Bible Commentaries
Ecclesiastes 12

Verse 1

Timely Remembrance:

Remember also thy Creator in the days of thy youth, or ever the evil days come, and the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them.— Ecclesiastes 12:1.

All the books, both of the New Testament and of the Old, may be said to have been written in faith and by faith. But we might use different words to describe the faith of the different saints and prophets who wrote them, or whose deeds are told there; if we should say that Moses had a self-sacrificing faith, Isaiah an expectant faith, Jeremiah a sustaining faith, Daniel a consoling faith, we might express some special truth as to the writings and spirit of each, as well as the true faith in God which is common to all. And if we thus distinguish the kinds of faith wherein the books of Scripture are written, we might say that this Book of the Preacher was written with a daringly honest faith, a faith that would look facts in the face, and see God in or behind those very things which serve to hide Him from most others.

Ecclesiastes is never afraid to declare his belief that life is good and pleasant—parts, at least, of this life very pleasant indeed, and meant to be enjoyed. “Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun”; “Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes.”

But he knew all the time that faith must be strengthened by all truth; that every single truth agrees with every other, while “no lie is of the truth,” and no lie can serve the truth. The world is good—good because God made it; but for us to live for this world only is not good, because this world will pass away, and we shall not, but shall have to be judged. He therefore speaks the words of the text in which he appeals to those who have life before them to remember God whatever else they forget.

“There is a polish for everything that taketh away rust; and the polish for the heart is the remembrance of God.” The companions said, “Is not fighting with the infidels also like this?” Lord Muhammad said, “No, although he fight until his sword be broken!” 1 [Note: The Sayings of Muhammad (trans. by Al-Suhrawardy), 115.]

On a chalk hill in England there is a gigantic figure of a horse cut out on the green turf, allowing the white soil to be seen. This was an idol that was worshipped by our heathen ancestors. It was the white horse of Odin that was held in the deepest reverence all over the North of Europe. Provision was made for keeping the shape of this figure clear and distinct on the hill for all time coming. At stated intervals a grand ceremony took place, attended with much pomp, called “the Scouring of the White Horse,” which consisted in removing the weeds and grasses that had choked and obscured the white lines of the gigantic idol cut out on the hill-side. 2 [Note: Hugh Macmillan, The Daisies of Nazareth, 70.]

1. “ Remember.”—The word “remember” in the text is a word full of meaning. It tells us that we have not to do something new, but to keep in mind something that we have already known. We have not by searching to find out a God unknown to us, but to recall a God in whose image we were created, by whose grace we were redeemed, and for whose glory we were made. His likeness was at first stamped upon us, as truly as the portrait of the king is stamped upon the coin we use, and on the postage stamp we put upon our letter. In the most sinful and polluted nature traces of this Divine image can be detected. And what is wanted is that this Divine image in us, which sin has soiled and defaced, which the evil things of the world have grown over and hidden, shall be restored.

On 28th July, 1900, Westcott again addressed the Durham miners at their service in the Cathedral. In opening his address the Bishop said: “A great modern writer has said, ‘If I looked into a mirror, and did not see my face, I should have the sort of feeling which actually comes upon me when I look into this living busy world and see no reflexion of its Creator.’ It is a startling and terrible image. I know no more impressive one in literature, and have we not all felt something of the same kind? We look upon the life of men whom God has made in His own image, and expect to find everywhere tenderness, self-control, self-sacrifice, love in its thousand shapes; instead of this we are met on all sides by selfishness, self-indulgence, passion, carelessness of all things except the desire of the moment. As Cardinal Newman says, it is as if we looked into a mirror and did not see our face. If, indeed, what we see upon the surface were all, I do not think that life could be lived. But, thank God, it is not all. When a sudden crisis comes, commonplace men, men hitherto in no way distinguished from their fellows, prove themselves heroes. They hear in their own souls the voice of God, and without one thought lay down their lives to save their comrades. Your own work, your own experience, is fertile in acts of unlooked-for and unprepared self-devotion. Such deeds correct our first impressions. They show us the true man; and we rejoice. God has not left the world which He called into being, though He hide Himself, and if the eyes of our hearts are open we can see Him. We rejoice in the signs of a Divine nature.” 1 [Note: Life and Letters of Brooke Foss Westcott, ii. 293.]

