin, but of coldness. It shows us how great a sacrifice
Love made for us. Cold returns for warm friendship are intolerable among
men; so between the soul and God.”[2]
Let those, then, stand aside who, in a coarse and thoughtless mood, have
no other interpretation to give to the cry of the pierced soul
“convinced of sin” than the expression of a vulgar and craven terror of
hell-fire under the scourgings of remorse, unmixed with aspirations
after better things. Let such hold their peace, for they are ignorant of
the soul’s most sacred sorrow, and can by no means interpret the sighing
of the broken heart, nor the pleadings, finding voice even on the lips
of a sinner, of that Holy Spirit which maketh intercession for us with
groanings which cannot be uttered.
If God has given me a keener pity for one class of sufferers than for
another, it is for the enslaved by sin, who are conscious of their
degradation, and who fear that moral renovation is impossible for them;
the renovation which God declares to be possible, of which the
resurrection of Christ is the sure pledge and type, which our eyes have
seen, and yet of which crushed hearts continue to say, to the end of
time, “It is not for me.”
To you first, then, would I speak, to whose lips has arisen the first
feeble birth-cry of the soul, “God be merciful to me a sinner,” albeit
you are well-nigh hopeless, scathed, and suffering in health, intellect,
and soul through sin. I address myself to sinners of the deepest dye; to
men whose very blood may have become corrupt through sin, who have
fathomed the depths of misery and guilt; to sinners such as those
described in the Vision of Dante, ‘i peccator carnali,’ in whom desire
had mastered reason, whom he dimly recognised through the thick
darkness, ceaselessly borne before the blasts of hell with restless
motion, piercing the gloom with their lamentations and cries and
blasphemies against high heaven; to those who, having resolved and
repented, have turned again to their wallowing in the mire; desperate
swimmers, escaping from a stormy sea, and having reached the shore with
great effort, whom a returning wave sweeps back again into the boiling
flood, with hardly life enough left in them to strike out again, and
once more seek the shore; to men of the nineteenth century, who are
worse than the men of Sodom, of Nineveh, and of Athens, inasmuch as they
have sinned beneath the full blaze of Christian morality, and with the
warnings of the Sermon on the Mount sounding in their ears, while the
sinners among the heathen had only a dim light to rebuke their evil
deeds; to Christians who have sinned against Love which poured out its
life for them, against Gethsemane and Calvary, and against the voice and
the power of the Holy Ghost.
My whole soul grows sick, my heart is faint, and my brain reels, I am
haunted, I am stifled as by the smoke of Tophet, when men’s sins rise up
before me, the sins of my countrymen; yet, before God I declare it, I
love you, my countrymen, my brothers. I love the grossest sinner that
lives; in a certain sense I honour him. The poor coin, trampled down in
the mire of the streets, still bears upon it the image and
superscription of the king. I know when I look at the victim of sin—my
brother, worn out, degraded, poisoned through his whole being—that God
can, if he please, stretch forth the arm of his omnipotence and seize
this leprous one proclaiming himself “unclean, unclean,” purify him,
transform him, and raise him up to sit in heavenly places among the sons
of God and saints in light.
One of the greatest obstacles to moral recovery is hopelessness. The
great enemy of God and of souls, the Deceiver, is also “the Accuser.”
Having first ensnared us, he seeks to fix upon us the yoke of despair,
through suggestions which often appear to us only as reasonable
acquiescence in the judgments of an offended God.
You say—you men experienced in sin, but not experienced in the power of
God to cleanse and renew—that moral restoration on earth cannot be; you
acknowledge the inexorable law of nature, the law of the world around
you; you know in your inmost soul that as the seed-time was so must the
harvest be; that as you have sown, so must you reap. You see and bow to
this law, but you see no farther; you know the natural, but you do not
know the supernatural; Nature speaks sternly, truly, and you hear her
voice; but you hear no other voice, speaking from heaven. You submit
yourselves to the silent, awful Nemesis which is come upon you; you
speak despairingly of fate, the fate which you brought upon yourself in
your youthful madness for experience, from the time that ill-disciplined
imaginations ripened into act, and repeated action became welded into
habit; you bow hopelessly, calmly, perhaps even humbly, before what you
believe to be an inexorable decree.
I come to you, knowing your sorrow, comprehending your despair, wounded
in spirit for you and with you, to tell you in the name of God that
restoration is possible for you—complete, perfect restoration. You tell
me that the fountains of thought can never be cleansed, that you
yourselves are hell; I answer that the fountains of thought can be
cleansed, that there is a power, unfelt by you yet, which is stronger
than death, stronger than the grave, stronger than hell. Every great
sinner thinks as you do when he first becomes aware of his own
degradation. His conscience tells him he has destroyed himself; his
ruined health, his impaired intellect, his enfeebled will speak to him
of unavoidable retribution, and he is tempted in his extremity by the
voice which hisses serpent-like in his ear, “Curse God and die,” or,
while the pleasures of the flesh still continue to have any charm, by
the voice in his heart, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.”
But a man’s conscience (sinned against) can tell him no more; an
offended conscience cannot tell him of hope, of the new life, of
resurrection, of cleansing, of sanctifying; and the natural man cannot
believe, cannot receive these tidings.
I speak to you as an equal, not a superior, as a fellow-sinner, a
fellow-sufferer; for not in vain have I sat in darkness and in the
shadow of death. I hate your sin with a perfect hatred, but I love you;
I claim you as brothers; your souls are precious to me. The greater your
sorrows, the more are you fitted to be my friends and companions; the
deeper your fall, the more tenderly do I feel for you. Do not reject my
invitation and message of hope, for the language I speak is no rhetoric;
every word is wrung out of a heart which has been exercised by no common
suffering. I know enough of human life and of Divine love to make me
tenderly loving to you were your confessions far more awful than they
are. Let me bear your burdens, let me weep and pray for you, if thereby
I may show you by my love how the Saviour loves you!
He hates _your sin_. He cannot dwell in those hearts of yours in moments
when you are reckless, hypocritical, coarse, impure, or fiercely
sceptical. His Spirit is withdrawn from you then; his face is hidden
from you; yet he loves you still—loves you to the death. His Spirit, the
Holy One, is hovering over you, near you still, mourning, grieving,
waiting for you, omnipotent to change you and make you holy, _when you
will_.
But you will not; you cannot. The strong will you once boasted is now
weaker than a little child’s; your strength to will is gone, as purity
is gone; you are paralysed; to resolve, to determine, are words of the
past for you; you are loaded with chains, and helpless. I know nothing
more awful to contemplate than the helpless impotence of the will which
has once rebelled against God’s laws, nor than the reality of that hell
with which the sinner surrounds himself on earth. I confess with you
that there is a sense in which the judgment which you pronounce upon
yourselves is true. You who have sinned grossly or habitually can never
be the same in earthly relations as those who have escaped the deeper
pollutions. You are wounded for life; you have cherished a disease which
will leave its sting behind; you will be, even when restored by God,
sorrowful men, burdened with bitter memories, weakened through the
wearing of heavy chains, and ever needing to be doubly guarded against
the return of an old and conquered foe. Your own hearts tell you that it
would not be just that in human relations you should rank with men who
have practised self-control and lived purely. It is here, perhaps, that
retribution is most keenly felt. Many a man has felt himself degraded to
the level of the beasts when shameful memories have visited him in the
presence of some pure companion of his life; many a one has been driven
to conceal from the wife of his bosom the thing that he has been, or,
confessing it, to cloud her happiness and shake her reverence. The
bright dreams that may have pleased and gladdened your adolescence are
gone for ever. Except so far as a great spiritual change is worked in
him, a man cannot love purely whose body has been a temple of lust. His
worst sins link themselves on to his purest and deepest affections,
poison the fountainhead of the sweetest emotions, thrust themselves
forward in his holiest moments, and are a scourge to him, it may be,
till the day of his death. In a deeper, sadder sense than a mere
corporeal one, are those inflexible words of Scripture fulfilled,
“Whatsoever a man soweth, _that_ shall he also reap;” “he that soweth to
the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption.”
I know all this. I know that you are lost men; that you can never become
what you were,—_never what you were_. Yet hear me tell you, in Christ’s
name, that although you can never undo the past, nor return to
innocence, you may through a mighty regenerating power become something
better than what you were in guileless childhood.
It is true that you have lost much; in respect of this world and its
uses you are the worse for what you have gone through; a very blessed
thing has escaped your grasp for ever; but another thing, a blessed
thing also, is offered to you. I believe that in the kingdom of God you
may gain by your loss. I believe that you may be made a mightier
instrument in his hand by reason of your wounds and your misery. The
serpent has bruised your heel; turn now upon him in wrath, and bruise
his head! There is truth in the saying, “Fractures well healed make us
more strong.” Henceforward you shall take of the very stones over which
you stumbled and fell to pave your path to heaven, and thereby make a
firmer footing for yourself. God places his own omnipotence at your
disposal; stretch forth your feeble paralysed hand, and lay hold of it;
your hand will be restored, and you will hold God. All things are now
“possible to him that believeth,” for “all things are possible with
God,” and by this simple act God and you are _one_. Henceforth, though
like Gideon you may be the least in your father’s house, the heavenly
salutation is to you: “The Lord is with thee, thou mighty man of
valour!” Arm yourself for the battle!
I have seen a noble sight; it is that of a young warrior armed from head
to foot, watchful from the first, strong and free, passing on unwounded,
victory going before him. He is indeed lovely; he is worthy of our
admiration, for the grace of God was with him to keep him from first to
last unscathed. “His strength is as the strength of ten, because his
heart is pure.” Yet have I seen a not less noble and a more pathetic
sight; it is that of a soldier, wounded almost to death, enfeebled by
the past strife, bleeding at every step, exhausted and weary, rising to
a desperate necessity, and with a sorrow and resolution on his face more
eloquent than words, leading a forlorn hope to victory. The angels in
heaven rejoice, we are told, over the victory of such an one as this. If
you cannot now be the former, you can be the latter. “When the forces of
thy soul are scattered, rally them by believing, and remember that
already _many a wounded soldier hath won the day_.”[3] Through this sad
but noble conflict your souls will become holy, pure, and strong.
“Shall we award
Less honour to the hull, which, dogged
By storms, a mere wreck, waterlogged,
Masts by the board, her bulwarks gone
And stanchions going, yet bears on;
Than to strong lifeboats, built to save,
And triumph o’er the breaking wave?”
I remember to have dreamed a dream which I will tell you. There arose
before me in my dream a beautiful cathedral, exquisite in all its
proportions, perfect in its unity, grandeur, harmony of design, and in
its most delicate details. It stood majestically, its beautiful spires
and towers pointing heavenward, unhurt by violence or time; it was a
temple fit for the worship of God. The sun was setting, and the glory of
the west fell full upon the perfect building, and flashed back the light
from its pure and polished marbles; but it fell upon its outward walls
only. I went further, and I saw before me a ruined abbey, roofless, open
to the sky, with great rents and seams and cracks in its walls
everywhere, its delicate traceries broken or crumbling to pieces, its
carved work, once so beautiful, discoloured and worn by storms. The
glory of the setting sun fell not only _upon_ this second temple, but
entered it, penetrated it through and through, flooded it with glory
without and within, lighted up with a new beauty every torn and broken
fragment, streamed in a flood of gold through every crack and rent of
its ruined walls, lovingly, lavishly dressing its poor decay with a
glory not of earth. As I looked, I wondered at the beauty, and loved the
glorious sunshine which seemed to linger so fondly round this ruin, and
which, because it was a ruin, could so envelope and penetrate it with
its own beauty; and I thought that the glory of this second temple was
greater than the glory of the first. To whom among us sinners has God
denied the beauty of holiness, beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for
mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness? That Lord
to whom I invite you with tears, and with inward groans, as of one who
travails with a deep desire,—that Lord, our God, our Christ said of
himself, “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because he hath
anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal
the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and
recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are
bruised.” And what shall hinder? “Who art thou, O great mountain? before
Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain.” “The Lord of Hosts is with us,
the shout of a King is among us.”
Lift your eyes unto the hills! It is possible, it is possible to be new
created. Christ announced it to the astonished Nicodemus, who, though he
was a teacher in Israel, knew not these things; and when the Holy Ghost
carries the message to your heart in its fulness, and in its deep inner
meaning, you will be equally astonished; till then it is equally hidden
from you.
I speak, it may be, to some who were misled and corrupted very early in
life; planted, perhaps, in one of those hotbeds of youthful vice—wherein
the evil is often so secret as to elude the utmost vigilance of those
who watch for souls—while you were still but little children, with a
conscience only half awakened to the knowledge of good and evil. If so,
God pities you deeply; the anger of the Blessed One is aroused on your
behalf, and he will avenge you of your spiritual adversary, the
malignant foe who, in the person of some wretched tempter, blighted you,
instructing you in evil on the very threshold of life. Those words of
our Lord are very awful, “Take heed that ye offend not one of these
little ones.” His compassion for you who were early tempted may be
measured by his holy indignation; “Woe unto that man through whom the
offence cometh; it were better for that man that a millstone were hanged
about his neck, and that he were cast into the depths of the sea.” That
which happened to you very early in life may often bring a cloud between
you and your confidence in the love of God: “Why, if he is love, did he
permit it?” I can feel deeply for you in this painful questioning, as
hard to answer sometimes in any particular case as it is in the broad
view of it—that of the dark and insoluble mystery of the origin and
existence of evil. Let us leave it, and listen to God as he speaks to us
as the God of love: “It is not the will of your Heavenly Father that one
of these little ones should perish;” “Let no man say when he is tempted,
I am tempted of God;” “Every good and every perfect gift cometh down
from above.” But blight and destruction do not come down from above, and
when they fall upon the weak and innocent, it is not at the command nor
with the consent of the Most High; it is not his will that wrong and
pain and sin should be brought by one upon another. There is _another
will_ at work in the world, an opposing will, a cruel power, only
second, but always second, to the power of good. God can bring good out
of evil. God can turn even the devices of Satan to his own glory, and to
the good of man. It is true that he permits evil, which exists contrary
to his will, to work for a season; but the whole history of man proves,
and the future will still more gloriously prove, that he turns evil
aside, brings good out of it, brings life out of death, power out of
weakness, light out of darkness, glory out of shame. “The zeal of the
Lord of Hosts will do this.”
“This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God.” _Believe_
this, apply it to whatever sickness of soul or body afflicts you as the
fruit of sin; embrace this hope, and you will one day praise God with
wonder and love.
How often are we inclined to say, “Lord, if thou hadst been here, my
brother had not died;” “If thou hadst been present in that first hour of
temptation, all these woes would not have followed!” Christ was _not_
there, it seems, and the devil and death triumphed. But now call to mind
how calmly Jesus answers these words with “Thy brother shall rise
again;” “Said I not unto thee that if thou wouldst believe, thou
shouldst see the glory of God?” My brother may be worse than sick; he
may be dead in sin, yes, long dead, corrupt, the prey of worms, insomuch
that timid friends may be appalled at the thought of his rising up again
to claim relationship with them, as when Martha cried out, “Lord, by
this time he stinketh;” yet when he who is the Resurrection and the Life
approaches his corpse, he lives again, he _shall_ live again! “Lazarus,
come forth!” Such a stupendous effort of power and love on the part of
the Lord is what is needed in your case, and this he is always ready to
exert. It needs only faith in you, a little faith, “as a grain of
mustard seed;” for it is not the degree of faith upon which the miracle
hangs, but upon the power of God, which the weakest faith may claim.
Believe me, God only suffered Satan to triumph _for a time_, that God
might triumph _for ever_. God will make of you now such a tool in his
hands as you could not have been had you never come into close conflict
with the enemy of souls.
The heart of Christ is very tender towards you, for you did not sin with
a high hand, but were caught in a net, dragged through the mire, victims
to the insatiable lust of the Destroyer, who goes about seeking whom he
may devour. Your souls were tender, and unable to resist the fatal
working of the poison administered to you by the soul-murderers who are
lurking everywhere, the accursed generation whose seed renews itself
from year to year, and from age to age upon the earth, and before whom
the souls of the “poor innocents” fall prostrate, as grass before the
mower’s scythe. Some good gift of God to you, it may be (personal
beauty, a pure face, a frank grace of manner, a sensitive, responsive
nature, unconsciousness of evil), was the thing which first drew upon
you the evil eye which blights that which it looks upon; or perhaps you
did not possess the qualities which attract and ensure popularity among
the young, and so, when unlooked-for affection was offered to you, you
responded to it with an abandonment of gratitude and a wealth of love
which the loneliness of your being up to that time had only served to
intensify; and foul weeds sown by an enemy’s hand sprang up side by side
with fair flowers, dark and deadly evils grew up side by side with
pleasant friendships, and the circumstances which were designed for the
development and strengthening of your social being became ministers to
sin.
