Unspoken Sermons

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If it have not this origin, there is but the other that it can have--
Our Lord himself. To this I will return presently.

And now, let us approach the subject from another side.

With this in view, I ask you to think how much God must know of which
we know nothing. Think what an abyss of truth was our Lord, out of
whose divine darkness, through that revealing countenance, that
uplifting voice, those hands whose tenderness has made us great, broke
all holy radiations of human significance. Think of his understanding,
imagination, heart, in which lay the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
Must he not have known, felt, imagined, rejoiced in things that would
not be told in human words, could not be understood by human hearts?
Was he not always bringing forth out of the light inaccessible? Was not
his very human form a veil hung over the face of the truth that, even
in part by dimming the effulgence of the glory, it might reveal? What
could be conveyed must be thus conveyed: an infinite More must lie
behind. And even of those things that might be partially revealed to
men, could he talk to his Father and talk to his disciples in
altogether the same forms, in altogether the same words? Would what he
said to God on the mountain-tops, in the dim twilight or the gray dawn,
never be such that his disciples could have understood it no more than
the people, when the voice of God spoke to him from heaven, could
distinguish that voice from the inarticulate thunderings of the
element?

There is no attempt made to convey to us even the substance of the
battle of those forty days. Such a conflict of spirit as for forty days
absorbed all the human necessities of _The Man_ in the cares of the
Godhead could not be rendered into forms intelligible to us, or rather,
could not be in itself intelligible to us, and therefore could not take
any form of which we could lay hold. It is not till the end of those
forty days that the divine event begins to dawn out from the sacred
depths of the eternal thought, becomes human enough to be made to
appear, admits of utterance, becomes capable of being spoken in human
forms to the ears of men, though yet only in a dark saying, which he
that hath ears to hear may hear, and he that hath a heart to understand
may understand. For the mystery is not left behind, nor can the speech
be yet clear unto men.

At the same moment when the approaching event comes within human ken,
may from afar be dimly descried by the God-upheld intelligence, the
same humanity seizes on the Master, and he is an hungered. The first
sign that he has come back to us, that the strife is approaching its
human result, is his hunger. On what a sea of endless life do we float,
are our poor necessities sustained--not the poorest of them dissociated
from the divine! Emerging from the storms of the ocean of divine
thought and feeling into the shallower waters that lave the human
shore, bearing with him the treasures won in the strife, our Lord is
straightway an hungered; and from this moment the temptation is human,
and can be in some measure understood by us.

But could it even then have been conveyed to the human mind in merely
intellectual forms? Or, granting that it might, could it be so conveyed
to those who were only beginning to have the vaguest, most
error-mingled and confused notions about our Lord and what he came to
do? No. The inward experiences of our Lord, such as could be conveyed
to them at all, could be conveyed to them only in a parable. For far
plainer things than these, our Lord chose this form. The form of the
parable is the first in which truth will admit of being embodied. Nor
is this all: it is likewise the fullest; and to the parable will the
teacher of the truth ever return. Is he who asserts that the passage
contains a simple narrative of actual events, prepared to believe, as
the story, so interpreted, indubitably gives us to understand, that a
visible demon came to our Lord and, himself the prince of worldly
wisdom, thought, by quoting Scripture after the manner of the priests,
to persuade a good man to tempt God; thought, by the promise of power,
to prevail upon him to cast aside every claim he had upon the human
race, in falling down and worshipping one whom he knew to be the
adversary of Truth, of Humanity, of God? How could Satan be so foolish?
or, if Satan might be so foolish, wherein could such temptation so
presented have tempted our Lord? and wherein would a victory over such
be a victory for the race?

Told as a parable, it is as full of meaning as it would be bare if
received as a narrative.

Our Lord spake then this parable unto them, and so conveyed more of the
truth with regard to his temptation in the wilderness, than could have
been conveyed by any other form in which the truth he wanted to give
them might have been embodied. Still I do not think it follows that we
have it exactly as he told it to his disciples. A man will hear but
what he can hear, will see but what he can see, and, telling the story
again, can tell but what he laid hold of, what he seemed to himself to
understand. His effort to reproduce the impression made upon his mind
will, as well as the impression itself, be liable to numberless
altering, modifying, even, in a measure, discomposing influences. But
it does not, therefore, follow that the reproduction is false. The
mighty hosts of life-bearing worlds, requiring for the freedom of their
courses, and the glory of their changes, such awful abysses of space,
dwindle in the human eye to seeds of light sown upon a blue plain. How
faint in the ears of man is the voice of their sphere-born thunder of
adoration! Yet are they lovely indeed, uttering speech and teaching
knowledge. So this story may not be just as the Lord told it, and yet
may contain in its mirror as much of the truth as we are able to
receive, and as will afford us sufficient scope for a life's discovery.
The modifying influences of the human channels may be essential to
God's revealing mode. It is only by seeing them first from afar that we
learn the laws of the heavens.

And now arises the question upon the right answer to which depends the
whole elucidation of the story: _How could the Son of God be tempted_?

