St. Matth. xiii. 55, 56.
Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? And his brethren, James and Joses and Simon and Judas? And his sisters, are not they all with us? Whence then hath this man all these things? And they were offended in him.
We have, in these words, a striking picture of ENVY; which makes us unwilling to see, or to acknowledge, any pre-eminence in those, whom we have familiarly known and conversed with, and whom we have been long used to regard as our inferiors, or, at most, but on a level with ourselves. Our Lord’s neighbours and countrymen, who had been acquainted with him from his youth, could repeat the names of his whole family, and knew the ordinary condition, in which they lived, were out of patience to think that, so descended and so circumstanced, he should be grown at once into distinction among them, and should be taken notice of for abilities and powers, which they, none of them, possessed.
This temper of mind, I say, is here very graphically expressed; and it operated among the Jews with a more than common malignity, shedding its venom on those, whom not their own industry, but the special favour of Heaven had raised above their fellows, and had commissioned to go forth with extraordinary powers (of which they had frequent instances in their history) for the common benefit of themselves and of mankind. Whence it acquired even the authority of a proverbial sentence,—that a prophet hath no honour in his own country, and in his own house[205].
But, I mean not to enlarge, at present, on this moral topick. There is another, and very important use to be made of these words, which is, to let us see, “how very small a matter will serve to overpower the strongest evidence of our religion, though proposed with all imaginable advantage to us, when we hate to be reformed, or, for any other reason, have no mind to be convinced of its truth.”
This strange power of prejudice is exemplified in the text, and will deserve our serious consideration.
Our blessed Lord had now given many proofs of the divine virtue, that was lodged in him; and was, therefore, moved, not only by the duty of his office, but, as we may suppose, by that regard which every good man hears to his country, to make a tender of his mercies to those persons, especially, among whom he had been brought up. Accordingly, we are told, that he came to his own city of Nazareth, and preached in their Synagogue, insomuch that the people of that place were astonished, and said, whence hath this man this wisdom, which appears in his doctrine, and these mighty works, which we have seen him perform? And then, calling to mind the mean circumstances of his birth and family, before repeated, they expressed their dissatisfaction, or, as the text says, were offended in him.
But, were those circumstances a reason for rejecting a doctrine, which astonished them with its wisdom; and works, which they owned to be mighty, and above the common power of man? Rather, sure, the opposite conduct was to be expected; and, because they knew certainly, from the mean extraction and education of him who taught and did these things, that he had no means of acquiring his abilities (if they were at all to be acquired) in an ordinary way, they ought, methinks, to have had their minds impressed with a full assurance, that they were owing, as they were by himself ascribed, to the power of God.
But, no: rather than admit a conclusion, which hurt their pride, and crossed their foolish prejudices, they stifle the strongest conviction of their own minds; and resolve not to receive a prophet, whom they had long desired and expected, who came to them with all the credentials of a prophet, and with the offer of what they most wanted, the remission of their sins, and the inestimable gift of eternal life. And all this, because the prophet was the son of a carpenter, in their own town, and because his brethren and sisters, persons of a mean condition, were all with them.
When we contemplate such a conduct, as this, we are ready to say, that it sprung from a more than common perverseness of character, and that the people of Nazareth were more unreasonable and sottish, as the common proverb made them to be, than the rest of Israel[206].
Yet, if we turn our thoughts on the other tribes and cities of that nation, on the inhabitants of Judæa, and even of Jerusalem, we shall find, that they reasoned no better than the men of Nazareth had done; and discovered equal, indeed, much the same prejudices as those, by which our Lord’s own countrymen had been misled.
For, what else was it to say, as they commonly did, that no prophet could come out of Galilee[207]; that he could not be the Messiah, because his disciples were illiterate fishermen[208], and not Scribes and Pharisees; because none of their rulers believed on him[209]; because he conversed, sometimes, with publicans and sinners[210]; because he did not observe their minute ceremonies or traditions[211]; because he manifested his divine power in healing the sick, and casting out devils, and not in breaking to pieces the Roman empire and restoring the temporal kingdom of Israel[212]; because—but I need not instance in more particulars: Universally, the Jews, of all places and denominations, rejected their Lord and Saviour for reasons, the most absurd and trivial; for reasons, that came from the heart, and not the head, which shewed they were under the power of some contemptible prejudice, and would yield to no evidence, unless that was complied with.
