Verse 36
The Self-destroyer
What is the particular truth of the text? It is that sin is not only an offence to God, whom no man hath seen nor can see, but it is a distinct and irreparable injury to the man, the sinner, himself. "Whoso sinneth against me, doth not wrong me only, but wrongeth himself." And that is the only way to get hold of man. Oh, the infinite cunning, the infinite subtlety, the holy inspiration of this immortal volume! Tell a man that by sinning he is hurting the unseen God, and what does he care? You can only get hold of a man in so far as any truth you teach or any requisite you demand impinges upon himself. Touch the little Self, and you have put a hook in the nose of leviathan. That is the subject, that to do wrong is not only to do an injury to an unseen spirit, but to do a positive injury to the man guilty of that wrong himself.
There is a plant, and I say to the sun, "I am not any longer going to be under obligation to you; I am going to keep this plant in the cellar," and I take down the plant that ought to be in the very middle of the garden, miles away from any shadow, and say to the sun, "I am going to do without you." Do I injure the sun? Not at all. What do I injure? The plant. The sun says, "I want to shine upon that plant, and to bring out of its juices all the beauty that is hidden there, and I would do so if you would allow me: whoso, plant of any kind, sins against me, or is made to sin against me, wrongs itself; does not wrong me, does not impair my shining. My light shall be as pure and lavish as ever, but the plant that is withdrawn from my shining shall die." And the sun blazes on, performing his circuit and accomplishing his appointed work.
I say to Nature, "You have given me two arms; I am going to bind one of them to my side and never to use it. My purpose is to do as well as I can with one arm and one hand." What does Nature say? Nature says, "I meant you to use both arms; if you do not use both those limbs you will not injure me Nature; you will set aside my purpose; you will destroy the limb." But cannot I bind my arm to my side and keep it there while I please, and allow it to hang there, and then let it grow as it may be able? "No," Nature says, "no." The everlasting ordinances of God, written on Sinai, written in the dust, written in the air, written everywhere, say "No." Whoso sinneth against physiological law wrongeth his own nature, his own flesh and blood, and he shall feel, in manifold penalty, in excruciating pain, in gradual and irresistible decay, that he has violated eternal law. That is the distinct teaching of the text. He that sinneth against wisdom, Christ, truth, light, purity, wrongeth his own soul, commits suicide, brings himself to an untimely death and a dishonoured grave.
It may be difficult to show men that they ought not to sin against a being whom they have never seen, or against spiritual and moral laws which they had no share in determining. Man may under those circumstances get up a kind of metaphysical defence against such obedience; but this unhappy possibility is met and overruled by the unalterable and appalling fact that not to obey is to suffer, to sin is to decline and perish, to go away from truth and purity and honour is to go into darkness and shame and intolerable torment. That is the tremendous hold which God has over us. Understand that God's argument with man is not an affair of words which may be twisted by strong and skilful reasoners in any shape and direction which their genius may suggest; God's hold over us is this, that if a branch be cut out of the vine no man on earth can save it from decay. And the appeal of the divine Being is to facts; the great contention of Christianity with us is not as to a set of notions their metaphysical value, their philosophical relationship to one another, and their general bearing on the civilisation of the day: the great argument to man is this He that believeth shall be saved; he that believeth not shall be damned. The issue is sharp enough: there is no room there for quibbling and shuffling; we are shut up against a granite wall, higher than we can measure with the eye, wider than any line of ours can bring to figures. This is the argument which can soon be brought to the test; a child can prove it no giant can escape it. I propose, then, to bring you upon ground that is very narrow to shut you up to an argument that you cannot escape from and be fair to the first principles of justice, to the elements of common honesty.