If any one say that he was not moved by those temptations, he must be
told that then they were no temptations to him, and he was not tempted;
nor was his victory of more significance than that of the man who,
tempted to bear false witness against his neighbour, abstains from
robbing him of his goods. For human need, struggle, and hope, it bears
no meaning; and we must reject the whole as a fantastic folly of crude
invention; a mere stage-show; a lie for the poor sake of the fancied
truth; a doing of evil that good might come; and, with how many
fragments soever of truth its mud may be filled, not in any way to be
received as a divine message.

But asserting that these were real temptations if the story is to be
received at all, am I not involving myself in a greater difficulty
still? For how could the Son of God be tempted with evil--with that
which must to him appear in its true colours of discord, its true
shapes of deformity? Or how could he then be the Son of his Father who
cannot be tempted with evil?

In the answer to this lies the centre, the essential germ of the whole
interpretation: He was not tempted with Evil but with Good; with
inferior forms of good, that is, pressing in upon him, while the higher
forms of good held themselves aloof, biding their time, that is, God's
time. I do not believe that the Son of God could be tempted with evil,
but I do believe that he could be tempted with good--to yield to which
temptation would have been evil in him--ruin to the universe. But does
not all evil come from good?

Yes; but it has come _from_ it. It is no longer good. A good corrupted
is no longer a good. Such could not tempt our Lord. Revenge may
originate in a sense of justice, but it is revenge not justice; an evil
thing, for it would be fearfully unjust. Evil is evil whatever it may
have come from. The Lord could not have felt tempted to take vengeance
upon his enemies, but he might have felt tempted to destroy the wicked
from the face of the earth--to destroy them from the face of the earth,
I say, not to destroy them for ever. To that I do not think he could
have felt tempted.

But we shall find illustration enough of what I mean in the matter
itself. Let us look at the individual temptations represented in the
parable.

The informing idea which led to St Matthew's arrangement seems to me
superior to that showing itself in St Luke's. In the two accounts, the
closes, while each is profoundly significant, are remarkably different.

Now let us follow St Matthew's record.

And we shall see how the devil tempted him _to_ evil, but not _with_
evil.

First, He was hungry, and the devil said, _Make bread of this stone_.

The Lord had been fasting for forty days--a fast impossible except
during intense mental absorption. Let no one think to glorify this fast
by calling it miraculous. Wonderful such fasts are on record on the
part of holy men; and inasmuch as the Lord was more of a man than his
brethren, insomuch might he be farther withdrawn in the depths of his
spiritual humanity from the outer region of his physical nature. So
much the slower would be the goings on of that nature; and fasting in
his case might thus be extended beyond the utmost limits of similar
fasts in others. This, I believe, was all--and this all infinite in its
relations. This is the grandest, simplest, and most significant, and,
therefore, the divinest way of regarding his fast. Hence, at the end of
the forty days, it was not hunger alone that made food tempting to him,
but that exhaustion of the whole system, wasting itself all the time it
was forgotten, which, reacting on the mind when the mind was already
worn out with its own tension, must have deadened it so, that
(speaking after the experience of his brethren, which alone will
explain his,) it could for the time see or feel nothing of the
spiritual, and could only _believe in_ the unfelt, the unseen. What a
temptation was here! There is no sin in wishing to eat; no sin in
procuring food honestly that one may eat. But it rises even into an
awful duty, when a man knows that to eat will restore the lost vision
of the eternal; will, operating on the brain, and thence on the mind,
render the man capable of hope as well as of faith, of gladness as well
as of confidence, of praise as well as of patience. Why then should he
not eat? Why should he not put forth the power that was in him that he
might eat? Because such power was his, not to take care of himself, but
to work the work of him that sent him. Such power was his not even to
honour his Father save as his Father chose to be honoured, who is far
more honoured in the ordinary way of common wonders, than in the
extraordinary way of miracles. Because it was God's business to take
care of him, his to do what the Father told him to do. To make that
stone bread would be to take the care out of the Father's hands, and
turn the divinest thing in the universe into the merest commonplace of
self-preservation.

And in nothing was he to be beyond his brethren, save in faith. No
refuge for him, any more than for them, save in the love and care of
the Father. Other refuge, let it be miraculous power or what you will,
would be but hell to him. God is refuge. God is life. "Was he not to
eat when it came in his way? And did not the bread come in his way,
when his power met that which could be changed into it?"

