No human being can imitate our Lord in that supreme act of self-surrender to His Father’s will, by which He abandoned all His right and power to avenge Himself on His enemies, and became the supreme victim, and therefore atonement, for human sin. But it is possible for men to follow Him in the course of action which brought Him to that awful decision and agony. “He resisted unto blood, striving against sin.” So far as we strive against sin and evil, whatever the consequences to ourselves, we are following Him to the foot of the Cross. It is not the mere endurance of suffering, the mere surrender of life in itself, which renders us followers of our Lord in His sacrifice: men have endured much and sacrificed much for more or less selfish reasons, for ambition or for military glory and power. But the essence of our Lord’s sacrifice was that it was made in the cause of righteousness and truth only. “To this end was I born,” He said, “and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.” We are following Him so far as in all our words and acts we are bearing witness unto the truth. That witness may at any time involve suffering and death. God has so constituted mankind that few great causes have ever been finally won without the voluntary sacrifice of life. That sacrifice may sometimes be made, like that of our Lord and of the martyrs, by the voluntary endurance of the cruel penalties inflicted by the enemies of the truth; or it may be endured in obedience to the claim of lawful authorities that we should take up arms and offer our lives, in defence of some righteous cause. Men may act in our Lord’s spirit if they submit to wrong in their own persons, rather than avenge themselves. But the authorities who, as St. Paul says, are the ministers of God, are bound to protect those committed to their charge, and for that purpose have a right to call upon those under them to use the sword at their command to defend the right. In so using the sword at the command of their rulers, at whatever cost to themselves, they also are acting in Christ’s spirit, because they are upholding righteousness and asserting the truth in the manner required by their duty. To all forms of organized sin the witness of the Jewish sacrifices holds good. “Without shedding of blood is no remission.” That, so long as the present dispensation lasts, is the unalterable law of God’s Will and Word. Soldiers, therefore, who are obeying a lawful command in defence of the right, are offering their lives in the spirit in which Christ endured the Cross, and may claim the comfort of being fellows with Him in the “holy war” of right against wrong.
But if the Cross of Christ is to be the centre of our lives, we must strive to live in all things, and not only in such great crises as those of war and the battlefield, in the spirit which brought our Lord to His Cross—the spirit of absolute obedience in all things to the righteous will of God. What the Spirit of the Cross requires of us is the absolute surrender of our own wills to the will of God, and the constant endeavour to bear witness to that will, and to promote it in every part of our lives. It is not the mere meditation on the sufferings of the Cross which will bring us into harmony with it. The Apostles do not dwell much on them, profoundly as they must have been moved by them. What they dwell on is the spirit which moved our Saviour to accept them and to bear them. That spirit is to be discerned throughout His life, as well as in His agony in the garden and in His sayings on the Cross. It is embodied in His gracious words: “Whoever shall do the will of My Father which is in Heaven, the same is My brother and sister and mother.” The Cross is the highest and final expression of His devotion and His Father’s will; but we can follow that spirit in every duty, however humble. If the National Mission is to fulfil its object, it must impress that spirit of supreme devotion to the will of God, as revealed in Christ, upon the nation as a whole, and the Cross must become the symbol of our national, no less than of our individual, life.
The King’s Accession and Intercession.
CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, 1915.
“I exhort, therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, thanksgivings, be made for all men: for kings, and for all that are in authority: that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.”—1 Tim. ii. 1.
It is in fulfilment of the duty prescribed in this text that we hold every year a Service of Thanksgiving and Intercession on the anniversary of our King’s accession to the throne, and I am sure we all know and appreciate the abundant reasons we have for offering such thanksgivings. We know that every public action of the King since he came to the throne has borne witness to his unreserved devotion to the welfare of his subjects in all parts of his Empire. His visit, for instance, to India was a very arduous and anxious undertaking, and was prompted by his own desire to assure the Indian people of his deep personal care for them, and also to strengthen the bonds between them and his subjects at home; and no doubt the generous service which Indian princes and soldiers are now rendering to the Empire on the plains of Flanders is in great measure due to the influence of that visit, in deepening the loyalty and devotion of his Indian subjects. We have had abundant evidence, moreover, in the last few months, of the King’s deep sympathy with his people in the sorrows and losses which this war is inflicting upon them. He has sent his son and heir to serve with his soldiers at the Front, and has himself visited them there to thank and cheer them, and he has lately set a very conspicuous example of personal self-denial in the ordinary habits of life. We see that the King and Queen live for the good of their subjects, and for the promotion of all that is good and true and gracious throughout their vast Empire, and that their example is one of the chief influences which are working among us for these noble ends. Knowing and appreciating all this, I need not say more to induce you to join with a full heart to-day in the words of our Service, and to “yield unfeigned thanks to God” that He was pleased, as on this day, to place His servant our Sovereign Lord King George upon the throne of this realm.