2. The remembrance of God should inspire youth with a sense of its responsibility and opportunity. The French have a saying, “If youth but knew and age had power.” It is almost a proverb, so deep and full of wisdom is its sad truth. If youth but knew that youth is their spring! If youth but knew that they are shaping the future! If youth but knew that it has opportunities that will never come again! Memory is in a peculiar sense the faculty of youth; and it is a wise contrivance of Him who formed us, that on our setting out in life we should be furnished with the means of laying in those stores of knowledge which we shall have to draw upon in future years. Youth is the time to make those impressions upon the mind, and to paint those scenes upon the imagination, which the eye of the soul will survey in after life, when it contemplates the objects and images which surround it in the world within.

I love above all other reading the early letters of men of genius. In that struggling, hoping, confident time the world has not slipped in with its odious consciousness, its vulgar claim of confidantship, between them and their inspiration. In reading these letters I can recall my former self, full of an aspiration which had not learned how hard the hills of life are to climb, but thought rather to alight down upon them from its winged vantage-ground. Whose fulfilment has ever come nigh the glorious greatness of his yet never-balked youth? As we grow older, art becomes to us a definite faculty, instead of a boundless sense of power. Then we felt the wings burst from our shoulders; they were a gift and a triumph, and a bare flutter from twig to twig seemed aquiline to us; but now our vans, though broader grown and stronger, are matters of every day. We may reach our Promised Land; but it is far behind us in the Wilderness, in the early time of struggle, that we have our Sinais and our personal talk with God in the bush. 1 [Note: Letters of James Russell Lowell, i. 154.]

(1) It is in youth that we have the power to remember our Creator.—Our knowledge of God afterwards is ever tending to be of a different kind—a knowledge without love—in which our reason seems to go beyond our feelings, which does not interweave itself in our nature, and is certainly not, to the same degree, capable of moulding us to His will. In a few years we shall no more be able to make a free offering of our hearts to Him. We shall bring Him the waste of our power, the wreck of our lives. The world will have caught us in its toils; those natural gifts which seem in themselves not far from the Kingdom of Heaven will have passed away and been lost to us; the goods of this life will place themselves between us and heaven. If we ever looked upwards with any earnest thought or wish, if we ever remember to have felt assured in past times of a blessedness on those who believed, let us hold fast this thought, let us recall this image, because the time of promise is short and the evil days will soon come.

The period of gloom began with Newman’s enforced resignation of the editorship of the Rambler in 1859 and lasted till Kingsley’s attack on him in 1864. It was undoubtedly aggravated by a touch of morbidness brought on by ill-health. His state of mind in those years is recorded in a journal which he began to keep at this time—one of the literary treasures he has left—written as in the sight of God, with an utter simplicity and sincerity. The first entry [dated Dec. 15th, 1859] was written shortly after his failure as editor of the Rambler. “I know perfectly well, and thankfully confess to Thee, O my God, that Thy wonderful grace turned me right round when I was more like a devil than a wicked boy, at the age of fifteen, and gave me what by Thy continual aids I never lost. Thou didst change my heart, and in part my whole mental complexion at that time, and I never should have had the thought of such prayers as those which I have been speaking of above but for that great work of Thine in my boyhood. Still those prayers were immediately prompted, as I think, in great measure by natural rashness, generosity, cheerfulness, sanguine temperament, and unselfishness, though not, I trust, without Thy grace. I trust they were good and pleasing to Thee,—but I much doubt if I, my present self, just as I am, were set down in those past years, 1820 or 1822 or 1829, if they could be brought back, whether I now should make those good prayers and bold resolves, unless, that is, I had some vast and extraordinary grant of grace from Thy Heavenly treasure-house. And that, I repeat, because I think, as death comes on, his cold breath is felt on soul as on body, and that, viewed naturally, my soul is half dead now, whereas then it was in the freshness and fervour of youth. And this may be the ground of the grave warning of the inspired writer, ‘Memento Creatoris tui in diebus juventutis tuae, antequam veniat tempus afflictionis … antequam tenebrescat sol,’ ” etc. 1 [Note: W. Ward, The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman, i. 574.]

