Bible Commentaries
Galatians 6

Verse 2

Burdens

Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.— Galatians 6:2.

For each man shall bear his own burden.— Galatians 6:5.

The key-note of this Epistle, the key-note of Christianity, is struck in these two sentences. They seem to express a contradiction, but it is not really so. If we take them together they are a brief description of the essence of our religion; a definition, in short compass, of the spirit of the Christian life. For the Christian faith is based upon two great underlying principles which, though not strictly original to it, are yet, in their passionate expression, among the most precious of its gifts to man. They explain at once the mystery and comprehensiveness of its scheme of salvation for the individual soul; and also the Divine beauty and eternal reality of that great ideal of the Church as the Kingdom of God, a community of souls in which each individual member must bear his own burden, while all the members are bound together, bearing one another’s burdens, and united in Him who is the great Burden-bearer of humanity, who is the Head of the body, even Christ.

It is impossible to obey one part of this law without obeying the other; it is impossible to bear our own burden, without at the same time bearing the burden of others; it is impossible to realize the awful responsibilities of being, without at the same time realizing the claims of our brothers; impossible to find our own true life without giving up our individual will, without merging our personal interests in those of the human brotherhood.

So we have—

I. The Individual Burden.

II. The Mutual Burden.

III. The Law that Lightens the Burden.

I

The Individual Burden

“Every man shall bear his own burden.”

1. When St. Paul says, “Every man shall bear his own burden,” he is speaking of the burdens which no man can transfer from his own shoulders to those of another, burdens which from the very nature of things he must bear, and not another. And he uses a word that carries this meaning. It is the word used by classical writers when speaking of a soldier’s kit. St. Luke uses it in the Acts when speaking of the lading of a ship. And our Lord uses it when He says, “My burden is light.” In all these cases the idea is that of a burden which cannot be got rid of. A soldier on active service must carry his own knapsack, or he is not fit to be a soldier. A merchantman must carry her own lading, or she may as well be broken up. A Christian must bear the burden of Christ, whatever that burden may be, or he cannot be a Christian. There are, then, certain burdens which a man must himself bear, which he cannot transfer from his own shoulders to those of another—which another cannot carry.

How many people cunningly and persistently contrive to shift their burden to the shoulders of their neighbours! They are not particular as to whom they saddle with their duty and care, but they determine to bear as little of it themselves as is possible. In youth somebody must fag for them; they treat their friend as a valet; their public life is parasitical; as husband or wife, they shuffle the whole weight of responsibility on their partner. The ingenuity of the ignoble to make themselves comfortable at other people’s expense is no small part of the comedy and tragedy of human life. How different the spirit of Christ! Let me manfully accept my own burden; and then, by thought, sympathy, influence, and substantial aid, let me lighten the burden of my neighbour. My Master was the great burden bearer of the race. Let me drink in His spirit and follow in His steps. 1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson, The Gates of Dawn, 24.]

2. In creating man God has laid firm and deep the foundations of individual character and of individual life. There is no individuality in the case of a flock of sheep or a herd of cattle Doubtless no two sheep are exactly alike, and the shepherd knows the difference between them, however alike they may appear to the superficial; but there is no individual consciousness and no individual life. One primrose is like another primrose. It is a pity that this one should fade, but another will spring up in its place, and the hedgerow will be none the worse. But in the case of men God has laid firm and deep the foundations of individual character, individual condition, individual responsibility, and individual destiny. So it comes to pass that of two children born of the same stock, playing in the same nursery, brought up very largely with the same education and surroundings, each possesses his own individual character from the outset, sometimes in a fashion which puzzles parents who study their children closely; and, as soon as moral responsibility begins, each one begins of necessity to shape his own character, to choose his own course, to mark out his own path, and very largely to fashion his own destiny. And the burdens each one has to bear are those belonging to his individual lot.

Perhaps the most prominent Secession divine in Aberdeen who was a contemporary of Dr. Kidd was James Templeton, minister of what is now Belmont Street U. P. Church. He was a man of quiet power and singular shrewdness of observation. His mother wit, spiritual fervour, homely illustration, and unabashed vernacular gave him acceptance with the people. One Sabbath, speaking to persons who complained that their burdens in life were exceptionally heavy, he said—“Suppose now you were to take all your separate burdens to the Castlegate and drop them doon there, and after examinin’ them and comparin’ them one with another, I am thinkin’ you wouldna be willin’ to exchange with any when you really saw what they were; but, pickin’ up your bit bundlie, each one of you wad gang awa’ hame mair contentit than when you went to the Castlegate.” 1 [Note: James Stark, Dr. Kidd of Aberdeen, 140.]

(1) There is the burden of physical disability or disfigurement, such as lameness, blindness, or deformity of any sort—always a very grievous burden to be borne. St. Paul knew this burden, the shame and the sorrow of it. Apparently he suffered from some distressing physical evil that made him contemptible in the eyes of men and that injured even his ministerial usefulness. Some, indeed, have held that the thorn in the flesh was a moral weakness—a violent temper, a jealous nature, even a lustful passion. But no man ever received grace to bear these things, though thousands have received grace to get rid of them. The facts that the thorn was not removed and that grace was given him to bear it show conclusively that it could not have been a moral weakness but rather a physical defect, a disease. And there are thousands in the world to-day, like him, who have to bear unaided and alone the burden of physical weakness or deformity save for that Divine grace which helps them to overcome the shame and to endure the pain.

In one of Schiller’s poems a beautiful story is told to this effect: When God made the birds He gave them gorgeous plumage and sweet voices, but no wings. He laid wings on the ground and said, “Take these burdens and bear them.” They struggled along with them, folding them over their hearts. Presently the wings grew fast to their breasts and spread themselves out, and they found that what they had thought were burdens were changed to pinions. 1 [Note: A. T. Pierson.]

(2) There is the burden of intellectual weakness. Men have not all the same mental powers, the same facility in acquiring learning, the same range of vision, the same foresight. One man succeeds in life because he has a greater power of forecasting the future, of calculating the changes in the money market, or industrial life, than his neighbour. The race is perhaps not always to the swift, but it generally is. The battle is not always to the strong, but it generally is. And in the race of human life a man, notwithstanding all his diligence and probity, may find himself outdistanced by one of keener intellect and greater foresight. He may think it hard that it should be so, but he must bear the burden of his own defects as best he may.

I would gladly bear your burden,

If it might be so,

But each heart its own must carry;

None may go

Altogether free, you know.

If I might, it would be easy,

O my friend, for me

Just to take your task and do it,

But, you see,

Such a thing could never be.

Though my heart aches, as I watch you,

Toiling through the day—

Missing some of life’s old sunshine

From your way—

Finding work instead of play—

Yet I know that it is better—

Know that you and I,

Looking back from God’s to-morrow,

By and by—

Never more shall question “Why?”

By our losses He is leading

To eternal gain:

He will surely give us sunshine,

After rain—

Calm for sorrow—peace for pain. 1 [Note: Edith H. Divall, A Believer’s Rest, 78.]

(3) It may be some permanent or far-reaching consequence of a former act of our own; some neglect, or recklessness, or sin in the past, which has hung a weight about our necks. The sin may be repented of; the pardon may be assured. But the temporal consequences of the sin remain, and will remain so long as we have breath. This is the most irksome and the most painful form which a man’s individual burden can take. If you thrust a knife into your arm, it does not affect me. You yourself feel the pain; you yourself must endure the agony. I may sympathize, I may pity, I may bandage the gash, but the severed flesh and the lacerated fibres are yours, and along your nerves nature telegraphs the pain. So it is with the soul. A man who stabs himself with a bad habit, who opens the arteries of his higher life with the lancet of his passions and drains them of the vital fluid, who inserts his head within the noose of appetite and swings himself off from the pedestal of his self-control, must endure the suffering, the weakness, and the loss which are the issue of his insane conduct.

Sin is often described by active and aggressive metaphors—it is a deceiver, a destroyer, an enemy, etc. This passive one is more dreadful, for it tells simply of the dead weight of fact. Facts are “chiels that winna ding.” Sin is, to Paul, “this dead body”; and the flaccid mass of inelastic flesh, at once soft and heavy, is horrible enough without the implied hint of decay. The worst thing about sin is just that it is there—an irrevocable fact which the sinner has put there. When he realizes this he feels it as a burden: he cannot sleep, or eat, or work, or play as once he did. Yet that is a precious pain. The far deeper danger is that one should grow accustomed to it, as the Swiss peasant to the growing load of hay or Milo to his ox, until he is able complacently to “draw iniquity with a cart rope.” The unblushed-for past—the dead weight of sinful facts faced deliberately and carried lightly—that is a doom far deeper than the most oppressive load. 1 [Note: John Kelman, The Road, i. 3.]

3. Now St. Paul does not say that the burden shall be lifted from off our shoulders, or that it shall be borne for us, but that we shall be sustained in carrying it. If it is God’s gift, it is His will that we should keep it, at least for the time. There is some blessing in it for us, and it would not be kindness to us for God to take it away, even at our earnest pleading. It is part of our life, and is essential to our best growth. This is true of duty; however hard it is, to relieve us of it would be to rob us of the opportunity for reaching larger usefulness. It is true of struggle; all nobleness and strength of character come out of conflict. It is true of suffering; it is God’s cleansing fire, and to miss it would be a sore loss to us. Hence, while God never fails us in need, He loves us too well to relieve us of weights which are essential to our best growth and to the largest fruitfulness of our life. He does not take the load from our shoulder, but instead He puts strength in us to enable us to carry the burden, and thus grow strong. This is the secret of the peace of many a sick-room. It is the secret of the deep, quiet joy we see oft-times in the home of sorrow.

The seal of one of those Scottish Covenanters whom Claverhouse imprisoned on the lonely Bass Rock reads “Sub pondere cresco”—“I grow beneath the load.” 2 [Note: A. Smellie, In the Hour of Silence.]

Thy burden is God’s gift,

And it will make the bearer calm and strong;

Yet, lest it press too heavily and long,

He says, “Cast it on Me,

And it shall easy be.”

And those who heed His voice,

And seek to give it back in trustful prayer,

Have quiet hearts that never can despair,

And hope lights up the way

Upon the darkest day.

It is the lonely road

That crushes out the light and life of heaven;

But borne with Him, the soul restored, forgiven,

Sings out through all the days

Her joy and God’s high praise. 1 [Note: J. R. Miller.]

II

The Mutual Burden

“Bear ye one another’s burdens.”

1. The Greek word for burden in this verse might be better rendered by “load,” for the idea is that of an adventitious and heavy burden. A man’s family is, in a certain sense, a burden—a burden that arises from his being a husband and a father—but it is not a burden of which he can rid himself. To him it is a light burden, as to the Christian Christ’s burden is light. But to this burden there may be added the burden of ill-health, or misfortune, or poverty. It is not in any one’s power to say to him, “I am to take up your burden. You shall no longer be weighted down with your family. You shall no longer be a husband. You shall no longer be a father. Your duties as husband and father shall no longer oppress you.” We cannot say that. We might, indeed, remove his children from him, but that would not in any degree lessen his duty to care for them and train them and teach them and act a father’s part towards them. If we wish to help him it is his load, not his burden, we must bear—the crushing weight of poverty, or misfortune, or sorrow.

2. This burden-bearing means a different thing in each life. It is not a pretty sentiment, a mere figure of speech. It is the great and manifold service of love, which needs all the wisdom and strength and patience that we can bring to it, and which can be wrought in a thousand ways. Occasionally this burden-bearing can be done very literally when we can take on to our own shoulders for the bearing, and into our own hands for the doing, that which for another was too heavy and too hard. But more frequently it must take the form of the indirect and mediate service of sympathy. In the great league of pity and help to which we are all called, and in which, if only we are unselfish enough, we can all find a place, we ever find that the best thing we have to give to the world is our influence. No man liveth to himself. Every man is ever adding to or diminishing the burden of other lives. There is an infinitude of interaction—much of it beyond our tracing; and in so far as we carry through life a cheerful, patient, responsive, and unselfish spirit we shall be doing something every day to make the burden of others easier to be borne.

Dr. Bell’s desire for sympathy, and his appreciation of it was touchingly intense, and yet he had a way of looking and speaking with almost flippant unconcern when feeling most deeply. This was at times when he knew that any display of emotion would “upset everything.” Thus many people who knew him well saw little of his inner self. They saw him as the hope-inspiring physician, smiling and chatting, cheering the sorrowful, soothing the sufferer, quick to see fun lurking near solemnity, taking up the burden of others with seemingly no burden of his own, bringing a gay good humour to meet anxious doubts and dreadful fears. When young, his bearing was that of a joyous nature on whom the gods had showered their good gifts. Even in later years when many bereavements had wounded his warm affections to the quick his smile was ready, and his sense of fun as fresh as ever. His self-control was perfect. 1 [Note: Joseph Bell: An Appreciation, 34.]

The late Right Hon. W. H. Smith, when First Lord of the Admiralty, was leaving his office one afternoon, when his secretary, seeing him packing up a number of letters and other Government papers, asked him to leave them and have them forwarded to him by post as other Ministers did. “No,” was the answer, “the fact is our postman has plenty to carry. I watched him one morning coming up the approach, and I determined to save him as much as I could.” 2 [Note: The Morning Watch, 1894, p. 10.]

(1) By the giving of sympathy you take away the worst weight of sorrow. You cannot take it all away, but you can lift off that in it which maims the life or slays the soul, if you love enough. Unloving sympathy has no tact, no inventiveness, no insight, no reverence. But the sympathy of love—and that you are bound to win, if you would obey this law—enters into the sanctuary of another’s sorrow with uncovered head and reverent stillness, sees the point where tenderness can touch and not hurt, has quickness of imagination to invent the means of bearing away the burden; rescues the sufferers before they are conscious of being rescued, and wins undying love. There is no happiness in life so delicate and pure as the doing of this beautiful thing. It is the happiness of God Himself.

(2) Joy may for the moment be as great a burden as sorrow. The heart may be o’erfraught with delight, and nigh to breaking with it. When Lear awoke from his madness and saw Cordelia bending over him, and love in her eyes, he all but died of joy. We have no right, but have great wrong, if we treat with indifference the joy of the child or the rapture of youth. “They want no sympathy,” we say, or even with a scoff, “He is happy! let him alone!” Have we never repulsed young or old with a cold look when they came up full of their delight, longing for us to share their pleasure? It is an unkindly act; let us never do it again. Let us think rather that joy is a burden that you have to bear for others. Make the delight of others brighter by sympathy. Do not blow with a cold wind upon the rose in flower, lest you wither its leaves. “Rejoice,” said St. Paul, with his large knowledge of the needs of love, “rejoice with them that do rejoice.”

3. Different temperaments, like different plants, require different atmospheres. Some plants require a tropical heat before they will put on their beautiful garments. We have to create about them a mimic summer, and delude them into feeling that they are far away, at home in the burning clime. Other plants seek for our own temperate heat; they disburse their treasure, not to the soft calling of the luxurious breeze of the tropics, but to the robust, bracing, toughening winds of our own land. How we have to humour the plants if we would lure them out into blossoms and flower! This one must be set a little farther in the shade. That one must be lifted up into the light, to receive the baptism of the sun. Each one must be placed according to its temperament. And when vices cling about them in the shape of destructive little parasites, little insects which grow fat by draining up the sap, then how we have to medicate the atmosphere, to provide certain conditions which shall help the plants to deal with their enemies, and to throw off the burdens! Thus we create suitable conditions for individual plants; and thus we must create suitable conditions for the full and beautiful growth of individual men.

Looking back over these two years of illness, it is impossible not to be struck by the calmness and fortitude with which that illness was met. There were moments of terrible depression and of disappointment and of grief. It was not easy for him to give up ambition, to leave so many projects unfulfilled, so much work undone. But to him this illness grew to be a mount of purification,

Ove l’umano spirito si purga,

E di salire al ciel diventa degno.

More and more there grew on him a deepening sense of the goodness of God. No one had ever suffered more from the Eclipse of Faith, no one had ever been more honest in dealing with himself and with his difficulties. The change that came over his mental attitude may seem almost incredible to those who knew him only as a scientific man; it does not seem so to the few who knew anything of his inner life. To them the impression given is, not of an enemy changed into a friend, antagonism altered into submission; rather is it of one who for long has been bearing a heavy burden on his shoulders bravely and patiently, and who at last has had it lifted from him, and lifted so gradually that he could not tell the exact moment when he found it gone, and himself standing, like the Pilgrim of the never-to-be-forgotten story, at the foot of the Cross, and Three Shining Ones coming to greet him. 1 [Note: Life and Letters of George John Romanes, 351.]

III

The Law that Lightens the Burden

“And so fulfil the law of Christ.”

Here the Apostle directs his readers from the law given on stone to the law which should be written on the heart, from the Mount of Sinai to the Mount of Beatitudes, from the law of the letter which killeth to the law of the Spirit which giveth life. There can be little doubt that the Apostle’s words here were suggested by the controversy which had been raging in the Galatian Church.

The Galatians who were the object of St. Paul’s attention had been showing much more interest in the outward marks of religion than in its inward power. They had come under the spell of that view which made religion a matter of rite and ritual, and here the Apostle would have them learn that such a view was altogether a mistake. Like his fellow-Apostle, he could enforce the truth that pure religion before God and the Father was not a matter of circumcision or of outward ordinances. It did not consist of attendances at synagogue at the proper hour or of keeping the feasts in all their strictness. Pure religion was something more than these. It was to visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.

1. This law is founded on the necessities of our human nature. It is not necessary to obey it because it is commanded; it is commanded because it is necessary. It fits into the wants of man. For we are all dependent on one another. As in our body each organ lives for itself only in living for the rest, as each part, even each atom, of our frame supplements the wants of the others, gives and receives, bears and forbears, dies and lives alternately for the life of the whole—so is it in the ever living body of humanity. The life of each nation, each society, each man, depends on the mutual giving and receiving, dying and living, bearing and forbearing of all the rest. So the moment we, through selfishness of life, divide ourselves from this living and dying for others, the moment we isolate ourselves, we pronounce our own sentence of death. The absolute loss of love is eternal death, as its absolute gain is eternal life. It was that Christ Jesus saw; it was that He proclaimed on Calvary. And it is the law of the life of the universe. Therefore, “bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.”

To bear the burdens of others might well have seemed to St. Paul a dictate of the intuitive moral consciousness, and might well have been commanded by him on the ground of that inward intuition. But this is not the ground on which St. Paul commands it; he appeals to a positive historical authority, which he calls “the law of Christ”; and he asks men to bear the burdens of others, not because that precept was written in their hearts, but because it had been given by Him who was the object of their worship. In writing to these Galatians, wavering as they were between Christianity and Judaism, he evidently speaks of the law of Christ in contradistinction to the law of Moses. It is as if he had said, “Do not think that, in coming from Judaism to Christianity, you are passing from a region of positive certainty into a world of mystic obscurity; we too have a historic Lawgiver, who has uttered His voice from the mount of God, and who speaks with an authority which Moses never wielded. You have received from Moses only the negative precept—the command not to hurt your brother; we offer you a law of Christ which commands you to identify your brother’s interests with your own—‘Bear ye one another’s burdens.’ ”

When Dr. Temple resigned the headmastership of Rugby to become Bishop of Exeter, his farewell sermon to the boys was from the text, “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.” “This new commandment of Christ,” said the preacher, “this law of love which Paul is here referring to, our Lord and the Apostles place above all other commandments. How is this? The older dispensation had placed the fear and love of God first, then the love of neighbours. Surely the highest rule must be to love first God, then truth, holiness, justice, and after these one another. Has the Gospel sunk below the law? No, for under the Gospel, by the incarnation of the Son of God, the two loves are united, can no longer be kept apart. There can be no love of God apart from love of man. Christ Himself has pointed out this love of each other as the special mode by which He would have us acknowledge Him. Let us help one another, then, at our Lord’s call, by courage, by patience, by cordial and tender sympathy in joy and sorrow, by faithful warning, by resignation. There are no bounds to the help which spirit can give to spirit in the intercourse of a noble life. When parted, we can still bear one another’s burdens by hearty, mutual trust. There is nothing which gives more firmness and constancy to the life of a man than loyal trust in absent friends.” 1 [Note: Frederick Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, i. 238.]