Still, “the Jews, in general, you will say, were unlike other people. Tell us how the polished Heathens reasoned on the subject of Christ’s mission; and whether, when the Gospel was addressed to them, they opposed it on the footing of those senseless prejudices, which you have enough disgraced.”
Luckily, I have it in my power to accept this challenge; and to shew you, on the best authority, that those men of enlightened minds and renowned wisdom were as weak in their sophisms, and as childish in their cavils against the new religion, as the Jews themselves.
We read in the Acts of the Apostles[213], that St. Paul came to Ephesus, a rich, learned, idolatrous city of Asia; that he applied himself more especially to the instruction of its Gentile inhabitants; disputing daily, for two years together, in the school of one Tyrannus, a teacher of rhetorick, or philosophy, as we may suppose, and a convert to the faith of Jesus. That his success was great, we may conclude, both from his long residence, and from the special miracles, which he wrought, among them. Yet, when the word of God had grown mightily and prevailed, a certain silver-smith, who made silver shrines for the Goddess of the place, had credit enough with this well instructed city, because its trade was likely to suffer by the downfall of idolatry, to raise such an uproar among the people, that the Apostle’s labours were, at once, overturned by this powerful argument, and he, himself, compelled to leave them to their old infatuations: which was much such treatment, as Jesus himself had received from the Gadarenes; who, because he had permitted the devils, ejected out of one of their people, to enter into a herd of swine, and to destroy them, would not be saved at this expence, and required him, but civilly indeed, to depart out of their coasts. Now, was that craft, or this husbandry, a matter to be put in competition with the saving of their souls, which they had reason to expect from the preaching of Paul and Jesus? Or, is it not clear, that a petty interest, that is, a sordid prejudice, prevailed against the most precious hopes, supported by the fullest evidence?
But these were prejudices of the ignorant vulgar. Let us see, then, what success St. Paul had in a nobler scene, among wits and sages, men of refined sense and reason, in the head-quarters of politeness and civility, in the eye of Greece itself, in one word, Athens[214]. Here, the great Apostle, who had the charity, and the ability, to make himself all things to all men, encountered their ablest philosophers; reasoning with them, even before their revered court of Areopagus, on their own favourite topics of God, and the Soul, in a strain of argument, which was clearly unanswerable; and concluding his weighty apology with Jesus and the Resurrection. But what was the effect of all this truth on the minds of these liberal heathens? Why the text says—when they heared of the resurrection of the dead, some (that is, the Epicureans) mocked; and why? because their philosophy admitted no future state: while others (the Stoics) said, We will hear thee again of this matter; but, for as poor reason, as the other, because their philosophy taught I know not what of a certain renovation of the world, which, for the credit of their sect, they were half inclined to confound with the Christian resurrection. You see, in both parties, the power of prejudice; where yet the occasion was the most interesting, the hearers the most capable, the ability or the speaker, independently of his assumed inspiration, unquestionably great, and where the conclusion, (so carelessly dismissed) was, after all, a question of FACT, which had no dependance on the fanciful tenets of either party.
I should weary you and myself, should I carry on this deduction through the following ages of the Christian church; and shew, as I might easily do, that the ablest men of science, who opposed Christianity, did it on grounds no better than those of these Athenian sophists. We see what these grounds were, in the fragments, that remain to us, of many ancient unbelievers[215], men, the most acute and learned of their times; while yet every man of sense, that now reads and considers their objections, will own, whether he be himself a Christian or not, that they are altogether weak and frivolous, and have the face not so much of sound, or even colourable arguments, as of faint and powerless prepossessions against unwelcome truth.