There are men in the world so modest that the utterance of an impure
word in their presence is pain to them, and so charitable that the
thought of wilfully betraying the soul of another into sin would be
death to them, who yet are conscious of a cruelly unhappy past, and of a
sense of degradation in the memory of sin; men—I cannot express it
otherwise—of great natural purity, who are yet impure; who were born
with an instinctive repugnance to all that is base and low, yet whose
aching hearts must ever harbour the memory of some inner baseness which
they fain would blot out for ever. When a man whom nature fashioned
coarsely sins coarsely, his sins are at least in harmony with his
nature; but when a man whom God gifted with a pure, refined, and
sensitive nature is betrayed into gross sin, he sins not against God
only, but against his own nature; he does violence to his better self,
and the result is a frightful discord, a terrible incongruity: he is
like two men, hating the one self with the other self; his sins are not
of the same colour as his mind, but are like a dark stain upon a white
garment. Such a man’s sufferings touch my heart more deeply than those
of the stronger sinner, whose punishment in the flesh may be in
proportion to the strength of his fleshly nature; for the finer soul
suffers in the most delicate part of his being, the emotional part; he
is wounded in his inmost tenderness, his idealism, his love of the
beautiful, his sense of worthiness, and fitness, and honour. For such an
one the loss of purity implies such a keen, sorrowful, tender, lifelong
regret, as men of a stronger and coarser mould cannot conceive of; his
is a sadness which sometimes seems to me to resemble the sorrow which
Adam may have felt when he had fallen from his high pristine purity to
become the slave of a new and hated tyranny within him, weak, silenced,
guilty, subject to death, an exile from paradise; sometimes I have
thought it resembled more the agony of a tender woman robbed of virtue,
than that of a man. When to this refinement of nature is added a clear,
keen intellect, and that good gift of God, a humble and just judgment
which discerns with simplicity good and evil, the agony is increased,
the shame is deepened that the lower nature should ever have triumphed,
and the hatred of the evil within him is intensified through the man’s
keen perception of intellectual and moral beauty; his estimate of the
past, of his own part, of God’s part, of his fellow-creatures’ part in
it, is humble, just, and gentle; he does not impatiently nor
irreverently cast off the blame of it upon God’s providence, nor
coarsely accuse his fellows; to his just mind sin has a terrible
personality; it is to him an evil which would never have existed in
God’s universe but for the will of the sinner, nor have ruined himself
but for the guilty concurrence of his own will; he harbours no secret
sullenness against the laws of society which require men to live morally
and to practise self-restraint; for his moral judgment is enlightened
with so much of light from above as to show him that such laws as are
just and pure among men are based upon a divine law, and that the Author
of the divine law is a living, personal God, to whom he himself is
individually accountable for the breach of law—singly and personally
accountable, as much as if there were no society nor human laws around
him, nor any one in the universe except God and himself. He who so
judges himself is surely gently judged by him who “came not to call the
righteous, but sinners to repentance;” whose glorious reproach it was
and is, that “He is gone to be a guest with a man that is a sinner.” Who
among us, who even among the righteous, will venture to cast a stone at
such an one?
To such an one, to be absolved from guilt is much, but not enough.
Salvation for him must include more; he must be cleansed for ever from
the accursed thing, separated from it “as far as the east is from the
west.” Even beyond this he feels at times a passionate desire for what
the Greeks say God himself cannot grant, that the past should not have
been, or that, having been, it should be no more; perhaps to the last
day of his life there may be something of that fruitless, impossible
wish. Even at the cost of our immortality that cannot be granted; but
the nearest thing possible is promised—that God will remember our sins
no more. Can God forget? Is oblivion possible for God? Perhaps this may
mean that when our wills are so closely united with his as to be one
with his will, they may then have no more connection with their sinful
actions in the past than he has who created them with possibilities of
evil, from which the only refuge is in him. Most certain it is, at
least, that in his presence all unholiness must have passed away, and
that we shall be pure _even as he is pure_. This is our sure hope, and
for the present life our regret, remorse, dissatisfaction with
ourselves, may become a mighty moving power.
If the passionate remembrance of our loved ones removed by death—the
light of our eyes extinguished, the music of our life silenced—which
seems at first so concentrated in our sorrow and desire for reunion,
may, without desecration or departure from its own simplicity, suffer a
spiritual change into something higher and worthier of those we mourn,
so also may feelings which are less sacred and more full of earthly
bitterness suffer a spiritual change, so as to become subordinated to
the one high motive of our life. It has been said that we need “a goad
in the side as well as love in the heart.” Lovers of purity, who have
been false to the thing you love, you have a double motive to work for
God, and to aid in the overturning of Satan’s kingdom and in the
advancement of Christ’s kingdom on earth! A holy anger and revenge shall
possess your souls, and become a motive only less mighty than grateful
love to your Saviour. The principle of opposition is very strong in some
men, and through the conversion of the whole army of the moral forces
within you, which by the grace of God is as possible as the amendment of
your outward life, that which otherwise would be bad or dangerous in you
may be turned in all its force against God’s enemy and yours; holy
hatred, holy scorn, as well as holy love, shall work in you; that strong
untiring motive of compassion will be greatly increased in you, for you
will feel for those who are entangled by the accursed thing as a man
cannot feel who has never himself been deeply wounded.
I know how deep is the scepticism on this subject among those who have
fallen and are suffering; how difficult it is to receive the hope of a
new creation. One form of delusion arising from this difficulty seems to
me to prevail much. I mean the delusion of supposing that forgiveness of
sins and moral restoration can be separated. It is very common to hear
such language as this: “God can, I know, forgive the blackest offences,
and receive the poor sinner to himself at last, because he is so
merciful; but present holiness and perfect renewal he cannot produce in
such as I am; the spring once poisoned must continue to send forth muddy
waters. Experience has taught me this, and nothing can speak with effect
which speaks contrary to experience.”
You who speak so are in error. God does not save men by only pardoning
them. Salvation is a double work; it is forgiveness and purification.
“Without holiness no man shall see the Lord.” “It shall be called the
way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it.” “If a man have not
the spirit of Christ (a spirit of purity), he is none of his.” Believe
me, you are labouring under a great, though a very common delusion, and
one which gains more ground in many a man’s heart, and influences many a
man’s practice, more than he likes to confess to himself. Do you really
believe that God gathers men hastily up at the last, and admits them as
they are (having continued unholy) to the city of God, the heavenly
Jerusalem, to the companionship of the “innumerable company of angels,
and of the spirits of just men made perfect”? Even if he did so, heaven
would be no heaven to them, for being of a different nature from all
that exists there, they would be strangers there, an element of discord
amidst the general harmony, and liable to the question, “How camest
_thou_ in hither?” Nay, nothing that does not in its very essence belong
to heaven and to God can enter there. The heaven or hell of the future
has its beginning now in our hearts here on earth. It rests upon the
awful truth of the permanence of character, the bent and the ultimate
fixity of which God has made dependent on our own deliberate choice,
aiding and seconding, and encouraging with the most tender watchfulness
and love, by the motions of his Holy Spirit, the feeblest efforts and
faintest inclinations of our will towards him.
Denying the hope of being made pure and holy now, you deny every hope.
It is “the pure in heart” who shall “see God.” I pray you to reflect on
the twofold character of this change, and to remember that it renews the
nature while it places the sinner out of condemnation. The love which
holds out to the sinner free forgiveness, infuses also into the heart
which truly believes an element of transforming purity.
Many men go on until death, soothing themselves with this wretched idea
of some final absolution or indulgence, which may be grasped in the
moment of death by one who desires no moral change in himself. They
continue unchanged, and die unholy.
There are some who do not desire this change; you to whom I speak do
desire it, but you doubt its possibility. Your conscience tells you how
strong your sinful nature is, how deeply dyed, how interpenetrated with
impurity; but your conscience is blind regarding the great power of God,
and bears no witness on that side. Is not one part of the great work as
easy to God as the other? Is it not as easy for him to expel your
disease, and bid you rise up and walk, as it is for him to say, “Son,
thy sins are forgiven thee”? You say it is not. “God,” you say, “can
forgive me, because he is so good and merciful; but he cannot make me
pure in heart. He cannot arrest the natural downward tendency, nor do
away with the law which reigns rampant in my flesh.” This is plainly
what you say when you doubt the possibility of a complete change in
yourself. You make God a liar. You dispute his power and his word. You
declare a miracle to be impossible with God (as indeed men do very
freely in these days). You are a materialist, in bondage to supposed
laws of necessity, and denying the power of the Divine Creator Spirit.
If I mistake not, your conscience bears me witness that, in a greater or
less degree, my words concerning you are true.
You do well indeed to profess humbly that you bow to the law of nature,
the law which now curses you; but oh! do not, I pray you, speak in the
same breath of the intent and purpose of God, or yield to the temptation
of supposing that he for a moment acquiesces in your present state of
slavery. God works in nature, and uses her as his handmaid in the
punishment of guilt and correction of the erring; but God is above
nature, and can work exactly contrary to nature. It never was the will
and purpose of God, and never will be, that you should be so cursed, so
hopeless, so degraded. You have gone directly against his will. Call to
mind those pathetic words of Jesus, “Ye _will not_ come unto me, that ye
might have life.” “How often _would I_ ... but _ye would not_.” “O
Israel, thou hast _destroyed thyself_, but in me is thy help.” Yes, you
are self-destroyed, and there is no inexorable divine appointment in
your present state of wretchedness. I repeat that I do not speak as a
person who is ignorant of the power and effects of gross sin. I know its
deadly poison, I have seen its blighting power, its ravages in bodies,
and souls, and intellects. I have fainted before its scorching breath.
But I have seen that where sin abounded grace has much more abounded. I
have seen dead men rising from their graves. I know the power of him who
says, “Behold, I make all things new.” God is able to work in us
“according to the mighty power which raised Jesus from the dead.” Try to
conceive of that power, the power of Jehovah, which so reversed the
order of nature and trampled upon death that it was impossible that
Christ should be holden of it. This is the self-same power which is
waiting now at your door to bring you forth to a new and glorious life.
And although this new birth unto righteousness and perfect purity may be
gradual and painful, yet so powerful, so progressive, so aggressive and
victorious is the Spirit which works this moral change, that no sin, no
memories, no evil habits, no results of evil habits, no disease which
belongs to the soul of man can stand before it. All yields before the
omnipotent working of that silent, awful Spirit.
Flee ye to the stronghold, ye prisoners of hope! Take courage; strong,
desperate courage! Approach Christ, the Saviour of our souls, who “also
is the Saviour of the body.” Touch but the hem of his garment, and you
shall be made “perfectly whole.”
Turn to the future in hope; do not waste time in vain regrets and in
cursing yourselves. We must repent and fear, and observe also where and
how we fell; but it is safest not to dwell much on the past. There is a
surer means of attaining to true sorrow for sin, and that is, to see the
love against which we have sinned, and to see all sin as a deep
treachery against love. Then alone is it that we learn what true
contrition means; when we look upon him whom we have pierced, and mourn
because of him.
We are too much inclined to ask for time to be granted us to perform
funeral rites over our dead selves before we will come to God to receive
a new life. How often have I heard the words, “I believe God can restore
me, but it will be a long time first.” But why should it be a long time,
I ask, before the first step is taken by you? The first step is that you
should cast yourself upon God, and place the matter in his hands. This
gained, you have gained much; yet this is only the entrance into the way
of life; the great work is not now completed, but only begun; from this
point you will find that there is more to be learned and unlearned, done
and undone, than you even now imagine. Let the days then of fruitless
mourning over dead hopes and wasted energies be brought quickly to an
end, and let the true sorrow accompany you through your whole life,
joined with true love, and bearing much fruit. Hear the voice of Christ
saying to you, “Let the dead past bury its dead: Follow thou me!”
PART II.
POST NAUFRAGIUM TABULA.
The attitude of the heart and will towards God differs so much in men
whose past lives may have been equally guilty, that widely different
motives are presented to the one and the other by those who would be
God’s messengers to them. The voice of God is always the voice of love,
for God is love; but as he invites and persuades and reassures some, so
he uses terrors and denunciations with others, that, when they refuse to
be drawn, he may scourge and drive his wanderers home.
There is a wide difference between you to whom I have been speaking, who
are deeply persuaded of your own sinfulness, whose aching hearts conceal
much of secret pain and sorrow, and others of whom I am about to speak.
There are men around us who are daily poisoning the springs of our
social and national life. They are the children of luxury, prosperous
leaders in sin—heartless, self-indulgent, fashionable, audacious,
triumphant sinners, who are selling their strength, and health, and
rank, and manhood to Satan,—trading as long as they can on their
personal advantages, graceful manners, light wit, knowledge of all the
arts of seduction and ways of the world, and, if these fail, having
recourse to solid gold, the price of iniquity, the price of blood and of
souls. These men require costly sacrifices to be made at the shrine of
lechery. They drag with them into the whirlpool of destruction
everything they can lay their hands on that is sweetest and most
beautiful in creation. Their haunts are the “dark places of the earth,”
which are “full of the habitations of cruelty.” Cruel, ruthless, and
desolating, they dispense plagues and death wherever they move by the
very infection of their breath. Gentler natures, easily destroyed, and
hardly if ever restored, fall before their devouring lusts; the bodies
and souls of tender women are to them as though they had been expressly
designed and created to be destroyed and broken to pieces for the relief
of men’s basest needs, as sheep and oxen are provided to be slain for
the satisfying of their hunger. These are they who have “the
understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the
ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart; who,
being past feeling, have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to
work all uncleanness with greediness;” “filthy dreamers, who defile the
flesh;” “speaking evil of those things which they know not; but what
they know naturally as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt
themselves.” “Clouds are they without water, carried about of winds;
trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by
the roots; raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame;
wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for
ever.”
“Speaking evil of those things which they know not” is frequently in the
sacred writings linked together with the practices of gross sensualists.
Experience confirms this observation; these sensualists are also the
cynics and scoffers, who continually sneer at the good of which they
know nothing. In all their speech they aim at lowering the moral
standard around them to the level of their own, and at reducing the
general tone to the colour of their own minds; and thus they succeed in
silencing the last whispers of conscience, which might disturb them in
the midst of their profligacy by bringing to them from time to time the
consciousness of a purer atmosphere not far off. They affect, until it
becomes a reality to them, a profound scepticism as to the existence of
any virtue, or possibility of virtue, or of any sincerity or
unselfishness in the world. They see nothing but their own selfish and
impure souls reflected in the society around them; they are unable to
see anything else, a total blindness having fallen upon them, as upon
the men of Sodom, from whose raging passions even the angels of God
needed to be sheltered. They have become dead to the perception of moral
worth and beauty. They are so given up to the flesh, that every thought
which presents itself to the mind, every sight, every sound, comes to
them loaded with heavy chains of impure and degrading associations. They
are so petrified in scepticism, that if Christ himself in all his divine
perfection of character were once again to appear among us, their
estimate of him would be that of the fashionable profligates of his own
time on earth, “a gluttonous man and a winebibber.” So tainted is the
whole being of such men with the poisonous atmosphere of their Circean
existence, that the divinest guests who should attempt an entrance into
their breasts would be changed by them into swine; to them all that is
best and sweetest in man, woman, or child, is born of evil, and tends to
evil.
And this moral blight is not reserved for those alone who are long
experienced in evil. In many lands, and now partially in our own, the
foulest vice is so instituted and organised as to supply a training in
impure principle and in guilty practice to our youth from their earliest
years. “It strikes our youth at that unhappy moment when first they
cross the threshold of the abodes of officially-regulated vice; and when
they recross that threshold to the purer air, O God! what fatal deed has
not been done! For them the spring of life has no more flowers; the very
friendships of their youth are polluted; they become strangers to all
the honourable relations of a pure young life: and thus it is that more
and more in these days we see stretching wider and wider around us the
circle of this mocking, faded, worn-out, sceptical youth, without
poetry, without love, without enthusiasm, without faith, and without
joy.”[4]
A dilution of this moral poison, this disbelief in God and in goodness,
creeps upwards into the higher moral strata; it is communicated from the
“lewd fellows of the baser sort” (for of the baser sort they are, though
often the proudest blood of the aristocracy flows in their veins), to
the minds of many who are worthy of a better creed; and we feel it
around us, entering our homes through the pages of many books and
writings, wherein these mournful cynics treat, in a hard and untruthful
spirit, of all the most holy relations of life, of the tenderest and
deepest secrets of the heart, as well as the deeper and more sacred
mysteries of Providence, of which, indeed, they cannot but speak falsely
and blindly, since they are ignorant of them, and have not the key
wherewith to unlock such knowledge. These also are guilty, though it may
be unconsciously so, of cruelty, because they rob men of hope, without
which earth is darkness; “because,” saith the Lord, “with lies ye have
made the heart of the righteous sad, whom I have not made sad;” because,
in envy of the good which they have not found or have forfeited, they
perpetually deny its existence, and spread around them the infection of
despair.
“A licentious age is parent of a cruel age,”[5] and in the case of the
individual, cruelty follows quickly as the twin-companion of profligacy.