2. The bearing of our own burden in a Christian spirit prepares us for lifting the load of other people. Every experience carries with it the power of bearing a burden. Have you never passed through times when your own religious faith was at stake? Then how tenderly you can enter into the mental struggle of others. Have you never known the trouble of making both ends meet? Then you will sympathize with the burdens of those who dare not be generous, because, by God’s grace, they will first be just. Have you known what it is to go to your business, while some dear child was lying, like alabaster, in the sleep of death, and you had to keep down your feelings while you won life’s daily bread? Then how you can feel for others who have left their hearts in the great death-chamber with the closed door.

While it is true that by bearing our own burdens we learn best how to bear other people’s, the converse is no less true. There is no help towards bearing our own burdens so effective as the bearing the burdens of others as well. This is the moral paradox of our being. Are we sinking under the weight of our own burden? Then let us go up to our neighbour, and courageously shoulder his also. The two will be lighter, incomparably lighter, than the one was. Is not this demonstrably true? Is a man’s heart wounded and bleeding with some recent sorrow—a cruel bereavement, a disappointed hope, an outraged affection; and he broods over it until the pain becomes too terrible to bear? The only relief for his agony is found in ministering to the wants or consoling the sorrows of another. His sympathy is thus evoked; and with sympathy come new interests, new feelings, a new life.

Sad souls, that harbour fears and woes

In many a haunted breast,

Turn but to meet your lowly Lord,

And He will give you rest.

Into His commonwealth alike

Are ills and blessings thrown;

Bear ye your neighbours’ burdens; lo!

Their ease shall be your own.

Yield only up His price, your heart,

Into God’s loving hold;

He turns with heavenly alchemy,

Your lead of life to gold.

Some needful pangs endure in peace,

Nor yet for freedom pant;

He cuts the bane you cleave to off,

Then gives the boon you want. 1 [Note: S. H. Palfrey.]

Describing David Hill’s itinerant tours in China, one of the missionaries, the Rev. T. Protheroe, says, “I venture to add an incident which occurred on one of our journeys. He had a servant in training for the work of an evangelist. The servant had given over a bundle of rugs, which served as Mr. Hill’s bedding, to an old man who escorted us, and showed evident unwillingness to bear any share even in relieving the old man of his burden. It was a hot day. One word from Mr. Hill would have been enough, but he preferred to teach the much-needed lesson in another way, and said he should carry the bundle himself. Of course, I objected, and there was some dispute as to which of us should bear the burden but he won the day in the end by saying, ‘Do let me have it; I want to teach him humility.’ ” 2 [Note: J. E. Hellier, Life of David Hill, 247.]

3. The measure of our love to one another must be the love that Christ showed to us. It is an infinite measure. There is no one who can say, “I have done enough for my brother man. I have loved enough.” Beyond our most eager efforts stretches the ever-expanding loving-kindness of Jesus. There is no one who can say, “I have forgiven enough! If my brother sin again, if my enemy do me another wrong, I will forgive no more”; for beyond our most amazing forgiveness extends the unwearied forgiveness of Christ—the image, the reflexion and the revelation in man of the unconquerable desire to bless and to redeem, which is deepest towards us in the heart of God our Father. Therefore, in this illimitable demand upon us for love, we are greatly blessed. We are placed in the infinite, and kept in the infinite; we are freed from definitions of love, from maxims of forgiveness, from all the foolish casuistry that limits love. In this, at least, we are not to be content with our limitations. There are no limitations. We are challenged by God Himself to share in His infinity; never to endure finality in tenderness, never to imagine the end of love. It is a glorious call, and to answer it brings us into the infinite God Himself. So, as the Apostle Paul exhorts the Ephesians, “walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, with all lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering, forbearing one another in love.”

Thus will you “fulfil the law of Christ”—that law which has its culminating glory in the atoning death of Calvary; its Divinest symbol in the cross. Then only does the higher life begin with us when we bow ourselves before the majesty of this “supreme offering made by supreme love, because the need of man was great, when we feel the glow of a common life with the lost multitude for whom that offering was made, and behold the history of the world as the history of a great redemption in which we ourselves are fellow-workers in our own place and among our own people.”

In the Pilgrim’s Progress, coming to the Cross is the last incident in the man’s salvation. The cross, which used to be the emblem of slavery, now becomes the means of liberty and lightening. The point to notice here is that we are saved by what we see. The sinful man loses his burden upon realizing a fact, and the essence of Christianity is a magnificent realization. Sin had been too much for him, but now God has vanquished it. The joy that follows is inevitable. Bunyan tells us in his Grace Abounding, that, when the joy of this release came to him, he could have spoken of it to the very crows that sat upon the ploughed land by the wayside. The power and beauty of the simple sentence which tells of the burden tumbling into the mouth of the sepulchre make that passage one of the religious classics of the world. No commentary is necessary or possible except the memory of that experience in the hearts of those in whose lives it has happened. 1 [Note: John Kelman, The Road, i. 71.]

Burdens

Literature

Ainsworth (P. C.), A Thornless World, 154.

Alexander (S. A.), The Christianity of St. Paul, 157.

Brooke (Stopford A.), Short Sermons, 12.

Burrell (D. J.), God and the People, 264.

Caird (Edward), Lay Sermons Delivered in Balliol College, 3.

Campbell (A. A.), Sermons Preached before the Queen, 3.

Cuyler (T. L.), A Model Christian, 21.

Hamilton (J.), Works, vi. 407

Lightfoot (J. B.), Ordination Addresses, 136.

Little (W. J. K.), Characteristics of the Christian Life, 140.

Maxson (H. D.), Sermons, 269.

Neale (J. M.), Sermons, ii. 139.

Neville (W. G.), Sermons, 312.

Murray (W. H. H.), in The American Pulpit of the Day, iii. 182.

Palmer (J. R.), Burden Bearing, 3.

Potter (H. C.), Sermons of the City, 220.

Rogers (J. Guinness), The Gospel in the Epistles, 131.

Selby (T. G.), The Strenuous Gospel, 357.

Talbot (E. S.), in Keble College Sermons, 1877–88, 1.

Temple (F.), Rugby Sermons, i. 144; iii. 281.

Thompson (J. R.), Burden, Bearing, 7.

Thomson (W.), Life in the Light of God’s Word, 299.

Tomory (A.), in Alexander Tomory, Indian Missionary, 109.

Trench (R. C.), Sermons New and Old, 50.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), vi. (1869), No. 631.

British Congregationalist, Oct. 4, 1906 (J. H. Jowett).

Christian Age, xlii. 34 (L. Abbott).

Christian World Pulpit, xxv. 58 (W. M. Statham); xxix. 49 (R. Eyton); xxxvii. 179 (J. L. King); xli. 214 (R. I. Woodhouse); xlii. 338 (J. Wills); l. 186 (I. Harthill); lxv. 36 (W. T. Davison); lxx. 298 (T. B. McCorkindale); lxxx. 42 (W. McMillan).

Church Family Newspaper, Oct. 11, 1912 (A. Robertson).

Verse 5

Burdens

Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.— Galatians 6:2.

For each man shall bear his own burden.— Galatians 6:5.

The key-note of this Epistle, the key-note of Christianity, is struck in these two sentences. They seem to express a contradiction, but it is not really so. If we take them together they are a brief description of the essence of our religion; a definition, in short compass, of the spirit of the Christian life. For the Christian faith is based upon two great underlying principles which, though not strictly original to it, are yet, in their passionate expression, among the most precious of its gifts to man. They explain at once the mystery and comprehensiveness of its scheme of salvation for the individual soul; and also the Divine beauty and eternal reality of that great ideal of the Church as the Kingdom of God, a community of souls in which each individual member must bear his own burden, while all the members are bound together, bearing one another’s burdens, and united in Him who is the great Burden-bearer of humanity, who is the Head of the body, even Christ.

It is impossible to obey one part of this law without obeying the other; it is impossible to bear our own burden, without at the same time bearing the burden of others; it is impossible to realize the awful responsibilities of being, without at the same time realizing the claims of our brothers; impossible to find our own true life without giving up our individual will, without merging our personal interests in those of the human brotherhood.

So we have—

I. The Individual Burden.

II. The Mutual Burden.

III. The Law that Lightens the Burden.

I

The Individual Burden

“Every man shall bear his own burden.”

1. When St. Paul says, “Every man shall bear his own burden,” he is speaking of the burdens which no man can transfer from his own shoulders to those of another, burdens which from the very nature of things he must bear, and not another. And he uses a word that carries this meaning. It is the word used by classical writers when speaking of a soldier’s kit. St. Luke uses it in the Acts when speaking of the lading of a ship. And our Lord uses it when He says, “My burden is light.” In all these cases the idea is that of a burden which cannot be got rid of. A soldier on active service must carry his own knapsack, or he is not fit to be a soldier. A merchantman must carry her own lading, or she may as well be broken up. A Christian must bear the burden of Christ, whatever that burden may be, or he cannot be a Christian. There are, then, certain burdens which a man must himself bear, which he cannot transfer from his own shoulders to those of another—which another cannot carry.

How many people cunningly and persistently contrive to shift their burden to the shoulders of their neighbours! They are not particular as to whom they saddle with their duty and care, but they determine to bear as little of it themselves as is possible. In youth somebody must fag for them; they treat their friend as a valet; their public life is parasitical; as husband or wife, they shuffle the whole weight of responsibility on their partner. The ingenuity of the ignoble to make themselves comfortable at other people’s expense is no small part of the comedy and tragedy of human life. How different the spirit of Christ! Let me manfully accept my own burden; and then, by thought, sympathy, influence, and substantial aid, let me lighten the burden of my neighbour. My Master was the great burden bearer of the race. Let me drink in His spirit and follow in His steps. 1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson, The Gates of Dawn, 24.]

2. In creating man God has laid firm and deep the foundations of individual character and of individual life. There is no individuality in the case of a flock of sheep or a herd of cattle Doubtless no two sheep are exactly alike, and the shepherd knows the difference between them, however alike they may appear to the superficial; but there is no individual consciousness and no individual life. One primrose is like another primrose. It is a pity that this one should fade, but another will spring up in its place, and the hedgerow will be none the worse. But in the case of men God has laid firm and deep the foundations of individual character, individual condition, individual responsibility, and individual destiny. So it comes to pass that of two children born of the same stock, playing in the same nursery, brought up very largely with the same education and surroundings, each possesses his own individual character from the outset, sometimes in a fashion which puzzles parents who study their children closely; and, as soon as moral responsibility begins, each one begins of necessity to shape his own character, to choose his own course, to mark out his own path, and very largely to fashion his own destiny. And the burdens each one has to bear are those belonging to his individual lot.

Perhaps the most prominent Secession divine in Aberdeen who was a contemporary of Dr. Kidd was James Templeton, minister of what is now Belmont Street U. P. Church. He was a man of quiet power and singular shrewdness of observation. His mother wit, spiritual fervour, homely illustration, and unabashed vernacular gave him acceptance with the people. One Sabbath, speaking to persons who complained that their burdens in life were exceptionally heavy, he said—“Suppose now you were to take all your separate burdens to the Castlegate and drop them doon there, and after examinin’ them and comparin’ them one with another, I am thinkin’ you wouldna be willin’ to exchange with any when you really saw what they were; but, pickin’ up your bit bundlie, each one of you wad gang awa’ hame mair contentit than when you went to the Castlegate.” 1 [Note: James Stark, Dr. Kidd of Aberdeen, 140.]

(1) There is the burden of physical disability or disfigurement, such as lameness, blindness, or deformity of any sort—always a very grievous burden to be borne. St. Paul knew this burden, the shame and the sorrow of it. Apparently he suffered from some distressing physical evil that made him contemptible in the eyes of men and that injured even his ministerial usefulness. Some, indeed, have held that the thorn in the flesh was a moral weakness—a violent temper, a jealous nature, even a lustful passion. But no man ever received grace to bear these things, though thousands have received grace to get rid of them. The facts that the thorn was not removed and that grace was given him to bear it show conclusively that it could not have been a moral weakness but rather a physical defect, a disease. And there are thousands in the world to-day, like him, who have to bear unaided and alone the burden of physical weakness or deformity save for that Divine grace which helps them to overcome the shame and to endure the pain.

In one of Schiller’s poems a beautiful story is told to this effect: When God made the birds He gave them gorgeous plumage and sweet voices, but no wings. He laid wings on the ground and said, “Take these burdens and bear them.” They struggled along with them, folding them over their hearts. Presently the wings grew fast to their breasts and spread themselves out, and they found that what they had thought were burdens were changed to pinions. 1 [Note: A. T. Pierson.]

(2) There is the burden of intellectual weakness. Men have not all the same mental powers, the same facility in acquiring learning, the same range of vision, the same foresight. One man succeeds in life because he has a greater power of forecasting the future, of calculating the changes in the money market, or industrial life, than his neighbour. The race is perhaps not always to the swift, but it generally is. The battle is not always to the strong, but it generally is. And in the race of human life a man, notwithstanding all his diligence and probity, may find himself outdistanced by one of keener intellect and greater foresight. He may think it hard that it should be so, but he must bear the burden of his own defects as best he may.

I would gladly bear your burden,

If it might be so,

But each heart its own must carry;

None may go

Altogether free, you know.

If I might, it would be easy,

O my friend, for me

Just to take your task and do it,

But, you see,

Such a thing could never be.

Though my heart aches, as I watch you,

Toiling through the day—

Missing some of life’s old sunshine

From your way—

Finding work instead of play—

Yet I know that it is better—

Know that you and I,

Looking back from God’s to-morrow,

By and by—

Never more shall question “Why?”

By our losses He is leading

To eternal gain:

He will surely give us sunshine,

After rain—

Calm for sorrow—peace for pain. 1 [Note: Edith H. Divall, A Believer’s Rest, 78.]

(3) It may be some permanent or far-reaching consequence of a former act of our own; some neglect, or recklessness, or sin in the past, which has hung a weight about our necks. The sin may be repented of; the pardon may be assured. But the temporal consequences of the sin remain, and will remain so long as we have breath. This is the most irksome and the most painful form which a man’s individual burden can take. If you thrust a knife into your arm, it does not affect me. You yourself feel the pain; you yourself must endure the agony. I may sympathize, I may pity, I may bandage the gash, but the severed flesh and the lacerated fibres are yours, and along your nerves nature telegraphs the pain. So it is with the soul. A man who stabs himself with a bad habit, who opens the arteries of his higher life with the lancet of his passions and drains them of the vital fluid, who inserts his head within the noose of appetite and swings himself off from the pedestal of his self-control, must endure the suffering, the weakness, and the loss which are the issue of his insane conduct.

Sin is often described by active and aggressive metaphors—it is a deceiver, a destroyer, an enemy, etc. This passive one is more dreadful, for it tells simply of the dead weight of fact. Facts are “chiels that winna ding.” Sin is, to Paul, “this dead body”; and the flaccid mass of inelastic flesh, at once soft and heavy, is horrible enough without the implied hint of decay. The worst thing about sin is just that it is there—an irrevocable fact which the sinner has put there. When he realizes this he feels it as a burden: he cannot sleep, or eat, or work, or play as once he did. Yet that is a precious pain. The far deeper danger is that one should grow accustomed to it, as the Swiss peasant to the growing load of hay or Milo to his ox, until he is able complacently to “draw iniquity with a cart rope.” The unblushed-for past—the dead weight of sinful facts faced deliberately and carried lightly—that is a doom far deeper than the most oppressive load. 1 [Note: John Kelman, The Road, i. 3.]

3. Now St. Paul does not say that the burden shall be lifted from off our shoulders, or that it shall be borne for us, but that we shall be sustained in carrying it. If it is God’s gift, it is His will that we should keep it, at least for the time. There is some blessing in it for us, and it would not be kindness to us for God to take it away, even at our earnest pleading. It is part of our life, and is essential to our best growth. This is true of duty; however hard it is, to relieve us of it would be to rob us of the opportunity for reaching larger usefulness. It is true of struggle; all nobleness and strength of character come out of conflict. It is true of suffering; it is God’s cleansing fire, and to miss it would be a sore loss to us. Hence, while God never fails us in need, He loves us too well to relieve us of weights which are essential to our best growth and to the largest fruitfulness of our life. He does not take the load from our shoulder, but instead He puts strength in us to enable us to carry the burden, and thus grow strong. This is the secret of the peace of many a sick-room. It is the secret of the deep, quiet joy we see oft-times in the home of sorrow.

The seal of one of those Scottish Covenanters whom Claverhouse imprisoned on the lonely Bass Rock reads “Sub pondere cresco”—“I grow beneath the load.” 2 [Note: A. Smellie, In the Hour of Silence.]

Thy burden is God’s gift,

And it will make the bearer calm and strong;

Yet, lest it press too heavily and long,

He says, “Cast it on Me,

And it shall easy be.”

And those who heed His voice,

And seek to give it back in trustful prayer,

Have quiet hearts that never can despair,

And hope lights up the way

Upon the darkest day.

It is the lonely road

That crushes out the light and life of heaven;

But borne with Him, the soul restored, forgiven,

Sings out through all the days

Her joy and God’s high praise. 1 [Note: J. R. Miller.]

II

The Mutual Burden

“Bear ye one another’s burdens.”

1. The Greek word for burden in this verse might be better rendered by “load,” for the idea is that of an adventitious and heavy burden. A man’s family is, in a certain sense, a burden—a burden that arises from his being a husband and a father—but it is not a burden of which he can rid himself. To him it is a light burden, as to the Christian Christ’s burden is light. But to this burden there may be added the burden of ill-health, or misfortune, or poverty. It is not in any one’s power to say to him, “I am to take up your burden. You shall no longer be weighted down with your family. You shall no longer be a husband. You shall no longer be a father. Your duties as husband and father shall no longer oppress you.” We cannot say that. We might, indeed, remove his children from him, but that would not in any degree lessen his duty to care for them and train them and teach them and act a father’s part towards them. If we wish to help him it is his load, not his burden, we must bear—the crushing weight of poverty, or misfortune, or sorrow.

2. This burden-bearing means a different thing in each life. It is not a pretty sentiment, a mere figure of speech. It is the great and manifold service of love, which needs all the wisdom and strength and patience that we can bring to it, and which can be wrought in a thousand ways. Occasionally this burden-bearing can be done very literally when we can take on to our own shoulders for the bearing, and into our own hands for the doing, that which for another was too heavy and too hard. But more frequently it must take the form of the indirect and mediate service of sympathy. In the great league of pity and help to which we are all called, and in which, if only we are unselfish enough, we can all find a place, we ever find that the best thing we have to give to the world is our influence. No man liveth to himself. Every man is ever adding to or diminishing the burden of other lives. There is an infinitude of interaction—much of it beyond our tracing; and in so far as we carry through life a cheerful, patient, responsive, and unselfish spirit we shall be doing something every day to make the burden of others easier to be borne.

