SERMON XVII

THE SWORD OF ST. MICHAEL.

There was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the Dragon."-Rev. xii. 7.

THE very exhaustiveness of the Gospel of Christ constitutes its chief peril. Its reach and scope are so large, that the lines of connection, which hold it fast into consistent unity, lose themselves, vanish, outspan our sight. We cannot follow them home, and are thus thrown back upon the one refuge for the baffled brain,

the use of paradox. Paradox is the expedient by which our thought expresses its sense, its intuition, its anticipation, of an underlying unity which it cannot thoroughly master or unravel. It detects the action of a single principle throughout a mass of dissimilar incidents. It sees too little to be able to exhibit the singleness of the principle amid all its variable and intricate transformations; but it sees enough to be sure, by some touch of living instinct, of the profound and dominant unity which all this intricacy makes inanifest. And in order to give force and insistance to a truth which it cannot adequately express, it summons in the imagination to its aid,-it seizes on the two most extreme and contradictory of all the manifestations,—and, by the very act of placing them

in startling neighbourhood the one to the other, it emphasizes their real, yet hidden, similarity.

Thus it is that the Christian faith revels in paradox. It delights in binding together in one statements apparently intense in their mutual opposition. The further it pushed its intellectual conquests, the more vivid and extreme became its sense of the power that lies in the recognition of paradox,-the more secure its confidence in the reconciliation of contradictions. Its deepest heart throbbed in response to the reverberant counter-song of the Creed of Athanasius: "Three who are Lord, yet but one Lord; three who are God, yet one God; three Almighty, yet one Almighty;' " its whole soul rose to the great repudiation of Pelagius, as it cried, with the strong voice of St. Paul, “I live: yet not I, but Christ liveth in me;" for, indeed, in the pronouncement of these far-reaching oppositions, it felt itself in possession of that infinite truth which holdeth all in one, and stretcheth from end to end, and is never broken. It knew its power, and its triumphant glee could not conceal its victory, as it broke out in creed, or collect, or hymn: The Word of the Lord is a double-edged sword: it turneth this way and that.

But this double character has its natural danger. At the slightest weakening of the high tension which paradox expresses, we slide into the easier and lazier course of contenting ourselves with one or other of the opposing sides of our truth. This has been familiar enough in the history of heresy: perhaps it is hardly so familiar in the moral domain.

Yet that paradoxical character of the Christian creed, which has left its mark so forcibly upon its theology, is no less remarkable in its moral aspirations and development. There, too, Christ revealed, as embraced within the compass of a single principle, actions and effects of intensely opposite tendency: "Blessed are the hungry; they shall be filled." "Blessed are the meek; they shall inherit the earth." "He that loseth his life shall save it." "He that saveth his life shall lose it." So ran the startling message, and as men stood bewildered with vague awe at words so double-sided, they found themselves uplifted to the level of their solution by the impulse of a compelling faith in Him in Whom paradox attains its climax of astounding surprise, yet attains it without extravagance, without strain, without effort, without violence, in the perfect peace of assured fulfilment-in the ease and the quiet of a natural, an irresistible reconciliation. For, indeed, where was there to be found one trace of discordant contradiction in Him, Who was at once absolute Lord and absolute Servant of all; of Him Who lived that He might die, and died that He might live; of Him Who claimed the entire control and possession of our whole will, and heart, and soul, on the ground that He, and no one else, was meek, and lowly, and submissive; of Him Who obtained and demanded all glory, because He sought not His own glory; and could do all things that the Father doeth, because He could of His own self do nothing; of Him, in one phrase, Who was Son of God. because He was the Son of Man?

There are two opposing sides, then, to the moral

character instilled by the graces of Christ, just as much as there is a double-sided opposition in the intellectual expression of the Godhead, revealed in Christ; and morally as well as intellectually, therefore, we have to guard against any one-sided development-against any jealous exaltation of a single factor of the opposition. Such partiality would be a moral heresy, however true its actual aim, however pure its aspiration; just as any attempt to ignore the counter-side of a theological position becomes intellectual heresy, however exact and genuine the actual statement itself may be. It is heretical not because it is wrong, but because it is partial, because it is deficient. Let us try to recall the double and Divine aspects of the Christian's spiritual manifestation, that so we may know more surely whether we stand at all in peril of such moral partiality, such moral heresy.

The Christian character, then, may be compared, on the one hand, to the leaven which leaveneth the whole lump; to the mustard-seed, which groweth no man knoweth how, until, from being the smallest, it increaseth to be the largest of herbs, and the birds can lodge in the branches thereof. Here is a familiar and most beautiful ideal! This secret, mysterious, unseen growth, by which, below all outward surfaces, beneath all form, and show, and fashion, in the hidden place, in the quiet chambers of the soul,-there, where no eye penetrates, no sound disturbs, no tumult disarrays, no vanity deceives,-there, where the roots and fibres of the spirit run back into the deep silence of God's awful presence, and drain from His dark founts their unnoticed supplies, and feed on His

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secret food, which He delivers, by hands invisible and unfelt, out of His own incomprehensible fulness,—there, where there is hushed and breathless stillness upon angel and archangel, as with open eyes they gaze on the Hiding of God's power, on that .process of condescending love in the might of which God lowers Himself to secrecy and concealment, and is content to creep into our hearts through dark passages and overlooked ways, to creep as a thief in the night, under the cloud of shame and contempt, into the houses of our souls, whose doors we have barred and bolted against free and open entry, to creep as a thief, digging through the wall at an hour when no man knoweth, in mean disguise, with noiseless tread, unsuspected, unannounced, unforeseen, there, at the dim base of our innermost being, where God waits in unspeaking patience to instil His grace, drop by drop, slowly and lengthily, into our graceless and unready minds;—this marvellous growth, by which God succeeds in pervading and penetrating our life by continual, unceasing effort, day by day and hour by hour, until at last He has won complete acceptance, and has moulded the whole man in us anew to His liking, and can move forward into fuller use, into nobler attainment; and can show out His Divine glory; and can make His presence felt and revealed; and can gather in new stuff to the work; and can spread, and enlarge and increase, and break out on every side, so that the man becomes a living expression of God, a lump leavened through and through by the lively ferment of the infused Divinity; and men, his fellows, are startled to