The Need and the Means of Right Judgment.
CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, WHIT SUNDAY, 1915.
“The Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, Whom the Father will send in My Name, He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.”—St. John xiv. 26.
Never in our time, perhaps never in the history of the world, has there been such urgent occasion as there is to-day for joining with all our hearts, in the prayer of the Whit Sunday Collect, that God will grant us, by the help of His Spirit, “to have a right judgment in all things.” We have before our eyes the most tremendous illustration ever afforded of the awful consequences which may ensue from the absence of such a right judgment, and the prevalence of a wrong judgment. In the first place, the war itself is entirely due to the exercise of a wrong judgment by some person or persons. Nothing but a great misjudgment, on one side or the other, of the circumstances which occasioned the war, or of its consequences, could have precipitated all the nations of Europe into such a deadly and disastrous conflict.
Every statesman, of course, thinks that some other statesman has blundered, but the mutual recriminations form at least a general confession of wrong judgment somewhere. When we see such wrong judgment possible among the ablest and most powerful men in Europe, in a matter which involves the sacrifice of tens of thousands of lives, the desolation of thousands of homes, and the devastation of some of the fairest countries in Europe, have we not need to cry to God, with the most intense earnestness, that He will grant to us, and to all who act for us and with us, the help of His Spirit to give us a right judgment in all things? This gift of a right judgment may seem, perhaps, in ordinary times, a comparatively small matter to be treated as the culminating blessing won for us by the Death and Resurrection and Ascension of our Lord. This is the final festival of the series which commemorates the great events of His Life; for Trinity Sunday, which follows, does but sum up the whole substance of the Christian revelation, as that of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The Whit Sunday Collect embodies the final craving of the Christian life, for those gifts which, on our Lord’s Ascension, He became empowered to bestow upon His Church. But we may appreciate, at this time, better than ever before, why all those gifts are summed up in the prayer that we may be granted a right judgment in all things. Upon that right judgment in the leaders of the Christian nations depends the peace of the whole world, and the possibility of ourselves leading a peaceable life in all godliness and honesty. It is demonstrated, by the most awful example ever given, that all the wisdom, all the experience, all the knowledge of human nature, accumulated for twenty centuries, are insufficient, of themselves, to ensure that right judgment; and we are driven to-day to act upon the exhortation of St. James, “If any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God” and “it shall be given him.”
But this failure of good judgment in the political management of the world is not the only, nor the most terrible, exhibition which is afforded at the present time of the grievous liability of human nature to form wrong judgments. The worst and most distressing exhibition of all is seen in the moral perversion of one of the greatest of European nations. Unless our own judgment is absolutely perverted, Germany has become possessed by an utterly false, un-Christian, and even inhuman judgment in moral conduct. The case was justly summed up in a letter published the other day by an eminent member of our Church, the Dean of Exeter—“Women outraged, treaties broken, inoffensive citizens, women and babes, murdered wholesale by land and sea, wells poisoned, deadly gases taking the place of manly conflict, Houses of God ruthlessly destroyed, fair lands desolated, noble cities destroyed without provocation, without reasonable object or purpose, the world filled with abominable lies, the hymn of hate chosen as a national anthem, and a baleful curse placed, as a nation’s prayer, on the lips of children, and placarded in the streets, a fit sequel to the hymn of hate”—this is the moral and religious spectacle which Germany now exhibits, and its rulers and guides not only allow these things to be done, but have pleasure in them that do them. It is not merely that these un-Christian and inhuman things are done, but that they are justified, that they are treated as lawful and meritorious, that the spirit which promotes them is recognized and applauded as the right spirit—this is the amazing and appalling exhibition of wrong judgment which Germany now offers to the world.
Let us, moreover, if we would duly appreciate the lesson to be derived from such a spectacle, bear in mind the character and capacities of the nation by which it is exhibited. We should bear in mind that Germany is probably the most highly educated country in Europe; its science, its literature, its arts, its industry have been among the finest that the world has seen. In religion it gave Europe the Reformation; and the great Protestant nations of the world, alike in Europe and America, recognize the immense spiritual debt they have owed to it in the past. Our own theological literature, during the last century, has acknowledged an immense debt to it, and German scholars have, in our own time, been in the front rank of the learning of the world. It is a country which was proud of its culture, and, in such matters as I have mentioned, with full justice. No thoughtful man can treat the Germans, as a nation, as inferior to any other in Europe, in all the externals of such culture. All the achievements of past history, all the acquisitions of Christian civilisation, lay open before them, as much as before ourselves, and they are bound to us by intimate ties of blood and of common interests. It is a nation, in short, with every equipment which human intellect, and art, and Nature can bestow; and yet, notwithstanding all this, the nation, as a whole, has formed a judgment so false and inhuman, on the very elements of moral duty, that we are forced to recognize that in fighting it we are fighting not merely a political foe, but a moral outlaw from Christian civilisation.