Dr. Bell’s desire for sympathy, and his appreciation of it was touchingly intense, and yet he had a way of looking and speaking with almost flippant unconcern when feeling most deeply. This was at times when he knew that any display of emotion would “upset everything.” Thus many people who knew him well saw little of his inner self. They saw him as the hope-inspiring physician, smiling and chatting, cheering the sorrowful, soothing the sufferer, quick to see fun lurking near solemnity, taking up the burden of others with seemingly no burden of his own, bringing a gay good humour to meet anxious doubts and dreadful fears. When young, his bearing was that of a joyous nature on whom the gods had showered their good gifts. Even in later years when many bereavements had wounded his warm affections to the quick his smile was ready, and his sense of fun as fresh as ever. His self-control was perfect. 1 [Note: Joseph Bell: An Appreciation, 34.]

The late Right Hon. W. H. Smith, when First Lord of the Admiralty, was leaving his office one afternoon, when his secretary, seeing him packing up a number of letters and other Government papers, asked him to leave them and have them forwarded to him by post as other Ministers did. “No,” was the answer, “the fact is our postman has plenty to carry. I watched him one morning coming up the approach, and I determined to save him as much as I could.” 2 [Note: The Morning Watch, 1894, p. 10.]

(1) By the giving of sympathy you take away the worst weight of sorrow. You cannot take it all away, but you can lift off that in it which maims the life or slays the soul, if you love enough. Unloving sympathy has no tact, no inventiveness, no insight, no reverence. But the sympathy of love—and that you are bound to win, if you would obey this law—enters into the sanctuary of another’s sorrow with uncovered head and reverent stillness, sees the point where tenderness can touch and not hurt, has quickness of imagination to invent the means of bearing away the burden; rescues the sufferers before they are conscious of being rescued, and wins undying love. There is no happiness in life so delicate and pure as the doing of this beautiful thing. It is the happiness of God Himself.

(2) Joy may for the moment be as great a burden as sorrow. The heart may be o’erfraught with delight, and nigh to breaking with it. When Lear awoke from his madness and saw Cordelia bending over him, and love in her eyes, he all but died of joy. We have no right, but have great wrong, if we treat with indifference the joy of the child or the rapture of youth. “They want no sympathy,” we say, or even with a scoff, “He is happy! let him alone!” Have we never repulsed young or old with a cold look when they came up full of their delight, longing for us to share their pleasure? It is an unkindly act; let us never do it again. Let us think rather that joy is a burden that you have to bear for others. Make the delight of others brighter by sympathy. Do not blow with a cold wind upon the rose in flower, lest you wither its leaves. “Rejoice,” said St. Paul, with his large knowledge of the needs of love, “rejoice with them that do rejoice.”

3. Different temperaments, like different plants, require different atmospheres. Some plants require a tropical heat before they will put on their beautiful garments. We have to create about them a mimic summer, and delude them into feeling that they are far away, at home in the burning clime. Other plants seek for our own temperate heat; they disburse their treasure, not to the soft calling of the luxurious breeze of the tropics, but to the robust, bracing, toughening winds of our own land. How we have to humour the plants if we would lure them out into blossoms and flower! This one must be set a little farther in the shade. That one must be lifted up into the light, to receive the baptism of the sun. Each one must be placed according to its temperament. And when vices cling about them in the shape of destructive little parasites, little insects which grow fat by draining up the sap, then how we have to medicate the atmosphere, to provide certain conditions which shall help the plants to deal with their enemies, and to throw off the burdens! Thus we create suitable conditions for individual plants; and thus we must create suitable conditions for the full and beautiful growth of individual men.

Looking back over these two years of illness, it is impossible not to be struck by the calmness and fortitude with which that illness was met. There were moments of terrible depression and of disappointment and of grief. It was not easy for him to give up ambition, to leave so many projects unfulfilled, so much work undone. But to him this illness grew to be a mount of purification,

Ove l’umano spirito si purga,

E di salire al ciel diventa degno.

More and more there grew on him a deepening sense of the goodness of God. No one had ever suffered more from the Eclipse of Faith, no one had ever been more honest in dealing with himself and with his difficulties. The change that came over his mental attitude may seem almost incredible to those who knew him only as a scientific man; it does not seem so to the few who knew anything of his inner life. To them the impression given is, not of an enemy changed into a friend, antagonism altered into submission; rather is it of one who for long has been bearing a heavy burden on his shoulders bravely and patiently, and who at last has had it lifted from him, and lifted so gradually that he could not tell the exact moment when he found it gone, and himself standing, like the Pilgrim of the never-to-be-forgotten story, at the foot of the Cross, and Three Shining Ones coming to greet him. 1 [Note: Life and Letters of George John Romanes, 351.]

III

The Law that Lightens the Burden

“And so fulfil the law of Christ.”

Here the Apostle directs his readers from the law given on stone to the law which should be written on the heart, from the Mount of Sinai to the Mount of Beatitudes, from the law of the letter which killeth to the law of the Spirit which giveth life. There can be little doubt that the Apostle’s words here were suggested by the controversy which had been raging in the Galatian Church.

The Galatians who were the object of St. Paul’s attention had been showing much more interest in the outward marks of religion than in its inward power. They had come under the spell of that view which made religion a matter of rite and ritual, and here the Apostle would have them learn that such a view was altogether a mistake. Like his fellow-Apostle, he could enforce the truth that pure religion before God and the Father was not a matter of circumcision or of outward ordinances. It did not consist of attendances at synagogue at the proper hour or of keeping the feasts in all their strictness. Pure religion was something more than these. It was to visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.

1. This law is founded on the necessities of our human nature. It is not necessary to obey it because it is commanded; it is commanded because it is necessary. It fits into the wants of man. For we are all dependent on one another. As in our body each organ lives for itself only in living for the rest, as each part, even each atom, of our frame supplements the wants of the others, gives and receives, bears and forbears, dies and lives alternately for the life of the whole—so is it in the ever living body of humanity. The life of each nation, each society, each man, depends on the mutual giving and receiving, dying and living, bearing and forbearing of all the rest. So the moment we, through selfishness of life, divide ourselves from this living and dying for others, the moment we isolate ourselves, we pronounce our own sentence of death. The absolute loss of love is eternal death, as its absolute gain is eternal life. It was that Christ Jesus saw; it was that He proclaimed on Calvary. And it is the law of the life of the universe. Therefore, “bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.”

To bear the burdens of others might well have seemed to St. Paul a dictate of the intuitive moral consciousness, and might well have been commanded by him on the ground of that inward intuition. But this is not the ground on which St. Paul commands it; he appeals to a positive historical authority, which he calls “the law of Christ”; and he asks men to bear the burdens of others, not because that precept was written in their hearts, but because it had been given by Him who was the object of their worship. In writing to these Galatians, wavering as they were between Christianity and Judaism, he evidently speaks of the law of Christ in contradistinction to the law of Moses. It is as if he had said, “Do not think that, in coming from Judaism to Christianity, you are passing from a region of positive certainty into a world of mystic obscurity; we too have a historic Lawgiver, who has uttered His voice from the mount of God, and who speaks with an authority which Moses never wielded. You have received from Moses only the negative precept—the command not to hurt your brother; we offer you a law of Christ which commands you to identify your brother’s interests with your own—‘Bear ye one another’s burdens.’ ”

When Dr. Temple resigned the headmastership of Rugby to become Bishop of Exeter, his farewell sermon to the boys was from the text, “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.” “This new commandment of Christ,” said the preacher, “this law of love which Paul is here referring to, our Lord and the Apostles place above all other commandments. How is this? The older dispensation had placed the fear and love of God first, then the love of neighbours. Surely the highest rule must be to love first God, then truth, holiness, justice, and after these one another. Has the Gospel sunk below the law? No, for under the Gospel, by the incarnation of the Son of God, the two loves are united, can no longer be kept apart. There can be no love of God apart from love of man. Christ Himself has pointed out this love of each other as the special mode by which He would have us acknowledge Him. Let us help one another, then, at our Lord’s call, by courage, by patience, by cordial and tender sympathy in joy and sorrow, by faithful warning, by resignation. There are no bounds to the help which spirit can give to spirit in the intercourse of a noble life. When parted, we can still bear one another’s burdens by hearty, mutual trust. There is nothing which gives more firmness and constancy to the life of a man than loyal trust in absent friends.” 1 [Note: Frederick Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, i. 238.]

2. The bearing of our own burden in a Christian spirit prepares us for lifting the load of other people. Every experience carries with it the power of bearing a burden. Have you never passed through times when your own religious faith was at stake? Then how tenderly you can enter into the mental struggle of others. Have you never known the trouble of making both ends meet? Then you will sympathize with the burdens of those who dare not be generous, because, by God’s grace, they will first be just. Have you known what it is to go to your business, while some dear child was lying, like alabaster, in the sleep of death, and you had to keep down your feelings while you won life’s daily bread? Then how you can feel for others who have left their hearts in the great death-chamber with the closed door.

While it is true that by bearing our own burdens we learn best how to bear other people’s, the converse is no less true. There is no help towards bearing our own burdens so effective as the bearing the burdens of others as well. This is the moral paradox of our being. Are we sinking under the weight of our own burden? Then let us go up to our neighbour, and courageously shoulder his also. The two will be lighter, incomparably lighter, than the one was. Is not this demonstrably true? Is a man’s heart wounded and bleeding with some recent sorrow—a cruel bereavement, a disappointed hope, an outraged affection; and he broods over it until the pain becomes too terrible to bear? The only relief for his agony is found in ministering to the wants or consoling the sorrows of another. His sympathy is thus evoked; and with sympathy come new interests, new feelings, a new life.

Sad souls, that harbour fears and woes

In many a haunted breast,

Turn but to meet your lowly Lord,

And He will give you rest.

Into His commonwealth alike

Are ills and blessings thrown;

Bear ye your neighbours’ burdens; lo!

Their ease shall be your own.

Yield only up His price, your heart,

Into God’s loving hold;

He turns with heavenly alchemy,

Your lead of life to gold.

Some needful pangs endure in peace,

Nor yet for freedom pant;

He cuts the bane you cleave to off,

Then gives the boon you want. 1 [Note: S. H. Palfrey.]

Describing David Hill’s itinerant tours in China, one of the missionaries, the Rev. T. Protheroe, says, “I venture to add an incident which occurred on one of our journeys. He had a servant in training for the work of an evangelist. The servant had given over a bundle of rugs, which served as Mr. Hill’s bedding, to an old man who escorted us, and showed evident unwillingness to bear any share even in relieving the old man of his burden. It was a hot day. One word from Mr. Hill would have been enough, but he preferred to teach the much-needed lesson in another way, and said he should carry the bundle himself. Of course, I objected, and there was some dispute as to which of us should bear the burden but he won the day in the end by saying, ‘Do let me have it; I want to teach him humility.’ ” 2 [Note: J. E. Hellier, Life of David Hill, 247.]

3. The measure of our love to one another must be the love that Christ showed to us. It is an infinite measure. There is no one who can say, “I have done enough for my brother man. I have loved enough.” Beyond our most eager efforts stretches the ever-expanding loving-kindness of Jesus. There is no one who can say, “I have forgiven enough! If my brother sin again, if my enemy do me another wrong, I will forgive no more”; for beyond our most amazing forgiveness extends the unwearied forgiveness of Christ—the image, the reflexion and the revelation in man of the unconquerable desire to bless and to redeem, which is deepest towards us in the heart of God our Father. Therefore, in this illimitable demand upon us for love, we are greatly blessed. We are placed in the infinite, and kept in the infinite; we are freed from definitions of love, from maxims of forgiveness, from all the foolish casuistry that limits love. In this, at least, we are not to be content with our limitations. There are no limitations. We are challenged by God Himself to share in His infinity; never to endure finality in tenderness, never to imagine the end of love. It is a glorious call, and to answer it brings us into the infinite God Himself. So, as the Apostle Paul exhorts the Ephesians, “walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, with all lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering, forbearing one another in love.”

Thus will you “fulfil the law of Christ”—that law which has its culminating glory in the atoning death of Calvary; its Divinest symbol in the cross. Then only does the higher life begin with us when we bow ourselves before the majesty of this “supreme offering made by supreme love, because the need of man was great, when we feel the glow of a common life with the lost multitude for whom that offering was made, and behold the history of the world as the history of a great redemption in which we ourselves are fellow-workers in our own place and among our own people.”

In the Pilgrim’s Progress, coming to the Cross is the last incident in the man’s salvation. The cross, which used to be the emblem of slavery, now becomes the means of liberty and lightening. The point to notice here is that we are saved by what we see. The sinful man loses his burden upon realizing a fact, and the essence of Christianity is a magnificent realization. Sin had been too much for him, but now God has vanquished it. The joy that follows is inevitable. Bunyan tells us in his Grace Abounding, that, when the joy of this release came to him, he could have spoken of it to the very crows that sat upon the ploughed land by the wayside. The power and beauty of the simple sentence which tells of the burden tumbling into the mouth of the sepulchre make that passage one of the religious classics of the world. No commentary is necessary or possible except the memory of that experience in the hearts of those in whose lives it has happened. 1 [Note: John Kelman, The Road, i. 71.]

Burdens

Literature

Ainsworth (P. C.), A Thornless World, 154.

Alexander (S. A.), The Christianity of St. Paul, 157.

Brooke (Stopford A.), Short Sermons, 12.

Burrell (D. J.), God and the People, 264.

Caird (Edward), Lay Sermons Delivered in Balliol College, 3.

Campbell (A. A.), Sermons Preached before the Queen, 3.

Cuyler (T. L.), A Model Christian, 21.

Hamilton (J.), Works, vi. 407

Lightfoot (J. B.), Ordination Addresses, 136.

Little (W. J. K.), Characteristics of the Christian Life, 140.

Maxson (H. D.), Sermons, 269.

Neale (J. M.), Sermons, ii. 139.

Neville (W. G.), Sermons, 312.

Murray (W. H. H.), in The American Pulpit of the Day, iii. 182.

Palmer (J. R.), Burden Bearing, 3.

Potter (H. C.), Sermons of the City, 220.

Rogers (J. Guinness), The Gospel in the Epistles, 131.

Selby (T. G.), The Strenuous Gospel, 357.

Talbot (E. S.), in Keble College Sermons, 1877–88, 1.

Temple (F.), Rugby Sermons, i. 144; iii. 281.

Thompson (J. R.), Burden, Bearing, 7.

Thomson (W.), Life in the Light of God’s Word, 299.

Tomory (A.), in Alexander Tomory, Indian Missionary, 109.

Trench (R. C.), Sermons New and Old, 50.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), vi. (1869), No. 631.

British Congregationalist, Oct. 4, 1906 (J. H. Jowett).

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Christian World Pulpit, xxv. 58 (W. M. Statham); xxix. 49 (R. Eyton); xxxvii. 179 (J. L. King); xli. 214 (R. I. Woodhouse); xlii. 338 (J. Wills); l. 186 (I. Harthill); lxv. 36 (W. T. Davison); lxx. 298 (T. B. McCorkindale); lxxx. 42 (W. McMillan).

Church Family Newspaper, Oct. 11, 1912 (A. Robertson).

Verse 7

Sowing and Reaping

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.— Galatians 6:7.

1. It is one of the characteristics of St. Paul that he enforces the commonest duties by the highest motives. When he urges the Corinthians to make a contribution for the poor saints at Jerusalem, he drives home his appeal by these words: “For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might become rich.” When he vindicates himself from the accusation of fanaticism which his enemies had made against him, he says: “Whether we be beside ourselves, it is to God: or whether we be sober, it is for your cause. For 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.” His habit thus was to run up the separate actions of his life to great principles, by which they were dominated, and in accordance with which they were regulated. The poet has reminded us that in the material universe,

That very law which moulds a tear,

And bids it trickle from its source,

That law preserves the earth a sphere,

And guides the planets in their course.

And much in the same way the Apostle shows that the great fact of our redemption by Jesus Christ should affect the little things of our benevolence and our manner of speech as really as the great things of our life at the crucial and decisive turning points in our history. The background of his life was the cross of Christ, and from that every action, whether to human view important or the reverse, drew its inspiration and acquired its momentum.

Accordingly we are not surprised to find that the words of the text stand in immediate connexion with the command that ministers of the gospel should be liberally supported by those whom they instruct. That is a commonplace duty, but it is lifted by St. Paul into eternal importance, when he links it on, as here, directly and immediately to the doctrine of retribution; for then we are reminded that in the way in which we deal with it we must sow either to the flesh or to the spirit, and reap either corruption or everlasting life.

2. The principle on which this warning rests is stated in terms that give it universal application: Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. This is in fact the postulate of all moral responsibility. It asserts the continuity of personal existence, the connexion of cause and effect in human character. It makes man the master of his own destiny. It declares that his future depends upon his present choice, and is in truth its evolution and consummation. The twofold lot of “corruption” or “life eternal” is in every case no more, and no less, than the proper harvest of the kind of sowing practised here and now. The use made of our seed-time determines exactly, and with a moral certainty greater even than that which rules in the natural field, what kind of fruitage our immortality will render.

We scatter seeds with careless hand,

And dream we ne’er shall see them more:

But for a thousand years

Their fruit appears

In weeds that mar the land,

Or healthful store.

The deeds we do, the words we say,—

Into still air they seem to fleet,

We count them ever past;

But they shall last,

In the dread judgment they

And we shall meet. 1 [Note: Keble, Lyra Innocentium, 115.]

3. While the text is fitted to awaken the careless, we must not forget that it is equally fitted to cheer and encourage the fainthearted. This, indeed, seems to have been its original purpose. St. Paul was writing to the members of the household of the faith, and was calling them to Christian service. And to encourage these Galatian Christians to labour earnestly, he tells them that their labour cannot be in vain. Their spiritual work is a sowing, and by the eternal law of the universe it must be followed by a reaping. For in the spiritual world, laws are as inevitable and unalterable as in the natural world. Caprice has no more a place in the one than in the other. “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” Just as surely as he who sows to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption, so he who sows to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.

We have thus, first of all, to understand the law of the harvest—“Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap”; and then we have to receive a warning, which is at the same time a strong encouragement—“Be not deceived; God is not mocked.”

I

The Law of the Harvest

“Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

1. Our present life is the seed-time of an eternal harvest. Each recurring year presents a mirror of human existence. The analogy is a commonplace of the world’s poetry. The spring is in every land a picture of youth—its morning freshness and innocence, its laughing sunshine, its opening blossoms, its bright and buoyant energy; and, alas, oftentimes its cold winds and nipping frosts and early sudden blight! Summer images a vigorous manhood, with all the powers in action and the pulses of life beating at full swing; when the dreams of youth are worked out in sober, waking earnest; when manly strength is tested and matured under the heat of mid-day toil, and character is disciplined, and success or failure in life’s battle must be determined. Then follows mellow autumn, season of shortening days and slackening steps and gathering snows; season too of ripe experience, of chastened thought and feeling, of widened influence and clustering honours. And the story ends in the silence and winter of the grave! Ends? Nay, that is a new beginning! This whole round of earthly vicissitude is but a single spring-time. It is the mere childhood of man’s existence, the threshold of the vast house of life.

What men sow, they reap, is not a cheque to be cashed here below, when and how we please, but a word of faith, which cannot be severed from the hope which rests in God, the righteous Judge of heaven and earth. The text points to another, a perfect world; it says: The harvest comes, but whether as a blessing or a curse, for salvation or perdition, that is the great question for us all. 1 [Note: J. E. B. Mayor.]