But I think it may be desirable and opportune to lay some special stress on those intercessions which we are bidden to offer “for kings and for all that are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.” Those words remind us, first of all, that the purpose of God, so far as this world is concerned, is that we may live a life of peace in all godliness and honour—a state of peace in which men may enjoy the happiness for which God intended them, in which they may “replenish the earth and subdue it,” and develop to the utmost the faculties and capacities with which God has endowed them. That is the main object to be kept in view for the purpose of the present life. The next fact of which the words remind us is that the maintenance of these peaceful conditions of life depends mainly upon Kings and all that are in authority. It does not depend merely upon Kings, but also upon those in authority, who are the Kings’ Ministers. In some parts of the world, as in this country, Kings no longer have the power by themselves, and of their own motion, to determine the course of public affairs, to keep the peace or to declare wars. Yet their position must always give them an immense influence in the government of a nation; and even now, in the two greatest countries of Europe—Germany and Russia, they have not merely the supreme control, but the supreme initiative, in affairs of State. The peace of the world, the possibility of our living a quiet and peaceable life, depends in Europe, in the main, on the rulers of Russia and Germany, upon those in authority in France, and upon the King of England and his Ministers.
It is a momentous fact, and a surprising one to realize. God has so constituted mankind that the welfare of the masses, of the millions of ordinary men and women, depends upon the actions of a few dozens of the leading men in the various countries of Europe. We are proud of being a constitutional country, and of the fact that by the election of members of Parliament—by selecting, that is, the members of the House of Commons—the vast majority of Englishmen have a voice in creating their own Government; and to a certain extent in that way we govern ourselves. But nevertheless, in the last resort, the fate of the country depends upon the dozen or two men who are placed in power by the House of Commons. It is a simple fact that the mass of the people in this country had no voice whatever in determining whether we should or should not enter upon this terrible war. It was determined for us in the course of a few hours by the King’s Ministers, and by the action they took in their relations with other countries. In the nature of the case it must be so. Whether they will or not, great masses of people and great nations cannot do without a Government; and when they have established one, that Government must necessarily act in many critical emergencies without waiting to consult the people whom it governs. A nation and its King, with his Ministers, constitute as much one body, to use St. Paul’s image, as the various elements and limbs of the human body and its brain. We become one single organism, under the control and management of the brain of that organism, which is the King and his Ministers. It is an awful responsibility for men to have entrusted to them, to be able to declare war and thus to launch many millions of men in their own country, and hundreds of millions of men in the Empire and in other countries, upon a gigantic struggle, of which all we know for certain at the outset is that it will involve a sacrifice of tens of thousands of lives, the devastation of fair countries, and the waste of enormous treasure. But so it is and ever must be. In the freest republics that ever existed the chief rulers have had similarly to act as the brain of the whole people; and it depends on their wisdom and faithfulness, not merely at critical moments, but in that daily administration of affairs out of which critical moments arise, whether the people shall live a quiet and peaceable life or not.
We must add to this the fact—which no one would be more ready to recognize than these leaders and rulers, Kings, Ministers, or Presidents, themselves—that the affairs with which they have to deal, the problems they have to solve, are too vast and mysterious to be fully grasped by any human brain, and that they are liable to the most grievous miscalculations. If you need evidence of this, look at the outbreak of the present war. Our rulers in this country had no idea at all, within a few days of the event, that such a war was about to break upon us; the rulers of all other nations have been loudly proclaiming, ever since it began, that they are not responsible for it, and that it would not have happened but for circumstances which they could not foresee or control. There seem, indeed, to have been wild and unscrupulous spirits in Germany who were eager for it, and who had long been intriguing for it; but none the less it burst upon Europe suddenly and unexpectedly, and it baffled the foresight of European statesmen in general. In the face of such imperfect competence for these problems of statesmanship, and of such enormous responsibility for them, are we not compelled to stretch out our hands towards Heaven, and implore God’s guidance for the rulers who are feeling their way amidst such dim lights—“for kings and for all in authority,” upon whose words and actions the fate of the world and its peace, the happiness and the very life of millions of men and women are dependent? If, indeed, we could not do so, we might well despair. We should behold before us a mass of nations rising against one another, blinded—as we see in Germany that nations can be blinded—by passion and pride, and fighting wildly, almost like men in the dark, and we might well feel helpless before such a chaos. But knowing, as it is the privilege of Christians to know, that “the Lord sitteth above the water-floods,” that “the Lord remaineth a King for ever,” knowing, as another Psalm says, that “the Lord is King, be the people never so impatient. He sitteth between the cherubim, be the earth never so unquiet,” we cry unto the Lord in our trouble, and implore Him to deliver us out of our distress.