If such an awful perversion of judgment is possible, have we not reason to tremble at the possibilities of human error? The horrors I have recalled are a disgrace to Germany; but let us not disguise from ourselves the lamentable fact that they are also a disgrace to human nature. To this, we must realize, human nature can come, in spite of literature, and science, and art, and the traditions of generations, and profound religious capacities. One cannot divide the Germans from all other human races, or even from ourselves, and say that they have a human nature of their own. It is our common human nature which, in this case, has succumbed to such a degraded judgment, and which has become false to the inherited principles of Christian civilization. What we ought to learn from so distressing a spectacle is the absolute need of some influence higher than any that mere human nature, when left to itself, can exert, if the moral judgment, the moral sense, the moral character of nations and races, and of ourselves among them, are to be kept true to the ideals towards which human nature, at its best, has always been striving, and which our Lord Jesus Christ has revealed as the eternal standard established by God. I am afraid there can be no doubt respecting one cause, at all events, of this terrible degradation. For the last generation or two, in consequence of the prevalence in Germany of a false philosophy and an extravagant criticism, the minds of the educated classes in that country have been imbued with a complete distrust of the Scriptures, and of the revelation of God in Christ; and, in consequence, they have abandoned all deference to the authority of God’s Word and the example and teaching of our Lord. I believe, indeed, that faith in God and God’s Word, and love of Christ, still subsist in much of their old intensity among the simpler classes of the German nation—among numbers to whom the name and the teaching of Luther are still a venerated influence. But they have ceased to mould the character and guide the thoughts of the educated classes, and the consequence is that human nature has broken loose from all control, and has abandoned itself to an unbridled lust of power and of earthly pleasure.
It is painful to contemplate such a spectacle, and to recall it to you; but it is necessary we should realize what it means, if we are to learn the lesson which is the most imperative for us at this moment, and if we are to take home to our minds the full blessing of the promise of Whit Sunday. It is encouraging to bear in mind that a similar spectacle and crisis existed in the world at the time when our Lord spoke the words of the text. The Roman Empire, although, like the German nation, it rendered great services to mankind, was in His day developing into a terrible despotism, and its rulers were becoming the incarnation of a ruthless and unscrupulous force. The age of the twelve Cæsars, some of whom were monsters of violence and vice, was commencing; and at that moment there appeared another influence, that of the twelve Apostles, who proclaimed in the world the authority and the inspiration of another King, their Lord and Master, who taught the blessedness of another ideal—the ideal of poverty of spirit, of mourning, of meekness, of mercy, of purity, and of peacemaking. The two ideals struggled side by side for three centuries; but the spirit of violence proved unable to crush the spirit of meekness, and had at last to acknowledge its superiority, and to submit, in great degree, at all events, to the authority and example of our Lord. The mostly highly organized physical force that the world at that day had ever seen was slowly but surely undermined by the spirit of Christian meekness and love; and from that moment Christian principles of conduct extended their authority more and more over the whole range of worldly life, and even over the fierce passions and struggles of war. Gradually there became established those principles of chivalry under which, as our great philosophical statesman described it, there prevailed “that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.” That great amelioration of human passion and of human evil was won by the persistent contemplation and assertion of the authority and example of our Lord, and by the perpetual inculcation of the teaching of His Apostles. The Spirit of God, descending as on this great day, inspired Evangelists and Apostles to write those Gospels in which the Person, the teaching, and the example of our Saviour are so marvellously depicted, and those Epistles in which they are brought home to our hearts with such touching force. The same Spirit was vouchsafed to the great teachers and leaders of the Church, and quickened in the hearts of the people at large the gracious seed which was thus sown. If the new embodiment of the rule of force in human affairs is to be effectually overcome, it can only be by the same means. It cannot be done by our arms alone. Force alone is no remedy for force. The Spirit of Christ as it lives in the Books of the New Testament, must again make its appeal to the minds and consciences of the nations of Europe; and the Spirit of God, acting through those examples and exhortations, must bring home to us, once more, the life and love of Christ, must open men’s hearts to receive His image, and so enable them once more to have a right judgment in all things.
The prayer of the Collect, therefore, should turn our hearts and minds, at this juncture, to the supreme necessity, if we would save ourselves from the dangers of wrong judgment, and if, according to a famous saying, we would “save Europe by our example,” of submitting our hearts and lives with the deepest earnestness to the ideals set before us in the Scriptures, and especially in the teaching and example of our Lord and His Apostles, as the only sufficient means of maintaining a right judgment among us on the great moral problems of life. As a nation we have hitherto enjoyed unique advantages in this respect. To no other nation in the world has it ever been given to have the Word of God, the whole Word of God, read aloud in our churches, Sunday by Sunday, for more than three hundred years; and to have thus had the words and deeds of Christ, and the exhortations of His Apostles, and the devotions of Psalmists and Prophets, impressed upon our minds week by week, and sometimes day by day, until much of them has become the most familiar of all the records of our memories. There has been another means, moreover, especially in Scotland, but in England also, by which we have been kept in constant touch with the same influence, and that is the custom, which generally prevailed till recently, of Family Prayer, and the reading of the Holy Scriptures in the family circle. By these means that Divine Seed was sown in the hearts of young and old, and it could not but produce much fruit. If we desire to preserve the Christian instincts, which can alone protect us against such dreadful relapses into a world of violence and ungoverned passion as human nature has been proved capable of, let us submit ourselves with renewed earnestness to those Divine Words, and to that Christian discipline, which have maintained for so long, in this country, the character of Christian gentlemen and gentlewomen, and have upheld among us, in spite of our many faults and failures, at all events the main principles of a right judgment. When our Lord says, in the text, that His Spirit would bring all things to the remembrance of the Apostles, whatsoever He had said unto them, He gave a promise which was in the first instance fulfilled, as I have said, in the writings of the Evangelists and the Apostles, but to which it is also the privilege of every Christian to appeal. If we will read His Scriptures, He will open our minds to understand them, He will bring home to us, by His fellowship, the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Love of God; He will save us from false judgments of all kinds; and will enable us to uphold in our own hearts, and in the world at large, that truth and love, that meekness, gentleness, and humility, for the protection of which we are now appealing to the arbitrament of battles, and of the God of battles. May He grant us victory in that appeal; and when it has been granted to us, let us strive to render the victory secure by living more devoutly in His faith and fear, and seeking more diligently the Grace of His Holy Spirit.