(2) It is in youth that we can offer a generous devotion of self.—It is easy to see how dishonourable it is to offer to God the blind and lame and sick instead of the healthy and vigorous part of our lives; yet we may feel it the more if we compare that which we sacrifice to God with what God sacrificed for us. What He gave up indeed, in coming down from heaven, we cannot possibly measure or understand; but look at His life after He was made Man, and there learn what is a true generous devotion of the best of self. Look at Him who was born in a stable on a winter night, that there might be no moment kept back from the work He had to do, that He might begin to suffer from the first; who worked unknown and unhonoured for thirty years, a poor man’s Son and a poor Man Himself, that He might know all the petty worrying cares of everyday life, as well as the great sufferings that it is noble and heroic to endure. He had very little time to take His pleasure in. The evil days came on Him very soon—days in which He had no pleasure, but in which His soul was exceeding sorrowful, even unto death; when the sun and the light was darkened, not in the heaven only, but in His soul, as He cried, “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Indeed, He gives us more time to be happy in than He had Himself. Is His perfect life, His early death, a thing to be repaid with the shortest, latest, poorest days that we count that enough to offer Him?

The outline of the life of Jesus Christ, in all its human essentials, is that of a failure as complete as can be conceived; and yet the historic figure we know and think of stands out in all human essentials as a Conqueror. And, re-examining that life, in the light of its own standard, we shall see One who so truly overcame, both in Himself and in His influence, that nothing seems to yield such copious hint of the solution of life’s mystery as does His “failure.” His failure stands not in a loss of spirituality, but in the superabundance and intensity of it. The isolation of His Spirit did not result in a diminution of the ideal, any more than did disappointment sour, or poverty embitter, Him. The bare outline of His life is harsh and forbidding; it is that of a failure: but upon near approach, it is found to be lit by an inner light, and in the light of that personal life we see a form of wondrous beauty and commanding awe. In a word, the personality of Jesus Christ is as sublime a triumph as His life is supreme among failures. 1 [Note: T. J. Hardy, The Gospel of Pain.]

(3) If we remember the Creator in our youth, He will remember us in our old age.—It cannot be truly said by an aged Christian, “I have no pleasure”; and though there may be “clouds,” he has also long and sunny intervals, and beyond this cloudy region he has blessed prospects. The peace which the Saviour gives to His people is a well of water springing up unto everlasting life; and there is nothing that keeps the feelings so fresh and youthful as a perennial piety. Compare that young sceptic, who has half persuaded himself into the disbelief of God and hereafter, and whose forced unbelief is often interrupted by intrusions of unwelcome conviction,—compare him with “Paul the aged” in prison, writing, “I know whom I have believed. I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand; I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. Henceforth, there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day.”

The biographies of two veterans appeared so simultaneously as almost to compel the contrast. Their declining days were somewhat similar. When getting old and feeling frail, they lost some of their dearest friends, and each lost his fortune. In these circumstances Sir Walter Scott writes, “The recollection of youth, health, and uninterrupted powers of activity, neither improved nor enjoyed, is a poor strain of comfort.… Death has closed the long dark avenue upon loves and friendships; and I look at them as through the grated door of a burial-place filled with monuments of those who were once dear to me, with no insincere wish that it may open for me at no distant period, provided such be the will of God. I shall never see the threescore-and-ten, and shall be summed up at a discount. No help for it, and no matter either.” Recovering from a similar slight illness, Wilberforce remarked, “I can scarce understand why my life is spared so long, except it be to show that a man can be as happy without a fortune as with one.” And then, soon after, when his only surviving daughter died, he writes, “I have often heard that sailors on a voyage will drink, ‘Friends astern,’ till they are half way over, then ‘Friends ahead.’ With me it has been ‘friends ahead’ this long time.” 1 [Note: J. Hamilton, Works, iii. 215.]

Shortly after entering his ninety-fourth year, Dr. Martineau wrote to his friend Rev. W. Orme White: “In the romantic moods of early enthusiasm the fancy took me that half my present age would amply test even a slippery soul and might well limit our desire of an eligible probation. Am I not reasonably humbled, then, by being judged in need of detention for a doubled test? And if so, may I perhaps hopefully pray to be not unready for the change of worlds? I dare not affirm; I only know that duty and love look more Divine and the spiritual life more surely immortal than when I thought and spoke of them with less experience. The final mood of living Religion resolves itself for me into filial trust and undying aspiration. Here I can quietly rest, and in some small measure still actively work, till my call comes and takes me to other scenes.” 2 [Note: The Life and Letters of James Martineau, ii. 245.]

Life! we’ve been long together,

Through pleasant and through cloudy weather.

’Tis hard to part when friends are dear,

Perhaps ’twill cost a sigh, a tear.