You have a strong emotional nature; you allow that. You cannot deny it if you are sane. My question immediately following your admission is, What are you going to make of it? You can laugh, cry, grieve, rejoice; you can show anger, sympathy, feeling of every kind: you have a tremendous steam power in you what are you going to do with it? The question is not, Will you have it? you have got it. To what use will you put it? Suppress it? Then you will wrong your own soul. Turn it towards low objects? Then you will debase one of the highest gifts of your nature. You must use it; you have it without your own consent, and the question which you have to answer must answer practically or verbally, or both, is, What are you going to make of that emotional nature of yours? It is the grand motive power of your being; you have passion, you have enthusiasm, you can weep bitterly, you can laugh triumphantly and rejoicingly what are you going to do with that dynamic power of human life? Are you going to despise emotion? That is the first sign of your falling. Are you as the apostle describes some persons whom he knew past feeling? Then you are very nearly in perdition; one step more and the outer darkness encloses you within its infinite fold, from which there is no escape.
If you do not touch a man emotionally you do not get the man at all. So long as he is merely arguing, contending, defending himself intellectually and logically against certain mental assaults, you may silence the man, but you will get no good out of him. Touch his emotion, move his heart, be master of his tears, keep the secret of his joy, and then you are master of him. Christ's grand appeal is to our feeling, our emotion, our homage, our loyalty: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy mind." The intellect itself is thus turned into an organ of devotion. If you suppress your emotion you will go down in the quality and the quantity of your being. You will desiccate your soul that is to say, you will take out of it all the vital juices, and you will become a mere thing, an article with a price attached to it, a life that has no immortality, a soul devoid of hope without hope because without God in the world.
Observe it is possible to suppress emotion: it is possible to say to your tears, "I do not want you;" it is possible to say to your laughter, "I shall never call you into operation;" it is possible to take a knife and cut out of the soul, so to speak, its grand emotional power. Some men seem to have done this; you never saw a hearty expression of emotion in all your intercourse with them: it is all dry, arithmetical, superficial, many inches deep in dust; wanting in the holy enthusiasm, the fiery passion, the tender emotion, which after all conquers and elevates the world. "He that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul," tears the stops out of the great organ of his being, and then expects that organ to play as voluminously, as powerfully, as tenderly and delicately as if he had not torn out of their places the stops that were needful to give full expression to the powers of his soul.
You have a great imaginative nature; the question is not, Will you have an imagination? You have it. Then the inquiry comes instantly upon that fact, What are you going to do with your imaginative nature? You cannot live within the narrow circle of things visible; you must, speaking generally alas! there are exceptional instances you must wonder about the unseen, the distant, and the future, if you are true to your instincts: and to begin to wonder in any intelligent and just manner is to begin to worship. Give me a man who sometimes says, feeling a pressure of the brain he can hardly bear, "I wonder what is beyond that blue veil, that stellar dome, that mystic night, that far and inaccessible horizon?" Give me a man who shall put these questions, express these wonders, and I say to him, "Thou art not far from the kingdom of God." Wonder may be the beginning of worship What are you going to do with your imagination? I will tell you what you can do with it: you can take a knife and cut its wings off, and let it labour and perish in the dust; you can keep your imagination at home and starve it, but if you do so you will sit down to a pauper's crust when you might revel at the banquet of a king. What are you going to do with that imagination of yours? He that sinneth against that wrongeth his own soul. "Why," say you, "I intend to take in the whole material universe." Do you? What is the whole? There, you see, I bring you straight to a wall which you cannot scale and you cannot penetrate. What do you mean by the whole? How do you know that when you have reached the end of your line it is not the beginning of another and a longer line still? "Well, but," you reply, "I am going to keep my imagination within that line." Then you are going to prevent it enjoying its widest liberty. The moment you call it home you interfere with its functions, you endanger its life, you withdraw it from the sun and the light, which are the necessary elements of its very existence. But suppose now you could find out the whole material universe, and say, standing on some central star, "I see all the constellations, all the planets, all the asteroids, all the material creation;" even then that marvellous imagination of yours has not scope enough it feels the bars and says, "I see daylight beyond; what is this which falls upon my eye, that assails my ear, that challenges me further still what is this?" Aye, what is that? and if you say you will not go out of the cage when the door is open, and the greatening universe sends you still larger and more hospitable invitations, then you wrong your own soul. The whole material universe, as you call it, or as it is conceivable by us, is a bird's small cage compared with the infinite resources of him who fainteth not, neither is weary, and of whose understanding there is no searching. Whoso sinneth against me, wrongeth his own soul, belittles himself, trivialises his own nature, wastes his powers, shuts himself up in a cell, when he might be enjoying the liberty of an ever-expanding firmament.