2. The text tells us that all our life long we are employed in sowing the seeds of that harvest which we must eventually reap. Our actions do not expire with their performance, nor our words with their utterance, nor our thoughts with the thinking of them. Each of these is a seed sown, and will bear fruit after its kind. Each of them survives in us, after it seems to be past and gone, and when it is perhaps forgotten, in the impress which it has left upon us, or in the habits and tendencies which it has strengthened and confirmed. It is a matter of experience that every after-period of life is affected more or less by the conduct of every earlier period, manhood by youth, and old age by manhood. “The child is father of the man.” Such as we now are, we are as the offspring of the past, the practical result or the living embodiment of the days and years during which we have been occupied—it may be without much thought about it—in acquiring or developing the qualities that now distinguish us. And the like process still continues. We are sowing, from day to day, the seeds of that character which will cleave to us in after life, and which, if the same course of action be adhered to, will follow us beyond the grave, and go with us to the judgment.

We cannot teach art as an abstract skill or power. It is the result of a certain ethical state in the nation and at full period of the national growth that efflorescence of its ethical state will infallibly be produced: be it bad or good, we can no more teach nor shape it than we streak our orchard blossom with strange colours or infuse into its fruit a juice it has not drawn out of the sap. And, farther, such seed of art as we sow, such also must we reap; that which is born of lasciviousness begets lasciviousness, that which is shed from folly will spring up into folly, and that which is sown of truth bear fruit of truth, according to the ground it is cast on, some thirtyfold, some sixty, some an hundred. 1 [Note: Ruskin, Relation of Ethics to Arts, § 5 (Works, xix. 166).]

The story of Adam Bede is a tragedy arising from the inexorable consequences of human deeds. It will be remembered that it was Charles Bray who first set George Eliot meditating on the law of consequences. Sara Hennell had thought much about it too. She wrote in Christianity and Infidelity: “When the law of moral consequences is recognized as fixed and absolute, the hope to escape from it would be as great madness as to resist the law of gravitation.” George Eliot’s best known expression of this law is in Romola: “Our deeds are like our children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our own consciousness.” This is the old Buddhist doctrine of Karma. St. Paul had put it still more briefly: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” This law was not fatal to St. Paul, because he believed in regeneration. George Eliot followed Charles Bray. For him, the responsible person was he who, recognizing the inexorable consequences, governed himself accordingly. Nemesis was George Eliot’s watchword, but in her handling of this law she approached to the Greek Fate rather than to St. Paul. It is this Fate that makes much of the extraordinary impressiveness of Adam Bede. Arthur Donnithorne’s sin brought its retribution of terrible suffering not only to himself, but to Hetty, to Adam, to the Poysers. “There’s a sort of wrong that can never be made up for,” are the words wrung from him after bitter experience. 2 [Note: C. Gardner, The Inner Life of George Eliot, 117.]

3. The harvest corresponds in kind to the sowing. Each seed produces its own kind, because God has so ordained. That which we reap from off the fields of nature is always of the same species as that which we have sown. No sane man, even if he should be the most unquestioning believer in the transmutation of species, would expect a crop of valuable grain from an inclosure which he had sown with tares; and every husbandman when he plants his corn does so in the confidence that, according to the uniformity of nature’s operations, he will have a harvest of the same. He has no manner of doubt about it. There may be sometimes a question in his mind during a long drought as to whether he shall have a larger or smaller crop, possibly even as to whether he shall have a crop at all; but he knows that if he have any crop it will be of the same kind as that which he has planted. On the plane of material nature, then, every one understands, admits and acts upon this principle as an absolute law admitting of no exception—“Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

Our Lord endorses this principle in his Beatitudes. He affirms that the soul’s reward matches the soul’s effort and expectation. If we hunger and thirst after righteousness, we shall be satisfied with righteousness, and with nothing lower. We reap that which we sow the seed of, and not any other kind of grain. There are some Christians who repine and grow despondent because they do not find themselves reaping a harvest which they have no right to look for. If you hunger and thirst after riches or renown, rather than after righteousness, you may win them on the same terms. If you devote yourself, body and soul, to becoming a successful man rather than a good man, you may probably succeed; only it is not possible to achieve both aims at once.

Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he reap. Mind you, he shall not only see it grow and see it ripen, but he shall reap. And everything you sow shall grow, and you, and you only, shall most certainly reap. Be sure your sin will find you out. It won’t perhaps be found out. But, I say, it will find you out. It will grow and grow and eat out your life. It will run you to earth a doomed man. For the end of these things is Death. And you will reap in many directions. You may not know the seed or the ground you sow, but sow and you will reap. Men know thistles from oats. You sow and sow, and then you hope God will forgive and your page be clean. I answer you, Nay. Sow thistles, and thistles will come up. Sow oats, and thistles will not come up, oats will come up. “Sow thistles,” you say, “and then sow good oats, and thus clear the thistles.” No, the harvest will be thistles and oats. 1 [Note: The Life of Henry Drummond, 477.]

One story connected with this time Mr. Erskine used to tell. It was of the Rev. William Dow, a good man, who was minister of a parish in the south of Scotland, but who for siding with the views of Mr. Campbell of Row was called to stand his trial before the General Assembly. On the Sunday immediately before he went to Edinburgh for his trial, being quite sure what fate awaited him, he thus addressed his country congregation:—“You all know that to-morrow I leave this to go to Edinburgh, and to stand my trial before the General Assembly. And the result I know will be that I shall be turned out of my parish, and that this is the last time I shall address you as your minister. This you all know. But there is one thing about myself which you do not know, but which I will tell you. When I first came here to be your minister I found difficulty in obtaining a house in the parish to live in. There was but one house in the parish I could have that was suitable, and that belonged to a poor widow. I went and offered a higher rent for her house than she paid. She was dispossessed, and I got the house. I put that poor woman out of her house then, and I hold it to be a righteous thing in God to put me out of my parish now.” 1 [Note: Principal Shairp, in Letters of Thomas Erskine, ii. 362.]

There are loyal hearts, there are spirits brave,

There are souls that are pure and true;

Then give to the world the best you have,

And the best shall come back to you.

Give love, and love to your heart will flow,

A strength in your utmost need;

Have faith, and a score of hearts will show

Their faith in your word and deed.

For life is the mirror of king and slave,

’Tis just what you are and do;

Then give to the world the best you have,

And the best will come back to you. 2 [Note: Madeline S. Bridges.]

4. The harvest is always an increase of the sowing. The crop is a multiplication of the seed. From the seed of the flesh the ripened result is corruption, which is flesh in its most revolting state. From the seed of the Spirit the full ear is life everlasting, which is eternal holiness with its concomitant of endless happiness. We plant a single grain, we pluck a full ear; we sow in handfuls, we reap in bosomfuls; we scatter bushels, but we gather in rich granary stores. The remorse of earth is but the germ of the despair of hell. The holiness of the present is only the bud from which will blossom that vision of God which is the full-flowered beatitude of heaven.

This stern law of reaping as we sow has a gracious and gospel aspect in respect to the abundance of the harvest, whether natural or spiritual. Our Lord insists especially upon this. He says that the seed which fell upon good ground bore fruit, “some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold.” May we not suppose that He had been counting the grains in a wheat ear, and saw in this the beneficence of the law of growth, and a prophecy of nature as to the growth of His Kingdom? This natural multiplication goes far beyond what we should have expected. It is increase after the Divine measure, rather than the human. Our Lord sees another example of this in the mustard plant, which grows from one of the tiniest of seeds, but within the year mounts up into quite a branchy bush, the biggest of the garden herbs of Palestine, and affords rest and shelter for the birds.

This teaching is confirmed by our experience of life. We are all tempted to despise the small crosses, the small openings for kindness and self-sacrifice the day brings us, and the petty duties and burdens which fill up our humdrum existence. When we meet these faithfully and nobly, we have our reward on a grander scale than we could have expected. Burdens grow to wings, crosses to crowns, faithful endurance to triumph; and from each discharge of duty we acquire the power to meet the next with efficiency. “We see dimly in the present what is small and what is great,” as Lowell says. We are blinded by the illusions of life, and take the great for the small, because it is not the big. Our small victories in the face of temptation are won over obstacles and spiritual enemies of the highest rank, and are won to the shaping of our characters, the strengthening of our wills, the purification of our vision, the increase of our faith and joy. Professor William James suggests that to do each day of life some one thing which we know we ought to do, but which we do not want to do, would have the result of making us wiser and braver men, and more fit for great things if these fell to our share.

Hast thou, dear brother, toiled through many years

And seen no fruits, though thou hast freely sown

Thy life in labour and with watchful tears

Watered the soil yet none the richer grown?

Remember that the reaping is God’s own,

And He can gather even of doubts and fears;

We only plough and plant our little field—

He is our harvest, and His Love the yield.

Be sure no kindly word or work may fail

To leave a blessing, if we know it not

And our poor efforts often err and ail,

While nothing that we do is without spot;

Christ stands Yoke-fellow, in the lowliest lot;

He is the light, and prayers at last prevail;

And, should thy service seem a wasted part,

It still shall blossom in some happier heart.

Not ours to finish tasks or seek the sight

Of precious increase and the praise of man,

But just to scatter seed in nature’s night

And leave with God the issue of His plan;

He will complete what He in Grace began,

And order even thine errors all aright.

Thou wert well paid, whatever clouds do come,

If thou hast helped one wandering sinner Home. 1 [Note: F. W. Orde Warde.]

II

The Folly of Self-Deception

“Be not deceived; God is not mocked.”

The word for “mocked” implies the most unseemly and insulting gesture. When is God thus mocked? God is mocked when we pretend to be His, while we cut our being in two and give the better half to Satan; when we draw nigh unto Him with our lips while our hearts are far from Him; when we say, “I go, sir,” and go not; when we try to combine the vile pleasure of sin with the perfect allegiance which God requires; when we say “Lord, Lord,” and do evil continually.

1. The danger of deception is very real. For one thing the interval between the sowing and the reaping is much longer than in the natural world, and the connexion between them is not clearly seen. Think of a child that has been foolishly brought up. No effort is made to train its will to obedience, to instil into its mind a reverence for God, and a love for the high things of the soul. There is a certain pleasure in giving the little one its own way. Thus the evil seeds have been sown. The child becomes a man. Years lie between the sowing and the reaping. Only then may it be that the harvest of pain and shame comes home which brings the grey head with sorrow to the grave. The interval is so long that the connexion between the sorrow and the foolish training is not recognized, and parents wonder why their children are so stubborn, self-willed, and ungrateful. They do not see that they are the victims of their own folly. Twenty years ago they sowed the seeds of which they now reap the bitter harvest. They have deceived themselves, but God is not mocked.

Napoleon had the faculty, when he chose, of creating a fool’s paradise for himself. In the Russian campaign he had, for example, ordered his marshals to operate with armies which had ceased to exist. When they remonstrated he simply replied, “Why rob me of my calm?” When the Allies invaded France he professed to rely greatly on the army of Marshal Macdonald. “Would you like,” said the Marshal to Beugnot, “to review my army? It will not take you long. It consists of myself and my chief of the staff. Our supplies are four straw chairs and a plank table.” Again, during the campaign of 1814 the Emperor was detailing his plans to Marmont. Marmont was to do this and that with his corps of ten thousand men. At each repetition of this figure Marmont interrupted to say that he had only three. Yet Napoleon persisted to the end: “Marmont with his ten thousand men.” But the strangest instance of this is detailed by Meneval, who tells us that when the Emperor added up numbers of his soldiers he always added them up wrong, and always swelled the total. So at St. Helena he really, we think, brought himself to believe that he would be released when Lord Holland became Prime Minister, or when Princess Charlotte ascended the throne. 1 [Note: Lord Rosebery, Napoleon: The Last Phase, 113.]

2. Long before we gather into our arms the final harvest, we are receiving according to what we have done, whether it be good or evil. In the end we shall still be as we have been, only in more perfect measure. “He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still.” Let us not imagine that the principles of moral order will be different in the end from what they were at the beginning—God is always judging us as He will judge us at the last. The end is not yet. The harvest still tarries. The cornstalk is not matured, nor the full grain shown in the ear. But we are making our future every hour, and with many of us the crop is fast ripening into the eternal day.

Every evil thought or deed has sentence against it speedily executed in the character. One cannot do a mean thing or think a base thought without becoming like the thing he thinks or does. The worm takes on the colour of the leaf upon which it feeds. Every vile thought leaves its trail of slime behind, leaves the mind filthier for even its momentary presence. Every bad act of a man’s life makes it easier for him evermore to do the bad. A miser not only scrapes his fingers to the bone in raking together his money, he hardens his heart to the core. “What is put into the strong box,” it is truly said, “is taken out of the man.” He who cheats, is cheating himself worse than all others. The thief steals from himself; the liar turns himself into a living lie; the profligate is his own victim. The man who attempts to injure his neighbour, only succeeds in injuring himself. The wrong that he does his own soul is ten times more severe and lasting than any evil he can inflict on others. “No man,” says Burke, “ever had a point of pride that was not injurious to him”; and St. Bernard wrote: “Nothing can work me damage except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me, and never am a real sufferer but by my own fault.”

In this God’s-world, with its wild-whirling eddies, and mad foam-oceans, where men and nations perish as if without law, and judgment for an unjustly thing is sternly delayed, dost thou think that there is therefore no justice? It is what the fool hath said in his heart. It is what the wise, in all times, were wise because they denied, and knew forever not to be. I tell thee again, there is nothing else but justice. One strong thing I find here below: the just thing, the true thing. For it is the right and noble alone that will have victory in this struggle; the rest is wholly an obstruction, a postponement and fearful imperilment of the victory. Towards an eternal centre of right and nobleness, and of that only, is all this confusion tending. We already know whither it is all tending; what will have victory, what will have none! 1 [Note: Carlyle, Past and Present, bk. i. ch. ii.]

Before commencing his campaign, he called on two ancient intimates, Lord Heddon and his distant cousin Darley Absworthy, both Members of Parliament, useful men, though gouty, who had sown in their time a fine crop of wild oats, and advocated the advantage of doing so seeing that they did not fancy themselves the worse for it. He found one with an imbecile son, and the other with consumptive daughters. “So much,” he wrote in his Notebook, “for the Wild Oats theory!” 2 [Note: George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.]

3. The text has been commonly interpreted as solely a warning to the profligate. Yet the context shows that the words were intended rather as a solemn encouragement to the faithful. The Apostle is writing not to terrify evildoers, but to cheer those good men who else might grow weary of sowing the good seed. And he invokes this profound and awful truth as an exceeding great and precious promise for all the dejected and disconsolate people of God. Christians in some respects are peculiarly apt to be deceived. The illusions of life can dazzle and perplex the wisest children of this world. But those who strive to walk by faith are doubly vexed by the falsehood of appearances. From the nature of the case, their goal and their recompense must lie out of sight. The fair fruit of their labour hardly ripens in our earthly climate, and even the bravest workers will faint and grow weary because after long husbandry they can discern hardly a trace of the blade and the ear.

“Be not deceived; God is not mocked.” We may lose heart and hope, but His will never wavers. We seem vanquished, but His dominion ruleth over all. Though we be faithless He abideth faithful; He cannot deny Himself. Whoever else is cheated and betrayed, there is no such thing as failure in the counsels of God. Our schemes and our works miscarry, but “the fabric of God’s holy Kingdom is slowly rising, while He patiently, but certainly, fulfils His purposes.” The universe shall not disappoint its Creator and Redeemer at last.

While Zinzendorf was still a lad at school, he united his companions in a guild, which he called “The Order of the Grain of Mustard Seed,” and of which the badge was a ring with this motto, “No man liveth unto himself.” It was very little of course that these boys could do to help others. But they planted a seed, and the seedling grew into the great Moravian Missionary Brotherhood, with branches extending throughout the world. And so with all other great efforts. They must have a beginning; they must have a seed. And if only the seed is there, sown in good ground, it will, like the seed of our Lord’s parable, bring forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirty-fold, for our reaping in the after-days. 1 [Note: G. Milligan, Lamps and Pitchers, 151.]

What matter if I stand alone?

I wait with joy the coming years;

My heart shall reap where it has sown,

And garner up its fruit of tears.

The waters know their own, and draw

The brook that springs in yonder height,

So flows the good with equal law

Unto the soul of pure delight.

The stars come nightly to the sky:

The tidal wave unto the sea;

Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high,

Can keep my own away from me. 2 [Note: John Burroughs.]

Sowing and Reaping

Literature

Alford (H.), Quebec Chapel Sermons, v. 122.

Banks (L. A.), Paul and his Friends, 308.

Crawford (T. J.), The Preaching of the Cross, 98.

Darlow (T. H.), Via Sacra, 87.

Dewey (O.), Works, 191.

Greenhough (J. G.), in Jesus in the Cornfield, 167.

Harris (H.), Short Sermons, 273.

Lightfoot (J. B.), Cambridge Sermons, 48.

McGarvey (J. W.), Sermons, 202.

Macgregor (G. H. C.), “ Rabboni,” 47.

MacIntosh (W.), in Scotch Sermons, 140.

Momerie (A. W.), The Origin of Evil, 111.

Robertson (F. W.), Sermons, i. 205.

Salmon (G.), The Reign of Law, 1.

Sampson (E. F.), Christ Church Sermons, 1.

Shore (T. T.), The Life of the World to Come, 3.

Shutter (M. D.), Justice and Mercy, 140.

Smith (J. H.), Healing Leaves, 218.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, liv. (1908), No. 3109.

Steel (T. H.), Sermons Preached in Harrow Chapel, 266.

Taylor (W. M.), Contrary Winds, 169.

Tulloch (J.), Some Facts of Religion and of Life, 65.

Williams (H. C.), Christ the Centre, 97.

Christian World Pulpit, xxiii. 58 (F. W. Farrar); lxvii. 157 (W. Martin).

Church of England Pulpit, xxxvi. 289 (C. Alfred Jones); lxii. 52 (H. Mayne Young).

Clergyman’s Magazine, 3rd Ser., vi. 154 (H. G. Youard).

Literary Churchman, xxxiii. (1887) 317 (J. B. C. Murphy); xxxviii. (1892) 404 (E. J. Hardy).

Preacher’s Magazine, xiv. 549 (J. Reid).

Weekly Pulpit, ii. 195 (D. L. Moody).

Verse 9

Weariness in Well-Doing

And let us not be weary in well-doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.— Galatians 6:9.

1. St. Paul had been amongst these Galatians. He had planted the gospel amongst them, and formed their churches, and knew how zealous they were at the outset for the glory of Christ; and so beloved was he amongst them that if necessary they would have taken out their very eyes for him; but he had heard that a change had come over them. He had to say to them: “Ye did run well; who did hinder you that ye should not obey the truth?” He knew there were many who had begun to grow weary, and that there was a possibility of many more growing weary and fainting, and consequently the cause of Christ beginning to decline; therefore he wrote them this Epistle, and in these closing verses, in this pathetic and impressive way, said: “Let us not be weary in well-doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.” With that perfect courtesy of which the Apostle was such an example, he identifies himself with the people to whom he is writing. He supposes for the moment that he might be inclined to the very same failing, which he perceived in them. He is identifying himself with them as subject to the same passions and feelings, so he does not say, “Do not ye be weary in well-doing,” but he says, “Let us not be weary in well-doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.”