It is not to himself alone that the impure man is cruel; indeed, so far
as this life is concerned, he constantly saves himself and his
reputation, while he destroys another. Men too commonly profess to
believe that to further degrade and oppress a being already degraded and
enslaved is a venial fault; that the sin of fornication is not the
“deadly sin” it has been pronounced to be, because, they say, they do
not destroy what is good, but only, under the force of temptation, take
a sinful advantage of a great evil already existing. This is a fatally
false judgment. The soul of the most forlorn outcast was redeemed by
Christ, and is dear to him. Most certainly the souls of women are as
precious to God as the souls of men; and God has never and nowhere said,
that that which brings certain and utter destruction to the souls of
women is a light offence on the part of men. Our Lord said, “It must
needs be that offences will come;” but he added those awful words, “Woe
unto _that man_ through whom the offence cometh.” No one can say that
any one man is responsible for the existence of the horrible fact that
thousands of women, of young girls, of mere children, are continually
dragged and driven to the fashionable markets of lust, and there slain
like sheep appointed for slaughter. The offence is distributed among
many, both of men and women, and the exact measure of the _woe_ shall
assuredly be dealt, by the God who judges not as man judges, to every
one who has put forward a hand, even once, to help to crush the
helpless, or to prevent the fallen from rising. The line is untenable
between the first seducer of a woman, and the men who, cowardly, rush in
when the victim is once down, to seize upon and devour her in their
wickedness, until every trace of the divine stamp of womanhood is
effaced. The case is as though a woman were buried alive by each man in
a crowd flinging on her a handful of earth, or as though she were
trampled to death by the marching over her prostrate form of a company
of soldiers. Though no one singly seems to kill, yet collectively they
kill her, and each one is guilty. The judgment of men of the world on
this matter is for the most part shallow, selfish, and cruel; and when I
look at the question in the light which Christ’s solemn words flash upon
it, then I see how falsely or how wickedly some men speak and act. It
avails not to plead, “The woman solicited me.” What if she had solicited
you to assassinate her? Would her solicitation justify you in that? And
after all, what is it that she wants of you when she solicits you? It is
your money: if you are disposed to give that freely, no law of God
forbids it; but the law of God forbids, and humanity forbids, your
buying of her the permission to degrade her body and ruin her soul.
“Sophistical defences all vanish in the clear daylight of truth. When a
_sale_ is hideously unnatural, intrinsically unlawful, productive of
cruel miseries to soul and body, the _purchaser_ also is guilty,—and
here is thrice guilty, beyond the seller; because _he_ is seeking for
carnal pleasure only; _she_ can have no pleasure, but much rather
misery, and is in quest of money only; nay, of the poorer women we may
say, they are in quest of a bare livelihood only. The fine flaunting
courtesans who are carried away by vanity, and obtain high prices from
rich profligate men, less deserve our pity in their present phase of
life; only that we know them to be on the fatal slope down which a large
number of them will be carried, when the men who have bought them one by
one abandon them, each justifying himself by the large sums which he has
paid! What, then, will a thoughtful man say is the legitimate price of
virtue? Either virtue is empty talk, or it is above all price. If any
hardened man hold virtue to be mere talk, stern fact replies, that at
least vice is a hideous fiend, a substantial and terrible reality, and
its propagators are agents of cruelty.”[6]
Your offence—my guilty brother—recall it! Though it be but that of which
men speak so lightly, of having helped to trample down in the dust, so
as to make rising again impossible for ever, one of those over whom the
multitude tread every day, it is recorded against you, and your portion
of the woe (you who set but one foot upon her), is waiting for you.
“Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish;” and the only true
repentance is a practical repentance, which hastens to make restitution,
to restore fourfold.
You are sceptical concerning these victims of men’s vices. To blacken
them, to speak of them as beyond all hope of restoration, seems perhaps
to lessen the uneasy sense of guilt which stirs at times within your
breast. As one who knows something of the heart of the outcast, I can
tell you that these victims on their part are sceptical concerning _you_
and the possibility of your redemption; and the doubt has assuredly as
much foundation to rest upon in the one case as in the other.
The minds of these poor women are frequently distracted with
speculations concerning the lives of their male partners in guilt. They
are perplexed to conceive how it is that a man can for years, for his
whole life perhaps, act a _double part_. They say, “We are sinners
indeed, but we are not _hypocrites_; we do not, after plunging into
impurity under cover of the darkness of night, take our place smilingly
in the daytime among pure men and women, and go to church, it may be, on
a Sunday. We receive all the blows and all the curses from society which
we deserve, and sometimes more; but these men! tell us, is it possible
for their consciences ever to be cleansed?” I wish to make it clear to
you that these poor women consider the reclaimability of profligate men
accepted by the world to be a doubtful possibility _because of the
hypocrisy of their lives_. Their estimate of that hypocrisy is, that it
must be death to the whole character. They feel themselves incapable of
practising such an hypocrisy, deeply sinful as they are. They see their
nightly male visitors received in society, courted by the world,
surrounded by wife and children, holding offices of responsibility; and
their poor souls are perplexed. Now, men who doubt the reclaimability of
fallen women look upon _unchastity_ as the one damning sin. The women,
on the other hand, look upon the _hypocrisy_ as the damning sin which
shuts a man out from hope of heaven, if not from the London
drawing-room. Thus, while one class of persons may be looking upon
another class as utterly vile and irreclaimable, the very class so
judged may be holding the same view with regard to their judges. Now,
let me recall to your minds the story of the Pharisee and the Publican:
the one would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but only said,
“God be merciful;” the other, you know, was a reputedly respectable
person. He who “knew what was in man,” asserted that the one was
justified rather than the other. We find this Divine Person more in
agreement with one of the judgments referred to above than with the
other. That quality of mind which made the attitude of the publican more
hopefully directed towards moral reformation than the other—namely, the
quality of _humility_—is not unfrequently found in the character of
outcast women. It is this honest humility, combined sometimes with a
passionate desire to seem no better than she is, which constitutes the
redeeming feature in the character of the poor outcast. She is not
acting a double part. I fear it may be said as truly now as it was said
long ago to persons who contemptuously speak of outcast women as a
hopeless class—“The publicans and the _harlots_ enter into the kingdom
of heaven before you.”
I would ask you who, after years of shameful wallowing in sin, have
taken to yourselves the comforts of home life, whose praises are in the
mouths of men, who are smiled upon by pure women, and caressed by loving
children, to come with me and look at this degraded woman, sobbing her
poor broken heart out in a corner of some hospital ward, consumed by
disease and misery. What was her life, and what was yours? She was
perhaps slain through her heart’s best affections. The abandonment of
herself to a person beloved was perhaps her first step to ruin; and who
shall say that that self-abandonment in woman, which will make her fling
herself away for another, is altogether devoid of some trace of
unselfishness, which men would do well to mark and shield in her, and to
imitate for themselves in a pure and good cause? What is there in such
an one which makes her a greater sinner than yourself? Be honest! She is
lost to society; you are petted by society. She is killed by the poison
she drank; you survive. No after sweetness, no late consolations of
home, nor the love of children, are reserved for her. She dies
prematurely, and her place knows her no more. Your own past life could
reveal sins as great before God as hers have been; and you are—I will
not say happy, for a little knowledge of the secrets of hearts forbids
me to use that word—but you are not in your coffin, in an unhonoured,
unvisited grave. You are alive, and counting your solid blessings around
you, and receiving the right hand of fellowship every day from the best
part of society, of which, may be, you become gradually soothed into the
belief that you are an honourable and worthy member. It would be vain to
say to you, “Put away your blessings, strip yourself of earthly goods,
come down into the dust, and proclaim yourself what you are.” I can but
say to you, and I do so with grief and shame for you, “Take, if you
will, all the delights of life, but take them in deep self-abhorrence
and confession to God who bears with you so far. Take them, but fear!
Your present prosperity is no sign of the favour of God towards you; it
is his frown, not his smile; wheresoever you go, whether alone or in
company, there is an invisible unbending finger pointing at you, and a
voice more awful than that of the seer of Israel saying of you, ‘Thou
art the man!’”
How fares it, I might ask of many, with the soul of her whom, having
cherished as a wife for a time, you put away when you deemed it
expedient to enter the estate of marriage, and with the souls of those
children, hers and yours, whose existence (unacknowledged perhaps by
you) cries every day to heaven against you? To you it is not difficult
to step back into paths of virtue, and to establish yourself in a home,
with a companion from whom you have been obliged to conceal the fact
that you have yourself lived in adultery up to the time when you made
the offer of yourself to her, and that your soul is stained with the
sins of inconstancy and treachery. But for her who is set aside, the
return to virtue is not easy. You dare not calmly contemplate _her_
future. You know that should she even escape being carried away by that
law of downward gravitation which so frequently governs the life of a
woman who has once erred, and should retire into seclusion, yet she goes
to her grave wronged, and marked with the world’s badge of shame. But I
ask not of any duty fulfilled in regard to her temporal state. I ask you
of her soul and eternal destiny. You think you have done well in
bestowing large gifts of money. Take heed lest God say to you, “Thy
money perish with thee!” because you have thought to atone with wretched
gold for a moral nature wrecked and an immortal soul betrayed! You have
tardily become convinced (you perhaps reply), that your relationships of
an immoral nature must be broken off; but when you have broken off
these, have you done all? Does God allow you to think only for your own
restored respectability and your own salvation, while she who shared
your guilt, it may be loved you truly, goes down to perdition? I beseech
you to consider that we shall be called to answer before God for the
souls of those with whom we have held close and intimate intercourse,
for those whose nature was weaker than our own, and who strengthened
themselves in sin by leaning against our stronger hearts; and that those
children, of whose being you are the author, will be confronted with you
in that awful day when it will not avail you any longer to ask, “Am I my
brother’s keeper?” Where is that woman, that child, whom you inoculated
with your vices, or in any way injured through the weakness and cruelty
of passion? Can you rest in peace one night upon your bed, until you
have sought out those whom you have injured, and moved heaven and earth
to repair the injury you have done? Or, if they have gone beyond your
reach into the darkness whence you can never recall them, can you rest,
enjoying your comforts and honours, until you have made restitution of
other souls to God for those whom you have destroyed? There may be
consciences more tender than your own, organisations more delicate than
yours, which are now suffering, year after year, pains and miseries and
darkness which _you_ brought upon them. There may be companions of your
youth who are now enduring the lifelong blight which you inflicted upon
them, and who, when they meet you in public places now, and see you
courted as leaders in society, are filled with contempt and hatred of
you, knowing not that your outward success is no sign of God’s favour.
You have brought souls into darkness and unbelief, causing them to ask,
“Are God’s ways equal?” “Why dost thou show me iniquity, and cause me to
behold grievance?... Wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal
treacherously, and holdest thy tongue when the wicked devoureth the man
that is more righteous than he?”
Men who have been selfish in the indulgence of their evil nature are too
often selfish even in repentance, content to recover themselves, with
scarcely a thought for those who have suffered through them. I have deep
sympathy with the sinful and sorrowful, and tempted and self-condemned;
but with this self-love which will flee even to the right source for
health and recovery, forgetting others, I have not the shadow of a
thought of sympathy. It moves my deepest scorn.
Wherever the true sorrow has penetrated, wherever the lesson of the
compassionate Saviour has been learned, however imperfectly, selfishness
disappears; those who have no deep care for, and make no active effort
for other sinners, especially for the victims of their own sin (if there
be such), are strangers to the true inner life, however correct, and
however highly praised, their outward life may be.
Few things are more sad to contemplate than the sight of men covering
their deep, unhealed wounds with a late-attained outward virtue and
decency, plastering their terrible griefs and diseases with the rewards
which belong to the virtuous. These things ought not to be. Yet among
those who have weakly, passionately, or in greediness of all that life
can give, clutched and gathered round them all that is sweetest and
best, there are some whose aching hearts still attest that they have
brought them no real health, that they are but external props to an
outward decency of conduct, leaving the deep sore untouched. To these I
would speak gently and sorrowfully, not in anger. You know well that you
are not healed by simply becoming outwardly moral. You know that only
the Infinite can penetrate the necessities of your immortal being, and
that only his hand can reach and apply healing to the deep wounds of
your soul. The remedies you have chosen are to your soul’s disease only
as the stimulants used for a person in consumption, which build him up
for a while, and bestow a false health, an unreal vigour, a temporary
excitement and fulness of the veins, which only make his decline more
rapid and death more sudden, when sooner or later the disease breaks
forth again. I beseech you, by the love of God, not to suffer these
present good things to withdraw your eyes from the only cure, the only
source of spiritual life and health. Better that you should suffer, that
your heart should ache, and that your old wounds should torment you
still, than that, in losing the sense of pain and shame, you should lose
your own soul. These good things may be a support to your weakness in
the regulation of your outward life, but they cannot give you eternal
life nor cleanse the moral nature.
O my erring brothers! be warned, and be aware before the night cometh of
the dangers of this later bliss, this earthly happiness or prosperity,
as you are aware of the perils into which your first choice of evil
brought you. There is an opiate in the purer cup which you now drink, as
there was poison in the former cup of intoxication which at first was to
you so pleasant, and afterwards stung like a serpent. Will you submit
that this opiate should cause you to slumber with the poison not cast
out, but working in you still—the poison which you can escape only by
deep cutting, and cauterising with the fire which he brings who came “to
bring fire on the earth,” who came to baptize us “with the Holy Ghost
and with fire”?
“Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?” Is there
hope, not only for the erring and self-destroyed, but for the criminal
who has misled and destroyed another, upon whose head rests the guilt of
cruelty and treachery? With God all things are possible. “Nazarene, thou
hast conquered,” were the last words of Julian the Apostate, closing the
rebellion and defiance of a lifetime. The heart of the most scornful of
the rebels against his holy laws may, by the hand of God, with whom
nothing is impossible, be broken, softened, and laid bare to the kind
and healing dews of heaven. If at some happy season an angel should
descend and stir the deep waters of his soul, now so stagnant and
congealed beneath the upper froth, I believe they might prove to be
waters of healing. Would that he could hear through the dry air of the
wilderness where he is dying of thirst the Divine voice, “What aileth
thee?” and that his eyes might be opened to see close by his hand the
well of water which he knew not of. “I will give to him that is athirst
of the water of life freely.” “If any man thirst, let him come unto me
and drink.” Thousands are dying of thirst and of the fever which
accompanies it—dying with a deep well of water by their side, and with
words of profane mockery and despairing denial on their lips.
A strong yearning possesses my soul to stretch forth my hand to the most
hopeless creature that lives, to the wildest prodigal who ever fled from
his father’s house, to call him brother, and to speak to him of life and
of love. When there arose a mighty famine in that land, he began to be
in want, and would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the
swine did eat, “and no man gave unto him.” This, that “no man gave unto
him,” has often seemed to me the most sorrowful part of that story of
the Prodigal. These suicides rush downwards to destruction, and men fear
to put forth a hand to stop them, or hearts fail for want of love. We
too readily include them all in one hopeless class, supposed to be sick
beyond recovery, lost beyond recall. There is not one among us who
possesses in its perfection “the intuitive decision of a bright and
thorough-edged intellect to part error from crime.” But God does not
judge men in masses. He, and he alone, takes exact account of every
individual soul, with every particular of the circumstances, and the
forces without and within the man which combined to hurl him down to his
present estate of wretchedness. To us indeed they all appear as
wandering stars, but God alone knows to which among them the “mist of
darkness” is verily reserved for ever. There are moments of sanity and
of sadness, in which the eyes are opened to see that they are selling
their manhood and their immortality for—a mess of pottage!—moments in
which a little thing—a word, a look, a hand held out—might mature
disgust of self into the humble and firm resolve, “I will arise and go
to my Father.” But that little thing “no man gave unto him.”
I know that in speaking of life and of love to some of these, I may be
speaking into the ears of a corpse. The man is dead; he has died the
death of a suicide; his day of grace is past long before his natural
life is ended; he cannot be restored, not because God cannot or will not
restore him, but because there is no longer left in his will or
conscience or affections any spark of life or of power to respond any
longer to the calls of God. But love will not easily be persuaded that
the moment of death has arrived, nor that it is time to leave the bier
of the dead and to return among the living; love, like Rizpeh, will
watch with a constancy stronger than death by the silent corpses of the
“dearly beloved and longed for,” fiercely denying that they shall be
given as carrion to the wolves and the vultures. I do not know when life
becomes extinct. God only knows. But I know that “_charity never
faileth_;” that charity believeth all things, and hopeth all things;
that she holds on in faith and hope, hearing the words, “enthusiast!
fanatic!” uttered by those who have not made full trial of the
long-suffering of God, and with the cautionings and doubtful
questionings of some even of the followers of Jesus sounding in her
ears. None know what God can do, and is ready to do, for the maddest,
wickedest, vilest, and most self-destroyed of men or of women, save
those who can say of themselves, “_De profundis clamavi_,” who have
kneeled, in spirit, side by side with the Lord in the garden of
Gethsemane, and have seen his sweat as it were great drops of blood
falling down to the ground, and who, in that awful hour of love and
sorrow, have dared to say to him, “Lord, take of my heart’s blood also,
and let it be poured forth for thee and thine.”
“I am the resurrection and the life; whosoever believeth in me, though
he were dead, yet shall he live.” “I am come that they might have life,
and that they might have it more abundantly.” So spake the Holy One. The
soul of man is insatiable, for good or for evil. Fulness of life is
desired by all; the breaking up of the frosts of winter, and the
bursting forth of spring; the dreams of childhood restored, but restored
as actual possibilities for us to grasp. The human heart thirsts for
life, and for the utmost expansion of life.
The demoniac of Gadara, he who had the legion, seemed to possess life
enough; he never rested day nor night, every moment straining to the
utmost all the energies of his animal nature; no man could tame him,
none could bind him, for he had often been bound, and had torn his
fetters and broken his chains in pieces. Yet his dwelling was _among the
tombs_. There is enough of demoniacal energy among us, which is not
life, but a hideous mockery of life. Christ has not come to destroy
life, but to save it, and by his own divine energy to cast out the
demoniacal energy. “What a word is this!” it was said of him, “for with
authority and power he commandeth the unclean spirits, and they come
out.” Our Lord said, in his last conversation with his disciples, “This
sign shall follow them that believe: in my name shall they cast out
devils.” And before this his disciples had told him with gladness and
wonder, “Lord, even the devils are subject unto us in thy name.” It has
been recorded by historians of the earliest Christian times how the
Christians triumphed over evil spirits, how they insulted and tormented
the devil wherever they found him, making him remove his lodgings from
the bodies of men “by a writ of ejectment from the name of Jesus
Christ;” and how “Christians, of the meaner sort” even, did, without any
ceremony, but only by their prayers and calling on the name of Christ,
what was beyond the power of all the heathen sorcerers, with their
Ephesian letters and magical incantations.