Then steal away, give little warning,

Choose thine own time;

Say not good-night, but in some happier clime,

Bid me good-morning. 3 [Note: Mrs. Barbauld.]

(4) To remember God is power and joy all through life.—Tolstoy said a memorable thing when he wrote, “It is necessary to have a soul.” We cannot understand the world without a soul; we cannot understand ourselves without it. We cannot even make ourselves what we would like to be without attention to the inward part which we call soul. One of the first and greatest powers for the development of the soul is religion. That word denotes whatever binds us to God, or rather whatever binds us back to God. There is no time in life when religion should have greater power than in youth. Youths sometimes shrink from religion because they believe that it kills all the joy and brightness of life. If they have gathered that from the lives of those who are older, then they who are older have misrepresented it. Religion suffers from the fact that too often it is only when men have strayed into the far country that, in their misery, they say, “I will arise and go to my Father”; that is why religion has a gloomy and saddened look. Those who came late have memories of the bitterness of the past to sadden them. They only hope that they will be taken in as hired servants of the Father. We should look at religion through the lives of the few who have never strayed away, who gave their hearts to God when they were young, and live in the fulness of His love and grace.

Pathetic and melancholy are the words with which Mr. Frederic Harrison, the leader of English Positivism, ends his Autobiography: “I close this book with words that indeed resume in themselves all that I have ever written or spoken during half a century, which is this—that all our mighty achievements are being hampered and often neutralised, all our difficulties are being doubled, and all our moral and social diseases are being aggravated by this supreme and dominant fact—that we have suffered our religion to slide from us, and that in effect our age had no abiding faith in any religion at all. The urgent task of our time is to recover a religious faith as a basis of life both personal and social.” 1 [Note: Frederic Harrison, Autobiographic Memoirs, ii. 333.]

3. Continual remembrance of God encourages the growth of the spirit. Man does not ripen naturally—that is, according to the course of his earthly nature—for eternity. He is the child of spiritual culture. By spiritual toil and effort only, by patience, by pain, by tears, can this crown of a good old age be won. It comes at the end of a good life-course, a course that has been aspiring and tending to God. It is the fruit of a continual renewing, the strengthening and unfolding of the inner man, which is not born of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of “the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever,” and “which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” And that nature needs close and constant culture; the weeds in its fields need to be cut down, and their very roots torn up, no matter what sensitive fibres may be lacerated in the process; while the seeds of the Kingdom, the germs which the good Sower has planted, have to be nurtured with many toils and tears, if in our old age we are to wear the look and bearing of men whose harvest has been reaped and is ready for gathering home into the garners of eternity.

No trace of the moroseness of old age appeared in Mr. Gladstone’s manners or his conversation, nor did he, though profoundly grieved at some of the events which he witnessed, and owning himself disappointed at the slow advance made by a cause dear to him, appear less hopeful than in earlier days of the general progress of the world, or less confident in the beneficent power of freedom to promote the happiness of his country. The stately simplicity which had always charmed those who saw him in private seemed more beautiful than ever in this quiet evening of a long and sultry day. His intellectual powers were unimpaired, his thirst for knowledge undiminished. But a placid stillness had fallen upon him and his household; and in seeing the tide of his life begin slowly to ebb, one thought of the lines of his illustrious contemporary and friend:

Such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

Turns again home. 1 [Note: J. Bryce, Studies in Contemporary Biography, 458.]

Call him not old, whose visionary brain

Holds o’er the past its undivided reign.

For him in vain the envious seasons roll

Who bears eternal summer in his soul.

If yet the minstrel’s song, the poet’s lay,

Spring with her birds, or children with their play,

Or maiden’s smile, or heavenly dream of art,

Stir the warm life-drops creeping round his heart—

Turn to the record where his years are told—

Count his grey hairs—they cannot make him old! 2 [Note: Oliver Wendell Holmes.]

Literature

Bevan (S. P.), Talks to Girls and Boys, 153.

Blunt (J. J.), Plain Sermons, i. 424.

Brown (J. B.), Our Morals and Manners, 49.

Cooper (A. A.), God’s Forget-Me-Not, 1.

Garvie (A. E.), A Course of Bible Study for Adolescents, 115.

Hamilton (J.), The Royal Preacher, 215 ( Works, iii. 207).

Jowett (B.), College Sermons, 1.

Macaskill (M.), A Highland Pulpit, 146.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Esther, etc., 391.

Macmillan (H.), The Daisies of Nazareth, 68.