I shall only instance in one of these prepossessions, which you think prodigious. The Roman empire, labouring under its own vices, and many physical evils, which then lay heavy upon it, experienced, in the fourth century, that reverse of fortune, which, in its turn, the greatest nations must expect. But by this time Christianity had spread itself through all the provinces, and was become the religion of the state. In these circumstances, the Heathens, very generally, not the rabble only, but the gravest and wisest of the Heathens; ascribed these disasters to the abolition of idolatry; and thought it an unanswerable argument against the faith of Jesus, that it did not maintain their empire in that degree of splendour and prosperity, to which, in the days of pagan worship, it had happily been raised. And this miserable superstition, which we now only pity, or, perhaps, smile at, made so deep an impression on the minds of men, that the greatest of the ancient fathers, and particularly St. Austin[216], were scarce able, with all their learning and authority, to bring it into contempt.
Such was the power of ancient prejudice against the Christian religion. But I hasten to set before you, in few words, what its tyranny has been in later times.
The accidental and temporary commotions, which reformed religion produced in our western world, furnished in the minds of many, a notable argument against the cause of Protestantism, which, when taken up and improved, as it soon was, by state-policy, had, indeed, a fatal influence on its success. But, even as to Christianity itself, that day-spring of knowledge, which broke upon us at the Reformation, and, as they say, has been brightening from that time to this, could not disperse those phantoms of prejudice, which are forever haunting the human mind.
Men, who piqued themselves on their sagacity, presently started up, and said, that, because popery had been found to be an imposture, Christianity was so too; and because the legendary tales of the cloysters had been convicted of falshood, that the Scriptures themselves deserved but little regard. And when afterwards these suspicions gave way to sober criticism and learned inquiry, prejudices still arose, in various shapes, against the EVIDENCES, and the DOCTRINES of the Gospel-Revelation. We were told, that the prophecies proved nothing, because some of them were too obscure, and others too plain. Could both these objections come from the oracle, Reason? Or, is it so much as likely, that either of them did so? when, for any thing it could tell, both the clearness, and the obscurity might be suitable to the occasion, and each, be fit, in its place. Then again, there were others bold enough to deny the existence of miracles, not, because many have been forged, but because none can be true. Was this, too, the voice of Reason? or, is not St. Paul’s appeal to common sense enough to disgrace this fancy to the end of the world—Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you that GOD should raise the dead?[217] God, who surely has power to do this, or other miracles, when his wisdom sees fit.
The contents of the Gospel have also been treated, I do not say with as little respect, but with as little shew of reason and argument, as the evidences of it.
For instance, it was current, not long ago, that “Christianity was as old as the Creation;” the meaning of which wise saying was, that Christianity could not be true, because the moral part of it was such, as nature taught, and had at all times been able to discover by its own light. Admit the fact: what follows? That therefore a divine revelation needs not repeat and could not occasionally enforce the laws of nature. Is reason, pure unmixed reason, accustomed to trifle at this rate?
But the complaint now is, that nature does not teach the doctrinal part of the Gospel. And what then? Was it not equally to be expected that what concerns the essence and counsels and dispensations of God should be a secret to nature, unassisted by revelation, as that our practical moral duties should lie open to its view? And, if the force of this question be not generally felt, there is no doubt, I think, but it will, in a short time. For, it is to be observed of all these idle cavils, that they presently vanish one after another; and, when each has had its day, is, thenceforth, exploded even by unbelievers themselves.
But, ’tis time to come to a conclusion of this matter. The purpose of all I have said is, only, this, to shew, what weak and idiot prejudices have, at all times, been taken up against Christianity, and how generally they have been mistaken by the acutest of its enemies, for reasons of much weight.
And, if all, who hear me, be led by this experience, to suspect the infirmity of their own minds; if, having seen the disgraceful issue of so many fancies, which for a time have passed for shrewd arguments, but have, afterwards, appeared to be nothing more than childish prejudices, they can be brought to mistrust those, that occur to themselves; if, in a word, they can be induced to question the pertinence and force of what they too easily consider in the light of objections to Christianity, and to argue soberly and cautiously at least, if they will needs try their skill in arguing against it; the end, I have in view, will be answered, and neither my pains, nor your attention, will be thrown away on this discourse.