Verse 27
Practical Religion
The word "religion" here means religious service. Not religious doctrine, not religious profession of a merely nominal kind; but religious service, activity, conduct. This rendering of the text does not do away with faith, theology, doctrine, or spiritual conviction of any kind; the text is not speaking about that line of things at all. We want a ritual, a ceremonial, a code of action: Very good, says James; if you want that, here it is, pure ritual, pure religious service, real, honest, useful religious conduct is this. How many persons there are blessed or unblessed with aesthetic taste in religious ritual! What a marvellous study the religious antics of some men afford! They like a splendid service. James the Apostle says, So be it; here is the splendid service, without trumpet or drum or clash of metal, without colour or pomp or studied attitude, here it is: make room at the table for the orphans, gladden by your presence and assistance the houses that have been desolated by death, pure religious service is this. Yet how to get rid of that little imp of æstheticism, the bowing and beckoning and posturing and rising and falling and intoning, and only omniscience knows what besides! James looks on and says, You think you are religious pure religious service does not lie along that line at all: the orphans are round about the synagogue hungry and thirsty, or shivering with cold; pure religious service is to make room for them. That is not æstheticism, that does not lie along the genius of flowers and other emblems of nothing. But James is nothing if not practical; he is nothing if not stern, downright real, almost commercial. In James' church we seem to hear the clash of the scales as they go down upon its counter, and we hear his own voice, so clear and definite in tone, saying, We are wanting, we must have more, this will never do: you are weighed in the balance and found lacking. But we were very aesthetic; we took the Lord's Supper upon an empty stomach; we always looked towards the east when we were doing certain things, and toward the west when we were not doing them; we always perfumed the air of the church; we always went in at one door and came out by another: does that stand for nothing? Nothing! Pure religious service, real, downright, honest piety is this, To destroy the hunger of your neighbourhood, and make the desolate sing for joy. We have always been hard upon the Unitarians; we have expelled people from the church for not pronouncing " Shibboleth " with a good emphasis on the h ; if any man omitted the h we simply turned him out of church: our motto was, Sound doctrine: does that go for nothing? Nothing! That is not pure religious service. Of course, if James was mistaken, there is an end of the matter; if James had no right to speak on the subject, why quote his text at all? why not override him, or depose him, or ignore him, or forget him? If James has any status in the Church at all, he says that pure religious service, the right programme, is this: "To visit the fatherless," literally the orphan. You should increase your family by feeding the orphans; you should enlarge your service by looking out for real poverty and calling it to your hospitality; you should say Whom can I make happy this day? where can I disperse the cloud, or mitigate the storm, or lighten the weight of the burden? what blind folk can I lead across the thoroughfare, that they be not overrun or injured? where can I invest my soul's truest love of man, because truest love of God? And although you do not know the language of flowers, although you do not know the language of emblems at all, yet you will be regarded in the heavens as having rendered a pure religious service.
But this is very legal; and there are persons who would die rather than be legal in piety. They have a prejudice against that word "legal," principally arising, as nearly every prejudice does, from not knowing what it means. There is nothing so difficult to get rid of as ignorance. Ignorance dies hard. You cut it in two, but still both the pieces begin to wriggle; you have only two worms instead of one. You cut ignorance up syllable by syllable, but every syllable lives, and comes back and sets up a little house of its own. Ignorance is not dispersed by intelligence, paradoxical as that statement may seem to be. A man may know better, and yet retain his ignorance in the form of a prejudice. If you push him and test him intellectually, he will say at the last, I acknowledge that to be so in fact: but what I feel is this. Then he will tell you the action of some deadly superstition upon his soul. The last enemy which shall be destroyed in the Church is superstition. Many persons are afraid of good conduct, lest it should take somewhat from the honour of Christ: on the contrary, I look upon Jesus Christ as the fountain and inspiration of all good conduct. Wherever I find really good conduct, I find Jesus Christ; I say, No man can call Jesus the Lord, and no man can do the works of Jesus, but by the spirit of Jesus, although he may not know it. I will not admit that man can make any other than a waxen flower. Let me find a real flower anywhere, and I will call it a child of the sun; let me find a waxen flower anywhere, and I will say, You keep out of the sun's way, the sun is your enemy, he will kill you with his burning look. There is a morality that is not moral, that we do not praise or even civilly recognise; we denounce it as semblance, hypocrisy: but wherever there is a real morality, a true manner of the soul, a genuine attitude of reverence, worship and aspiration, resulting in beneficence of conduct, we say, This is the garden of Christ, this is a section of Calvary. It is interesting to watch all those persons who are afraid that if they behave too well they will take somewhat from the honour of Jesus. That is an immoral state of mind; our object should always to be to create under the action of the Divine Spirit a simple, massive, noble character.