Reid (J.), The Uplifting of Life, 214.

Shrewsbury (H. W.), Little Lumps of Clay, 67.

Simcox (W. H.), The Cessation of Prophecy, 201.

Whitefield (G.), Sermons, 143.

Woodward (H.), Sermons, 399.

Cambridge Review, iv. Supplement No. 81.

Christian World Pulpit, lxxii. 311 (W. S. Swanson); lxxviii. 101 (R. H. Wray).

Verse 13

The Whole Duty of Man

This is the end of the matter; all hath been heard: fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.— Ecclesiastes 12:13

1. Of what “matter” is this the conclusion? Ecclesiastes, in the writing of this little book, had a practical object in view. He had not indulged in any elaborate speculation; he had not attempted to solve the riddle of the world. He had simply recorded the results of his own experience and observation; and he had confessed himself unable to fathom the mysteries of Divine Providence. But he felt that he had a practical message for his countrymen. He had laid before them certain maxims for the guidance of their conduct. He had endeavoured to put them in the way of securing the “chief good” of life—of making the best of this present existence, with all its unsatisfying elements, and all its insoluble problems. And now, at the very end of his book, he seeks to drive the nail home, and to clinch all his exhortations by one pithy, pregnant counsel in which he sums up his practical philosophy of life.

And what is the conclusion of the Wise Man’s wisdom? “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom!” So the boy had been taught: and now the old man wonders whether it may not be, not only the beginning, but the end. When so much is dark, is not one path clear? one thing plain? Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: “Fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.” A life of godliness and virtue—this is the chief good for man. There is no better or deeper satisfaction to be found on earth than that which springs from reverencing God and keeping His commandments. This was the grand “conclusion” at which Ecclesiastes had arrived.

2. This may seem to us a very inadequate result, unworthy of a devout Israelite. It falls short of the faith of David. It is still further distant from that of a believer in the gospel. We should be tempted to look on one who declared solemnly that the experience of a long life had taught him to acknowledge the sovereignty of God and the eternal law of duty as speaking the language of a heathen. For such an one we should have little hope, or even, it may be, harsh condemnation. But the blessedness of thus apprehending any one article of faith is, that it must needs lead on to others. The words, “Fear God, and keep his commandments,” were the simplest of all precepts, and yet one who fixed his heart on them, and strove to live in them, would find himself led perpetually into new regions of truth, new convictions of sin, new forms of holiness.

The central peace of all is not allied with indolent quietude: the nearer to God the deeper the peace, and also the greater the necessity of eager activity. The realm is one of progress. The idea of continued progress in the Paradiso receives illustration as we note how the stages of mediæval learning are incorporated in the imagery. The virtues are not to be learned by practice or discipline, as in the Purgatorio; they must be effluent from graces already stored in the soul; they must come as from a centre of spiritual force, not as an acquired habit, but as in harmony with the governing impulses of the soul. But when these graces and virtues are thus possessed, more lies beyond. Then the powers of perception and apprehension are enlarged: the spirit can discern God in Nature, God in moral order, God in the very soul itself. The highest capacity reached is the theological, the final knowledge of God, not through any medium, like that of natural or moral order, but in direct spiritual vision. 1 [Note: W. Boyd Carpenter, The Spiritual Message of Dante, 189.]

I

A Right Feeling towards God

To fear God is to have a heart and mind rightly affected towards Him. It is to have scriptural and realizing views of His being and perfections, of His holy law and government, of His redeeming grace and mercy. It is to know, to reverence, and to love Him, as He is in Christ. Hence it is said that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” ( Psalms 111:10). To be destitute of it, whatever be the natural gifts and endowments a man may possess, is to be in reality a fool. The fear here in question is not the “fear which hath torment”—the slavish terror resulting from conscious guilt, the dark and disquieting apprehension of coming wrath that haunts the soul laden with unconfessed, unrepented, and therefore unpardoned, sin. No; it is a sentiment wide as the poles asunder from that spirit of bondage. This fear of God of which the author speaks, is the very spirit of adoption. It is the spirit with which the affectionate and dutiful child regards a father—a father whose wisdom he reveres, whose authority he owns, whose goodness has won his heart, whose favour is his chiefest joy, and whose displeasure fills him with grief and shame. The fear of God, accordingly, is, in Scripture, generally put for the whole of true religion in the heart, and is, not infrequently, inclusive also of its practical results in the life. Those who “fear God,” and those who have “no fear of God before their eyes,” are the two great descriptions of mankind.