2. Let us grasp what the Apostle really does say. This is the same St. Paul who includes in the catalogue of his own trials “in weariness and painfulness and watchings.” There is physical fatigue, and mental fatigue, and spiritual fatigue. Your ardent, eager worker is not denied his hours of depression when he is a tired man. More precious to Him who sees in secret, perhaps, are some tears of disappointment than the equanimity of him whose high hopes have never been disappointed because he never had any high hopes to disappoint. Did not Christ Jesus know weariness of body and heaviness of soul? No Christian is exempt from these feelings but he to whom the thought of the Kingdom is a pleasant, pious speculation, and never a sacred burden on the heart; to whom the prayer for it is never an agony, and the care for it never a cross. St. Paul knew all this and more; for he knew the inward discouragements also. He knew the deception and instability of his own heart. He knew the tempting voices of ease and pleasure, the luxuries of the intellectual life, and the indolence with which the flesh is so curiously sympathetic. And to be up and at it, day in and day out, unrecognized and unrewarded, nobody apparently wanting you or your help or your message, or caring much whether you come or go, labour of body and agony of soul expended seemingly to so little purpose—he knew all this, and, knowing it, stood and cried, “In doing beautiful things be not guilty of the crowning baseness of cowardice, tiring, fainting, deserting the divinest life, hope and service—the one thing worth doing, the one life worth living. Do not play the coward, in baseness of heart abandoning the doing of good and beautiful deeds.” This is St. Paul’s adjuration to the Christian Church.

I wish it were possible by any conceivable turn of the English phraseology to give the exact force of this epigrammatic saying, “Let us not be weary in well-doing.” I can, perhaps, partially explain it by saying that a frequent antithesis in Greek is between καλὸ?ς and κακὸ?ς , what is good and what is bad, or, more strictly, what is beautiful and what is base. These two words are used antithetically in this epigram. “In doing beautiful things let us not be base,” would be, of course, a very weak equivalent, though it would preserve some of the literal form of the saying. But this word “to be base” is the technical word for to turn coward, to lose heart, and so to tire at some hilly or difficult ground because of a weakness and infirmity of heart. In doing the beautiful in life let us not turn coward, let us not lose heart. That is the true meaning, although, as you will infer, little or nothing of the striking epigrammatic form is preserved. This word “to be base” or “to turn coward” is a tribute to the belief that the crowning typical baseness is cowardice, the flagging, fainting, tiring of the soul. I quarrel altogether with the translation “to be weary.” To be weary in our well-doing is a luxury denied to nobody. The baseness is in the cowardice, it is in the losing heart. It is in the wearying of it, if you like, although I cannot altogether assent even to that translation, for I have known men and women a little weary of it all—the strain and the struggle and the disappointment of “doing good”—who, nevertheless, are quite untainted by the baseness of cowardice, who have never lost hope or heart, who are still prepared under dark skies to plod and plod with a quiet, unfaltering resolution that unsuccess cannot discourage, until their long day’s work is done, and the welcome signal comes for home and sleep. 1 [Note: C. S. Horne, The Rock of Ages, 77.]

No one should think that sensitiveness to fear debars him from the grace and helpfulness of courage, or that a sanguine readiness to take things easily is any safeguard against cowardice. For this δειλία , or cowardice, like faith, its great antagonist, is not ultimately evinced in feeling one way or another, but in action. It is evinced whenever a man declines a task which he believes, or even suspects uncomfortably, that he was meant to face; whenever he looks along the way of faith, and thinks it will ask much of him, and takes the way of comfort and security—the way where he can be sure of continuous company and indisputable common sense. It may appear either in action or in refusing to act, according as the demand of faith is for patient waiting or for prompt advance; but the central wrong of it is the withholding of the service, the self-sacrifice, a man was born and bred and trained to render; it is the sin of “the children of Ephraim,” who, “being armed and carrying bows, turned back in the day of battle.” We can see sometimes in history or in fiction how a man seems prepared for and led up to the great opportunity of his life; something is asked of him, some effort, some renunciation, some endurance, which is not asked of others. He may say that if he refuses he is not making his own life easier than the lives of thousands round him seem quite naturally and undisturbedly to be; but he sinks thenceforward far below them if he does refuse. 2 [Note: Francis Paget, Studies in the Christian Character.]

It was not in the open fight

We threw away the sword,

But in the lonely watching

In the darkness by the ford.

The waters lapped, the night-wind blew,

Full armed the Fear was born and grew,

And we were flying ere we knew

From panic in the night. 3 [Note: Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills, 232.]

I

A Caution

“Let us not be weary in well-doing.”

1. We understand by weariness in well-doing weariness under all those duties and claims and responsibilities which a religious (in our case, a Christian) life lays upon us. To the Christian, life brings one long demand—upon his substance, or his time, or his patience, or his love, or his faith. He recognizes this demand in his home, in his church, in his fellow-creatures, not to speak of the peremptory demands which his own soul makes upon him.

It stares at us out of history and experience as one of life’s greater ironies that warnings against intermittent work, faint-hearted work, have to be uttered principally against the highest form of work done from the purest and least selfish of motives. You might reasonably think that the lower drudgery would be the first to pall, the drudgery that is merely selfish in its scheme and scope. You might say, Let light and air, space and beauty, into your manner of life, and it is good-bye to all apathy and listlessness. But worldliness is everlastingly shaming us. Is there any labour so assiduous, any toil so unintermittent, as that which is inspired by the very meanest and earthliest of motives, dross of self-interest unmixed with any higher metal of beneficence and disinterested desire? It seems as if life’s common prose were a subject of more commanding and abiding interest than life’s loftiest poetry. It seems that, if you narrow a man’s outlook to four walls, you will get more out of him of constant, unbroken work than if you give him the full horizon and the unlimited firmament and the sunlight and beauty of the world. The world being what it is, it is harder to live above it than to live down at its level. Sporadic goodness is common enough; men rather like than otherwise to find some relief or recreation in an act of benevolence. But it is like going to the sea-side, or having a day in the country. It is an occasional luxury, the too frequent repetition of which would destroy its charm. To make this higher service a life instead of an experiment, normal and natural instead of accidental and occasional—this was the purpose and mission of Jesus.

Some one has compared our undertakings and purposes to that great image which Nebuchadnezzar saw in his dream. The head was of fine gold—so are the beginnings of most men’s plans. Nothing is too costly, no labour too great. The breast and the arms are of silver. Interest begins to slacken; their views of possible success are modified; they have less exalted notions of what they are going to do. Lower still the silver has become brass—bright as the golden head, but not real, not genuine. They go on with the work, and it looks the same, but it is brass, not gold. The feet are part iron and part clay. Dreary ending to a work so nobly begun—what a picture of imperfection, a gradual deterioration, gold first, clay last! Such is the spiritual life of many who did run well. Such is the well-doing of many who started with high purposes to work for God. And now their life is jaded, cold, half-hearted. “Weary in well-doing” sums up their interior as well as their exterior life. 1 [Note: A. L. Moore, From Advent to Advent, 95.]

(1) A religious man feels that he is where he is, and he is what he is, not for his own sake so much as for the sake of others. He is here to help and bless the world. The great discovery of Christianity was this, that human life might be made better, sweeter, more wholesome; in the words of Scripture, that the world might be saved. And as Christians we should rejoice in the besetting duties of life, in its unremitting calls and claims upon us. Not to rejoice in this life of ours is to be weary. We are weary when we feel our duties to be dry; when we feel the claims of Christian love and brotherhood troublesome and against the grain. We are weary when we are indolent at the summons of faith or hope or love. We are weary in those hours when we do not like to think how much sorrow and how much need there is in the world and round about us, and that we might do something to reduce the bulk of human misery.

In weariness we seek to reduce our exertions to the lowest possible point. Weary men soon find out how little they may do, the least they may do. Retrenching our liberalities, we are feeling charity irksome; resigning one office after another with ingenious pleas, we are becoming weary in service. Ever striving to bring our Christian life down to the lowest standard is proof positive of decaying conviction and enthusiasm. The whole-hearted man asks, “How much can I be, give, do?” The weary man asks, “How little?” In weariness men magnify trifles. Dr. Livingstone tells that the Africans are sometimes afflicted by a singular disorder which causes them in passing over a straw to lift up their feet as if they were passing over the trunk of a tree. Weariness is a similar malady; it makes great efforts to overcome trifling and imaginary obstructions. The grasshopper is a burden. Weariness is seriously offended by the veriest trifles, by a word, or a look, or by the lack of a word or look which really means nothing. 1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson, Studies in Christian Character, i. 75]

What does The Slough of Despond mean in the allegory? Christian himself answers, tracing his misadventure to fear. It is the despondency of reaction which, if it become permanent, may deepen into religious monomania. It is to some extent physical, the result of overstrained nerves, so that “the change of weather” mentioned may be taken quite literally. A clear air and a sunny day are great aids to faith, and there are many, like Robertson of Brighton, whose fight with depression is brought on by rainy seasons. Thus it is not only sharp conviction of sin that we have here, but a state of hopelessness and weariness of spirit whose causes are very composite. All the evil side of life flows into it. Every sinful memory and unbelieving thought increases it. Bunyan’s reticence adds to his power here as elsewhere, for by not defining it more particularly he leaves each reader with a general symbol which he can fill in with the details of his own experience. Dr. Whyte reminds us that Christians are partly responsible for this slough. The Christian life is sometimes described in such a way as to make one think that there is no use trying; and there are many, like Widow Pascoe in Dan’l Quorm, who express a melancholy resignation in such phrases as “trusting Him where they cannot trace Him.” These are the chronic folk of the slough, who dwell so near its banks as to be spiritually bronchitic with its exhalations. This is bad enough; but when despondency comes to be regarded as a virtue, and happy faith in God as presumption, then the slough has become a place of sin as well as of misery. Humility, doubtless, is derived from humus; but as the quality of a living soul it must mean on the ground, not in it. Nor does it mean grovelling either, but standing on the ground. The voice Ezekiel heard still calls to all men, “Son of man, stand upon thy feet.” 2 [Note: John Kelman, The Road, i. 20.]

(2) Over and above those demands for our love and sympathy which our religion makes, there is the fundamental requirement of God that we ourselves be pure and holy in our own inward parts. That is another region in which weariness always threatens us. We may know what it is to be impatient of the regular duties of the religious life—to feel public worship an interference with our natural indolence, and so to think less of public worship, and to imagine some other way of spending the Sabbath would be better, because we would like some other way—as if we had not to suspect our likes rather than be guided by them. Then, to speak of more intimate things, we may know what it is to hurry through our prayers, feeling a certain irksomeness in what—if we were as we should be—is “the great love the Father hath bestowed upon us” to call Him Father, and to speak to Him as children. We may know what it is to put off the facing of private moral questions; we may know what it is to resent the perpetual demand for goodness, for seriousness, for self-examination, for religion, for restraint and abstinence and prayer.

At the Interpreter’s House, the fourth scene is the fire at the wall. Here life is seen in a new aspect, chosen in order to bring out the spiritual forces of good and evil which are at work upon it. The scientific definition of life as the “sum total of the functions which resist death” is strikingly applicable here. This view, which Professor Henry Drummond expounds so eloquently in his Natural Law in the Spiritual World, is exactly that of Bunyan’s figure. Life is a wasting thing, a waning lamp, a dying fire. And just as, in the natural world, there are many diseases and accidents which threaten to hasten the decay and violently end the resistance to it, so there are in the spiritual world agencies such as temptation, discouragement, and many others, which tend to extinguish the inner fire. These are all summed up in the figure of Satan casting water upon the flames. Yet the wonderful fact is that the flame is not extinguished. There are lives known to us all which seem to have everything against their spiritual victory—heredity, disposition, circumstances, companions—yet in spite of fate their flame burns on. The secret is that Christ is at the back of the wall, and there is no proof so wonderful as this of the reality of Jesus Christ as an agent in human life. Besides the two main agents there are plenty of human ones at work for both these ends. Some people are for ever throwing cold water upon the fires of the soul, devil’s firemen, whose trade seems to be that of discouraging. Others, and these are the blessed ones of the world, pour in upon the flagging spirit the oil of good cheer and hope. 1 [Note: John Kelman, The Road, i. 61.]

2. Why are we weary? There are many temptations to weariness. Let us touch upon a few of the most frequently encountered.

(1) Some of the hindrances arise from within, and are connected with the state of our own hearts. Although it should be our earnest desire and prayer that the God of peace may “sanctify us wholly,” and that our whole spirit, and soul, and body, may be thoroughly and harmoniously consecrated to the service of Christ, yet every believer knows, to his loss and to his lamentation, that he is sanctified “but in part”; that there is a law in his members warring against the law of his mind; that the flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh, and that these are contrary the one to the other. Instead, therefore, of making any steady progress in the way of well-doing, he finds himself drawn as it were in different directions; swayed hither and thither by the conflict of opposing principles which is going on within him. He is like a kingdom divided against itself, and sometimes feels as if he had two distinct and discordant natures struggling in his bosom. It is true that—

Evil into the mind of god or man

May come and go, so unapproved, and leave

No spot or blame behind.

But even where no “spot” is left, its confusing influence is felt; and hence his inward experience is often but a chaos of antagonistic purposes and conflicting inclinations. There is generally such a wide difference between his aims and his actings that he always finds reason to be dissatisfied with himself. The good that he would, he does not; the evil he would not, that he does. And of this he is always sure, that when he would do good, evil is present with him, hindering his higher resolutions, and hanging to the skirts of all his better designs, until he is often constrained to cry out, with the Apostle, “Oh wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from this body of death?” Sometimes the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak; at other times the spirit is weak while the flesh is strong; and between the various impediments arising from these sources, the believer’s progress is so grievously interrupted, that he is, at certain seasons, apt to sink into a state of utter discouragement.

I would have gone; God bade me stay:

I would have worked; God bade me rest.

He broke my will from day to day,

He read my yearnings unexpressed

And said them nay.

Now I would stay; God bids me go:

Now I would rest; God bids me work,

He breaks my heart tossed to and fro,

My soul is wrung with doubts that lurk

And vex it so.

I go, Lord, where Thou sendest me;

Day after day I plod and moil:

But, Christ my God, when will it be

That I may let alone my toil

And rest with Thee? 1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Christ Our All in All (Poetical Works, 242).]

(2) When a man grows “weary in well-doing,” it may be the effect of a false modesty. As he thinks of how very much misery, sin, want there is in the world, he may say, “After all, how little I can do. What is my little when compared with the infinite need of the world?” And so, from a genuine feeling of how much there is to be done in the world for Christ, we may actually let ourselves off with doing nothing. Yet surely one great principle of our religion is just this—to believe in the infinite power for good, in the infinite future of the Christlike behaviour of every one. And in any case, we have only our duties. We only know what Christ asks of us: it is not for us to know what will become of our deed, or how Christ will arrange for what we cannot overtake. We know the parable of the leaven in the meal. We know that the few loaves which Christ blessed and broke fed five thousand, besides women and children.

Two men met upon a steamer during a Scotch excursion and they talked with interest of many things, among others of Sunday schools. “To tell the truth,” said one, “I am not very enthusiastic about that kind of work. I was a teacher for many years, and after all I seem to have done no good.” “Well, I do believe in Sunday school work,” said the other. “As a lad I received life-long influences for good in my old class at school;” and he named the school with which he had once been connected. “Were you there,” cried the other; “that was where I taught. Were you there in my time? My name is ——” “And I was your scholar. I remember you now.” The younger man gave his name, and memories succeeded each other concerning that old school unforgotten by both. There, side by side, stood the teacher, who believed he had done nothing, and the man he had influenced for life. 1 [Note: Expository Times, i. 12.]

In the early morning, when the dew was bright on the grass, a child passed along the highway, and sang as he went. It was spring, and the ferns were unfolding their green fronds, and the hepatica showed purple under her green fur. The child looked about him with his eager happy eyes, rejoicing in all he saw, and answering the birds’ songs with notes as gay as their own. Now and then he dropped a seed here and there, for he had a handful of them; sometimes he threw one to the birds; again he dropped one for the squirrels; and still again he would toss one into the air for very play, for that was what he loved best. Now it chanced that he passed by a spot where the earth lay bare, with no tree or plant to cover its brown breast. “Oh!” said the child, “poor place, will nothing grow in you? here is a seed for you, and now I will plant it properly.” So he planted the seed properly, and smoothed the earth over it, and went his way singing, and looking at the white clouds in the sky and at the green things unfolding around him. It was a long, long journey the child had to go. Many perils beset his path, many toils he had to over-pass, many wounds and bruises he received on the way. When he returned, one would hardly have known, to look at him, that he was still a child. The day had been cruelly hot, and still the afternoon sun beat fiercely down on the white road. His clothes were torn and dusty; he toiled on, and sighed as he went, longing for some spot of shade where he might sit down to rest. Presently he saw in the distance a waving of green, and a cool shadow stretching across the white glowing road; and he drew near and it was a tree young and vigorous spreading its arms abroad, mantled in green leaves that whispered and rustled. Thankfully the child threw himself down in the pleasant shade, and rested from his weary journey, and as he rested he raised his eyes to the green whispering curtain above him and blessed the hand that planted the tree. The little green leaves nodded and rustled and whispered to one another: “Yes! yes! it is himself he is blessing. But he does not know, and that is the best of all!” 2 [Note: Mrs. Laura Richards, The Silver Crown.]

(3) In the very attempt at doing good we come across so much evil of which we had never dreamt. Evil is one thing looked at from a distance; it is quite another when we get into close proximity with it. The angel of light is anything but an angel when we come face to face with him. Novitiates in Christian service come to their work with bright dreams, grand expectations, only to find that life is a series of disillusionments. Fighting evil plays sad havoc with our cheap optimism, delivers us from our flippancy, convinces us that our rose-water schemes are utterly impracticable, and that our work is no mere child’s play.

Suppose we are of those who have made the great choice, have been converted, as some would say. Well, thank God, we have made a good beginning; but is the conflict won? Wait for the end. You have met the enemy, and by the grace of God you have beaten him. Henceforward your life on earth will be a series of conflicts, unless you grow weary and faint. Persevere, and you will know why the life of Christ’s followers is called a struggle or a race. You will begin to understand why the most experienced veterans are most cautious and circumspect; you will begin to know that you may not despise any help that God has given you. All the exultation and satisfaction which you felt at your first victory will have gone—given way to the silent earnestness of him whose every muscle is strained in his efforts to win the victory. 1 [Note: Aubrey L. Moore.]

(4) The ingratitude of those we strive to help is a common cause of weariness. Ingratitude is as common as it is detestable. Almost all nations have voiced their sense of the sin of ingratitude in striking proverbs. “Eat the present, and break the dish,” says the Arabic proverb. The Spanish says, “Bring up a raven, and it will peck out your eyes.” “Put a snake in your bosom, and when it is warm it will sting you,” says the English proverb. The world is ungrateful. It lives on God’s bounty, and yet refuses to own His power or to accept His love. “Where are the nine?” asked Christ; and there is a tone of indescribable sadness in His question. We have all felt the deadening influence of ingratitude. Our warm sympathy has flowed out in words and deeds of helpfulness, and that sympathy has been so chilled by the ingratitude and unworthiness of those we helped that it has flowed back to paralyse our hearts. But we must do good from higher motives than to secure the gratitude of those benefited. We must do it for its own sake and for Christ’s sake. He laid down His life for us when we were unthankful. Thank God, there are some who are grateful. We have seen the tear of gratitude tremble in the eye, and when it was wiped away we have seen the light of hope sparkle there. A word of kindness has banished from some weary heart and sorrowful home weeks of sadness, and has opened a future of hopefulness. Do not become morose. Do not say that gratitude is a forgotten virtue. A cynic is almost as bad as an ingrate. Indeed, cynicism and ingratitude are kin to each other. In many cases your words and deeds of well-doing are bearing precious fruit in the changed homes and the redeemed lives of men, women, and children, who shall rise up to call you blessed.

