SUFFERING OF CHRIST. 363 But God, with whom is no variableness, does not lightly change His laws, or suffer any principle to vary its operation, because persons come within its range or stand aloof. He blows with His wind, and the waters flow, either to bear the skilful mariner, or to drown the heedless. If we will do good, He gives us in doing it a reward above all we can ask or think; but He suffers us to pay the price of conflict with evil. He who puts naked foot on the serpent's head* will be stung in crushing the monster. There is even in soberest martyrdom, (be it reverently spoken,) a kind of rashness for the man's self; for his eye is on some holier and far-off object, and he cares not what may happen to him by the way. Thus he breaks the immutable law of self-preservation, though he has the reward of keeping a higher law of self-sacrifice to the Highest. If he would change the law of a nation, or the thought of the world, he must pay the price of his good name or his life; though if the idea with which his mind† labours be a true one, God will give him a reward in fulfilling it; for he will be helping forward the kingdom. Thus Jeremiah‡ the prophet had been among his countrymen 'like a lamb or an ox that is brought to the slaughter;' and perhaps of him, or of some kindred prophet, or his company, it was originally said that he was a man of sorrows§' and 'afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb.' So of many of the prophets, and of the sweet singers in the courts of the Lord's house, we find it written that their heart was broken with heaviness, and the ploughers ploughed upon their back, as they went on their way weeping, and bearing good seed, of which the fruit could only come after many days. But by faith they all endured, as seeing Him that is invisible; and even the shape of things temporal became, through their words, Jeremiah xi. 19. * See the beautiful Sermons of the late Rev. Fred. Robertson, of Brighton. + Ev. St John, xvi. 21. § Isaiah liii. 3-7. Psalm cxxix. 3; Hebrews xi. 13-37. 364 SUFFERING OF CHRIST. moulded more after the beauty on which they had fixed their gaze of things eternal. "Thus Jesus, as the change which God gave Him to work in the world was above all, must go beyond all in suffering. Thus He becomes most eminently the man of sorrows;' and whatever things were written of old, of suffering saint, of crucified prophet, of poor man trampled on, of Moses* rejected, of Israel becoming a spoil, of Isaiah sawn asunder, and of Jeremiah lamenting over Jerusalem, find a new and a higher fulfilment, for they come eminently to pass again in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. He must die as a slave, and as one whom the nation despiseth, before He reigns as King of kings and Lord of lords. But all this is only in harmony with the great mystery of the world's course, and because God hath given it a law which cannot be broken. "See now how this very humiliation brought about the rising again. If we ask, how Christ comes to reign over our thoughts, it is much by the words He spake, and much by the works He did. If He had only uttered great swelling words, and had lived at ease, or sat on the throne of Solomon, how little would He have touched our hearts. Even now a stranger to His mind is not readily followed by His sheep, for they do not know such a one's voice. But when we see Him paying out of His own life the price of delivering men from evil, going about homeless, while He provides a shelter in which our souls can rest, and suffering poverty and need, while He makes us rich in holy thoughts and happy memories, we feel that this is a true teacher, and we follow Him as a safe guide. When He says, I am come to throw fire upon the earth, we foresee it will not be quenched. When in sadder tone He says, How I would it were already kindled! (of suffering) to be baptised with; it be accomplished, we enter into His foretaste of shame and pain; we become convinced that He came into the world for and again, I have a baptism and how I am straitened until * Acts vii. 35; Hebrews xi. 26. FULFILMENT THROUGH SUFFERING. 365 no other cause than to bear witness to the truth; then, when He is rejected, scourged, crowned with thorns, and spit upon, we shrink back astonished; but our very indignation at the shame turns into more awful wonder at Him who bears it; and, in the dark hour of the judgment-hall, or by the cross, even more than in any triumph, our hearts answer with Peter, Lord, we are ready to go with thee, both into prison, and to death. Such is the kingdom God gives to Jesus over our souls. It is wrought out through suffering, and it belongs to the worthiest; so that our allegiance to it is like the sight of the eye to light, and the assent of our reason to truth, or the springing of our heart to what is lovely; we can neither withhold it, nor desire to do so, for nowhere else could we offer it so worthily. "What I have said of Jesus as a king of thought, will apply equally to Him as a prophet. For though His words have strange power to touch our heart, they do so more from their entire harmony with His life, and from the price which He paid for uttering them. That Truth, which did not begin to be with the Incarnation, but