Sermons on National Subjects

by Charles Kingsley

Some people will say: What puzzle is there in it? All animals die, why should not man? All animals fight and devour each other, why should not man do so too? But why need we suppose that man is fallen? Why should he not have been meant by nature to be just what he is? Some scholars who fancy themselves wise, and think that they know better than the Bible, will say that now, and pride themselves on having said a very fine thing; ignorant men, too, often are led into the same mistake, and are willing enough to say: “What if we are brutish, and savage, and ignorant, and spiteful, indulging ourselves, hating and quarrelling with each other? God made us what we are, and we cannot help it.” But there is a voice in the heart of every man, and just in proportion as a man is a man, and not a beast and a savage, that voice cries in his heart more loudly: No; God did not make you what you are. You are not meant to be what you are, but something better. You are not meant to fight and devour each other as the animals do; for you are meant to be better than they. You are not meant to die as the animals do; for you feel something in you which cannot die, which hates death. You may try to be a mere savage and a beast, but you cannot be content to be so. And yet you feel ready to fall lower, and get more and more brutish. What can be the reason? There must be something wrong about men, something diseased and corrupt in them, or they would not have this continual discontent with themselves for being no better than they are; this continual hankering and longing after some happiness, some knowledge, some good and noble state which they do not see round them, and never have felt in themselves. Man must have fallen, fallen from some good and right state into which he was put at first, and for which he is hankering and craving now. There must be an original sin in him; that is, a sin belonging to his origin, his race, his breed, as we say, which has been handed down from father to son; an original sin as the church calls it. And I believe firmly that the heart of man, even among savages, bears witness to the truth of that doctrine, and confesses that we are fallen beings, let false philosophers try as they will to persuade us that we are not.

Then, again, there are another set of people, principally easy, well-to-do, respectable people, who run into another mistake, the same into which the Pelagians did in old time. They think: “Man is not fallen. Every man is born into the world quite good enough, if he chose to remain good. Every man can keep God’s laws if he likes, or at all events keep them well enough.” As for his having a sinful nature which he got from Adam, they do not believe that really, though often they might not like to say so openly. They think: “Adam fell, and he was punished; and if I fall I shall be punished; but Adam’s sin is nothing to me, and has not hurt me. I can be just as good and right as Adam was, if I like.” That is a comfortable doctrine enough for easy-going well-to-do folks, who have but few trials, and few temptations, and who love little because little has been forgiven them. But what comfort is there in that for poor sinners, who feel sinful and base passions dragging them down, and making them brutish and miserable, and yet feel that they cannot conquer their sins of themselves, cannot help doing wrong, all the while they know that it is wrong? They feel that they have something more in them than a will and power to do what they choose. They feel that they have a sinful nature which keeps their will and reason in slavery, and makes sin a hard bondage, a miserable prison-house, from which they cannot escape. In short, they feel and know that they are fallen. Small comfort, too, to every thinking man, who looks upon the great nations of savages, which have lived, and live still, upon God’s earth, and sees how, so far from being able to do right if they choose, they go on from father to son, generation after generation, doing wrong, more and more, whether they like or not; how they become more and more children of wrath, given up to fierce wars, and cruel revenge, and violent passions, all their thought, and talk, and study, being to kill and to fight; how they become more and more children of darkness, forgetting more and more the laws of right and wrong, becoming stupid and ignorant, until they lose the very knowledge of how to provide themselves with houses, clothes, fire, or even to till the ground, and end in feeding on roots and garbage, like the beasts which perish. And how, too, long before they fall into that state, death works in them. How, the lower they fall, and the more they yield to their original sin and their corrupt nature, they die out. By wars with each other; by murdering their own children, to avoid the trouble of rearing them; by diseases which they know not how to cure, and which they too often bring on themselves by their own brutishness; by bad food, and exposure to the weather, they die out, and perish off the face of the earth, fulfilling the Lord’s words to Adam: “Thou shalt surely die.” I do not say that their souls go to hell. The Bible tells us nothing of where they go to. God’s mercy is boundless. And the Bible tells us that sin is not imputed where there is no law, as there is none among them. So we may have hope for them, and leave them in God’s hand. But what can we hope for them who are utterly dead in trespasses and sins? Well for them, if, having fallen to the likeness of the brutes, they perish with the brutes. I fancy if you, as some may, ever go to Australia, and there see the wretched black people, who are dying out there, faster and faster, year by year, after having fallen lower than the brutes, then you will understand what original sin may bring a man to, what it would have brought us to, had not God in His mercy raised us and our forefathers up from that fearful down-hill course, when we were on it fifteen hundred years ago.