Gratitude, however, is sometimes felt and expressed, as the following incident illustrates. “When I first learnt to know her she had a little cottage on a high road, the great Bath road of many tramps. It had been the lodge of an abandoned manor house, and was, of course, close to the gateway. There she tamed her tramp men, and made them friends. Every man who came had a table and chair under shelter; the plainest, simplest food; materials for mending his clothes, tea or cocoa to drink, her smile, her wonderful eyes upon his, her open heart and word. Never a thing was stolen from her doors, her wide windows; never a penny did she give; but many a man begged leave to chop wood for her, to dig in her garden—some little thing to show what she had done for him.” 1 [Note: W. S. Palmer, in Michael Fairless: Her Life and Writings, 5.]

(5) Another temptation to weariness arises from the apparent want of success attending our labours. It is but natural that we should look for some results from our efforts and, within certain limits, this feeling is not only natural, but lawful and right. We should be apt to sink altogether if we had reason to believe that we were labouring in vain, and spending our strength for naught; and hence it very seldom happens that the Lord leaves His servants without some tokens of success. But still there are times when these tokens are so poor and scanty that we are ready to say with the disciples, “We have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing.” But we should never forget that the Word of the Lord will not return unto Him void—that it shall accomplish the thing which He pleaseth, and prosper in the end whereto He sends it. And what is true of the preaching of the Word, is true of every other way in which we seek to promote our Master’s work. If we are guided by His counsel and actuated by His Spirit, we cannot fail to be successful, whether we see it or not. No good word is ever wasted, no good deed is ever lost.

Publicans and sinners, when we read about them in the New Testament, are poetical; but publicans and sinners, when we meet them in the present century, are very prosaic people, there is nothing poetical about them at all; and we get tired of trying to do anything for them. We start out in life with an impression that everybody wants to be better, that the ignorant want to learn, that the vicious people want to be virtuous, that the idle people want to work. But we do not undertake to do good work on that notion more than a week before we find that we are mistaken. The tramp comes to us, and is very sure that he wants work; give him some work, and he has not worked twenty-four hours when he wants some other job. The drinking man we get hold of, and we are sure that he wants to reform, and he is sure that he wants to reform. We get him up out of the gutter, and in a week we go out, and he is down in the gutter gain, and we say, “It’s no use; it is too hard work.” 1 [Note: Lyman Abbott.]

In the church at Somerville, New Jersey, where I was afterwards pastor, John Vredenburgh preached for a great many years. He felt that his ministry was a failure, and others felt so, although he was a faithful minister preaching the gospel all the time. He died, and died amid some discouragements, and went home to God; for no one ever doubted that John Vredenburgh was a good Christian minister. A little while after his death there came a great awakening in Somerville, and one Sabbath two hundred souls stood up at the Christian altar espousing the cause of Christ, among them my own father and mother. And what was peculiar in regard to nearly all of those two hundred souls was that they dated their religious impressions from the ministry of John Vredenburgh. 2 [Note: The Autobiography of T. De Witt Talmage, 17.]

Some years ago an orphan obtained a humble position in a bank through the kindness of a friend. His friend said to him: “All I will ask of you is that you should be the first to come and the last to go, and that you should never refuse extra work.” The lad went on faithfully, but for years no one seemed to observe him. He had the work, but not the thanks. Then a day came when he was promoted, and he is climbing the ladder now. He had faith to believe and to go on and the harvest came. Many give over, and all their lives are a disappointment. 1 [Note: W. R. Nicoll, Sunday Evening, 131.]

3. Now, lastly, what is the cure for weariness?

(1) To prevent this evil there must be increased consecration. We must renew our engagement to be the Lord’s. The weariness of religious exercises can be removed only by waiting upon Him who will renew our strength. The loss of personal interest in spiritual things can be restored only by communion with Him in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. The hyacinth will flourish for a while in a vase of water, but if it is to perpetuate itself, to bring forth fruit and seed, it must be restored to its native soil. And so your Christian life, left to itself, without any of its usual elements of growth, may for a time seem to put forth beautiful blossoms under the impetus it has received; but in order to grow vigorously and bring forth the peaceable fruits of righteousness, it must be planted anew in the soil of faith and love in Christ Jesus from which it sprang.

There is a way by which most of us may get back our eagerness for God’s service, and get it back immediately. It is by remembering our sins or some particular wrong-doing, from the guilt of which we trust to God to hold us pardoned. No other method so suddenly makes a man—a man who has had some such history—real, and brings him to his knees with a full heart. “My sin is ever before me”—weariness passes immediately at that thought. For the proof one has that God has really forgiven him his sins and has accepted him, is that he himself is now serving God, that he has now given himself to God. And if for a moment he discovers himself reluctant and disobedient towards God, does it not mean for such a man that the old things are back upon him once more, the old sin, the old fear, the old desolation of soul? In a moment the whole life of such a man becomes keen towards God, and altogether willing. He feels bound to Christ by an awful yet blessed secret. And after the sudden anguish has passed his heart is filled to breaking with new fresh love and gratitude. “Lord, what wouldst Thou have ne to do.” 1 [Note: J. A. Hutton, The Fear of Things, 184.]

Lord, many times I am aweary quite

Of mine own self, my sin, my vanity—

Yet be not Thou, or I am lost outright,

Weary of me.

And hate against myself I often bear,

And enter with myself in fierce debate:

Take Thou my part against myself, nor share

In that just hate.

Best friends might loathe us, if what things perverse

We know of our own selves, they also knew:

Lord, Holy One! if Thou who knowest worse

Shouldst loathe us too! 2 [Note: R. C. Trench, Poems, 147.]

(2) It is because in trying to do the best we can it often seems, as regards direct and immediate effects and with reference only to a limited period of time and a limited portion of human society, as if we were contending against nature itself, that we are apt to lose heart in well-doing. To prevent this consequence taking a narrow view of things, the best that can be done is to take a wider view, namely, that development, progress, is the law human life and society, though the process may seem to be, and point of fact is, slow and unequal. In trying to do the best we can in, in never losing heart in the business, we are partners with he Eternal in accelerating that process, however it may seem that our effort and endeavour is for the time unavailing and abortive. However it may seem to be fighting against nature and the course of things, it is in reality, and in a wider view, working out the eternal order, to keep on trying to do our best in the face of all difficulties and reverses. That is a view of things to the truth of which history is a witness. There is progress, though it is slow. To take that view, and to give it the place which it ought to hold in all our thoughts, is the best provision that can be made by us against the great calamity of losing heart in well-doing.

Of course the world is growing better; the Lord reigns; our old planet is wheeling slowly into fuller light. I despair of nothing good. All will come in due time that is really needed All we have to do is to work—and wait. 1 [Note: J. G. Whittier, in Life, by S. T. Pickard, ii. 673.]

I do not make much of “Progress of the Species,” as handled in these times of ours; nor do I think you would care to hear much about it. The talk on that subject is too often of the most extravagant, confused sort. Yet I may say, the fact itself seems certain enough; nay we can trace-out the inevitable necessity of it in the nature of things. 2 [Note: Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-Worship.]

II

An Encouraging Promise

“We shall reap, if we faint not.”

1. The certainty of reaping.—We feel that nothing less than such a declaration is necessary, in order to raise us above so much that sometimes makes true Christian well-doing morally impossible. But this declaration, grasped as a special word of God by the hand often so worn and weary, is also perfectly sufficient, in spite of all that threatens or oppresses us, to make us “stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord.” The good, much little, which in God’s name and power we are permitted to accomplish here, what is it else than sowing? and can that sowing ever be too much, when we can reckon on an abundant and joyful harvest? Yes, reckon; for the word of God, which lies before us is faithful and worthy of all acceptation. The farmer sows with quiet industry, although his prospect of the joy of harvest is far from certain. When but a few days divide the grain from the sickle, the tempest or the hail-shower may suddenly annihilate his fairest hopes. But the labourer for the Kingdom of God not only hopes, but is assured through faith that his harvest is perfectly guaranteed through the power and faithfulness of the Lord.

There is a true but somewhat disheartening word, that one sows and another reaps. We sow and our successors reap. This is well, but it is not the whole. We shall reap; we shall discover one day that all the good seed we have sown has sprung, and our one sorrow will be that we did not sow more diligently. As for the apparent frustration and delay, we shall look back in the world to come along the track of tears, and see the rainbow of God upon it, and perceive that by these disappointments and defeats He was interpreting to us all the while the wonder of the secret life.

Some of us have learned what it means to continue in well-doing without weariness, but we have not learned along with that to look for the harvest. We think that lesson has been forced upon us. Our patient continuance in well-doing has gained us no praise, our service of love has been requited by indifference, or even persecution, by those on whom it has been lavished. “That is the harvest of well-doing,” we say, with perhaps a touch of bitterness. “If we are to continue in it, it will not be in the hope of harvest, but solely for the sake of the well-doing itself.” “Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?” asked our Master. Nay, verily! And neither shall we gather thorns of grapes. The fruit of patience is not disappointment; the result of endurance in well-doing is not bitterness; the harvest of love is not pain. Foolish and faithless that we are! God and nature never brought forth such a harvest from such seed. The harvest of well-doing is the harvest of the realization of our highest hopes, a harvest of pure and never-failing joy, a harvest of all-satisfying love. In due season, for the seasons haste not nor lag for all our impatience, we shall reap that harvest if we faint not. 1 [Note: A. H. Moncur Sime.]

A joiner takes two pieces of wood, and with infinite care glues them in position. But unless he follows up his perseverance with patience, his working with waiting, he will make a sorry cabinet. The husbandman tends his vine, pruning and purging it day after day as he alone knows how. But unless he “waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient over it,” he will never cut one luscious bunch of grapes. A sculptor moulds his clay; day and night he toils strenuously and hard. But before his dream is realized, days of waiting for that clay to harden must follow nights of working at that clay to shapen. A small group of politicians, amongst whom was William Pitt, were busy in conversation, when somehow or other the subject of their talk turned, and a discussion arose as to which was the quality most needed in a Prime Minister. “Eloquence,” said one; “Knowledge,” suggested another; “Toil,” was the opinion of a third. “No,” said Pitt, who had learned from experience,” it is patience.” Carpenter, farmer, sculptor, minister: to join wood, to grow grapes, to mould a statue, to govern a country—if patience is a great essential with these in their work, how much more is it essential with well-doers in theirs! 1 [Note: W. S. Kelynack.]

2. The time of reaping.—In due season we shall gain our victory and His, and we shall reap our harvest. The months before the ingathering may often seem long and wearisome, and verily be heart-breaking things, but God’s “seasons” are not always measurable by our forecastings, even though the harvest is pledged by His oath and His promise. We shall reap the growth effectuated by His Holy Spirit, though we may not always understand the nature of the gracious sheaves that we are bringing in our bosom. We cannot calculate the hour or the nature of our triumph, but we know that the word of God stands sure, and that the due season draws nigh. We know that we shall reap if we faint not.

Let us not forget that God must be the judge of the “due time.” We are often in a hurry; God never is. Perhaps the greatest miracle in Christ’s life is that He should wait thirty years before performing a miracle. He bided His time. Undue haste pays the penalty of speedy decay. Did we know all the reasons as God knows them we should always approve of His seeming delay. How few converts, apparently, there were in Christ’s personal ministry! but one sermon on the day of Pentecost brings three thousand to Jesus’ feet. Soon the number increased so rapidly that Luke ceases to give us figures. Carey and his companions must labour seven years before the first Hindu convert is baptized. Judson must toil on until the churches grow disheartened, and everything but his own faith and God’s promise fails. In a single recent year eighteen thousand are baptized in connexion with work on these same foreign fields! These things are not accidental. They have their reasons. We cannot always trace the law. God can. Let us do our duty, and leave the result with Him.

It is one of the appointed conditions of the labour of men that, in proportion to the time between the seed sowing and the harvest, is the fulness of the fruit; and that generally, therefore, the farther off we place our aim, and the less we desire to be the witnesses of what we have laboured for, the more wide and rich will be the measure of our success. 2 [Note: Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture.]

My new-cut ashlar takes the light

Where crimson-blank the windows flare;

By my own work, before the night,

Great Overseer, I make my prayer.

If there be good in that I wrought,

Thy hand compelled it, Master, Thine:

Where I have failed to meet Thy thought,

I know, through Thee, the blame is mine.

One instant’s toil to Thee denied

Stands all Eternity’s offence,

Of what I did with Thee to guide,

To Thee, through Thee, be excellence.

Who, lest all thought of Eden fade,

Bring’st Eden to the craftsman’s brain,

Godlike to muse o’er his own trade,

And Manlike stand with God again.

The depth and dream of my desire,

The bitter paths wherein I stray,

Thou knowest who hast made the fire,

Thou knowest who hast made the clay.

One stone the more swings to her place

In that dread Temple of Thy Worth—

It is enough that through Thy grace

I saw naught common on Thy earth.

Take not that vision from my ken;

Oh, whatsoe’er may spoil or speed,

Help me to need no aid from men,

That I may help such men as need! 1 [Note: Rudyard Kipling.]

3. The condition of reaping.—We have an encouraging promise. But a condition is also suggested. We must not faint. We must persevere to the end. There must be no repining, no retreating, no fainting. We enlist for life, for eternity indeed. The dew of youth, the vigour of manhood, and the wisdom of age must be consecrated to well-doing. It is “to them who by patient continuance in well doing seek for glory and honour and immortality,” that the promise of blessedness is given.

Slothfulness in the summer may frustrate all the labour of the spring; and may even in the harvest of life have lost the gain of summer. The last few paces of our field may be perhaps the heaviest; but those who give up now might as well have left all the rest undone.

One of the sterling virtues in practical life is continuance—continuance through all obstacles, hindrances, and discouragements. It is unconquerable persistence that wins. The paths of life are strewn with the skeletons of those who fainted and fell in the march. Life’s prizes can be won only by those who will not fail. Success in every field must be reached through antagonism and conflict. 1 [Note: J. R. Miller.]

Ruskin, in a letter written to his Oxford tutor after he had left the University, gives an account of what he did not learn there. He says his teachers should have said to him, when he was an undergraduate, “In all your studies, we have only one request to make you, and that we expect you scrupulously to comply with: That you work with patience as well as diligence, and take care to secure every step you take: we do not care how much or how little you do—but let what you do, be done for ever.” 2 [Note: E. T. Cook, The Life of Ruskin, i. 81.]

Weariness in Well-Doing

Literature

Benson (E. W.), Living Theology, 129.

Blair (H.), Sermons, i. 379.

Brown (J. B.), The Sunday Afternoon, 295.

Horne (C. S.), The Rock of Ages, 77.

Hutton (J. A.), The Fear of Things, 172.

Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year: Easter to Ascension Day, 211.

Macgilvray (W.), The Ministry of the Word, 145.

Macmillan (H.), The Spring of the Day, 289.

Moore (A. L.), From Advent to Advent, 87.

Nicoll (W. R.), Sunday Evening, 127.

Pearse (M. G.), Parables and Pictures, 33.

Potts (A. W.), School Sermons, 85.

Raleigh (A.), Rest from Care and Sorrow, 172.

Reynolds (H. R.), Notes of the Christian Life, 334.

Service (J.), Sermons, 92.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxiii. (1877), No. 1383.

Watkinson (W. L.), Studies in Christian Character, i. 73.

Christian Age, xliv. 162 (L. Abbott).

Christian World Pulpit, xliii. 83 (D. Burns); xlvii. 3 (G. G. Bradley); lv. 265 (C. Gore); lviii. 250 (A. H. M. Sime); lxviii. 329 (H. H. Henson).

Churchman’s Pulpit: St. Mark, St. Philip, and St. James, xiv. 393 (H. F. R. Compston).

Verse 14

Glorying in the Cross

But far be it from me to glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world hath been crucified unto me, and I unto the world.— Galatians 6:14.

1. Early in the Apostolic age Judaizing teachers appeared in the churches, who, by the dissemination of principles which were subversive of the gospel, beguiled disciples from the simplicity of Christ, and produced discord and division among the brethren. The error which they propagated in the churches of Galatia was so prolific of evil that it sapped the foundation of the sinner’s hope toward God, poisoned and petrified that flowing fountain which had been opened at the cross “for sin and for uncleanness,” nullified the proclamation of free pardon which the gospel carries on its loving bosom to all the children of the Fall, thwarted the benevolent purposes of Jehovah, and robbed the redeeming Saviour of that glory which was due to Him for the matchless work He had achieved “for us men and for our salvation.” The error consisted in preaching circumcision as essential to salvation. They “taught the brethren, and said, Except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses, ye cannot be saved.” Their object, says St. Paul, was to make a fair show in the flesh and to avoid persecution.

The “cross” seemed a hindrance to their success, and therefore they hid it out of sight as much as possible; but all the time they were compromising a principle, and there was nothing in this mere outward conformity that could help men to an inward life of truth and grace. It was all a question of trifles, of a mere glorying in the flesh; but, says the Apostle, “Far be it from me to glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world hath been crucified unto me, and I unto the world.”

2. St. Paul’s passionate declaration sums up in itself all the positive teaching of the letter to the Galatians; it is this—that his soul makes her boast in the cross of Jesus Christ; that for the exaltation of this cross of Jesus he will cast everything aside—his past, his reputation among his own people, the future grandeur of the historic Israel, all that the world might reasonably be expected to offer to an innocent ambition. And what made this declaration so potent with the Galatians and all others to whom he addressed it was that it was a fact of experience. For these words represent the deliberate convictions at which the Apostle had arrived after much thought and long experience. So far from being the outcome merely of a passing mood, they tell of a growing intensity of feeling and of a belief deeply rooted in knowledge. It is quite true that the experience which lies behind the words was an exceptional one, and that they represent a very lofty level of life and thought. But to the man who uttered them they were real, and though for us they may seem to point to an ideal, it is at least one that we may count to be attainable.

3. St. Paul makes the cross the measure of all things. He brings the world and all the glories of the world to the cross, and weighs them there as in a balance, and he finds them wanting. Now let us try to understand what St. Paul means by the cross, and not put too narrow a limitation upon it. It was not the piece of wood, or the physical sufferings of the Divine Victim, or the painful, shameful death of the crucifixion scene. St. Paul, when he spoke of the cross, saw before him the vision of a splendid and a fruitful Life, crowned by a tragic end. To him the cross of Jesus Christ included all that was covered by the incarnation of the Son of God and the redemption of man. The whole life and work of Jesus Christ—His pure and holy manhood, His Divine wisdom, His tender sympathy, His saving grace, His glorious sacrifice, His risen power—all was summed up for the Apostle in the single word, the Cross.

The very Rev. old Ebenezer Brown I have twice heard preach, and a most interesting exhibition it is; he is a specimen of old Presbyterian eloquence and style. There is something very dignified in his energetic yet subdued manner; his old broad Scotch, his deep sonorous voice, rendered very inarticulate now from old age, but famed in his youth for reaching a mile at open air preachings; and oh how fain would he that it reached many and many a mile, if he could but bring poor sinners to his loved Saviour! Somehow, every word he utters melts me to tears; Christ crucified is all his theme, all his salvation, and all his desire. Humility, simplicity, serene peace, and that single repose in the Saviour which has brought the spirit of Jesus so eminently and so purely into his heart and life, are what characterize this aged saint. The pathos, the spirit, the unction of his preaching, surpasses all eloquence, and is overcoming to an unutterable degree; none could imitate it, none could ever equal it, unless imbued with the same spirit from on high. 1 [Note: Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, i. 360.]