1. Fear is not a characteristic of the religion of our age. Increasing knowledge has, according to its usual law, brought increasing familiarity. And it may be questioned whether pious affections have not been weakened and effeminated by the absence of it. In this, as in almost everything else, the pendulum explains the story. We have swung to the extreme on one side, because we had gone too far on the other. Not long ago, we heard little of love, and too much of fear; now, it is almost all love, and no fear. “Love God.” “Love God,” with our whole heart,—for He is “love.” He is our Father. He has “loved us with an everlasting love.” There never was a time, in all eternity, when He did not love us. No love like that love, so deep, so true, so faithful, so comprehensive, so minute, so like Himself,—for ever and ever! Love as we will, we shall never reach the deep echo of His love. And all other love, however dear, is only a drop in that one fountain! But let us remember that He is “a great God, and a terrible,” “of purer eyes than to behold evil”; and who cannot “look on iniquity.” Mercy and truth go before His face; but justice and judgment are the habitation of His throne.

As long as every opportunity that is offered to us means the choice between a wiser and a more foolish, or a nobler and more ignoble alternative, we shall be liable to choose the worse—not in blindness, but in weakness or passion—and then to recognize our lost opportunity, to feel the actual discord emphasized by the ideal harmony, and to know the anguish of the sense of sin. And when this experience has been ours, we shall know the meaning of the fear of God. Not that fear which drives us in terror to divorce our actions from our affections, and scares us from doing the thing we should still love to do; not the fear of God as of the Divine policeman who is always ready to bring the terrors of the law upon us; but the fear of God which is hardly even another aspect of the love of Him. We see the beauty of holiness, we see the mark of our high calling in communion with Him, we see the greatness of the opportunities of life; and this is the love of God. And we know that if, in yielding to sloth or to passion, we neglect these opportunities, and are content with the lower and the baser part, that harmony which we now feel will have its counterpart in the discord which we shall wake, in the hurt and miserable sense of sin. We know that we cannot escape, though we climb to the top of Carmel, or plunge into the depths of the sea; and this is the fear of God. It is the love of God which inspires our lives; it is the fear of God which protects us in our moments of weakness, when we love the part, rather than the whole, and would find a momentary and local harmony at the price of a permanent and universal discord. 1 [Note: J. E. Carpenter and P. H. Wicksteed, Studies in Theology, 165.]

2. How are we to obtain this right feeling? That filial emotion which here and throughout the Old Testament is often called “fear,” that blended emotion of reverence and trust, awe and affection, can arise only where the spirit of sonship reciprocates God’s revealed aspect of compassionate and forthgoing fatherliness. It matters little whether we call the affection fear, or, with the first and great commandment, call it love. In that fear which realizes God’s fatherliness, there cannot be terror; and in the love which recollects that its Father is God there cannot be petulant boldness.

Perfect love does, indeed, cast out fear; for if we loved God perfectly, we should love Him always, and sin would never tempt us. And, therefore, it is in the love of God that the formula of harmony must be sought. Even when conscious of our own sin, conscious of our self-alienation from God, and the discord that it has waked in our being, we must seek to feel the harmony above and below; that the sense of opportunity, of privilege, of glory, of God, may still rise above the sense of failure, of exclusion, of shame, of self; that fear may be nought but an under-agent of love, the sense of sin nought but an undertone in the sense of salvation. 1 [Note: J. E. Carpenter and P. H. Wicksteed, Studies in Theology, 166.]

II

A Right Thought towards God

The fear of God is that coincidence with His good pleasure, and that compliance with His revealed will which is called here keeping His commandments. He is our Creator, and, whether we will or not, we must be His creatures. But He is also the King of the universe, and we ought to be His loyal subjects. Almighty and all-wise, we should devoutly adore Him. Our righteous Ruler, we should with cheerful submission acquiesce in His disposal, and with strenuous activity should fulfil His commands.

1. Now, to obey God’s commandments we must know in what they consist. We must have a right thought towards God, a knowledge of His will. The commandments of God are many and very broad. He reveals His will in the natural universe and the laws which govern it—laws which, as we are part of the universe, we need to know and to obey. He reveals His will in the social and political forces which govern the history and development of the various races of mankind, which therefore meet and affect us at every turn. He reveals His will in the ethical intuitions and codes which govern the formation of character, which enter into and give shape to all in us that is most spiritual, profound, and enduring. To keep all the commandments revealed in these immense fields of Divine activity with an intelligent and invariable obedience is simply impossible to us; it is the perfection which flows around our imperfection, and towards which it is our one great task to be ever reaching forth.