And another thing which shows that these poor savages are not as God intended them to be, but are falling, generation after generation, by the working of original sin, is, that they, almost all of them, show signs of having been better off long ago. Many, like the South Sea Islanders, have curious arts remaining among them in spite of their brutish ignorance, which they could only have learned when they were far more clever and civilised than they are now. And almost all of them have some sad remembrance, handed down from father to son, kept up in songs and foolish tales, of having been richer, and more prosperous, and more numerous, a long while ago. They will confess to you, if you ask them, that they are worse than their fathers—that they are going down, dying out—that the gods are angry with them, as they say. The Lord have mercy upon them! But what is, to my mind, the most awful part of the matter remains yet to be told—and it is this: That man may actually fall by original sin too low to receive the gospel of Jesus Christ, and be recovered again by it. For the negroes of Africa and the West Indies, though they have fallen very low, have not fallen too low for the gospel. They have still understanding left to take it in, and conscience, and sense of right and wrong enough left to embrace it; thousands of them do embrace it, and are received unto righteousness, and lead such lives as would shame many a white Englishman, born and bred under the gospel.

But the black people in Australia, who are exactly of the same race as the African negroes, cannot take in the gospel. They seem to have become too stupid to understand it; they seem to have lost the sense of sin and of righteousness too completely to care about it. All attempts to bring them to a knowledge of the true God have as yet failed utterly. God’s grace is all-powerful; He is no respecter of persons; and He may yet, by some great act of His wisdom, quicken the dead souls of these poor brutes in human shape. But, as far as we can see, there is no hope for them: but, like the Canaanites of old, they must perish off the face of the earth, as brute beasts.

I have said so much to show you that man is fallen; that there is original sin, an inclination to sin and fall, sink down lower and lower, in man. Now comes the question: What is this fall of man? I said that the Bible tells us rationally enough. And I have also made use several times of words, which may have hinted to some of you already what Adam’s fall was. I have spoken of the likeness of the beasts, and of men becoming like beasts by original sin. And this is why I said it.

If you want to understand what Adam’s fall was, you must understand what he fell from, and what he fell to. That is plain.

Now, the Bible tells us, that he fell from God’s grace to nature.

What is nature? Nature means what is born, and lives, and dies, and is parted and broken up, that the parts of it may go into some new shape, and be born and live, and die again. So the plants, trees, beasts, are a part of nature. They are born, live, die; and then that which was them goes into the earth, or into the stomachs of other animals, and becomes in time part of that animal, or part of the tree or flower, which grows in the soil into which it has fallen. So the flesh of a dead animal may become a grain of wheat, and that grain of wheat again may become part of the body of an animal. You all see this every time you manure a field, or grow a crop. Nature is, then, that which lives to die, and dies to live again in some fresh shape. And, in the first chapter of Genesis, you read of God creating nature—earth, and water, and light, and the heavens, and the plants and animals each after their kind, born to die and change, made of dust, and returning to the dust again. But after that we read very different words; we read that when God created man, He said:

“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” He was made in God’s likeness; therefore he could only be right in as far as he was like God. And he could not be like God if he did not will what God willed, and wish what God wished. He was to live by faith in God; he was justified by faith in God, and by that only.

Never fancy that Adam had any righteousness of his own, any goodness of which he could say: “This is mine, part of me; I may pride myself on it.” God forbid. His righteousness consisted, as ours must, in looking up to God, trusting Him utterly, believing that he was to do God’s will, and not his own. His spirit, his soul, as we call it, was given to him for that purpose, and for none other, that it might trust in God and obey God, as a child does his father. He had a free will; but he was to use that will as we must use our wills, by giving up our will to God’s will, by clinging with our whole hearts and souls to God.