Not only from possessed persons were the evil spirits driven forth, but
from every temple wherein they were worshipped as gods. Christ
overturned shrines and temples in abundance; he “spoiled principalities
and powers, making a show of them openly;” dethroned the false gods,
from the most brutish to the highest, and quenched the false lights with
the true.
“Torquetur Apollo
Nomine percussus Christi, nec fulmina verbi
Ferre potest.”...
Behold the power of Christ! the hope of those who are afflicted by the
indwelling of some demon of uncleanness, or haunted by beauty, or
dazzled by light which are not of God.
“Be not drunk with wine, but be filled with the Spirit.” For the
drunkards of earth, maddened by whatsoever powerful excitements, who
renounce their master-passion, God has in store “the new wine of the
kingdom.” They need not fear to faint and die beneath the sudden
withdrawal of what has been to them till now the sole sustaining
stimulant of life. It was said of the followers of Jesus, “These men are
full of new wine.” It is true! And there are such men among us at this
day; and through this divine inebriation, this new passion, the love of
Christ, which has cast out all opposing elements, you shall hear them
speak, not as they have hitherto spoken, but “with other tongues, as the
Spirit gives them utterance.”
The eye of faith and of love, surveying the infinite and eternal
possibilities of redemption for the ruined soul, shall see, not the
Magdalene only, not the woman only who was a “sinner,” but the still
guiltier one, stronger in wrong-doing and deeper in treachery, bowing
low before the all-conquering love. Lo! even
“Iscariot washes the Saviour’s feet,
And wipes them with his hair.”
PART III.
BAPTISMUS LABORIOSUS.
Early in the fifth century there dwelt on the western bank of the Jordan
a monk named Zosimus, who had served God from his youth.
In the season of Lent A.D. 430, the Abbot Zosimus crossed the Jordan and
penetrated into the heart of the untenanted wilderness on its eastern
shore, there to meditate in silence on the temptation of our Lord.
Having travelled for twenty days, praying as he went, he one day halted
at sunset and sat down to rest. Raising his eyes, he saw what seemed to
be a human form, fragile and wasted, with hair as white as snow. He
approached, and the apparition being about to flee, he cried, “Stay, and
tell me why you inhabit this desert?” Mary of Egypt (for it was she)
stopped, and answered, “Wherefore do you wish to speak to me? You have
travelled far only to find one sinner.” Zosimus, believing he had met
with a saintly recluse, besought her prayers. “It is you,” she answered,
“who should pray for _me_. I have great need; entreat the Lord that he
will have mercy on me.”
Zosimus continued to urge her to reveal her history, and at length she
spoke as follows:—“I am ready to die of shame in telling you what I am.
I shudder to infect your ears, and the very air itself, with my story.
Nevertheless, holy father, I will speak, obeying your request.
“Egypt was my country. I had good parents, who cherished me tenderly;
nevertheless at twelve years of age I left them, and fled to Alexandria.
I cannot speak, I cannot even think, of my life there; be it enough to
say that for seventeen years I lived a life of infamy. This was my
choice; I had not the plea of poverty.
“I saw, one day, a great crowd of people running towards the seashore. I
asked where they were going, and was told they were about to embark for
the holy city, Jerusalem, there to celebrate the feast of the Exaltation
of the Cross of our Saviour. I embarked also, having no intention except
to continue my former course of life. We arrived in Jerusalem. On the
day of the festival, I repaired with the multitude to the sanctuary, but
scarcely had my foot touched the threshold, when I felt myself repulsed
by an invisible power. Attributing this to a superstitious weakness, I
essayed again and again to enter, but was four times arrested and driven
back as by an armed sentinel. The crowd poured in, and I was left alone.
Confused and wearied, I sat down in a corner of the outer court of the
temple. While there, some words which I overheard, addressed to the
people within, opened the eyes of my soul, and then I understood why it
was that I was not permitted even to look upon the symbol of our
salvation. In desolation and anguish of spirit I smote upon my breast,
and vowed with groans and tears that, might I but be suffered to enter
the sanctuary, and look upon the cross on which Jesus died for sinners,
I would forsake every sin, renounce the world, and flee whithersoever
the Lord should guide me. No sooner had I thus spoken, than I felt that
my vows were accepted, and the sentence of exclusion reversed. Once more
I drew near to the barrier, and this time entered with ease. Overwhelmed
with the thought of the incomprehensible goodness of God, and the
readiness with which he receives sinners when they repent, I threw
myself on the ground, and watering the pavement with my tears, implored
divine guidance to show me what I must do. It seemed to me that a voice
bade me fly from cities and from all the paths of men, and take refuge
in the lonely wilderness. I left the church in haste. I ran all day, and
in the evening reached the shores of the Jordan. I crossed the stream,
and penetrated into the depths of the wilderness.
“From that hour to this I have studied to flee from the face of man, in
the hope that one day I may see the face of God.”
Zosimus asked, “How long have you been in the desert, and how have you
lived?”
Mary answered, “I have lived in this solitude more than the number of
years in which I lived a life of sin. The herbs and fruits of the desert
have been my food, and God’s providence has not failed me.”
The abbot asked, “Did not so sudden a transition from a life of licence
to one so severe cost you much?”
“Abbot Zosimus,” Mary replied, “you ask me a question which I hardly
dare to answer. The memory of the anguish I have suffered terrifies me
yet: pray that God may grant me fortitude. Yes, truly for many years
after I had forsaken my evil life, I strove with constant and violent
temptations. I fought with them as with wild beasts. Here, in the
silence of the wilderness, I seemed to be carried back again in spirit
into the tumult of cities; I saw again the crowds of men who followed
me, I heard their flattering words; the air rang round me with their
passionate songs, summoning me to the responses with which I was so long
familiar. Hungry and fainting, I longed for the fleshpots of Egypt;
seeking vainly to assuage my thirst, I drank again in imagination the
wines which had often intoxicated me. There were times when every memory
which could most shake me assailed me at once, and threatened to drag me
forcibly from my retreat. At such times I would prostrate myself on the
earth and cry aloud to God, whose aid I once had known. Many nights have
I passed thus, filling the desert and rending the skies with strong
crying and supplications. God gave me the victory at last. After many
years, these torments ceased. Since then I have suffered much from cold
and heat, hunger and thirst, and many infirmities, but the mercy of God
has sustained me, while year by year I have offered up prayers for every
soul which had formerly fallen and sinned through me or with me. I have
poured out my soul in anguish and in weeping for them; I have offered up
myself a sacrifice for them, night and day, summer and winter, praying
that their sins may be washed away, and that the plea of my broken
heart, cast at the Saviour’s feet, may avail to open the gates of
paradise for them.”
She then took leave of the abbot, requesting that he would meet her
again in a year at the same spot. “Pray for me,” she cried, and
disappeared.
In the Lent of the following year Zosimus went forth on his search. The
way was long, the desert barren and scorched. As he drew near to the
appointed place, no sound, no movement indicated the presence of any
living thing. His eyes sought long in vain for a human form. At last
they fell upon a corpse. Prone on the earth she lay, her face towards
the east; and by her side, in characters rudely traced upon the ground,
he read, “My name was Mary.”
The abbot wept and raised the body; he buried Mary in a lion’s lair.
For surely lion-like throughout those seventeen years of mortal strife,
alone, in the wilderness, among the wild beasts, tempted of the devil,
had that weak woman endured to raise indignant protest against the
horrors of her former sin, dared to confront God’s outraged majesty with
that mute, unquenchable appeal.
In some church of Northern Italy, I remember to have seen a picture of a
woman clinging to a cross in a sanctuary to which she has fled for
refuge; around her throng on every side innumerable faces of men. She
cannot safely look for one moment this way or that; desperately, with
closed eyes, she clings to the cross. Shall we blame such an one because
her foes are so many and so strong? or, if she knows that in flight is
her only safety, shall we forbid her to flee?
If this fervour of repentance and indomitable fortitude, I hear you say,
had found expression in active labours for those fellow-beings for whom
Mary besieged heaven with her prayers, many would have been blest, and
she herself a nobler being. True; nevertheless might Mary, and such as
she, rise up in judgment against the men of this generation, who dally
with temptations, and above all things fear to push their virtue to
extremes; who may have courage for action, but have not courage or
endurance to dare to be for a season _alone with God_; to whom a few
years of self-denial seem a burden too grievous to be borne; whose
repentance may be a fervour of sentiment, but is seldom a reality of
pain.
Thus did they sorrow, and thus did they endure, those heroes strong in
humility, those heroines of the olden time. They bore the cross till the
weak flesh sank beneath the burden; they hasted from the city of
destruction, though their path was as a slender thread hung over gulfs
of fire. So came it that they subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness,
obtained promises, turned to flight the armies of the aliens, stopped
the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire; so came it that the
outcast of Alexandria has left a name greater than that of the
Ptolomies, insomuch that when the pure-hearted Van Eyck was summing up
in one great argument the annals of the early faith, he painted even
her, Mary of Egypt, in the forefront of that glorious company who gather
to the adoration of the spotless Lamb.
“Yet show I unto you a more excellent way.”
In the beginning of the thirteenth century lived Margaret of Cortona.
Her painful history, the sins and sorrows of her youth, have been
recorded by annalists of the Church in Italy. The eyes of her soul were
opened by a tragical event; she resolved, once for all, that her future
life should be one constant act of repentance. She sought her father’s
home, from which she had long strayed; he rejected her, and drove her,
with bitter reproaches, from his house. She took her little child by the
hand, and wandered forth; retiring to a distant part of a deserted
garden, she fell on her knees and wept bitterly. Then there drew nigh
for her one of those terrible hours when the powers of hell seem to
gather all their forces together for the destruction of a tempted soul.
Even thus in a garden Augustine fought his last and fiercest fight with
hell, till peace came to him in the message of a singing child. Thus in
a garden the Saviour of the world “began to be sore amazed and very
heavy,” enduring and vanquishing the “unknown agony,” and making victory
possible for men.
Forlorn and hopeless, Margaret’s first thought was of suicide. Then
there rushed back upon her the recollection of her brilliant, sinful
past. She was twenty-one years of age, and exquisitely beautiful. What
had she not still in her power? How often has such a moment come to a
frail girl who through her fall becomes the despised and rejected of
men!—a moment when on the one side are famine, friendlessness, and
shame, on the other an easy road to immediate luxury and praise, with
scope for all her power to please, and satisfaction for her instincts of
passionate affection. “If they will not love me in my penitence, let
them love me in my sin;” how many times has this thought decided the
ruinous relapse, overcoming a deep and genuine horror of the sin!
But Margaret was reserved for better things. After a long struggle, an
inspiration of grace seemed to bear into her heart the words, “When my
father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up.” “_His_
mercy,” she said to herself, “his mercy endureth for ever;” and calm at
last, and strong, she rose from the earth, prepared to go wherever the
guardian of her soul should guide her. She took the road to Cortona,
which she reached at sunset. As she entered the city, two ladies met
her; struck by Margaret’s wearied movements, her maternity, her beauty,
her sadness, they accosted her. Margaret told them her story; they
offered her a home. She lived for a brief period under this generous
protection; but her life there was too easy and delicate to satisfy her
desire of self-abnegation. She began to devote herself to the most
forlorn and miserable of her fellow-women, nursing them in sickness, and
proclaiming to them the unfathomable mercies of God. Though courting
seclusion, her devoted life became known, and she was invited to enter
the third order of St Francis, an order of seculars, who were bound to
maintain the active duties of life in the world. “From this time,” her
biographer says, “she seemed like a new creature in Christ Jesus; her
heart was set on fire with the love of God and of man. Sadness and
terror gave place to peace, and that tender sorrow, sweet and bitter,
which the accepted soul alone can know.” She laboured now with redoubled
assiduity. In the hospitals in which she served, the attendants, in the
intervals of work, sang and chatted together; but Margaret prayed, and
“often those who saw her ceased to sing, and kneeled with her and prayed
also; and when she spoke of the love of God and the severe purity of his
holy law, no heart, however much the slave of pleasure, remained
unmoved.”
Finding that the work she was doing drew her away too much from the
poor, and into the ranks of the more prosperous classes, she abandoned
it, and took a small room in the humblest part of the city, and there
she consecrated herself entirely to the service of the poor and the
outcast. To these she became a mother indeed. Her work, her time, her
humble dwelling, all that she had was theirs, insomuch that, giving to
their necessities of her own clothes and bedding, she was found
sometimes in winter with scarcely covering sufficient for the protection
of her worn frame. So maternal was her attitude towards them, so
delicate and bountiful the sympathy she gave to all, both men and women,
that multitudes forsook the doors of other helpers and spiritual guides,
and crowded round her humble dwelling. She laboured with her hands in
order to gain money to help the indigent, and to give an impulse to the
self-help of young girls and needy women. Margaret, however, had her
dark hours, when memories of the past and present allurements combined
to trouble her soul and shake her faith. Her sole resource at these
times was to take refuge in the deepest shadow of the cross. Fragments
of her private writings remain to this day, wherein is revealed the
motive power which enabled her to be “faithful unto death.” Advised by
an aged priest to moderate her labours and her self-denial, she replied,
“My father, never while I live shall there be a truce between my soul
and the evil that is in me.” Sometimes she would rally her body in the
quaint fashion of the saints of old: “Wherefore servest thou not the
Lord as eagerly as thou formerly servedst sin? Nay! do not lament, do
not pretend thou art dying. If thou wouldst dwell with Christ, win thy
crown and slack not.”
To the soul which has learned truly to love God, God’s choice, whether
of work or of suffering for that soul, is welcome. When men sin, and he
afterwards appoints for them a lot of privation, or pain, or of
redoubled effort through the whole of life, his appointment is not for
the destruction and defeat of their newly-awakened hopes and aims, but
in order to their fulfilment.
I address myself to you, friends, whose faces are now turned towards the
light, who have laid aside, or earnestly desire to lay aside, “every
weight and the sin which does most easily beset you.” You have ceased,
perhaps, to bewail the defeat of earthly ambitions, or your lessened
power of enjoyment of the best things, and you now only mourn over your
weakened energies of body and mind, because they render you less able to
serve him effectually while you live. A deeper knowledge of God and of
his ways will, I think, tend greatly to reassure you on this head. You
speak of a life baffled in hope and in action; these are sad words, yet
it may be asked, Does it not seem almost a law in the kingdom of grace
that every life which is finally victorious shall be at first baffled?
Was not our blessed Lord’s life baffled for a time? To human eyes it
was. It appeared a great failure, ending tragically.
Now that you have risen above despair, and are quickened by a mighty
hope, and have received the gift of life and love, one of the first
things needful for you is, doubtless, a complete acquiescence, an
acceptance, once for all and without a murmur, of the measure of
correction and of outward disappointment which is apportioned to you
now, presenting your souls to God as blank, clean-washed tablets, for
him to write upon them what he pleases, as instruments ruined, it may
be, for every use except the highest use of all. Even though you had now
all but spun your last thread, and your earthly future had dwindled into
a few weeks or months of inaction, suffering the penalties of sin,
remember the dying malefactor! Even he bore his testimony to Christ (a
testimony which will be carried down to the remotest ages), firmly
rebuking the blasphemy of his companion, and preaching from his cross of
shame the virtue of the sinless One. But many to whom I speak have still
much of life, and of the more serious work of life, before them. I wish
that I could by any words convey to you that which I feel may be in
store for you, if by the grace of God you are enabled not only to
receive the inward healing, but to dedicate your lives wholly to God.
Some of you, who have fallen, and have been lifted up again, and
strengthened by him whose feet you have not ceased to kiss, will
understand me when I speak of a more complete self-dedication than any
which we commonly see among Christian people. To you Christ’s words will
not seem intolerable when he speaks of forsaking houses, brethren,
sisters, father, mother, wife, children, and lands, for his name’s sake
and the gospel’s; to you it will appear a light thing that you should
deny yourselves in the matter of meat and drink, of ease, and sleep, and
social enjoyments. There are idols of the heart and soul, sweet dreams,
golden futures, reasonable ambitions of this world, resting-places,
homes, loves, hopes—to give up all these for Christ’s sake!—“who is
sufficient for these things?” You are the men whose past should make you
ready for these things, and whom God can make sufficient for them. I
believe that much of the work of God which is waiting to be accomplished
in our days on earth will not be accomplished until Christ has large
armies of voluntary martyrs. Society is in peril from dangerous wounds
which will not close until the young, the brave, the undaunted, the
reckless, for Christ’s sake, armed from head to foot in the impenetrable
armour of God, shall cast themselves into the yawning gulf. It is from
among you that this army may be greatly recruited. God can make of you,
who have been so terribly marred by sin, the boldest, bravest soldiers
of the cross; he can use you for great necessities, for hard and noble
service, as pioneers in wildernesses and rough places of the earth, as
leaders of forlorn hopes, to do the fatigue-work of God’s army, and to
fill every post of the utmost danger and exposure. It is to his glory
that he is able to furnish precious material out of the very rubbish of
the earth, that he should gather up the fragments that remain, that
nothing be lost, and direct to one holy end all these scattered and
desecrated energies. In order to this, Christ requires whole-hearted,
willing martyrs.
