Discipline and Other Sermons. Charles Kingsley

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СКАЧАТЬ there is no condemnation for sin—at least for the special sort of sin which happens to be in fashion, which is now-a-days the sin of making money at all risks.  We hold that there is one law of morality for the kingdom of heaven, and another for the kingdom of mammon.  Therefore we hold, more and more, that when money is in question anything and everything is fair.  There are—we have reason to know it just now but too well—thousands who will sell their honour, their honesty, yea, their own souls, for a few paltry pounds, and think no shame.  And if any one says, with Jeremiah the prophet, ‘These are poor, they know not the way of the Lord, nor the judgment of their God.  I will get me to the great men, for they have known the way of the Lord, and the judgment of their God:’—then will he find, as Jeremiah did, that too many of these great and wealthy worshippers of mammon have utterly broken the yoke, and burst the bonds, of all moral law of right and wrong: heaping up vast fortunes amid the ruin of those who have trusted them, and the tears of the widow and the orphan, by means now glossed over by fine new words, but called in plain honest old English by a very ugly name.

      How many there are in England now, my friends, who would laugh in their hearts at those worthy Rechabites, and hold them to be ignorant, old-fashioned, bigoted people, for keeping up their poor, simple, temperate life, wandering to and fro with their tents and cattle, instead of dwelling in great cities, and making money, and becoming what is now-a-days called civilized, in luxury and covetousness.  Surely according to the wisdom of this world, the Rechabites were foolish enough.  But it is the wisdom of this world itself—not simplicity and loyalty like theirs—which is foolishness with God.

      My friends, let us all take warning, each man for himself.  When a nation corrupts itself—as we seem inclined to do now, by luxury and covetousness, selfishness and self-will, forgetting more and more loyalty and order, honesty and high principle—then some wholesome, but severe judgment of God, is sure to come upon that nation: a day in which all faces shall gather blackness: a day of gloominess and thick darkness, like the morning spread upon the mountains.

      For the eternal laws of God’s providence are still at work, though we choose to forget them; and the Judge who administers them is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, even Jesus Christ the Lord, the everlasting Rock, on which all morality and all society is founded.  Whosoever shall fall on that Rock in repentance and humility, confessing, bewailing, and forsaking his worldliness and sinfulness, he shall indeed be broken: but of him it is written, ‘The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.’  And he shall find that Rock, even Christ, a safe standing-ground amid the slippery mire of this world’s temptations, and the storms and floods of trouble which are coming—it may be in our children’s days—it may be in our own.

      But he who hardens his heart: he who says proudly, ‘We are they that ought to speak; who is Lord over us?’—he who says carelessly, ‘Soul, take thine ease; thou hast much goods laid up for many years’—he who halts between two opinions, and believes to the last that he can serve both God and mammon—he, especially, who fancies that falsehood, injustice, covetousness, and neglect of his fellow-men, can properly be his interest, or help his interest in any wise—of all such it is written, ‘On whomsoever that Rock’—even the eternal laws of Christ the Judge—‘On whomsoever that Rock shall fall, it shall grind him to powder.’

      SERMON VII

      THE NAME OF GOD

Isaiah i. 10

      Who is among you that feareth the Lord, that obeyeth the voice of his servant, that walketh in darkness, and hath no light?  Let him trust in the name of the Lord, and stay upon his God.

      To some persons it may seem strange advice to tell them, that in the hour of darkness, doubt, and sorrow, they will find no comfort like that of meditating on the Name of the Ever-blessed Trinity.  Yet there is not a prophet or psalmist of the Old Testament who does not speak of ‘The Name of the Lord,’ as a kind of talisman against all the troubles which can befall the spirit of man.  And we, as Christians, know, or ought to know, far more of God than did even prophets or psalmists.  If they found comfort in the name of God, we ought to find far more.

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