How is that character to be cultivated? By acts of service. How is a man to be strong enough to stand upright? By stooping down a great deal. The gospel always proceeds after such methods, saying, If a man would save his life, he must lose it; if a man would serve Christ, he must take up his Cross and follow him; if a man would be really dignified, he must be graciously condescending; if any man would be truly religious he must have a large household of orphans and desolate lives. Perhaps there are some who do not understand such doctrine; in a sense I am not sorry for it, in another sense I regret it very much. If the understanding of metaphysics would interfere with the operation of charity, I should regret that understanding unspeakably: it any man should be so taken up with the metaphysics of Christianity as to neglect its morals, I should describe that man as acting foolishly and suicidally. There are persons who do not know the meaning of the word "metaphysics," but they will not be kept out of heaven on that ground. I am not sure that it is a word worth knowing. The metaphysicians have never been a very lovely or united family: one generation goeth and another generation of metaphysicians cometh, and when the next generation comes it begins to denounce the one that is gone. One longheaded, shrewd, farsighted metaphysician has settled everything and published a book upon it; another metaphysician has arisen and torn him all to pieces, and wondered how in the inscrutable providence of God such a man was ever permitted to live; and no sooner has that boaster uttered his gasconade than there rises up immediately behind him another, and he takes him by the neck and shakes him over the pit of his own ruin. So that, on the whole, I am not extremely careful that men should trouble about metaphysicians and metaphysics until the orphans are all fed, and the sore in heart are all healed, and the last shadow has been chased away from the house and the life; then you can begin what is not worth beginning. Pity the man who is so anxious about doctrine that he absolutely forgets the matter of practice. If any man who commits himself to a holy life ignores the existence of doctrine, then he ignores himself. Doctrine, in some form or under some initial aspect or ministry, exists behind everything else: thought first, then word, then deed; that is the succession of action, not in metaphysics only, but in practical life.
Have you ever helped a really poor man? Then you have prayed; you are not an atheist although you thought you were one, you are not even an agnostic, though you had quite an inclination towards that new Greek formation. You have become almost tired of the old Greek "Atheist," because that word had acquired a bad reputation morally; but "Agnostic" was a sort of clean rag, and you thought you might flutter that as if it bore a strange device. But if you have been feeding orphans, you are not even agnostics, you are Christians. Jesus went about doing good, always doing good. He took up little children in his arms; when he set them down again there were men and women, kings and queens. He broke bread, and multiplied it as he gave it away. He never sent anybody from himself to buy or get anything; he had everything in his own soul and in his own gift. Christianity covers a very wide area of life; we may have thought it only covered a point or two here and there, whereas it covers the whole space of being, so that if a man shall dry a tear from the eyes of sorrow the angels shall say, Behold he prayeth! That is not the end, that is but the beginning, but with such a beginning a glorious end must eventuate, it cannot be kept back long; no man can do these works except the Father be in him and with him, and the very doing of these works will lead on and on until the worker clasps the Christ and says, What is all I have done to this work of thine, thou bleeding Son of God, Priest of the universe?
James is very moral, he is quite a schoolmaster in discipline. He is indeed the martinet of the Church. He will not allow a man to be cleanly on the whole, saying, Taking life as it goes, and looking upon the average of things, I think you may be allowed to pass. He takes up the garment, and looks at it through a microscope, and what an enemy that microscope is to everything that wants to hide itself! When we go back to James and say, We have fed a hundred orphans to-day, and called at places that death had emptied, and kindled a fire on the cold hearthstone in every instance, now may not we go to heaven? he says, No, let me look at your garments. Oh, that demand! There are plenty of kind-hearted souls, naturally impulsive in the right direction, who would feed any number of orphans if you would not look too critically into their lives. May we not hold the garment a little distance off and say, There, who can find fault with that? is it not right? James says, It is not for you to hold the garment, I must hold it in the name of the Judge, and I will tell you, after due criticism tomorrow, precisely the condition of the robe. You thought from the beginning of this exposition that the whole matter was going to resolve itself into one of charity, as who should say, There are orphans: here is bread; I can spare it, therefore take it. No man can be charitable in giving that which he can spare; love does not begin so long as you can "spare" it. It is when the man says, I cannot very well spare this, but I cannot keep it back from him who loved me and gave himself for me, that is charity. "Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity vaunteth not itself, doth not behave itself unseemly, is not puffed up... charity never faileth." Charity does everything but fail. Charity is sometimes mistaken for lunacy; charity is sometimes mistaken for simple exaggeration; and there have been some men who have called it ostentatious bad men, who see themselves in everything as in a looking-glass, doubling their hideousness or giving some new aspect to their perversity.
But now we have come to a section of the thought which means travail, almost punishment Here is spiritual judgment; here is a criticism of motive. Who can put his motive into the fire and wait until it drops out and take it up again, saying, Behold the fire hath found no dross in this inspiration? In proportion as we are pressed along this direction do we need everything that is evangelical. It is at this point the gospel comes in to supply all our lack. We say to the Apostle, representing the true Judge, Why not acquit us at the point of having visited the orphan and the widows in their affliction? can we not be spared the remainder of the trial? The Apostle says, No: now the garment must be searched, and the searcher must look for spots. Who can stand? Not one.
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