He has had such martyrs as witnesses and landmarks at all times. There
have been men and women who have endured the breaking of their own
hearts for the love of Christ, who have resolutely cut off the right
hand or plucked out the right eye for his sake. Upon the altars of such
self-sacrifice has ofttimes been kindled a holy fervour which moved the
world. A strange and inextinguishable energy has appeared in some of
these lovers of Christ, these unwearying evangelists and lifelong
martyrs, which it has perplexed the world to account for. They have been
enabled to work miracles among the hearts and souls of their fellow-men.
They have passed through life as unknown, yet well known; as dying, and
behold they live; as chastened, and not killed; as sorrowful, yet always
rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet
possessing all things; taking pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in
necessities, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ’s sake.
I cannot greatly admire the reformed profligate, professing now the fear
of God, who greedily gathers to himself every good thing that life can
give him, avoiding actual sin, but enjoying himself to the utmost of his
remaining power of enjoyment. God is munificent, bountiful, generous to
the evil and the good, the just and the unjust. It is true that he
oftentimes allows the man to take all that he can get, and to be happy
in his own way; but it is not the highest happiness which he has chosen,
it is not the noblest choice nor the truest life; but then it is a life
without the heavy cross, and therefore to most men it is the chosen, the
welcome life. I am filled with grief and shame when I see how little
there is among men of that noble self-scorn which would urge them,
having been great in sin, to be great in self-denial. If such men could
see their past in the true light, see what it is to have wasted youth,
and strength, and energy, to have desecrated love, and aided in the
destruction of bodies which should have been temples of God, they would
put away from themselves henceforward in disdain the precious gifts of
earth, not in contempt of the gifts, but in anger at the thought that
they themselves should seem to know so little of true sorrow and true
revenge as to touch such gifts. They would put away all thoughts of ease
and of enjoyment, and of striking roots to bind them to a world in which
they must henceforward be as strangers and pilgrims, dispensers of
blessing and succour, enriching out of their own deep poverty. They
would make haste to live the life of the Crucified, freed from private
cares and joys, taking their lives in their hands, “counting not their
own lives dear unto them,” and to go forth whithersoever the Lord should
send them, their faces heavenward, pressing on to labour in the great
harvest-field before the sun goes down, and, for every soul which they
have hurt by their past neglect or open sin, to gather in and repay to
the Lord a thousand. Their desire would be to be claimed entirely, to be
laid hold of by God, to be gathered up in the hollow of his hand, that
they may be hurled forth again as fiery arrows from the hand of a giant
whose quiver is full, to execute his will to the ends of the earth. They
would cease to make nice and niggardly calculations of how much of the
world, of ease, and of pleasantness they ought to give up, and of how
much they may lawfully keep, but would question rather how they may give
up their all, and make their life a complete holocaust, heaping
sacrifice upon sacrifice at the feet of the Holy One who redeemed them.
I know that to some men such words as these are “a hard saying;” yet I
know also certainly that there are others in the world to whom the
thought of a whole surrender is more attractive than that of a half
surrender, who do not shrink from the darkest valleys and the most
rugged ascents of the _Via Crucis_; indeed to whom, looking back on
their past life, this new life of entire self-abandonment seems the only
one for them; to whom its glory is revealed in the midst of its anguish;
who feel it would be a shame to them to live as other men, or even to
linger among the green pastures and by the still waters where the
happier of Christ’s flock are nourished, who have been led by gentler
paths to a high wisdom and purity in the knowledge of God. These men are
content to put by all rest and enjoyment until they see God face to
face. And yet, from the moment that the vow of complete self-dedication
is made, the future joy dawns upon these hearts with a clearness never
known before. From the moment that the resolution is taken, a great calm
begins to fill the soul. There is a distinct loss and a distinct gain.
The Master whom we serve is so generous that he will never suffer those
who have stripped themselves for his sake to be without full
compensation. He lavishes his greatest wealth, his most precious gifts,
upon his poor ones who have deliberately made themselves poor for his
sake. Henceforward their life of outward hardship, of toil, of poverty
in the matter of life’s best things, may make them to appear in the eyes
of men of the world as “of all men most miserable,” but the inward
vexation and conflict are at an end; sorrow still fills their hearts,
but it is no longer the restless sorrow of the world; it is the sorrow
of the Man of Sorrows, which he who has been made a partaker of them
would for ever choose rather than the purest joys of earth.
And when did any age call for great devotion of heart more than our own?
The malady of the age deepens; men’s hearts are filled with doubt and
perplexity. How will God restore faith and establish righteousness on
the earth? We know he can do it, but by what means we know but very
imperfectly. It will surely be in a great measure through the individual
life of his witnesses on earth that he will renew the spiritual life of
the world; through men and women “full of the Holy Ghost and of power.”
It is through the human voice that he will speak in pleading accents. He
will make himself felt through the warm pressure of human hands
stretched forth for help, and through the earnest affection of human
eyes accustomed to penetrate the unseen. The miracles of men’s lives are
the only miracles which will convince the incredulous.
And now, I beseech you, let the honest and courageous contemplation of
the character of the day in which we live, its worst symptoms and its
most threatening dangers, be to you who are aspiring to a renewed life
an added incentive to humble, determined, and indomitable efforts. Such
a contemplation may lead you to a clearer conception of the part you
(young men especially) are called on to play at this time, and of the
manner in which your past experience, humbling or sad as that may have
been, may be subordinated to the service of suffering and sinful
humanity, which now more than ever groans and travails in pain and in
expectancy of a coming redemption.
Our own country seems at this time to stand hesitatingly, like Hercules
in the Greek fable, at the point of divergence of two paths leading in
opposite directions. Her future seems to hang in the balance. Without
moral faith it is impossible that any nation should ever progress; and
there has lately seemed to be a decay of moral faith, tending to a
universal and fatal lapse, and leading downward to that state which
Proudhon, in words which have in them the sound of a funeral-bell,
declares France to have reached, that of “an effete people,”—“_une
nation finie_.” Rank, wealth, and power are too often seen to be in
league with profligacy and materialism. There is much hollowness and
hypocrisy in the upper stratum of society, while a spurious _Science_
vaunts itself as the future redeemer of mankind, trampling under foot
the feelings, aspirations and sensibilities of all God’s
wonderfully-fashioned, sentient beings, and aspiring to sit in God’s
seat as omniscient ruler, not only of the material creation, but of the
souls and affections of men. Our high material civilisation has armed
the human brute with new instruments of his lust and his ferocity. We
are in danger of being carried back to the “uncertainties and despair of
a paganised philosophy, which in time, sweeping away all that elevates
man, will land us among the ferocities and lusts of a paganised
society.”
If our country is to escape moral and political ruin, the spirit of a
deep and true repentance, that replenishing shower promised for the
refreshing of God’s inheritance when it is parched and weary, must be
poured out upon us from on high. We must be rebaptized in first
principles; pure and holy truths must be accepted, taught, and
proclaimed perseveringly by the people and among the people. We must not
stand still and wait, expecting this teaching from our recognised
spiritual instructors, and from the churches; though, as sharers in the
blessings of a moral revival, these will lend their aid. Still less must
we be sanguine in any expectation of an initiative of good from the
upper classes, and those who have a factitious influence borrowed from
rank or some conventional prestige. It is in the more serious classes of
the people (under God) that we hope, and especially in the rising
generation, if they can “escape the corruptions that are in the world
through lust,” and the deadening materialistic creed which attracts in
crowds the votaries of pleasure and men of the world.
Nothing has more forcibly indicated the materialistic tendency of our
day than the public endorsement, which the last ten years have
witnessed, of the _unequal standard of morality_ for the sexes. This
double standard is man’s invention, for his own base convenience. It is
not the standard of Christ, and it is inconsistent with every principle
of justice and right. Christ taught the absolute equality of the moral
law in its application to men and women, to rich and poor alike. As if
to correct with scourging the false standard—oppressive of women and
indulgent to men—which he found existing in his day on earth, he
pronounced the sternest denunciations of high-class male profligacy,
while he received with the utmost gentleness the woman of the city who
was a sinner, who had crept to his feet, and restored her to her lost
place in society, separating her for ever from her sins. From this
standard and this judgment, founded on the eternal truth of the unity of
the moral law, men have separated themselves as far as the east is from
the west; and not men only; women of the higher classes, “women that are
at ease,” possessing, themselves, a merely negative virtue, become
capable, through a cowardly subserviency to custom and masculine
opinion, of deep and positive cruelty towards their own sex.
Christ’s teaching in this matter has been practically frustrated and
denied century after century, and upon its denial have been founded
legislation, customs, and public institutions, criminally and cruelly
immoral and unjust. Man, claiming for himself an impure privilege to
sin, is, in spite of his profligacy, received in society and entrusted
with moral and social responsibilities, while the lapse of a woman of
the humbler classes, though that lapse has been induced by the pressure
of poverty or the allurements of love, is made the portal for her of a
life of misery and shame. Society drives such an one out of bounds, sets
its hell-hounds on her track, and makes recovery all but impossible. It
is not now by profligate men alone that theories of life are propounded
in accordance with wicked practice. It is not the sensualist and
materialist alone who declare that unchastity is a “necessity” for man,
and that the “priestess of humanity,” the degraded and outcast woman,
must continue to the end of time to offer up sacrifices for society,
_herself_ the victim on the sacrificial altar, her soul, affections,
will, immortal spirit, cast, together with her frail and suffering body,
into the burning fiery furnace, the Gehenna of the insatiable lust of
the male brute who rules her destiny here on earth. We now hear good men
echoing this deadly doctrine in a somewhat milder form. Christian
ministers themselves are not free from this dire confusion of the moral
vision; if they had been so, it would have been impossible for them to
stand aside, silent as they have been, while the audacious doctrine of
the necessity of unchastity was publicly proclaimed, and the lie was
openly given to the truth of the unity of the moral law by the
proclamation and endorsement in public enactment of the unequal standard
accepted in society. The attitude of Christian ministers towards the sin
of unchastity, and their silence concerning the vice and cruelty of men
in their relations with women of the poorer classes, are a mournful
comment on the ease with which right principles may decay, and yet the
servant of God himself may not mark their decay. It has indeed been
reserved for us at this day to see something of the “infinite capacity
for cowardice in men.” How is it that, when our nation said, through the
voice of its rulers, “Evil, be thou my good!” when those rulers elevated
that destroyer of peoples and tribes and nations, sexual vice, into a
recognised industry officially organised, every pulpit in the land did
not ring with a clear denial of the impious doctrine underlying the
cynical deed? I have indicated the answer. The whole moral atmosphere
around us is poisoned by the influence of the “old and chartered lie”
which scourges humanity, that that which is sin, degradation, and shame
for woman, is but a light and venial offence, if offence at all, in man.
But we see a light as of the approach of the dawn of day. The night is
indeed far spent, and many are watching for the promised revival as
those that watch for the morning. There is conflict around us, strong,
persistent, increasing. God be thanked, wherever there is conflict there
is life! On the one hand there are faith, virtue, freedom; on the other
hand materialism, profligacy, oppression, and slavery. Great
antagonistic forces are drawing nearer for battle. There is a sound as
of nations arousing; the heart of this people is more deeply stirred in
our day than it has yet been in this century. We have fallen upon a
solemn time. It is a period of sifting, when God, by his messengers and
his providences, shall “throughly purge his floor,” and sift the nations
as chaff is sifted from the wheat. The innermost thoughts of men’s
hearts are being revealed; light has penetrated “the dark places of the
earth, which are full of the habitations of cruelty.” Light, too, has
visited the consciences of men; they that are of the light are hastening
towards the light; they who “hate the light because their deeds are
evil,” horrified at the presence of light, are flying from it. Iniquity
abounds; yet the Lord is pouring forth his Spirit, “as the latter rain,”
abundantly. The enemy comes in like a flood, but the Spirit of the Lord
is raising up a standard against him.
Religious awakenings have lately been realised among us far and wide,
and continue to spread over many parts of Europe and America. It is
clear that, in order to combat with any success the materialism of our
age, embodied in accepted theories, customs, laws, and institutions, we
need some great manifestation of the power of God. That much-wished-for
breath of heaven appears to be now visiting us. Indolent souls are
aroused, and baptized into a fresh spiritual life. A cloud of blessing
is hanging over many lands. We stand in awe and expectation, seeing in
these things the hand of God. Without entering into the mystery of these
spiritual visitations, we must recognise the fact that there are periods
when it seems as if God granted a special audience to waiting souls on
this suffering earth, and as if the prayers sent up through many barren
years met at last a quick and abundant response. Such times have been
frequently accompanied or followed, in a greater or less degree, by the
casting off of national evils and the overthrow of great instituted
abominations, the overturning of conventional standards, and the revival
of a higher morality. It was strikingly so when, in America, a
widespread and earnest religious revival preceded that final encounter
of antagonistic principles which resulted in the overthrow of the great
slave system. It will tend somewhat to discredit the thoroughness of the
present religious impulse if it should fail to come into direct
collision with the greatest of our social evils. It is not enough that
the spiritual teachers now appealing to the masses of the people should
include in their ministrations certain “women of the city who are
sinners;” they ought directly to deal with the false and guilty theory
that impurity is necessary for men, that the institution of harlotry
must for ever remain in the heart of Christendom, and that a mere
remnant of souls is all we may expect to save from the grasp of that
tyranny. It will be a sad thing for the future of our country if we do
not avail ourselves of this Pentecostal breath of Heaven in order to
bring down the strongest of Satan’s strongholds to the ground. The holy
men who are the appointed instruments for the promotion of this revival
movement devote themselves daily and hourly to the work of receiving all
anxious inquirers who come to them, unweariedly teaching, praying, and
comforting; infinite pains are bestowed on the individual. And in this
they act as Christ acted. It is to the awakening of the private
conscience that God has committed the real history and progress of
mankind. But if, the private conscience being awakened, the man who is
the subject of the awakening regards all those lost and unhappy beings
who are not, manifestly to him, the subjects of the same awakening
grace, as permanently excluded by a decree of Providence, as a portion
of the “world lying in wickedness,” which must for ever continue to lie
in wickedness; if he persistently declines to seek the reform of our
social institutions lest he should soil his own soul by contact with
something which he deems to belong to the domain of Satan; then the
progress which God has committed to the awakening of the private
conscience will be indefinitely arrested, and extraordinary spiritual
awakenings will be discredited; reproach will lie at the door of those
to whom the gracious advances of the Spirit of God have been made, and
their fidelity will be impugned. A bright and cheering hope will rest
upon the future when the present religious movement becomes more
aggressive and more openly hostile to evils which are patronised by the
rich and influential; and of this practical development signs are not
wanting, especially in Switzerland and in the South of France, where the
religious awakening has been felt, and is continuing to spread, and
where its leaders have emphatically pointed to the overthrow of the
“typical crime of the universe,” prostitution, as the necessary sequel
to a deeply-renewed spiritual life among the nations. We want a far more
stern, searching, and uncompromising religious work than we have yet
seen in _our own_ land; one which shall boldly attack the gigantic sins
of the day, the greed of wealth, those trades which flourish on the ruin
of the bodies and souls of men, and that conspiracy of avarice and lust
by which is accomplished the destruction of tens of thousands of the
daughters of our people. We want a spiritual and moral awakening which
shall probe and combat the great social inequalities and wrongs that are
undermining the very foundations of religious and social life. It will
scarcely be denied, that the evils which those who desire to see
righteousness established on earth are called on to attack and to
destroy, culminate and find their last and most terrible expression in
that gigantic iniquity, that systematised profligacy, which is now
openly advocated. Isolated efforts will not avail. Whole communities of
men and women, unanimous in respect of the end to be attained, must
arise simultaneously to the rescue; and we already see the beginning of
such a movement in many lands. This movement has arisen precisely at the
moment when the evil itself had become aggressive in a sense never
before witnessed in the history of the world; when it had found
apologists among teachers and disciples of science and philosophy, and
when the very foundations of society had begun to be threatened by the
prevalence of the lying dogma, that any faculty, because it exists, may
be used without further question; that the practice of fornication, and
the devotion to destruction of those who minister to it, are based on an
imperious and unconquerable _necessity_, and that a truce must now be
proclaimed between society and these monstrous evils, against which it
is at once unwise and hopeless any longer to make war. The birth of the
movement in opposition to this “lying dogma” has been the signal for
fearless speech. Silence on the subject is at an end. Immorality,
however fashionable, and however influential its apologists, will
henceforward no longer be allowed to fortify itself in conventionality
by the abject silence of public opinion, nor shall it be permitted to
retain its place in civilised societies and professedly Christian
countries as one of the officially recognised and protected institutions
of society.