I

The Cross and Christianity

Christianity is the religion of the cross. Its subject-matter is called the cross. Its Author and Lord is the incarnate, risen, and exalted Son of God who died upon the cross. Its aim—salvation—is accomplished through the cross. The true instinct of Christendom has echoed St. Paul’s words, and accepted this his spiritual ultimatum. The cross—not the holy cradle or the broken tomb—has always been its chosen, its prized and beloved emblem. It rises over the Christian Sanctuary, ornamented in richness, and wreathed into forms of beauty. It was once an emblem of shame, all and more than all that the gallows is to us; but now it is the sacred form which men delight to enrich with their jewels and their gold, or even to mould to lovely shapes, in which its own roughness seems almost lost. Outwardly at least, all Christendom has gloried in the cross. But such glorying, such rejoicing in the cross, marks a joy which has in it an undercurrent of seriousness.

Taking this tone and spirit of glorying for granted as the only one which becomes a Christian, surely we can see very clearly, and feel deeply, why we should glory in the cross. There are grounds upon which every disciple may take his stand in echoing the language of the Apostle—reasons why he should declare his determination to glory in nothing else save the cross, why he should refuse to bring into comparison or competition with it anything, however illustrious it may be, of an earthly or human nature.

The more it is pondered, the more the power of Christianity is found to lie in the cross. The incarnate Christ, the risen and exalted Christ, and all His mysterious presence among us and experiences in our midst, become intelligible when we find Him acting for us and upon us by His death on the cross, acting in us and through us, by awakening in us the very spirit that led Him to the cross. Of course the cross does not say all. It is but a symbol, and no symbol can. But “the very power of a symbol lies in the sublime inadequacy and yet practical effectiveness of its suggestion.” And this symbol is associated so intimately with the great critical, crucial event in the Saviour’s work for the world’s salvation that we are not surprised that the gospel is called the word of the cross. The cross symbolizes the service He did for us. It symbolizes the nature of the service He expects of us. And if it reminds us that the ideal life for man is no smooth, easy progress over carpeted tracks, but strenuous, arduous, often wrestling with things repellent and cruel, it tells us, too, that Christ asks nothing of His followers harder than that which He has faced for them of His own gracious will, for

Not in soft speech is told the earthly story,

Love of all Loves! that showed Thee for an hour;

Shame was Thy kingdom, and reproach Thy glory,

Death Thine eternity, the Cross Thy power. 1 [Note: R. J. Drummond, Faith’s Certainties, 145.]

1. The cross gives us a new conception of God.—Mankind before Christ went about, in St. Paul’s phrase, “groping after” God, as one gropes in the dark for an object suspected to be there yet nowhere to be found. He was not far, to be sure, from any one of them. Yet they had to “seek God, if haply they might feel after him, and find him.” And they would hopelessly strive to pierce through the darkness which surrounds the throne of the Almighty, and, even were they successful in finding God, they would not find the Father. But the light streaming from the cross dispels all the mist, and actually lays bare the very heart of the Eternal One in its paternal longings for men. All His revelations in the Old Testament, His ordinances, institutions, promises, judgments, reach their fulfilment and find their real explanation in the cross. More than that, all the hints of truth current among heathen nations—all their sighing and striving after the knowledge of God and communion with Him, all attempts to get rid of the consciousness of guilt, to atone for sin, and to effect a perfect restoration to Divine favour—in short, everything regarding the nature of God and His designs which glimmered as a ray of light here and there in this darkness obtains in Christ and in Christ crucified its goal, because in Him it finds its full manifestation. In the cross we have revealed most perfectly every one of the Divine attributes, and, in the very forefront, the completeness of the Divine understanding of, and the intensity of the Divine sympathy with, human suffering and sorrow.

In one of his sonnets in the Vita Nuova, Dante instils the essence of sympathy into two lines. Speaking of one who offered him comfort in his great grief over the death of Beatrice, he says,

Our life revives, since one doth now console

Who sorrows with us, healing grief with grief.

That goes to the heart of things. The sympathy that we feel to be most real is that which has behind it a kindred experience—can heal grief with grief.

By what has Christianity subdued the world if not by the apotheosis of grief, by its marvellous transmutation of suffering into triumph, of the crown of thorns into the crown of glory, and of a gibbet into a symbol of salvation? What does the apotheosis of the cross mean if not the death of death, the defeat of sin, the beatification of martyrdom, the raising to the skies of voluntary sacrifice, the defiance of pain?—“O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory?” By long brooding over this theme—the agony of the just, peace in the midst of agony, and the heavenly beauty of such peace—humanity came to understand that a new religion was born, a new mode, that is to say, of explaining life and of understanding suffering. 1 [Note: Amiel’s Journal (trans. by Mrs. Humphry Ward), 167.]

“What shall I ask for Thee, my Child?”

Said Mary Mother, stooping down

Above the Babe all undefiled.

“O let Him wear a kingly crown.”

From wise men’s gifts she wrought the crown,

The robe inwove with many a gem;

Beside the Babe she laid them down.

He wept and would have none of them.

“What shall I get for Thee, my Child?”

Unto the door she slowly went,

And wove a crown of thorn-boughs wild:

He took it up, and was content.

Upon the floor she gathered wood,

And made a little Cross for Him;

The Child smiled for He understood,

And Mary watched with eyes grown dim.

“Since these He doth prefer to gold,”

She sadly said, “Let it be so;

He sees what I cannot behold,

He knows what I can never know.”

That night the eyes of Mary saw

A Cross of stars set in the sky,

Which after it the heavens did draw,

And this to her was God’s reply. 1 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Empire of Love, 120.]

2. The cross gives us a new hope.—Not only does the cross reveal the Divine nature and the Divine purpose, but it is the great and efficient means by which this Divine purpose is carried out. On the cross atonement is made for sin, pardon is procured for the sinner, the work of grace is carried out to its last requisite, and everything perfected that belongs to the plan of redemption. Through the cross we have our consciences purged from dead works. We have a right to enter the holy place through His blood. We stand in the presence of the burning glory of the Shechinah, unabashed, unashamed, accepted in the Beloved, for we know that “there is no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.”

It is evident that St. Paul is here contemplating the Redeemer’s work in this vital aspect of it. He speaks in the next verse ( Galatians 6:15) of “a new creature”—that renewal of the heart which is everything in personal religion, and without which all mere rites and ceremonies are utterly worthless. And he manifestly traces the power which produces a new birth and new life to the cross of Christ. It is there that the opened eye of the heart first learns that God is not eager to punish, but generous to atone: that our sins in the past offer no longer a hopeless bar to our return to His favour; that on the contrary, He waits to receive and is prompt to forgive us for Jesus’ sake.

The cross of Christ is no longer to you the symbol of a bargain between a vindictive Deity and a self-sacrificing Deity, between the individual and selected Soul and the Trinity, but the expression of the great truth of life that self-renunciation, the way of the cross, is the only pathway in spiritual life, and that not as a duty or a trial, but as the only means of freedom, hope and joy. People will tell you Buddha taught this, and that all the ascetics have taught the same; but their teaching was not like Christ’s. They wanted to kill self, an impossible feat. He meant the self to be lost in love for others, and devotion to them; that by the miracle of spiritual life the lost self should return on the great spiral of progress to its old point in the plane, but to such elevation in height that it shines with immortality, and light, and love as with the garments of God’s Kingdom. This was the joy that was set before Him. This is the unhoped, unexpected joy set before our dim eyes. God help us to attain it, and in this we make no selfish prayer, for so truly is God love that He has made the condition of our progress (as James Hinton so well says) “others’ needs,” no selfish and self-sympathizing isolation and introspection, no weary attempts to perfect the self by the self. Thank God, the cross sweeps all those hardnesses away; and you in Dumbarton and I in Buenos Ayres, this busy and excited town, can live the life better than any hermit. And we won’t shrink from any suffering and anxiety He, in His love, puts before us, knowing that these things and His sweet love bring us into the fellowship of suffering, the world’s suffering, little understood and little aided. 1 [Note: W. Denny, in Life, by A. B. Bruce, 430.]

Natural and supernatural constitute a universal order and an everyday process. It is by such a path, beginning in the lowest forms of nature, that Bushnell finds his way up to holiness as God’s last end; and when that is gained, it will be seen that it is the culmination of a process that embraces all the stages of creation. The redeeming work of Christ will not appear as an intrusion into a continuous order, but only as another and a supreme instance of the supernatural entering into the natural. “The cross of redemption is no after-thought, but is itself the grand all-dominating idea around which the eternal system of God crystallizes.” 2 [Note: T. T. Munger, Horace Bushnell, 216.]

Thee such loveliness adorns

On Thy Cross, O my Desire—

As a lily Thou art among thorns,

As a rose lies back against his briar.

Thou art as a fair, green shoot,

That along the wall doth run;

Thou art as a welcoming open fruit,

Stretched forth to the glory of the sun.

Thou art still as one in sleep,

As the blood that Thou dost shed;

Thou art as a precious coral-reef

That scarce lifteth himself from his bed.

Thy limbs are so fine, so long,

’Mid the cords and nails that bind,

Thy body maketh a solemn song,

As a stream in a gorge confined. 1 [Note: Michael Field, Mystic Trees, 35.]

II

The Cross and The World

The Apostle rationalizes his boasting, and therefore gives it weight and value, by defining clearly to himself and to his friends the meaning, the inwardness of the cross: “Through which,” he says, “the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.”

1. The “world” here does not mean simply the ordinary occupations and interests of human life. St. Paul was by no means dead to these things. On the contrary, he was a particularly active member of society, and succeeded in profoundly influencing the world. And in this respect at least he would have all Christians follow his example. What he is thinking of here is not so much the life as the thought, the spirit, the ambitions of this present world. It is the whole sensuous and material aspect of things that he here sees in contradiction to the spiritual. St. Paul’s “Cosmos” is the material universe, the sphere of external ordinances. He has ever in his view the evil influence of certain teachers who, afraid of the offence of the cross, sought to belittle it, and to hold up the old ceremonialism of the Jewish law as of equal account.

2. St. Paul himself could have gloried in his Jewish nationality—“an Hebrew of the Hebrews.” In those old days he had gloried in the law and the covenant and the promises. He had felt himself specially favoured of Heaven in having received, as he thought, a mandate to defend the faith of Israel and punish her enemies. He threw himself with vigour into the crusade against Christians; he was eager to obey the law to the last letter; he revelled in the esteem of his elders, and strove eagerly to win new laurels of praise.

But he forsook that career when he heard the words, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” Up to the point of his meeting with Jesus his whole life had been one long effort to obtain a sure sense of freedom and of the favour of God. For this he had toiled and fought and prayed. And when he found in the cross of Jesus Christ his highest hopes realized, and that which he had striven so desperately to earn offered to him as a free gift and won for him at the price of an infinite sacrifice, his joy and wonder, his gratitude and adoration, knew no bounds.

3. This new relationship between St. Paul and God involved necessarily a new relation between himself and the world around him. The gospel of the cross the Apostle had to preach not by words only but also by his life. We may be sure that his preaching would have been in vain if his way through life had not been beset with difficulties and hindrances. He has himself told us of the troubles which beset him on every hand—of the thirst and weariness, of the stripes and imprisonments, of the watchings and fastings, which he had to endure, as he was going about doing His Master’s work. St. Paul’s life was one long life of crucifixion. All that he loved, desired, and wished to attain was cast down, until at last he lay in the dark dungeon at Rome, waiting for the executioner that should lead him to his Lord. And all this he found to be a daily uplifting into a diviner life. The very submission to the cross of suffering brought him into such closer and closer union with Christ that the Divine life of Christ became incarnate in him. Conscious that his inner life was sustained by the Divine Spirit of Jesus, he could say, “It is not I that live, but Christ liveth in me.” And inasmuch as, like his dear Lord, he had been uplifted into the higher life of union with the Divine on the cross of suffering, as he was conscious that what was foreshadowed for all in the sacrifice and glorification of the human nature of our Lord was being accomplished in himself, he could also say, “Far be it from me to glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

If we have not got a cross, alas! we may conclude that we have not got Christ, for it is the first of His gifts. 1 [Note: “Rabbi” Duncan, in Recollections by A. Moody Stuart, 219.]

Crucify the rebellious self, mortify yourself wholly, give up all to God, and the peace which is not of this world will descend upon you. For eighteen centuries no grander word has been spoken; and although humanity is for ever seeking after a more exact and complete application of justice, yet her secret faith is not in justice but in pardon, for pardon alone conciliates the spotless purity of perfection with the infinite pity due to weakness—that is to say, it alone preserves and defends the idea of holiness, while it allows full scope to that of love. The Gospel proclaims the ineffable consolation, the good news, which disarms all earthly griefs, and robs even death of its terrors—the news of irrevocable pardon, that is to say, of eternal life. The cross is the guarantee of the gospel. Therefore it has been its standard. 2 [Note: Amicl’s Journal (trans. by Mrs. Humphry Ward), 168.]

Thy Cross cruciferous doth flower in all

And every cross, dear Lord, assigned to us:

Ours lowly-statured crosses; Thine how tall,

Thy Cross cruciferous.

Thy Cross alone life-giving, glorious:

For love of Thine, souls love their own when small,

Easy and light, or great and ponderous.

Since deep calls deep, Lord, hearken when we call;

When cross calls Cross racking and emulous:—

Remember us with him who shared Thy gall,

Thy Cross cruciferous. 3 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Poetical Works, 167.]

Glorying in the Cross

Literature

Aitchison (J.), The Cross of Christ, 193.

Alcorn (J.), The Sure Foundation, 315.

Barry (A.), The Atonement of Christ, 93.

Benson (E. W.), Boy-Life, 295.

Bonar (H.), Short Sermons for Family Reading, 138, 148.

Burrell (D. J.), For Christ’s Crown, 33.

Clayton (C.), Stanhope Sermons, 278.

Craigie (J. A.), The Country Pulpit, 149.

Davies (D.), Talks with Men, Women and Children, iv. 202.

Drummond (R. J.), Faith’s Certainties, 125.

Dykes (J. O.), Plain Words on Great Themes, 31.

Edgar (R. M.), The Philosophy of the Cross, 221.

Greenhough (J. G.), The Cross in Modern Life, 1.

Grimley (H. N.), The Temple of Humanity, 44.

Henderson (A.), The Measure of a Man, 139.

Ingram (A. F. W.), The Faith of Church and Nation, 159.

Jerdan (C.), For the Lord’s Table, 313.

Lewis (E. W.), The Unescapeable Christ, 183.

Little (J.), The Cross in Human Life, 11.

Little (J.), Glorying in the Lord, 70.

Little (W. J. K.), The Light of Life, 268.

Little (W. J. K.), The Perfect Life, 149, 206.

Mabie (H. C.), The Meaning and Message of the Cross, 21.

Meyer (F. B.), From Calvary to Pentecost, 9.

Milne (R. S.), The True Ground of Faith, 21.

Moss (R. W.), The Discipline of the Soul, 41.

Parks (L.), The Winning of the Soul, 152.

Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, vi. 241.

Sage (W. C.), Sermons Preached in the Villages, 147.

Selbie (W. B.), The Servant of God, 179.

Winterbotham (R.), Sermons, 166.

Woodward (H.) Sermons, 334.

Christian World Pulpit, xiii. 228 (J. C. Gallaway); xxxvii. 312 (T. Whitelaw); lxiv. 387 (W. Jones); lxvii. 52 (N. H. Marshall); lxxvii. 262 (R. C. Gillie); lxxviii. 124 (H. Bisseker).

Church of England Pulpit, lx. 237 (C. Wordsworth).

Church Pulpit Year Book, 1904, p. 226; 1913, p. 158.

Verse 17

The Marks of Jesus

From henceforth let no man trouble me; for I bear branded on my body the marks of Jesus.— Galatians 6:17.

The Apostle was growing an old man. He was stamped and marked by life. The wounds of his conflicts, the furrows of his years, were on him. And all these wounds and furrows had come to him since the great change of his life. They were closely bound up with the service of his Master. Every scar must still have quivered with the earnestness of the words of Christian loyalty which brought the blow that made it. See what he calls these scars, then. “I bear branded on my body the marks of Jesus.” He had a figure in his mind. He was thinking of the way in which a master branded his slaves. Burnt into their very flesh, they carried the initial of their master’s name, or some other sign that they belonged to him, that they were not their own. That mark on the slave’s body kept any other but his own master from touching him or compelling his labour. It was the sign at once of his servitude to one master and of his freedom from all others. St. Paul says that these marks in his flesh, which signify his servitude to Jesus, are the witnesses of his freedom from every other service. Since he is responsible to his Master, he is responsible to no one else.

The stigmata are the marks of ownership branded on the Apostle’s body. These stigmata were used: (1) In the case of domestic slaves. With these, however, branding was not usual, at least among the Greeks and Romans, except to mark out such as had attempted to escape or had otherwise misconducted themselves, hence called “stigmatized (literati),” and such brands were held to be a badge of disgrace. (2) Slaves attached to some temple or persons devoted to the service of some deity were so branded. (3) Captives were so treated in very rare cases. (4) Soldiers sometimes branded the name of their commander on some part of their body. The metaphor here is most appropriate, if referred to the second of these classes. Such a practice at all events cannot have been unknown in a country which was the home of the worship of Cybele. A temple slave is mentioned in a Galatian inscription. The brands of which the Apostle speaks were doubtless the permanent marks which he bore of persecution undergone in the service of Christ. 1 [Note: J. B. Lightfoot, St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, 225.]

In the Roman Empire when a slave ran away, if he was caught, his owner might have him stripped, the irons heated, and the letters “FVG.” ( fugitivus) branded upon him. Perhaps the owner’s initials might be burnt on the slave, too. The practice long survived in France, where convicts were branded “V” ( voleur), or “TF” (travail forcé), and people took their children to see it done as a lesson in virtue. The historian, Herodotus, tells us that in Egypt, if a slave were dissatisfied with his master, he might go to the temple of Herakles and take on him the stigmata of the god, and be free for ever of his master and belong to the god. Such marks were indelible. 2 [Note: T. R. Glover, Vocation, 36.]

The branding was a mark of shame. No man was branded of his own free will—apart from slaves taking on them such a brand as that of Herakles, which was to exchange one servitude for another. To be the slave of Jesus Christ had not been Paul’s intention. The shame of bearing Christ’s name—of being “made as the filth of the world, the off-scouring of all things” ( 1 Corinthians 4:13)—the loss of home and family and friendships, of everything ( Php_3:8 )—the squalid life of privation, insult, persecution and danger—humiliation from beginning to end—no man would have chosen it, and Paul did not choose it. It was a vocation: “Necessity is laid upon me; yea, woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel! For if I do this thing willingly, I have a reward: but if against my will, I am entrusted with a stewardship” ( 1 Corinthians 9:16-17). A steward was very often a slave, if not always. Paul is at the beck and call of another whom he never chose to make his Master. He must have no will of his own. “Go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do” ( Acts 9:6),—so far was he from choosing a vocation, he has to wait for his orders.

The two responsibilities go together—the servant is responsible to the Master, and the Master to the servant. The very stigmata themselves become so many promises. The body is marked all over with signs of the Master’s use, as a favourite book, which a man reads often, shows most signs of wear—pencilled in here and there, crushed, worn and shabby, and in all these things identified with the reader who cannot do without it. The battered body and the tried and weary spirit are reminders themselves to Paul that “Christ liveth in me.” 1 [Note: T. R. Glover, Vocation, 37.]