Carlyle desired to tell the modern world that, destitute as it and its affairs appeared to be of Divine guidance, God or justice was still in the middle of it, sternly inexorable as ever; that modern nations were as entirely governed by God’s law as the Israelites had been in Palestine—laws self-acting and inflicting their own penalties, if man neglected or defied them. And these laws were substantially the same as those on the Tables delivered in thunder on Mount Sinai. You shall reverence your Almighty Maker. You shall speak truth. You shall do justice to your fellow-man. If you set truth aside for conventional and convenient lies; if you prefer your own pleasure, your own will, your own ambition, to purity and manliness and justice, and submission to your Maker’s commands, then are whirlwinds still provided in the constitution of things which will blow you to atoms. 1 [Note: J. A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle, 1834–1881, i. 89.]

2. Throughout this whole Book there is not a single technical allusion, no allusion to the Temple, to the feasts, to the sacrifices, rites, ceremonies of the Law; and therefore we can hardly take this reference to the “commandments” as an allusion to the Mosaic table. By the rules of fair interpretation we are bound to take these commandments as previously defined by the Preacher himself, to understand him as once more enforcing the virtues which, for him, comprised the whole duty of man. And these virtues are: To love our neighbour, to discharge the present duty whatever rain may fall and whatever storm may blow, to carry a bright hopeful spirit through all our toils and charities; to do this in the fear of God, as in His Presence, because He is judging and will judge us.

Modern moralists prefer to ask, not “What is man’s chief end,” but “What is man’s duty; what is the supreme law of his life?” Man’s good presents itself to him as an ideal, which he may or may not realize in practice; this is what distinguishes the moral from the natural life. The law of man’s life is not, like Nature’s, inevitable—it may be broken as well as kept; this is why we call it a moral law. While a physical law, or a law of nature, is simply a statement of what always happens, a moral law is that which ought to be, but never strictly is. The ancients were inclined to regard the end as something to be acquired or got, rather than as an ideal to be attained—as something to be possessed rather than as something to become. The moral ideal is an ideal of character. The claims of righteousness become paramount: do the right though the heavens fall. The end of life is thus an ideal of character, to be realized by the individual, and his attitude to it is one of obligation or duty to realize it. It is not something to be got or to be done, but to be or to become. It is to be sought not without, but within; it is the man himself, in that true or essential nature, in the realization of which is fulfilled his duty. 1 [Note: J. Seth, Ethical Principles.]

III

A Right Will towards God

But it is not sufficient to have a knowledge of the commandments of God; we must also keep His commandments. What do we mean when we say “keep the commandments”? It is an expression which has lost its force by frequent quotation. To “keep” is not to lose. To “keep” is to lay up in the high places of memory. It is to hide a thing down in the recesses of the heart. It is to observe cautiously, to treasure jealously, to hold fast, and never let go.

1. To keep God’s commandments, to discharge the various duties which He has appointed—this is the very best use which we can make of life; this is the highest good to which we can attain, amid all the difficulties, disappointments, sorrows, uncertainties, transitoriness and mystery of our present existence. And, in order that our souls may be sustained in living this life of godliness and virtue, we are ever to remember that we are responsible creatures; we are to look forward to a future life and a future judgment. To live in the light of that coming judgment leads us to keep watch even over our secret conduct, and deepens our reverence for all God’s holy laws.

Our thought will prosper, and our science, as we realize that it is not the first thing but the second. It does not till then realize its own place and right. To see God and hear Him is prior to all thought about Him or His world. The perception of faith is the condition of any science of God; religion founds all theology. The world we are in is not ours but God’s. We therefore revere its reality, and own a wisdom wiser and greater than ours. We do not create truth, but receive it. We do not command it, but obey it. Wisdom is over the thinker who loves it and seeks it. We are under obligation to seek and think the truth; we may not merely play with it, we may not loll in the stalls as it passes before us. It is a task, it is not a treat. And we do not legislate for truth; we have to see that the law of thought has its way with us. Our chief act of will is practically recognition of a gift. It is obedience to a grace, even in science. 1 [Note: P. T. Forsyth, The Principle of Authority, 111.]