The “new word of progress” among us is clear; and while contending on
every hand against all the unmistakable proximate _causes_ of
prostitution, we shall wage a spiritual warfare against its ultimate
_cause_,—the permission and sanction of the double standard, the
doctrine that impurity in man is a slight and excusable offence, while
in woman it is a deadly and unpardonable sin. Our task at this day is to
teach unremittingly, unweariedly, both publicly and privately, the great
and forgotten truth of the _unity of the moral law_. There is no double
dispensation of the moral law; that law is one, as God is one. “The law
of personal purity obliges men and women equally to rule their lives by
their highest spiritual ideal, to fulfil their highest conceptions,
moral and intellectual. It prohibits any violation of the spiritual
nature for the temporary and apparent satisfaction of the physical
nature. Such a violation of the soul is rightly called impurity. It
destroys the purity in human life which lies in the supremacy of the
spiritual will and affections, mastering, moulding, and animating the
material body. The natural law ordains a contest as the necessary
condition of spiritual life. In this contest the purest personal
motives, manly and womanly honour, modesty and courage, are engaged in
the service of the spirit. But the defeat of the will degrades the human
being beneath the level of a brute; since self-indulgence, contrary to
the higher nature and the will, its instrument, is not the natural
obedience to a true, self-sufficing instinct, but is abnormal, impure,
and evil in its personal as in its social consequences.”[7]
Much scepticism prevails, even among those who profess the faith of
Jesus Christ, on the subject of the permanent reclamation of the victims
of society, outcast women. Baffled or disappointed in two or three
attempts to elevate such women, and reinstate them in society, most
persons abandon the effort, and too often thenceforth go about
proclaiming the moral irreclaimability of these poor fallen ones. With
as much reason might they proclaim it to be an impossibility for trees,
stripped of their foliage by the winter’s cold, ever to regain their
leaves in spring, inasmuch as they themselves find it beyond their power
to redress the woods with verdure, or to call to a new life the dormant
and buried root hidden in the frost-bound earth. God alone can give life
to the soul; and these souls, sinned against and despairing beyond all
others, will answer only to the call of God, or of the follower of
Christ who has derived, through deep spiritual communion with him, the
secret of the rare and awful power of quickening souls. “The works that
I do,” said that Holy One, “shall ye do also, and greater works than
these shall ye do.” “I perceive that virtue is gone out of me,” he said,
when a trembling woman, who had touched the hem of his garment, stood
upright before him, “healed of that plague” which had blighted her life.
That Holy One alone could say in its fullest sense, “I and my Father are
one;” hence he alone in the fullest sense could be the channel of
healing virtue to suffering men; and for the working of miracles of
healing in the soul, they alone are sufficient who live in unbroken
communion with God.
John Eudes of Normandy, who lived in the seventeenth century, coming
forth from a retirement of five years spent in unceasing prayer and
thought, accomplished a great reformation work in France, especially in
the matter of public morality and the overthrowing of the conventional
ideas concerning the relative guilt of men and women who were impure. It
is told of him, that one day while preaching to a vast congregation in
the great church of St. Stephen’s at Caen, carried away by the thought
of the sin of the world and of the numbers before him who were its
slaves or victims, he ceased for a moment to speak, and then cried out,
in a voice of piercing emotion, “Mercy, O my God, have mercy!” The whole
congregation, falling on their knees, began to weep and to sigh, and
repeated, as with the voice of one man, the words, “Mercy, O my God,
have mercy!” Another very talented and popular preacher, a great admirer
of Eudes, believed, on hearing this, that he could produce the same
effect by the same method; he tried it, and pausing in the course of a
beautiful sermon soon afterwards, used the same words in a voice of deep
emotion; but though he repeated them twice, no heart was touched, no one
knelt, all remained seated and silent. This preacher had _not_ won,
through years of deep communion with God, that “virtue” which, like an
electric fire, flowed from the inmost soul of Eudes to the hearts of all
who heard him. Thus, among ourselves, the outward means by which
repentance and life are brought to dark and dying souls may be employed
by men and women who have not the spiritual power to render those means
effectual. In that case, their actions and appeals are but a
performance, a representation, instructive to the beholder, and
edifying, it may be, by way of example, but no more.
Yet is there not a work to be done by those who are conscious that they
lack the faith which would enable them to “receive their dead to life
again,” and to bring their fellow-sinners to the feet of God? Assuredly
there is. Of this same John Eudes it is said, that when he had daily
proclaimed the love of God to multitudes of the poor women of his city,
lost in misery and sin, he called some of his disciples around him, and
explained to them his need of their help. He “found that the weak seeds
of better feelings, of repentance and a desire to return to God, which
by grace were sown in their hearts while listening to his words, could
not take root under the pressure of poverty and the pestilential
atmosphere of vice and misery in which they lived.” He accordingly
induced many of his friends “to receive these poor women into their
houses, to give them work, to educate them, and, as far as possible, to
improve their moral character.” Thus they were placed in conditions more
favourable for the restoration of self-respect, and for the reception of
the hopes and aspirations of the spiritual life. There is not one among
us, however faltering our own advance in the better life, however
unworthy, however ignorant as yet in spiritual matters, who has not
within his or her reach the possibility of aiding in this holiest
mission of restoring the fallen, or of arresting the progress along the
path of destruction of some fellow-man or woman. A word, but one word,
of gentle human kindness, has marked, thousands of times, the
turning-point in a career of ignorance, recklessness, or despair, and
has given the impulse in the opposite direction. Multitudes of the most
unhappy class of sinners might be drawn out of the mire, separated from
the entanglements of the circumstances which surround them, and set
forth in the paths of honour and virtue, by the mere stretching forth of
a helping hand, succeeded by the patient combined efforts of those who,
in repentance and humility, sincerely desire to redress some human
wrong, and who, if not yet spiritually strong, are at least full of
human sympathy. For this work of raising from the dust the daughters of
our country’s shame, a generous faith in human nature and its
capabilities is indispensable. When this kind of faith is associated
with a sound understanding, common sense, a tender heart, and a lively
and healthy imagination, those who possess it are able to meet every
fellow-creature, however unfortunate or degraded, however far removed by
class distinctions or education, on the broad ground of a common
humanity. The secret of reclamation, viewed from the human side, is
delicately and frankly to elicit the true God-given character, buried
beneath the guilt and shame, and to give permanence to that character.
It is in vain for any one, not possessing in some degree such generous
faith in and reverence for human nature in its saddest plight, to
attempt to influence the women who are the victims of our social
depravity. There are men who continually spread abroad on all hands the
false and cruel belief that such women are past hope, unsexed, incapable
of purification, and more degraded than the men who have sinned with
them.
It fills me with grief and shame to see the hold that this belief has
got among large classes of virtuous people, especially in the higher
ranks, where it has least of all the opportunity of correction by
practical and personal knowledge of the conditions of life which
surround the daughters of the people, and of the character and homes of
the poor. But I doubt whether the most powerful reasoning on this
subject would convince any one who in his heart believes that fallen
women are lost, irreclaimable, unsexed, mere animals, harpies, and the
like; for the cause of this misapprehension lies in the heart and
character of the person who misapprehends; and unless the heart of that
person can be reached, and his whole mode of thought and of life be
changed, there is no hope whatever of influencing him on this head. A
single look at a man’s face is often enough to indicate whether it is of
any use to ask him to aid in the reclamation of fallen women. In some
men’s faces I see faith; in others, none. In order to convince these
doubters in this matter, I must ask them to come with me to haunts of
evil repute, and to poor homes and hiding-places of shame, and learn the
reality of the lives of these poor women, and then say whether they are
not altogether human beings like ourselves, with hearts and consciences,
sorrows and joys, tender hopes and poignant regrets. But then I reflect
that this would be, in some cases, useless; for the very approach and
presence of some men, and of some women too, paralyses the good there is
in these outcasts.
If I were to take with me one of these sceptics about human nature, and
introduce him among these women, they would look in his face in their
peculiar, keen, and inquiring manner; they would read his thoughts with
a quickness of perception which is developed in these Pariahs by the
pain of their position, and they would at once turn to him their bad
side—the hard, or bitter, or defiant side: hence it is impossible to
convince these same men even by this means, because there are certain
affinities lacking which are needful to draw out the goodness which
there is in these outcasts; and therefore these sceptics will ever
continue to assert that such women are beyond hope, and to call them by
every contemptuous and ungracious epithet.
Nothing is more common than the assertion (we hear it reiterated _ad
nauseam_), that women who sell themselves for money are degraded beyond
all other beings, and that the sin so perpetrated is one with which the
sin of the man, her partner, is not to be compared for moral turpitude.
In the face of this assertion, I will fearlessly avow, and I speak from
a large experience, that some of those who thus sin are among the least
guilty—I will even say the most capable of nobility of motive, of that
unhappy class.
I could tell you of a girl whose father was pining in sickness, and
could not even get a farthing candle or a bit of coal to lighten and
warm the cellar where his agonised nights were spent. I have seen the
daughter with her face buried in his rags of bedclothes, weeping her
heart out. Then she goes forth, and returns with various unexpected
comforts, and says, “Don’t ask, father, where I got them;” and so she
ministers to him till he dies, buying a shell to place his body in, and
a bunch of violets to lay on the breast of the corpse; and all out of
the sale of her own cold, trembling, hungry person, not carried away,
mark you, by any vanity, or morbid instinct, or passion, except the
_passion of pity for a dying father_. And yet we hear doctors and
statesmen and philosophers, and even women, say, “If women will be so
base as to sell their persons, they are no longer women; they deserve
anything, even to endure the ‘seal of their degradation,’” in the
official recognition, as a patented industry, of that dark and degrading
traffic, which to themselves has been only the last resort of hunger and
despair.
I could tell you of one whom I entreated that that day on which I found
her should be the beginning of a new life; and who, looking despairingly
at the skeleton of a child on her knee, replied, with white lips,
“Gladly would I cease to do evil; but what is to become of my little
boy? I am obliged to go out at night to get him a piece of bread.” I
could tell you of another to whom I said the same, and who, looking with
clear, frank, sorrowful eyes in my face, said, “I never _chose_ evil;
but I can get no work. Look at my mother; neither she nor I have broken
our fast since yesterday at this hour.” Her mother was an old woman,
stone blind, who clung to her one support, her daughter, to guide her
across the floor to her corner by the fire and to bring her her daily
crust. These are not fictions, but facts.
Strange that it should be needful to put to the consciences of men who
have sinned, the question, Did _you_ sin because of hunger? Were _you_
driven by want and starvation to the baseness of bartering virtue for
money? Nay; you were not poor; it was you who _paid_ the money. What,
then, was your motive? Was it _love_? You shudder at the word in such a
connection. I press you no further. But I adjure you to echo no more the
false and shallow verdict that she is the greater sinner whose poverty
is an incentive to, ofttimes the sole motive of, her sin. It is
difficult for those who are raised far above those conditions which
press so cruelly on the sons and daughters of toil and poverty to
realise what hunger means. They have never experienced, and have no
power to imagine, what is meant by the pain of hunger—I mean starvation
hunger—that gnawing and faintness, increasing through weeks, months, and
years, of insufficient nourishment, that passion for sustenance which
becomes a raging instinct, and drowns all other feeling.
Here is a truthful history, which has its counterpart in every city, in
every poor quarter of every city, in every street where the
poverty-stricken swarm and cower.... “With a few clothes, a few
shillings, a Bible and a Hymn-book, the orphan made her venture in the
world. She sought long for service, but in vain. She had no credentials.
She next turned to the city, and to the thousands fiercely struggling
for employment she added one more. Work proved scarce and hands too
plentiful. Long had the little bundle of clothes given by the kind nurse
at the hospital been exchanged for a smaller bundle of pawn-tickets, and
yet only just enough occasional work could she find to keep up doomed
hope. Then day by day, with boots which disclosed almost the whole
stockingless foot within, in a gown too thin even for summer wear,
almost her only covering, to the city she tramped through snow and mud;
night by night she sat in her room in wet clothes by a fireless grate.
She had taken a little room for herself: it was an empty attic, but when
she first entered it, she felt as Jacob on the Syrian common after his
vision of the ladder and the angels. It was her Bethel. There, like the
patriarch, she ‘vowed a vow, saying, If God will be with me, and will
keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and raiment
to put on, then shall the Lord be my God.’ But heroic effort and long
patience left her in bitter winter, without ‘bread to eat,’ and without
‘raiment to put on.’ One night she entered this room, and throwing
herself starved and weary on her bed, looking towards the little Bible
on the window-sill, madly she cried, ‘It’s no use—it’s no use; I am not
the sort for God;’ and covering her face with her thin black shawl, she
sobbed and shrieked in blank despair. Day by day she had sought work for
her fingers, and day by day, through wanton eyes and wanton tongues of
warehousemen and clerks, she had learned that she could make a market of
her beauty. The one she had strenuously sought; the other she had
heroically refused; but what must be the end? So far as starvation and
suicide were concerned, neither seemed unlikely to her. Yet was not that
dreaded life as good as friendless girls of that kind ought to expect?
What had been the experience of her honest, almost martyr’s efforts
after a virtuous and independent life?... Two years gone by; a crowd
become acquainted with the hysterical laugh, the wild reckless despair,
of a miserable woman in the custody of the police in a well-known
thoroughfare. But they had not seen the struggles and tears which in
solitude had often knitted the now brazen brow, and dimmed the now
fiendish eye. They had not heard the vows and prayers which had arisen
in an agony from the lips that now poured forth curses. At what cost the
purer life had been exchanged for this, God only knew.”[8]
Hear a tale told by one of the victims herself of our social
inequalities. “I am,” she said, “the daughter of a minister of the
gospel; and I pledge my word, solemnly and sacredly, that it was the low
price paid for my labour that drove me to sin. I could only make
two-and-ninepence a week at shirts, and should have starved but for the
streets. At last I swore to myself that I would keep from it for my
boy’s sake. I had pawned my clothes, and slept in a shawl and petticoat
under a butcher’s shed. I was trying to get to the workhouse. I had had
no food for two days. My baby’s legs froze to my side, and I sank upon a
doorstep. A lady found us, and would have fed us, but I could not eat;
she rubbed the baby’s legs with brandy. That night I got to the
workhouse; but they would not take me in without an order; so _I went
back to sin for one month_. It was the last. In my heart I hated it; my
whole nature rebelled at it; and nobody but God knows how I struggled to
give it up. I pawned my only gown more than once.” At the time when this
woman told her story, she had been eight years at service, honoured by
her employers. She was on an errand of mercy to save other women from
the same fate, when the recipient of her narrative met her: he took a
day’s journey to confirm the facts. Her employers spoke of her sobriety,
industry, and modesty. She told her story with her face hidden in her
hands, the tears dropping through her fingers, and sobbing so as
scarcely to be understood.
Another true story:—A beautiful Jewess, in years still a girl, but worn
and aged by suffering, came to my door. Mention of her had already been
made in the police columns of the daily papers. She had sought to
conceal the birth of her child; she had been followed, and all the
circumstances hunted up by a certain vigilant and zealous police-agent,
who was highly commended for the deed. She had undergone her legal
punishment, and now, broken-hearted with the sense of wrong suffered,
even more than of wrong done, she sought help that she might go “far
away, somewhere.” Some months had passed, and she was gone “far away,
somewhere,” into the presence of God, when a letter arrived for her. She
had asked me to open any such letter, even if addressed “private,” as
this was. “I have nothing to hide from _you_,” she said. The letter was
that of a man inviting her to return to him. It flattered: “Among the
many girls I see, none are so handsome as you. Why don’t you write?” And
the writer pleaded in selfish and inflamed language, as the father of
the infant, for renewed favours from the persecuted mother. The writer
was Police Constable ——,[9] the father of the infant, the same vigilant
and zealous agent who had hunted up the shrinking mother, dragged her
before the court, sought out “_the_ child” (his own!), and received the
commendation of his employers. I think I hear you utter words of scorn
or indignation as you read this. But why, I ask, why feel indignant with
the policeman? Policemen are “men of like passions” with yourselves.
This man did but perform the duty which he had been taught in dragging
to light and conveying to jail this young and frail victim of his own
seduction. His case does not differ greatly from that of the magistrate
who committed to prison the girl to whom he had paid money (the price of
his sin) in the street the previous night, and who, as he sat on the
bench, heard the charge from her own lips with unflinching countenance;
nor does it differ greatly from that of the legislator who waxes
eloquent in Parliament in advocacy of laws for the punishment of women,
far, far less morally guilty than himself. As we sow so must we expect
to reap. We have made the police the judges of the morality of the
people, or rather, I should say, of the morality of our women only. We
have invested them with powers with which the wisest and purest man
might tremble to be entrusted; and then we send them forth to watch and
dog the feet of women; to repress women, and to call it repressing vice;
to punish immoral women only, and call it punishing immorality. The men
who share the guilt of women are carefully, even studiously ignored, or
suffered to pass on, permitted to enter and re-enter the abodes of
infamy unrebuked and unchecked, protected by the law even there, allowed
to solicit the inexperienced or innocent wanderer in the street, to take
their fill of sensuality, and to hunt after “all uncleanness with
greediness.” The police, our despots of the future, are daily and
systematically trained, by our customs, laws, language, and acts, to
believe that the man may sin with impunity, and that the woman alone is
responsible, that there is, in fact, one moral law for the man and
another for the woman; and through this perpetual pursuit of the weaker
sinner, while privilege is reserved for the stronger, the “old and
chartered lie” is unceasingly promulgated anew, and is ever obtaining a
firmer hold on popular belief, while the victims of this false standard
become ever more faint and hopeless as the hour chills and darkens
before the dawn appears. Nevertheless “the morning cometh.”