I

Outward Marks

Every Christian man or woman ought to bear in his or her body, in a plain, literal sense, the tokens that he or she belongs to Jesus Christ. You ask how? “If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee.” There are things in our physical nature that we have to suppress; that we have always to regulate and coerce; that we have sometimes entirely to cast away and do without, if we mean to be Jesus Christ’s at all. The old law of self-denial, of subduing the animal nature, its passions, appetites, desires, is as true and as needful to-day as it ever was; and for us all it is essential to the loftiness and purity of our Christian life that our animal nature and our fleshly constitution should be well kept down under heel and subdued. If we are not living a life of self-denial, if we are not crucifying the flesh with its affections and lusts, if we are not “bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life also of Christ may be manifested in our body,” what tokens are there that we are Christ’s slaves at all?

The marks of Christ are brands burnt into the very body, so no outward thing will satisfy; nothing that your hands have done, nothing that the world can measure, for it is beneath all the dress and apparel of a so-called religious life, of which the world takes cognizance. They are part and parcel of yourself, so they can be nothing which can be taken up and laid down at will. They are inseparable, like flesh of your flesh and bone of your bone. You may be stripped of all else, like a body washed ashore, but by these shall it be known whether you are Christ’s or no. 2 [Note: Canon Furse.]

At the Cross, Bunyan tells us, Christian received four gifts from the angels—peace, new raiment, a mark, and a sealed roll. The mark, like the raiment, has to do with the outward appearance, but it is more intimately connected with the individuality of the man than the new garments. It seems to stand for something distinguishable by others, which is in a stricter sense ourselves than even our character is—a subtle change wrought upon the very personality by the Cross of Christ, as the marks of the Cross were printed upon St. Francis of Assisi in the familiar incident of the stigmata. In the Bible there are such references as the mark of Cain; the mark of Ezekiel’s man with the slaughter-weapon; the mark of the beast and the mark in the foreheads of the chosen ones, recorded in Revelation. All these illustrate in various ways the subtle change in men, recognizable by others, produced by supreme experiences of good and evil. 1 [Note: John Kelman, The Road, i. 72.]

1. Here is a man whose restless spirit, whose keen hungry eye, whose hard face, whose metallic voice, tells the story of a sordid soul. Do we need to ask anything about his master? We know, as we listen to him, as we look into his face, that he has a craving for money; that his life is spent in following the god of gold, and worshipping in the temple of mammon. Mammon is his master, and he bears branded upon his body the “stigmata” of the master he serves. Here is one whose bloated face, feverish lips, and furtive glance tell of sensuality. The vice seems to have petrified on the countenance. Not a finger-touch of God seems to be left there. We know the name of the master that man serves. He bears branded upon his sensual face the marks of the master whose slave he is. The name of his master is lust. Here is another whose mien betokens a lofty indifference and a contemptuous disregard for others, and an unquestioning appropriation of the best of everything. Those haughty looks tell the story of a life completely dominated by pride. Here is another whose face is scarred and marred with anguish. It says, as you look at it, “I am a man who has seen affliction.” The furrowed face, wrinkled brow, and sunken cheeks tell of a life that has been trodden by the hoof of sorrow. We know that the man has spent long years in the school of sorrow; he bears on his body the “stigmata” of pain.

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson’s play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, “I won’t count this time!” Well! he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering it, and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes. Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. Of course, this has its good side as well as its bad one. As we become permanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific, spheres by so many separate acts and hours of work. 1 [Note: W. James, Principles of Psychology, i. 127.]

In one of Tolstoy’s books he represents an ideal Czar who keeps open house and table for all comers. But the guests had to face one condition—each man had to show his hands before sitting down to the feast. Those whose hands were rough and hard with honest toil were welcomed to the best of the board, but those whose hands were soft and white had only the crusts and crumbs. The hands were the index of the soul. The hard rough hands told the story of toil, sacrifice, and suffering, and it was for these the best of the feast was spread. 2 [Note: J. G. Mantle, God’s To-morrow, 38.]

2. The face of a Christian disciple should testify to the grace of God within. It is a matter of constant observation that strong ruling emotions of heart do come, in time, to stamp themselves upon the countenance. Sometimes we see a face that speaks of beaming kindliness, or of sweet, devout, and holy peace. What God wants is that His character should be so stamped upon the lives of all His children that every observer of their daily walk should recognize in them what is really Divine.

After the death of the saintly McCheyne, a letter addressed to him was found in his locked desk, a letter he had shown to no one while he lived. It was from one who wrote to tell him that he had been the means of leading him to Christ, and in it were these words, “It was nothing that you said that first made me wish to be a Christian, it was the beauty of holiness which I saw in your very face.” 3 [Note: G. H. Knight, Divine Upliftings, 159.]

II

Spiritual Marks

1. While it is true that the primary reference of the text is to the scars of old and recent wounds which St. Paul had endured in the service of Christ, these were not the only “marks of Jesus” that he bore. After all, the true marks of Jesus are not outward but inward, not physical but spiritual. It was the Apostle Paul himself who said, “If any man hath not the spirit of Christ, he is none of his.” And in St. Paul’s own case, the wounds he bore, while in some respects the most striking, were not the deepest and most convincing “marks” of Jesus. The final and absolutely decisive proof that St. Paul belonged to Christ was that he had the spirit of Christ and that Christ lived over again in him.

The brand of Christ may be upon the mind and heart as truly as upon the body: on the mind, in the effort we make to subdue our natural arrogance and pride into humbleness and faith; on the heart, in the loving pity we have for the misfortunes of others. Are our minds no longer conformed to the spirit of the world, but transformed to the image of the Son; so that the mind that was in Christ is the mind that is in us? Are our hearts thus quick to suffer in the suffering of others, as His was, who by force of sympathy bore our grief and carried our sorrows? Therein only can we rest, thus only be at peace about ourselves; and as we pass through the detractions and misunderstandings of this world, and as we journey down the long road whose goal is death, we can learn to say, “Let no man trouble me—let me not even be troubled for myself—I have the marks of Christ, I know whom I have believed, and who shall separate me from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus, my Lord?” To have the marks, the brands, the stigmata, the open proofs of self-surrender and self-sacrifice—that alone counts.

There is a tendency, even in these days, to think Christ’s “marks” are external and mechanical. We think sometimes that the “mark” of a Christian is that he observes the Sabbath and attends church services and belongs to some ecclesiastical organization. I do not disparage the Sabbath and church attendance and membership. But these external things are not the “real” marks of Jesus. Did not Jesus Himself say that a man may have all manner of Church guarantees and certificates and be none of His? Did He not say, “Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy by thy name, and by thy name cast out devils, and by thy name do many mighty works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.” No, it is not the crucifix on the watch-chain, or the “S.A.” on the collar, or the name on the church roll that constitutes the marks of Jesus. The marks are inward and spiritual. They are certain features of character, and especially these three, obedience, love, sacrifice. Indeed, our Lord Himself emphasized and underlined these three things as being, above all others, the marks of His servants. First, obedience. “Whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother.” Secondly, love. “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” And thirdly, sacrifice. “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” Have we got these marks? Is our life characterized by an utter obedience to God, a great passion for souls, a remorseless sacrifice of self? We ask sometimes, “Hath He marks to lead me to Him, if He be my guide?” And we answer, “Yes, He has certain infallible marks: ‘In His feet and hands are wound-prints, and His side.’ ” But there is another question: Have we the marks that single us out as His? Does the world recognize Christ’s marks on us? Life always leaves its mark. The life of greed leaves its mark. The life of frivolous self-pleasing leaves its mark. The life of sin leaves its mark. And the life of Christian service leaves its mark. “They took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus.” The world, in their courage and devotion and self-sacrifice, saw the “marks of Jesus.” But more important still, does Jesus see the “marks”? “The Lord knoweth them that are his.” How? By the marks. We read how, in the last great day, there will be a division and a discrimination. The great Shepherd will then gather and fold His sheep. And that is how He will know them—by the “marks.” Shall we then be amongst the sheep on the right hand? It all comes back to this: Do we bear branded upon us the “marks” of Jesus—the infallible signs and tokens of His service? Do we possess that spirit of obedience to God, and love to men, and utter self-sacrifice which a real surrender of ourselves to Jesus Christ always produces? “For if any man hath not the spirit of Christ, he is none of his.” 1 [Note: J. D. Jones, The Gospel of Grace, 249.]

As in the Christ, though men beheld no beauty—

Only the marks of suffering and care,

God, from the first, beheld His own bright image

Rejoicing in the revelation fair.

So, where His children, looking on each other,

See forms and faces marred by pain and woe,

God, looking on the depths and not the surface,

Sees oftentimes His likeness formed below. 2 [Note: Edith H. Divall, A Believer’s Rest, 35.]

2. The “stigmata,” the marks of Christ their Master, cannot be mistaken. His followers have His marks on their body, as signs that they are members of His Body, in all purity and chastity and holiness, as being “temples of the Holy Ghost.” But they also have His marks on their temper, as those who have taken up their cross and borne it after Him in self-denial and mortification, in patience, in forgiveness, in humility, in cheerfulness; His marks on their soul, as being set free from condemnation by the atoning mercy of the Saviour, as being made partakers of the precious fruits of His sacrifice upon the Cross—the mark of justification, and the mark of sanctification, the imputed righteousness of Christ, the imparted and inherent righteousness wrought in them by the Holy Ghost; His marks on their spirit; being full of all spiritual affections—love, joy, peace, patience amid the trials of earth, longing for the security of Heaven, the present enjoyment of an almost perfect rest in the arms of God; in short, “a life hid with Christ in God.”

I would not miss one sigh or tear,

Heart-pang, or throbbing brow;

Sweet was the chastisement severe,

And sweet its memory now.

Yes! let the fragrant scars abide,

Love-tokens in Thy stead,

Faint shadows of the spear-pierced side

And thorn-encompass’d head.

And such Thy tender force be still,

When self would swerve or stray,

Shaping to truth the froward will

Along Thy narrow way.

Deny me wealth; far, far remove

The lure of power or name;

Hope thrives in straits, in weakness love,

And faith in this world’s shame. 1 [Note: J. H. Newman, Verses on Various Occasions.]

III

Stigmata of the Saints

1. The Apostle, it may be added, may have used the word “stigmata” with special reference to those marks in the body of his blessed Lord which were in the eyes of faith the symbol of salvation, and which love imagined to be reproduced in the disciple; those marks on which Thomas looked, and cried aloud, “My Lord, and my God.” For in the heat of his love of Christ, and in the certainty of his oneness with Him, what image was more natural than that of his own heart bearing the traces of the wounds of Christ? Such a thought must have passed into the minds of many saints of God; and where legendary fancy has expressed it outwardly, in the figures of holy men receiving actually in their bodies the print of their Saviour’s wounds, can we not read in the painter’s art the spiritual truth, “I bear branded on my body the marks of Jesus”?

St. Francis of Assisi in the year 1224 a.d. received in a trance the wound-prints of the Saviour on his body; and from that time to his death, it is reported, the saint had the physical appearance of one who had suffered crucifixion. Other instances, to the number of eighty, have been recorded in the Roman Catholic Church of the reproduction, in more or less complete form, of the five wounds of Jesus and the agonies of the cross; chiefly in the case of nuns. The last was that of Louise Lateau, who died in Belgium in the year 1883. That such phenomena have occurred there is no sufficient reason to doubt. It is difficult to assign any limits to the power of the human mind over the body in the way of sympathetic imitation. Since St. Francis’ day many Romanist divines have read the Apostle’s language in this sense; but the interpretation has followed rather than given rise to this fulfilment. In whatever light these manifestations may be regarded, they are a striking witness to the power of the cross over human nature. Protracted meditation on the sufferings of our Lord, aided by a lively imagination and a susceptible physique, has actually produced a rehearsal of the bodily pangs and the wound-marks of Calvary. 1 [Note: G. G. Findlay, The Epistle to the Galatians, 457.]

The name of a well-known scientific man having been mentioned, who, forbidden to work, occupies himself in closely watching his own case, Sir James Paget said, “It is a most dangerous thing to do that; people, by dwelling upon symptoms which they have not got, are very apt to produce them.” I said: “I have been told that the stigmata might quite well be produced in that way.” “Undoubtedly,” he replied. 2 [Note: M. E. Grant-Duff, Notes from a Diary, 1892–95, 44.]

2. There is something far better for us to do than so to contemplate the sufferings of our Lord as depicted by human art, that the stigmata may literally appear on our hands and feet. It is so to contemplate our Lord in the whole spirit of His life and service and sacrifice, and so to come under His influence, that the spirit of His life and cross shall enter into us, and we shall go away from the secret place of contemplation to reproduce His image and likeness in conduct and character—that we, “beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord,” may be “changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.”

In all art and literature, in every great and new creation, the impulse seems to lie in a new and vivid experience which makes a new knowledge. The man who was branded “FVG.,” like the woman in Hawthorne’s novel who wore the scarlet letter or the man who did not, knew something of those letters of the alphabet in quite a different way from all the rest. A burning experience and a burning memory indelible from flesh and spirit gave him those. It is somehow so that the poet learns his peculiar alphabet—something is burnt in upon him, perhaps in pain, perhaps in joy, for the joy of insight may go with pain and overwhelm it—and you get a new man, a “God-intoxicated man,” like Spinoza, perhaps—or a Jacob Behmen. All knowledge is changed for him; he knew before;—no, he thought he did; but he knows now—not so many things, but the one thing in a new way that alters all. “If any man be in Christ,” said Paul, “it is a new creation.” All things are made new—they have new values in the new light, and none is ever again what it was before; it cannot be. Life has a new intensity, a new direction a new purpose. It becomes a vocation. 1 [Note: T. R. Glover, Vocation, 45.]

I saw in Siena pictures,

Wandering wearily;

I sought not the names of the masters,

Nor the works men care to see;

But once in a low-ceiled passage

I came on a place of gloom,

Lit here and there with halos

Like saints within the room.

The pure, serene, mild colours

The early artists used

Had made my heart grow softer,

And still on peace I mused.

Sudden I saw the Sufferer,

And my frame was clenched with pain;

Perchance no throe so noble

Visits my soul again.

Mine were the stripes of the scourging;

On my thorn-pierced brow blood ran;

In my breast the deep compassion

Breaking the heart for man.

I drooped with heavy eyelids,

Till evil should have its will;

On my lips was silence gathered;

My waiting soul stood still.

I gazed, nor knew I was gazing;

I trembled, and woke to know

Him whom they worship in heaven

Still walking on earth below.

Once have I borne His sorrows

Beneath the flail of fate!

Once in the woe of His passion,

I felt the soul grow great!

I turned from my dead Leader;

I passed the silent door;

The grey-walled street received me:

On peace I mused no more. 1 [Note: G. E. Woodberry.]

IV

Christ’s Ownership

The ownership of Christ is one of the great realities of the Christian life. We speak of Christ as our Saviour, our Friend, our Example, our Teacher, but how seldom do we think and speak of Him as our Owner! And yet He is. We belong not to ourselves, but to Him. Our time, our talents, our money, our business, our home—all that we call our own is not so much ours as His. We were “bought with a price,” and we belong to Him who bought us.

That which is abject degradation when it is rendered to a man, that which is blasphemous presumption when it is required by a man, that which is impossible, in its deepest reality, as between man and man, is possible, is blessed, is joyful and strong when it is required by, and rendered to, Jesus Christ. We are His slaves if we have any living relationship to Him at all. Where, then, in the Christian life, is there a place for self-will; where a place for self-indulgence; where for murmuring or reluctance; where for the assertion of any rights of our own as against that Master? We owe absolute obedience and submission to Jesus Christ. The Christian slavery, with its abject submission, with its utter surrender and suppression of our own will, with its complete yielding up of self to the control of Jesus, who died for us; because it is based upon His surrender of Himself to us, and its inmost essence it is the operation of love, is therefore co-existent with the noblest freedom.

The Hebrews had a scheme of qualified slavery. A man might sell his service for six years, but at the end of that time he was scot-free. On the New Year’s morning of the seventh year he was granted his full liberty, and given some grain and oil to begin life with anew. But if on that morning he found himself reluctant to leave all his ties binding him to his master’s home, this was the custom among them. He would say to his master, “I don’t want to leave you. This is home to me. I love you and the mistress. I love the place. All my ties and affections are here. I want to stay with you always.” His master would say, “Do you mean this?” “Yes,” the man would reply, “I want to belong to you forever.” Then his master would call in the leading men of the village or neighbourhood to witness the occurrence. And he would take his servant out to the door of the home, and standing him up against the door-jamb, would pierce the lobe of his ear through with an awl. Then the man became, not his slave, but his bond-slave, forever. It was a personal surrender of himself to his master; it was voluntary; it was for love’s sake; it was for service; it was after a trial; it was for life. Now, that was what Jesus did. The scar-mark of Jesus’ surrender was not in His ear, as with the old Hebrew slave. It was on His cheek, and brow, on His back, in His side and hands and feet. The scar-marks of His surrender were—are—all over His face and form. Everybody who surrenders bears some scar of it because of sin, his own or somebody else’s. Referring to the suffering endured in service, Paul tenderly reckons it as a mark of Jesus’ ownership—“I bear the scars, the stigmata, of the Lord Jesus.” Even of the Master Himself is this so. And that scarred Jesus, whose body told and tells of His surrender to His Father, comes to us. And with those hands eagerly outstretched, and eyes beaming with the earnestness of His great passion for men, He says, “Yoke up with Me. Let Me have the control of all your splendid powers, in carrying out our Father’s will for a world.” 1 [Note: 1 S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Service, 85.]

Some scars are ornaments. I do not know a more splendid word in all the supremely splendid Epistles of St. Paul than “I bear branded on my body the marks of Jesus.” “Do you see this?” he said, “I was stoned there”; and then he would pull up his sleeve and say, “Do you see that?—it is the mark of the scourge. If you could only see my back, I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus”; he exhibited them as some men parade their degrees. His scars were his crown. 2 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

Walk through Greenwich Hospital, or go down to Chelsea and talk to some of the old pensioners. Are they ashamed of their scars? Why, I remember how, a few months back, we had, at one of our meetings, a brother who had served in the Crimean War, and he showed me how a bayonet had gone in here and come out there—how there was a mark in his arm where a ball had gone right through and a scar in his face where the sword had cut. I think he said that he had about twenty scars on him, and his eyes flashed fire as he told the story.3 [Note: 3 Archibald G. Brown.]

The “marks” of valour that the soldier obtains on the field of battle are invariably a matter of pride to himself and his friends. Lord Raglan’s orderly officer, Lieutenant Leslie, was wounded at the battle of Alma. On the evening of that day Lord Raglan said to another officer, “Do you know Tom Leslie’s mother? She is a charming woman. I must write to her. How proud she will be to hear that her son has a bullet in his shoulder!” At the battle of Busaco in Portugal, in 1810, Sir Charles Napier, afterwards the conqueror of Scinde, was shot through the face. His two brothers had been wounded a short time before, and when he wrote to his mother he said, “You have the pride of saying your three sons have been wounded and are all alive. How this would have repaid my father for all his anxieties, and it must do so for you. Why, a Roman matron would not have let people touch her garment in such a case. There is no shame for such wounds. The scars on my face will be as good as medals; better, for they were not gained by hiding behind a wall.” 4 [Note: The Morning Watch, 1895, p. 62.]

If Thou, my Christ, to-day

Shouldst speak to me and say,

“ What battles hast thou fought for Me?

Show Me thy scars; I fain would see

Love’s depth of victory;”

If Thou shouldst speak, my Christ,

My Leader and my King,

And bid me lay my wounds in sight,

The scars borne just for Thee in fight,

What love-scars could I bring?