2. To be animated by true fear is to have a right will towards God—is to have been brought into fellowship with Him as a reconciled God and Father. And hence the inseparable connexion of these two things—fearing God and keeping His commandments. Love is the fulfilling of the law. It is itself the very essence of all true obedience; and wherever it is really shed abroad in the heart, it will, and must, tend to active personal devotedness to God’s holy service. To fear God in the sense here intended, and yet to be living in allowed sin—in wilful, practical, habitual opposition to God’s commandments—is a contradiction in terms. It is, in truth, a moral impossibility. “For the love of Christ constraineth us,” says the Apostle Paul, referring to the necessary and inseparable connexion between a right state of feeling towards God, and a right course of acting—“the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead: and that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again.”

Catherine analyses with keen insight the relations which redeemed humanity can bear to the Loving God: she tells us how the servant, obedient through fear, may become the friend, obedient through gratitude and desire for spiritual blessings; and how these lower loves, through the operation of the Holy Spirit, may be transformed into the love of the son, who seeks God for His own sake, “with nothing between.” And how shall human love, when it has reached this point, reflect the love of Him who “needs not man’s work nor His own gifts”? How become, not merely receptive, but active and creative? Catherine gives the simple Christian answer: “God has loved us without being loved, but we love Him because we are loved.… We cannot be of any profit to Him, nor love Him with this first love. Yet God demands of us, that as He has loved us without any second thoughts, so He should be loved by us. In what way can we do this, then, since He demands it of us and we cannot give it to Him? I tell you: through a means which He has established by which we can love Him freely, and without the least regard to any profit of ours: we can be useful, not to Him, which is impossible, but to our neighbour. To show the love we have to Him, we ought to serve and love every rational creature. Every virtue receives life from love, and love is gained in love, that is, by raising the eye of our mind to behold how much we are beloved of God. Seeing ourselves loved, we cannot do otherwise than love.” 1 [Note: V. D. Scudder, Letters of Saint Catherine of Siena, 79.]

3. The New Testament fully endorses the idea that the “chief good” for man lies in a life of godliness and virtue. The gospel, it is true, seeks to infuse a spirit of love and trust into our reverence for God; but it does not abolish this reverence. It reveals to us a “Father in heaven” whose “name” is to be “hallowed.” It proclaims, indeed, the forgiving mercy of God, and offers pardon to the “chief of sinners”; but it does not lessen the sanctity of God’s law, or relax the demands of that law on our conscience. It points us to our great High Priest who has offered the perfect sacrifice of Himself upon the cross. It gives us a still larger view of the Divine commandments, and seeks to bring us into harmony with their inmost spirit. It does not “make void the law through faith”; it “establishes the law.” The Saviour whom it proclaims to us is the King whom we are bound to obey, and who said, “Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets; I came not to destroy, but to fulfil.”

True religion is no mere mystic passive dream of devotion—a gazing in rapt reverence on the mystery of godliness, and no more. It is a system also of high comprehensive delicate law, which demands daily determined obedience. It is a doing and a being. The righteousness of Christ is excelling; it signifies infinitely more than civil law, social courtesy, or ecclesiastical discipline. It means a noble heart governing daily life in its most delicate relations and situations. It is no “rule of thumb,” but of finer discriminations than the most exquisite instruments of science. Let me not mistakenly spend life in arguing down and arguing away the lofty laws of Christ. Let me not labour to accommodate them to my weakness. Let me daily pray for the grace that will bring me up to the height of the law, and not attempt to bring down the law to my frailty. 2 [Note: W. L. Watkinson.]

Literature

Brown (A. G.), God’s Full-Orbed Gospel, 96.

Bruce (W. S.), Our Heritage, 161.

Gamble (H. R.), The Ten Virgins, 189.

Hadden (R. H.), Sermons and Memoir, 191.

Hamilton (J.), The Royal Preacher, 230, 242 ( Works, iii. 220, 231).

Jowett (B.), College Sermons, 183.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Esther, etc., 402.

Parker (J.), The City Temple, iii. 10.

Plumptre (E. H.), Theology and Life, 309.

Salmon (G.), Sermons Preached in Trinity College, Dublin, 130, 148.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), New Ser., xvi. (1878), No. 1064; xvii. (1879), No. 1102.

Christian World Pulpit, xxx. 75 (J. M. Buckley); lxxviii. 152 (W. H. Harwood).