I said that the secret of reclamation is gently and delicately to elicit
the true God-given character; but characters differ, and present an
infinite variety; hence a machinery of a uniform nature, brought to bear
upon these infinite shades of natural disposition and capacity for good,
must present an obstacle through its lack of elasticity in its
application as a reformatory discipline. It is beginning to be more and
more felt that the old system of bringing together large communities of
young women separated from the rest of society, and all more or less
blighted by the one form of sin, is not the happiest or most successful
means for the rehabilitation of character. Everywhere the attempt is
made to approach more and more to the ideal of a _Home_, in the true
sense. Blessings innumerable have, doubtless, during the past century,
followed the efforts of the “lovers of the lost,” even when their
methods were rigid, and lacking in enlightenment and generosity. The
mere motive of compassion and the desire to save have borne fruit; but,
like many other designs or institutions, approved and successful in
their origin, their _form_ of charity is worn out; it has fulfilled its
office; it has tided over a period when nothing better could, perhaps,
have been conceived or maintained. It has had its day, and has become
effete. The victims themselves of our social impurity begin to feel a
yearning for some more natural and generous dispensation towards
themselves of the pity and charity which Christian hearts feel for them;
and this yearning has something in it of the prophetical. “Give me
_work_,” they ask sometimes; “if I may go straight to work, I shall do
well;” and “why,” they naturally question, “why is a certain fixed
period of quarantine required for us which is not required for sinners
of the other sex?” There had indeed come to be something superstitious
in the way in which the Penitentiary quarantine, as a necessity for
women alone, is regarded by society. If a young son of your own were to
fall into profligate habits, and you, hastening to the rescue, were
planning, with deep concern and the best wisdom you could summon, the
means most likely to restore him to virtue and set him forth once more
on an honourable career, how would you act? Would you desire to place
your young son in a walled establishment, where he must promise to
remain for one year or two years, where he would see no one save male
companions of his own age, whose antecedents were in every case very
similar to his own, where certain employments would be assigned to him,
in company with the other profligate youths in course of being
reclaimed, and certain religious exercises enjoined? Possibly, in a case
of dipsomania, some such forced discipline may be resorted to, when the
unhappy subject becomes more of a patient than a criminal, and the
restoring influence of a constant appeal to individual responsibility
must be dispensed with. But in a case where the sin has been that of
impurity, I believe that no parent would desire precisely such a
discipline for his son as is commonly imposed upon the _daughters_ of
the people. It would be deemed by you safer and better to surround him
with some homelike influences, with a prudent amount of external
enjoyment, freedom, and exercise, and to give him constant and suitable
work; you would strive to place him under the influence of good men and
good women; above all, under some holy maternal influence; and you would
seek to bring him in contact, while in the world (not secluded in an
institution), with strong, virtuous, and honourable men, whose example
and counsel would fence him round with safeguards. But industrial
training, you will say, is required to fit the poor women for
self-dependence and honest work. True; and such industrial training can
often be had only in communities where a number of persons of similar
age and position are assembled. The attainment of this object, however,
is not incompatible with the essential elements of the home-life. It is,
nevertheless, but imperfectly recognised as yet that the true idea of a
home embraces more than the kindness and maternal influences which are
seldom lacking in the modern refuge, more than the comparative freedom
now allowed, and more than the sense of security and protection,
valuable as all these are. When God set human beings on earth in
families, he bestowed on them not only the happiest earthly conditions,
but those most favourable for the development of unselfishness, mutual
sympathy, and growth in moral character. In our homes, we are not all of
one age and one condition; the old and young, the enfeebled through age,
and the helpless infant, are placed together with the full-grown man and
woman, and with the young man and the maiden. Every sweet and holy
combination arises out of these differences; sympathies, duties, mutual
help, and mutual dependence are created, which give to life so much of
its holiness, its sweetness, and its strength. The family is God’s
order. So far as we make social arrangements in which the family order
is set aside, we lose just so much of the help and the comfort which
Providence intended for our feebleness, and we just so far create
artificial conditions which do not tend to the wholesome and natural
development of what is best in the human being.
This begins to be felt to be true in regard to the work of rescue and
rehabilitation. A wild and wayward girl, who has many a time been found
to be little amenable to any motives of a direct spiritual nature, or to
the influence even of a kindly matron set over her, has changed her
whole character when entrusted with the care of a little child or of an
aged man or woman. Some who rebelled against the restraint of the house
of penitence have become as it were new creatures when called to some
serious responsibility in regard to a fellow-creature even more erring
or weak than themselves. Others, apparently unmoved and indifferent,
have found their lives transfigured through an introduction to some
active and holy office of tending the sick or the dying. The utmost
scope should, when possible, be allowed, for the widely-differing
capacities, desires, and gifts of these poor women. What may be an
irksome or unsuitable task to one, may be, humanly speaking, the
salvation of another. Skill in music or in some delicate art, or manual
labour in the open fields, among gardens, and under the blue heavens,
have in other cases been the means whereby the broken energies and
dormant motives and tastes have been revived and encouraged, and through
which soundness of mental health has been slowly regained.
A happy picture of what might be done is presented in some broken and
fragmentary accounts I have seen of a work accomplished in France, after
that country had been scourged and desolated by the long wars of the
Fronde. The fathers and brothers and husbands of the poor population of
some of the provinces had been almost destroyed by that sanguinary war.
Villages were depopulated and families broken up; famine and pestilence
succeeded; orphan girls and young widowed mothers wandered about
barefooted and ragged, a prey to hunger and misery. One of the noble
ladies of that period, while travelling to her chateau in the country,
was penetrated with grief at the sight of so many forlorn girls and
women; and when she observed that many of them were offering to sell
themselves to any comer in order to obtain bread to allay the agonies of
famine, she said to herself, “It is time that women who are raised above
this terrible alternative should hasten to the rescue of these.” She
asked of these girls, “Are you willing to work?” Willing, even eager,
they all were. The laborious and humble beginnings of the enterprise
which arose from this necessity it is not needful here to record.
Suffice it to say, that an _Industrial Colony_ was founded through the
energy and perseverance of the men and women actuated by a desire to
save these victims. The colony was situated in the country, remote from
any large cities. Hundreds were gathered there. “Industry” was the motto
of the community. After some years, the place had the appearance of a
large and flourishing village; the sounds of busy labour, of the
laughter of childhood, of singing and of praise, were heard by those who
passed through it. The family life was truly realised here. Only while
at work in the factory, which formed the main industry of the place,
were the women assembled in one place. After work-hours they returned to
their homes—little cottages with gardens, some standing alone, others in
rows, facing the central green of the village, shaded by luxuriant
trees; and to these cottage homes were brought from many parts the aged
poor, and orphaned or deserted infants, to be cared for and ministered
to, and in their turn to bless those who tended them. Many a poor Hagar
turned her wandering feet with her starving child to this abode of
industry and peace, leaving behind her the great wilderness of the city.
The mothers of this community lived in its midst, constantly and
lovingly superintending, advising, and influencing, yet leaving abundant
freedom to the citizens of this little colony. When some of these
mothers—the ladies devoted to the work—were called away, others took
their place. A place of worship arose in the midst, and a schoolhouse
for the little ones. Every varied form of human ministration was here
presented to the poor fallen ones, thus calling out such gifts of heart
or mind as each might possess, while the alternation between the regular
hours of industrial labour and the ministering of the cottage-home
filled the affections and the mind, at the same time employing the hands
in a degree hardly attainable under any other conditions. We catch a
glimpse, in the broken record of this enterprise, of the happy evenings,
when the girls, trooping back to their little cottages, would wrangle
amicably for the first embrace of the baby or the tottering little ones
who came forward to meet their adopted young mothers, clinging around
them, chasing far away, with their pure sweet kisses and innocent talk,
all memory of unholy and unwomanly act and thought. We see, in the happy
scramble for the embraces of the babes, defeated candidates among the
young girls pressing forward towards the cottage doors; one throws her
arms gaily and tenderly around the silvered head of a stooping, feeble,
aged man, saying, “This is _my baby_.” He was her special charge, and
long did the hours seem to the aged man till his beloved nurse returned
from her daily work to bring sunshine and gladness to the little room
where he dwelt. She, once “a woman of the city and a sinner,” now poured
forth all the womanly tenderness and abounding love of her poor heart on
this old man, seeing, it may be, in him a father long dead, whom she
seemed now to serve again, as in childhood. Another would be entrusted
with an aged woman, in whom she found again the mother long ago grieved
or dead. In some cases the patience and skill of the young women were
tried and tested, but bore the trial. Some had an aptitude for teaching,
and their evenings were spent in the school. A library was established;
books were read and exchanged in the little homes. Convalescents from
city hospitals were sent sometimes to recover in this happy valley,
through which a pure stream danced and sang, and in which breezes from
the south and west played freely.
Some of the cottages became convalescent homes for these pale visitors
from the cities. The poor women who approved themselves by long service,
or by devotion to the young, or sick, or aged, became promoted by
degrees to the position of mothers of the colony. A preacher would
sometimes visit the place, when a crowd of all ages and conditions would
gather from many a porch of the industrial colony to hear the glad
tidings of the gospel of peace preached under the open sky in the
village green, whence hymns of praise ascended evening by evening. The
products of the industry of the colony were sent to the nearest
manufacturing city, and in the course of years the colony became more
than self-supporting.
Those who have read of the work done by Rosa Govona, and of her happy
industrial colony in the vale of Mondovi on the northern side of the
Ligurian Apennines, will understand still better the favourable
conditions realised by poor and friendless women thus gathered together.
“Thou shalt live by the labour of thine own hands,” was Rosa Govona’s
salutation to every new-comer, thus at once, and without any interval of
prescribed quarantine, establishing them in remunerative labour,
inspired with the principles of independence and self-respect: for this
was one of the most cherished points in her creed.[10]
In travelling over our healthful Yorkshire moors, or through some of the
beautiful secluded parts of rural England, I have sometimes thought, “Is
the realisation of such an enterprise as this an impossibility in our
own time and country?” God grant that ingenuity and courage, as well as
charity, may be brought to bear on this matter, so that thousands (now
humanly speaking without a straw to catch at for life) may be withdrawn
from that great gulf stream which is whirling them downward to
destruction. Even in the heart of our cities, industrial enterprises
might be established with success, where the principle of
self-dependence and the home element might alike be secured. In work
such as I have imperfectly recorded, women must be the chief agents; but
they cannot accomplish so great a work unaided by men.
That portion of the mighty task appointed to us at this day, which is in
danger of being again and again lost sight of, is the elevation of the
moral standard of our sons and our brethren. If this is neglected, the
work of rescuing women will continue to resemble the attempt to dry the
bed of a river by turning away its waters, while the fountainhead
continues actively to pour forth its ever-renewed floods. To you again,
then, young men, I would turn. To you is allotted this high, difficult,
and thrice-blessed work.
“It is right that a moral stimulus so wholesome, an enthusiasm so real,
as their participation in this social movement will furnish, should be
permitted to young men.
“It is true that they must be chiefly engaged in preparation for the
duties of active life. But this is a duty which they are imperatively
summoned to discharge without delay or preparation, since the evil
springs from among their own number. Any antagonism to this iniquity
must be paralysed, if they do not strike the first blow for purity and
justice. Let a young man, whose tacit compliance will otherwise be
assumed, make a resolute protest against this human sacrifice, and he
can liberate, it may be, more than one of the victims; while he will
exercise upon others an influence for good which cannot easily be
measured.”[11]
Thrice happy you, young men, who have escaped the corruption that is in
the world through lust, in whose breasts is no concealed memory of past
shameful deed! Thrice blessed are you! Strength and joy be your portion!
The blessing of the _mothers_ of men rests upon you. Humble, modest, and
watchful, I know many of you are; more humble often than your companions
who might well feel a sense of humiliation in your presence; for
experience in sin does not in itself induce humility, but too often
pride: the heavenly light of God’s grace alone begets humility, alike in
the fallen and in those who have been able to withstand temptation. “Let
no man take thy crown,”—the crown of your noble youth and manhood. In
the name of whatsoever things are pure, lovely, honest, and of good
report, the invitation is this day made to you, England’s joy and pride,
to join in the battle of the Lord against the mighty. May God open your
eyes, young men, to see the noble _rôle_ which lies before you. May you
be filled with the unconquerable ardour of expectation, and with the
irresistible enthusiasm which is possessed by reformers who hold a
position which is _absolutely impregnable_. And let those who are
baffled by temptation, or bruised by falls, or crushed by sin’s
penalties, yet repentant now and resolute, arise together with you, and,
strengthened by you, let them labour for the bringing in of the new
era—that era when the unequal judgment of man on this fundamental
question will cease to poison at the fountainhead the springs of human
life.
PART IV.
AMA, ET FAC QUIDQUID VIS.
“This is the standpoint of Archimedes, from which you may move the
world.”
I look back to the years when my soul was in darkness on account of sin,
the sin, the misery, and the waste which are in the world, the great and
sad problems of life, the prosperity of evil-doers, the innocent
suffering for the guilty, the cruelties, the wrongs inflicted and never
redressed, and the multitudes who seem to be created only to be lost. A
great cloud gathered over me. Anger, fear, dismay filled my heart. I
could see no God, or such as I could see appeared to me an immoral God.
Sin seemed to me the law of the world, and Satan its master. I staggered
on the verge of madness and blasphemy. I asked, “Does not God care? Can
God bear these things? He is silent, the woe deepens, and the question
is still sent up, from generation to generation. Hath God not seen? will
he not help? does he look down from his eternal calm of heaven an
indifferent spectator?” Can it be that the Eternal rests content that
any human beings whom he has created should perish for ever? That men
should destroy themselves in spite of God is a terrible thought, but not
so terrible, not so fatal to hope, to love, and to faith, as the
thought, full of deadly poison, that God cares not—that the heart of him
who redeemed us is cold, when my own is filled with an agony of
compassion. This bitter thought, taking possession of my soul, did not
beget despondency, or lassitude, or indifference, leading me to close my
eyes and fold my hands; but it stirred up the rebel within me. I could
not love God, the God who appeared to my darkened and foolish heart to
consent to so much which seemed to me cruel and unjust, and removable by
an act of his power. I was like one who is leaning over a great gulf,
whence none who fall into it ever return.
“_In my distress I cried unto the Lord, and he heard me._” The pride and
rebellion gave way before deep and heavy sorrow; and then all the sorrow
gathered itself up into one great cry. I asked of the Lord one
thing—that he would take of his own heart and show it to me; that he
would reveal to me his one, his constant attitude towards his lost
world; that as I had shown him my heart, he would show me his heart, so
much of it as a worm of the earth can comprehend and endure, so much of
it as the finite can receive from the Infinite (for to know his love for
the world and his sorrow for the world, as they are, would break any
human heart; I should, in the moment of such a revelation, expire at his
feet; a man cannot so see God and live). Deep calleth unto deep; his own
helpful Spirit, out of the depths of my heart making supplication for me
with groanings unutterable, calling to the deep heart of Christ,
awakened echoes there which called back again to mine. Continuing to
make this one request through day and night, through summer and winter,
with patience and constancy, the God who answers prayer had mercy on me;
he did not deny me my request—that he would show me of his own heart’s
love for sinners, and reveal to me his one, his constant attitude
towards his lost world; and when he makes this revelation, he does more;
he makes the inquiring soul a _partaker_ of his own heart’s love for the
world.
The doubt, the dark misery, growing out of the contemplation of the
sorrows of earth and the apparent waste of souls, are no longer able to
drive me into sullenness and despair; for I have found the door of hope.
I do not say—for I will speak neither more nor less than I have learned
of God—that the perplexity is solved, that the sorrow is gone. Sorrow is
with me still, the enduring companion of my life. I do not pretend to be
able to explain the secrets of God, and the great problems of life, with
any clearness of speech to satisfy another. But I have found the door of
hope. He has the key of all mysteries, and we are then nearest to the
solution of every painful mystery when we have drawn nigh, and heard
from him the secrets of his heart of love.
Now I know, when my heart is strangely stirred by the sight of a vast
multitude in some great city, that my heart’s yearnings over them are
but the faintest shadowings of his heart’s yearnings over them; that my
love, which would embrace them all, is but as a drop of water to the
ocean of his love, which would embrace them all. But in vain! Words are
not found in which to express what it is which Christ may reveal to the
soul which has waited on him in determined love and grief, with this one
request, “Show me thy heart’s love for sinners, and thy one, thy constant
attitude towards thy lost world.” Seek it, friends, and you shall know
how far it solves the sorrowful problems of earth, though you too may
find it to be among the things which it is not possible or lawful for a
man to utter. Where, where in heaven or on earth, if not here, will you
find an answer alike to the great questions of life which vex your
heart, and to the problem of yourself, that single being, so fearfully
and wonderfully made?
“He breathed on them, and said, Receive ye the Holy Ghost.” That Holy
Ghost is the very breath and life of Jesus Christ our Saviour, and when
he breathes it into us, what do we receive? High aspirations towards
God, heavenly thoughts, the power of communion with glorified spirits?
Yes, all these; but yet more abundantly than these, so it appears to me,
do we receive a strong quickening of human sympathies, and such a love
for man as till then we had not conceived of; for the breath which is
breathed into us, the breath of God, is also the breath of Jesus, the
Man of Sorrows, our Brother, our own flesh and blood, the
self-sacrificing, who laid down his life for his friends. “His delights
were with the sons of men,” and it is the same with those to whom he
thus imparts a portion of his own heart, into whom he breathes his own
secret mind and feelings; their delights also are with the sons of men;
their hearts from that moment embrace all men. This is love! the love
which, O my brothers, if you had found, you would not use that sacred
word so lightly and so unworthily. This is the only love, which to
possess is the only salvation for those passionate souls which are the
most easily wrecked and destroyed; for, short of the possession of this
divine passion, such souls are not only not satisfied, but not safe;
without it they are in jeopardy every hour. This is the only passion,
the true, the all-absorbing passion, the Love which is my Lord and King;
not a tyrannical Lord to-day and forsaking me to-morrow, but a Lord who
has bound me His captive for ever. The utmost heights and depths of
human passion, in all its beauty, its power, its sweetness, its
self-abandonment, are to this love as the feeble flicker of a rushlight
compared with the midday sun. Is there a heart on earth so mad for love,
so consumed with the desire of love, so in love with loving, as St
Augustine expresses it, whom this love of loves cannot satisfy, this
love of Christ, in which we become partakers of his own heart’s love for
the whole world,—this love which embraces the universe, deeply tender,
sweetly human, yet divine?