which we see mirroring itself with fulfilment for good or evil in every age of history, has more power over us when we see it embodied in a life, and when this life is evidently hallowed by its presence, and passed in obedience to its law. We see how Truth can support its own messenger, and give secret strength in all trouble, rising in thought above that which rules the body, and though it animate many minds, yet remaining ever One with the highest Being. This highest Truth makes us free from prejudice, and hatred, and fear, and gives us access in the spirit of our minds to that which was, and is, and is to come. Yet it is only through a drama of suffering that it shews its fulfilment among men. Again, if Jesus was to be a priest, He must have some oblation to offer. So long as priesthood belonged to a caste, such as Brahmans or Levites, no common man might present his offering in the place where Divine presence might be more immediately apprehended. But when the older ignorance passed, 366 SPIRITUAL SACRIFICES. and the face of the unseen God was unveiled to faith as that of a Father, His presence was no longer in any high and holy place, but wherever men would feel after Him, as not being far from every one of us. Then, not even the least of His children would offer sigh, or prayer, or life, or good-work, or trust, or love, without full confidence of being accepted, as might be fit. Thus all mankind, so far as they knew the Father of Jesus, and their Father, became a spiritual priesthood. But Jesus, who brought to fuller light this freedom which the Patriarchs and Melchisedec had enjoyed, but which caste-worship had imperfectly expressed, became the head of the more spiritual priesthood, and offered above all His brethren an oblation beyond price, in His own life and death, and the anguish of His consenting will. In Him is the fulness, both of that which gave the old sacrifices their meaning, and of what must be in every offering of ours, if it is to avail in the sight of God. We all who drink into His mind, associate our feebleness with His more perfect self-devotion; thus as we give ourselves to God in solemn sacrament, or in action, or in suffering, we catch a virtue not our own; our lives become penetrated with the spirit of His death; and whenever heartfelt prayers and thanksgivings, or pure thoughts and deeds of patience, or goodness, or uprightness, are offered up by us in His holy name and spirit,* He, being dead, yet speaketh in us, and is doubtless accepted of the Father. "There can be no greater sacrifice to God, than for us so to associate our will with His will, as to melt ourselves up in the Divine purpose, and rejoice in its fulfilment, not asking what comes of ourselves, as if that were our own. Not to every one is such love given; but perhaps one sees a perverted form of it in that passion which has made some in past years throw themselves under the car of Jagannátha. For thus they seemed to * If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His. Romans viii. 9. Compare v. 26, and chap. vii. 6, and xiii. 8-10; and Galatians iv. 6, 7; v. 13, 14, 22-25. LOVE SEEKING NOT ITS OWN. 367 express a devotion without bounds, though He who gives and preserves our life is not pleased with such a sacrifice. Perhaps again in your doctrine of Nirvána is an overstrained and mystical expression for the joy of union with God, by making His design our will. But Jesus seems more perfectly to have fulfilled whatever truth may be in your thoughts, in that He rushed not on self-chosen death, yet most willingly gave His life, when the great enemy of the Divine will could only so be vanquished. Nor can we wonder, that out of a death so holy went forth power for life, as when a seed is cast into the ground, and dies, . but there springs up four-fold. Thus by the death of Jesus, even more than by His life, men were drawn to His faith, as if their souls were purified in gazing with a tragical awe; and when they considered how much they partook of that sinfulness in the world which made the death of Jesus necessary to deliver us from evil, they seemed almost to partake of that which slew Him, and were pricked to the heart. You can imagine, what would be the revulsion in men's conscience when thus awakened. A sympathy with the holy sufferer would awaken attention to His doctrine; and its truth, when listened to, would prevail in proportion as there was good ground to receive it. Even the rude nations of the North (as the savage Clovis and his people) were awakened out of their native ferocity as they felt a better indignation at the griefs of the Man of sorrows on the Cross. Nor should I suppose that you in India would be deaf to the witness which unparalleled suffering gives to the highest Truth. "He who is so identified with the holiest cause as to lose himself in it, will think its triumph no mean reward. Nor is this entire self-abnegation beyond the reach of that love which seeketh not its own, of which God makes the soul capable. Yet we have a presentiment stretching into a faith, that the very mind thus devoted will find from the Divine equity an acknowledgment of its work, and have a reward in seeing it prosper, and even an overflow of gift beyond recompense in everlasting |