You have a profound moral nature; what are you going to make of it? "Well," some one will say, "I am going to do right." What is right? Are you going to do the infinite right or your own notion of rectitude? What is your standard to what do you appeal? Your right may be wrong to me, and I may be able to prove it to be wrong to you; right is not an affair of terms, is not a metaphysical distinction between one word and another it is an eternal quantity, it comes to man first by intuition, and secondly by revelation. Before, therefore, you can satisfy me on that side of the argument, you must give me distinctly to understand by what standard you determine the absolute right. "Well, then," you may perhaps reply, "I am going to do the best I can." Do you say so? I give you time to recall the words, and modify them. If you insist upon that form of words, I hasten with a reply, bright as lightning, cutting as a sword Who is to be judge of the best you can? Whoever did the best it is possible for him to do? One young man thought he had done so, when he had kept the commandments in the letter. Whoever imagines that he has kept the commandments has reached the very consummation of self-deception; they cannot be kept, they grow upon the man who tries to keep them. He realises his first conception, and then that conception broadens, enlarges, heightens, and says, "Further still." "Thou shalt not kill." The man says, "I have not killed; I have kept that commandment at all events," and the commandment says, "No perhaps not; it may be thou art a murderer, though no red-hot blood ever fell upon thy trembling hand." "Whoso hateth his brother, or is angry with his brother without a cause, hath committed murder in his heart." Who then is to be judge of the best you can do? You cannot be your own judge, otherwise we should have millions of standards, and various heights and various qualities; there must be one law, one judge, one commandment, one faith, one Lord, one baptism. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord. Ah, I find that your protestations and propositions of moral behaviour will not bear cross-examination; they shrivel under scrutiny because there is no real life in them.
So this is the hold God has upon us: "He that sinneth against me wrongeth himself." You do so physically. Do you imagine that you can do as you please physically and escape all consequences? God makes you possess in your bones the effects of your moral action. Once a man came into a new experience, and abruptly exclaimed, "Thou makest me to possess the iniquities of my youth." He thought he had escaped these he was fifty years away, mayhap, from boyhood and early manhood; but at seventy his old sins caught him and they always will do so. A man says, "Surely I can devote what hours I please to business." You cannot without moral consequences. You cannot turn up a gas lamp after a certain hour without Nature standing over you and marking down something against your account.
You imagine that you have been proceeding comfortably, successfully, triumphantly, and making a fortune, while, in fact, you have so used your brain as to entail upon that little boy of yours and that little girl paralysis of the highest powers, a life-long disability and manifold discomfort. Do you imagine that you have got the keys of the universe at your girdle and can do as you like? If it were a question of metaphysical morality, and you were to be told that there is an account against you above the blue sky, you would laugh at the speaker as a sentimentalist, and, therefore, God comes right down and works in your bones, so that one day will find you a tottering old man, saying, "I have not only injured myself, but my poor children. I so wrought my brain as to leave them a legacy of the most painful kind." Therefore, God does not give up life the Lord still brings us to practical judgments, to distinct personal consequences of our action, and we who would shrink from any merely metaphysical Divinity, from any philosophical conception of right, are bound to feel in our own flesh and blood and bones that we have done wrong. What are you going to do? The good man makes the best of his powers; the Christian man gets the best out of himself; righteousness makes a man realise the grandest of his powers, the widest of his capacities, and imparts to him as he goes along such instalments of heaven as are consistent with a life upon earth.
If you want to sleep well, be good. If you want to do your business well, be good. If you want to enjoy your holiday, be good. If you want to make a. penny go furthest, be good. If you want a happy home, be good. That is where God has his terrific hold over us if we insult him in what we suppose to be the sentimentalities and metaphysics of nature, in all those concerns which He immediately within the range of our present experience.
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