There are souls among us who, living ever in a deep solitude and
isolation in the world, hunger for perfect sympathy and companionship
with some single heart which should beat in harmony with their own,
whose whole being cries out for oneness with the being of another.
This desire of oneness, ofttimes terrible in its distortion, and not
seldom working out its own destruction in the very height of its earthly
consummation, is yet capable of the holiest direction. It is consummated
in the communion of saints, and in the union of the heavenly Bridegroom
and mystic Bride. It forms the keynote of the writings of the Apostle of
Love. Our blessed Lord recognised that deep desire of the heart, born in
man from God: “Holy Father,” he prayed, “keep through thine own name
those whom thou hast given me, ... that they all may be _one_, as thou,
Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be _one_ in us.”
There are other natures which, like complicated musical instruments, are
capable of sending forth alike the sweetest or the most discordant
sounds. Those who are conscious of such a double nature are apt to
consider their own case an exceptional one, as if God had made a mistake
in forming them. They think it easier for all the world to rest in God
and be saved than for them; and perhaps such are somewhat exceptional,
not understood by many. Weak prescriptions are offered to them in good
faith, but which they feel are not sufficient for their cure. That which
is best in them is so closely allied to that which is worst, that the
whole of life must be to them a conflict. The sweet sounds of music, the
loveliness of external nature, the passing by of a beautiful face, are
enough to awaken in them the hunger of soul which indeed is designed to
lead to God, but which, until they have struck the keynote of a new and
deeper life, continually tends to lead them away from God, into
entanglements of earth, and down deeper still, into the intoxication of
sensual delights, which quickly run out the strength, not only of the
immortal soul, but of the finer parts of the earthly nature, and which,
sooner or later, plunge them, if God do not stretch forth his hand to
save, into eternal darkness. To such souls as these I would fain bring
the hope of becoming possessed with the love of which I have spoken,
which, when the heart has once tasted, it cries out to God, “O save me
for ever from the false love, and fill me for ever with the true love!”
Fire which is turned down to earth destroys and is destroyed; but fire
is fire, and may be taught to burn upwards towards its source and
origin. Hope! and do not despair, you fiery-hearted, to whom all life,
if it be not indulgence ending in death, must be pain and conflict, who
must be flung forward from wave to wave upon a stormy sea, and _so_ be
brought to the desired haven. Learn the deeper life of God! Much that is
said to you by men and books must, I know, seem inadequate; but God is
infinite. Is he enough for heaven, and not for _you_? Did he create
hunger and thirst which he is unable to satisfy? Did he make any living
creature whose nature in all its complications he cannot claim and fill?
When he planned the creation and the redemption of man, did he fail to
comprehend in his eternal mind the remotest ages? Was the malady of this
age, or of any age, unforeseen by him, when he provided a remedy which
should reach into eternity? Is he not able to adapt his own infinity to
wants and circumstances which are infinite? Believe that he can save
you, and with such a salvation as shall make you a wonder to men and
angels. Believe that he can use that very fire within you by
subordinating it to holy and powerful uses on earth, and also that it
may be given to such as you to penetrate the deeper secrets of Christ’s
sorrow, and through his baptism of fire to be transformed more
completely into his image.
Until that image is perfected in us, this love of which I speak sends us
back again to earth. The raging demoniac, when the love of Christ took
possession of his breast, dislodging the legion, desired that he might
be with him wherever he went. This is often the cry of the heart when
first deeply pierced with the seraph’s spear. But Christ’s answer was,
“Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath
done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee.” Such an answer I have
always found—“Go home to thy friends.” My friends!—they are not yet the
angels, nor glorified saints, but they are men and women, not only those
who love the Lord, brethren in Christ, but the indifferent, the
hardened, the vile, the reckless, and the profligate. My home!—it is not
yet in the heavens; this accursed, this beloved earth is my home, until
the day when the voice of the Saviour shall be heard above the sound of
earthly weeping, and it shall be said, “The Master is come, and calleth
for thee.”
Think not that in order to become holy lovers of Christ you need to put
away a particle of your humanity; for all that is human in the best
sense will thereby become intensified. Your delights will be with the
sons of men, in a deeper and wider sense than you before knew of; for
love breaks down every barrier, and while it draws a line of peculiar
sanctity around our chosen, private friendships, it dissolves all our
secret antipathies, our sensitive fears, and our antagonism, inspiring
us with the desire to bring to every living soul the sound of this glad
evangel, without exception, and without prejudice. Christ reveals to us
the secrets of his heart, and then it is, and not till then, that he
sends us, with his own seal and commission, back to the world for which
he died, that we also may die for it. It is from the heart of Christ
alone that I venture to speak these words to you. I know nothing except
what I have learned upon my knees before him, and I will speak nothing
except that which I have so learned.
I pray that this message may be, not mine, but God’s message to you.
What though the messenger be but the weakest among you, but a bruised
reed, yet I have thought that perhaps the great Musician, dropping his
mouth to this poor reed, and breathing into it his divine breath, might
be able to send forth from it some tender strain, which, like a melody
learned in infancy, should bring back to the hearts of some weary
stragglers through this wilderness memories of a forgotten love and a
forsaken home.
Take, oh take, my message! It is from God; for it is not in vain that I
have knelt long before him, entreating him to give me somewhat that I
may give to you. God does not mock me. He is faithful and tender. When
his child asks of him bread, he does not give a stone. I know that when
I ask of him to whisper to me a message which I may give to my friends
who sin, or suffer, or wait for the day, he does not send me a strong
delusion that I should believe a lie; but he gives me the thing I ask.
“Every good and every perfect gift cometh down from above, from the
Father of Lights, in whom is no variableness, nor shadow of turning.”
And what gift is so good, so perfect, as this of love?
The love which is bestowed on you is in proportion, not to the
worthiness of the person loved, but to the power of loving and necessity
for loving of the lover. There is a void in the eternal heart of God
until he has found you, and you him. It is not your heart alone which is
unsatisfied, and your happiness which is incomplete, until you have
found Christ. The Saviour’s travail of soul is not yet fully rewarded,
nor his bliss consummated, nor his infinite heart at rest, until he has
found you; and therefore, for the disciple who has drunk deeply of his
cup, and been made a partaker of his heart’s love for his lost world,
though he should be filled with “joy unspeakable and full of glory,”
yea, with “all the fulness of God,” yet for that disciple there is no
rest—no rest on earth, except the rest of unceasing travail of soul for
those who are Christ’s but not Christ’s, beloved but not loving,
redeemed but not gathered in.
The love which I offer you is indeed the love of God. I have a
commission from him, through long waiting upon him, to tell you of his
love for you—you, whomsoever you are, whose eyes shall meet these words.
To you I speak singly, face to face, as it were, calling you by your
name, “O man greatly beloved!” Yes! you are greatly beloved. If still
wandering far from God, you are yet so greatly beloved of him, that he
leaves his saved ones, and goes forth afar seeking his strayed sheep,
desiring with great desire the time when he shall lay you on his
shoulders rejoicing. If you are turning towards the light, however
feebly—
“An infant crying in the night,
An infant crying for the light,
And with no language but a cry,”
you are of him greatly, tenderly beloved. Gaze on through the darkness!
Hope against hope! Believe against despair! Turn neither to the right
hand nor to the left! Patiently hold on, with bleeding feet, over the
sharp stones, accepting every cross, your back to the darkness, your
face to the sunrise! You are not alone. His hand is upon you. His right
hand embraces you. He will never leave you nor forsake you, but will
guide and cherish you, “until the day break, and the shadows flee away!”
When the “windows of heaven” are opened, then will the “fountains of the
great deep” be broken up. When our God shall pour upon the waiting earth
the abundance of his promised Spirit from on high, then will the
“nations of the earth mourn before him;” then will the great deep of the
heart of man tremble and awake, as when “the Spirit of God moved upon
the face of the waters,” and chaos gave place to light. The gifts of
repentance and of a fruitful sorrow will be showered from on high; the
fountains of holy tears will be unlocked for those who have never yet
wept, and the “spirit of grace and of supplications” will possess those
who have never yet prayed.
Even now the spirit of prophecy is abroad among us. There are
unconscious prophets, who, in uttering their own experience, are but
telling out the whole world’s needs, and whose hope of a better future
is but the heart’s echo of that which God hath promised. A deep disgust
and weariness of the wickedness of the world begins to be felt. In many
a soul, which as yet is a stranger to true contrition, there is at least
an anxiety for a better and holier condition. There exists ofttimes,
even under experience of private and personal injury, a sentiment which
is something more than mere resentment; it is a sense of injustice, and
connected with it, as the mind becomes calmed and the thoughts more
diffused, a melancholy impression of the lost moral balance of the whole
world, and a corresponding yearning for abodes where righteousness shall
be a principle of universal action. From many a heart is arising the
cry, “Who will show us any good? Lord, lift thou up the light of thy
countenance upon us!”
And there are also among us prophets whose quickened faith is already
the very “substance of things hoped for.” Already there are anointed
eyes which see from afar the Redeemer’s kingdom advancing; already there
are opened ears which are able to catch some strains of the last great
harvest-hymn, and the sounds of the joyful tread of home-going feet.
Long and cold have been the hours of sowing in tears; but through the
bitter cold of the hour before the dawn a million eyes are gazing
forward, and a million tongues are asking, “Watchman, what of the
night?” and the answer will not long delay—“The morning cometh;” “The
night is far spent, the day is at hand.”
The holy rebellion proclaimed aloud in our day, the revolted cry of
womanhood against her enslavement to the licentiousness of man, and
against the falsehoods by which the greatest of social evils is
maintained, has more than anything in our memory, more perhaps than any
event in the history of Christendom, awakened echoes from all parts of
the earth, shaken the ancient strongholds of privileged licentiousness,
and called out of its guilty slumber the conscience of the Churches.
That revolted cry is the herald of a sifting season. The fan is in the
hand of the winnower, and he will throughly purge his floor. Throughout
Europe there is a sound of the restless shaking of long-worn chains. The
heart and mind of the nations are never stirred, as now, to their
foundations, without manifold good fruits. “Whatever happens in the
world has its sign which precedes it. When the sun is about to rise, the
horizon assumes an infinite gradation of colours, and the east seems on
fire. When the tempest is coming, a hollow sound is heard on the shore,
and the waves heave as if stirred by some strange impulse. The
innumerable and diversified thoughts which conflict and mingle on the
horizon of the spiritual world, are the sign announcing the rising of
the Sun of Righteousness. The confused murmur and the internal commotion
of peoples aroused are the heralding sign of the tempest destined soon
to pass over the trembling nations. Hold yourselves ready, for the time
approaches.”[12] Yes, a time of tempest approaches; for the dawn will
not be ushered in calmly, shedding a sweet, unbroken light over a placid
ocean and a peaceful earth. There is every sign around us of a
preparation for a stern and bitter conflict. There will be an increasing
opposition of antagonistic principles, an accelerated movement of the
forces both of good and of evil. The bright rays of the Sun of Justice
will draw out from the darkness of human nature its most poisonous and
fetid exhalations—lust, pride, cruelty, revenge, and hate. Can one, it
may be asked, who believes in the all-puissance of Love, anticipate and
prophesy the increase of implacable cruelty and hate? Yes! You shudder
at such a prophecy, perhaps; but experience will witness to its truth;
for there is an influence whose operation in man is somewhat analogous
in its _power_ to the influence of divine grace. The hatred of some men
for that which opposes them in their cruelty, greed, and lust, is
something beyond mere human passion. As the saints through divine help
are raised to heroic degrees of love, and are enabled to perform actions
which in the course of nature would be above their strength, so the
haters of purity appear to imbibe an energy and bitterness of soul over
and above the capacities of their own base and hardened nature, and in
their opposition to holiness seem to have a power working within them,
“tempering all their passions to a far more perfect state of hatred than
could be effected by the most sublimated rankness of mere flesh and
blood. The nearer the hater approaches to the altar, the more intense is
his hatred. The nearer he comes to infinite purity, goodness, nobleness,
love, the more does his base and craven nature boil and seethe in its
presence.” This is not a hatred engendered by reason or intelligence,
but is the bitterness of human passion, acted upon and endowed with a
supernatural power and activity, by the inward possession and impulsion
of the great spiritual enemy of God and man, the power of darkness, the
“Accuser” and “Destroyer.” Deeper and deeper instincts of cruelty are
created; horrors hitherto unimaginable are perpetrated. Man becomes
himself the maddened agent of a relentless cruelty against which the
collective conscience of mankind nevertheless continually protests and
revolts. We see even now the beginning of this abnormal development of
the most hideous instincts and propensities in man; we see it in the now
revealed horrors of the scientific laboratory, and in the unnameable
atrocities practised by man on his fellow-creatures, embittering and
deepening the groaning and travailing in pain alike of the animal
creation and of the whole human family. We see the beginning only, not
the end, or nearly the end, of the horrors which are yet to be revealed.
It would appear as if the powers of evil were about to combine, at the
hour before the dawn, for one last gigantic effort to turn God’s dear
earth into hell; and there are men who, making common cause with the
powers of darkness, will, with the rays of the approaching Sun of
Righteousness flashing full in their faces, choose the darkness, and
proclaiming aloud, “Evil, be thou my good!” will form their own dark and
miserable destiny in the full glare of that dawning day.
It is no proclamation of peace, then, that heralds the dawning of the
new day, but rather a proclamation of a consecrated rebellion against
the rule of materialism and sensuality—that materialism which, creeping
into the intelligences of men, has smouldered, scorching and charring
the last remains of faith, until sensuality has set on fire that which
has been so fully prepared for bursting into flame, resulting in a
conflagration more desolating and destructive to the nations of the
earth than the fire and sword of material extirpation. We are in times
of battle. Apathy or indifference in such a conflict as this means
destruction; to be remiss is to be wounded; to stay the fight is to die.
In war waged by flesh and blood mercy may intervene, and life be spared;
but principles know not the name of mercy. We are rebels for God’s Law.
“Let us go forward then, even though we do it at the risk of being torn
in pieces by the very men through whose changed hearts our purpose will
one day be accomplished.”[13] For God can change hearts. We will
evermore remember this; and while love will be the enduring bond of all
who shall now combine with resistless force to labour for the new day,
we shall not depart from charity even towards our adversaries, even
towards those of whose bitterest hatred we have spoken. Our warfare is
not against men, but against all which has deceived, misled, and cursed
society; lying dogmas, dark principles, and wicked institutions. The
utmost force of love shall be tried when all other forces have been
exhausted; and then, by God’s grace, shall we not hope to see multitudes
of repentant ones deserting the lines of the enemy and coming over to
us, declaring, “We will go _with you_, for the Lord is with you?” Shall
we not see the hostile cohorts melting away like mist before the full
light of the glad morning, and recognise our foemen of the night to be
our “brothers at the break of day?” “Then shall the mountains bring
peace to the people, and the little hills righteousness.” The groaning
and travailing earth shall be released from her bondage, and the rod of
the oppressor shall be broken! Fetters shall no longer be wrought out of
the intelligence and civilisation of one zone to entrap the unwary
simplicity and enslave the generations of another. The light of day will
fall upon all the dark places of the earth, now full of the habitations
of cruelty, and there shall come forth, at the call of the Deliverer,
the thousands and tens of thousands of the daughters of men now enslaved
in all lands to cruelty and lust. There will be then no more hollow
virtues, no more specious and splendid crimes. None shall ever again
rejoice at another’s expense, or hold advantages bought by the blood and
tears of his fellow; but “rising in inherent majesty, the Redeemer’s
kingdom will strengthen and extend, wide as the limits of nature’s
boundary, far as sin has diffused its poison;” and in the plenitude of
his power, when all nations shall serve him, the highest achievement of
the blessed Saviour, the Desire of all nations, will be, that “he
delivereth the needy when he crieth, the poor also, and him that hath no
helper.”
VENI, DOMINE JESU!
ENDNOTES
Footnote 1:
Manning.
Footnote 2:
St Catherine of Genoa.
Footnote 3:
Archbishop Leighton.
Footnote 4:
M. Aimé Humbert.
Footnote 5:
Sir James Mackintosh.
Footnote 6:
Francis Newman.
Footnote 7:
Extract from the first Manifesto of the “Social Purity Alliance,”
1873.
Footnote 8:
The Gaol Cradle.
Footnote 9:
The facts were verified.
Footnote 10:
These words, “Tu mangerai col lavoro delle tue mani,” Rosa caused to
be engraved over the portal of every house of industry which she
founded.
Footnote 11:
From the original Manifesto of the “Social Purity Alliance,” 1873.
Footnote 12:
Lamennais, Paroles d’un Croyant.
Footnote 13:
John Stuart Mill.
PRINTED BY BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO.
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
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