Regard that word _changed_. The whole matter lies in that. Changed from
what? From what God had made it. Changed into what? Into what he did
not make it. Why changed? Because the Son was hungry, and the Father
would not feed him with food convenient for him! The Father did not
give him a stone when he asked for bread. It was Satan that brought the
stone and told him to provide for himself. The Father said, That is a
stone. The Son would not say, That is a loaf. No one creative _fiat_
shall contradict another. The Father and the Son are of one mind. The
Lord could hunger, could starve, but would not change into another
thing what his Father had made one thing. [Footnote: There was no such
change in the feeding of the multitudes. The fish and the bread were
fish and bread before. I think this is significant as regards the true
nature of a miracle, and its relation to the ordinary ways of God.
There was in these miracles, and I think in all, only a hastening of
appearances; the doing of that in a day, which may ordinarily take a
thousand years, for with God time is not what it is with us. He makes
it. And the hastening of a process does not interfere in the least with
cause and effect in the process, nor does it render the process one
whit more miraculous. In deed, the wonder of the growing corn is to me
greater than the wonder of feeding the thousands. It is easier to
understand the creative power going forth at once--immediately--than
through the countless, the lovely, the seemingly forsaken wonders of
the corn-field. To the merely scientific man all this is pure nonsense,
or at best belongs to the region of the fancy. The time will come, I
think, when he will see that there is more in it, namely, a higher
reason, a loftier science, how incorrectly soever herein indicated.]

If we regard the answer he gave the devil, we shall see the root of the
matter at once: "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word
that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." Yea even by the word which
made that stone that stone. Everything is all right. It is life indeed
for him to leave that a stone, which the Father had made a stone. It
would be death to him to alter one word that He had spoken.

"Man shall not live by bread alone." There are other ways of living
besides that which comes by bread. A man will live by the word of God,
by what God says to him, by what God means between Him and him, by the
truths of being which the Father alone can reveal to his child, by the
communion of love between them. Without the bread he will die, as men
say; but he will not find that he dies. He will only find that the tent
which hid the stars from him is gone, and that he can see the heavens;
or rather, the earthly house will melt away from around him, and he
will find that he has a palace-home about him, another and loftier word
of God clothing upon him. So the man lives by the word of God even in
refusing the bread which God does not give him, for, instead of dying
because he does not eat, he rises into a higher life even of the same
kind.

For I have been speaking of the consciousness of existence, and not of
that higher spiritual life on which all other life depends. That of
course can for no one moment exist save from the heart of God. When a
man tries to live by bread and not by the word that comes out of that
heart of God, he may think he lives, but he begins to die or is dead.
Our Lord says, "I can do without the life that comes of bread: without
the life that comes of the word of my Father, I die indeed." Therefore
he does not think twice about the matter. That God's will be done is
all his care. That done, all will be right, and all right with him,
whether he thinks about himself or not. For the Father does not forget
the child who is so busy trusting in him, that he cares not even to
pray for himself.

In the higher aspect of this first temptation, arising from the fact
that a man cannot feel the things he believes except under certain
conditions of physical well-being dependent upon food, the answer is
the same: A man does not live by his feelings any more than by bread,
but by the Truth, that is, the Word, the Will, the uttered Being of
God.

I am even ashamed to yield here to the necessity of writing what is but
as milk for babes, when I would gladly utter, if I might, only that
which would be as bread for men and women. What I must say is this:
that, by _the Word of God_, I do not understand _The Bible_. The Bible
is _a_ Word of God, the chief of his written words, because it tells us
of The Word, the Christ; but everything God has done and given man to
know is a word of his, a will of his; and inasmuch as it is a will of
his, it is a necessity to man, without which he cannot live: the
reception of it is man's life. For inasmuch as God's utterances are a
whole, every smallest is essential: he speaks no foolishness--there are
with him no vain repetitions. But by _the word_ of the God and not
Maker only, who is God just because he _speaks_ to men, I must
understand, in the deepest sense, every revelation of Himself in the
heart and consciousness of man, so that the man knows that God is
there, nay, rather, that he is here. Even Christ himself is not The
Word of God in the deepest sense _to a man_, until he is this
Revelation of God to the man,--until the Spirit that is the meaning in
the Word has come to him,--until the speech is not a sound as of
thunder, but the voice of words; for a word is more than an utterance--
it is a sound to be understood. No word, I say, is fully a Word _of_
God until it is a Word _to_ man, until the man therein recognizes God.
This is that for which the word is spoken. The words of God are as the
sands and the stars,--they cannot be numbered; but the end of all and
each is this--to reveal God. Nor, moreover, can the man know that any
one of them is the word of God, save as it comes thus to him, is a
revelation of God in him. It is _to_ him that it may be _in_ him; but
till it is _in_ him he cannot _know_ that it was _to_ him. God must be
God _in_ man before man can know that he is God, or that he has
received aright, and for that for which it was spoken, any one of his
words. [Footnote: No doubt the humble spirit will receive the testimony
of every one whom he reveres, and look in the direction indicated for a
word from the Father; but till he thus receives it in his heart, he
cannot know what the word spoken of is.]

If, by any will of God--that is, any truth in him--we live, we live by
it tenfold when that will has become a word to us. When we receive it,
his will becomes our will, and so we live by God. But the word of God
once understood, a man must live by the faith of what God is, and not
by his own feelings even in regard to God. It is the Truth itself, that
which God is, known by what goeth out of his mouth, that man lives by.
And when he can no longer _feel_ the truth, he shall not therefore die.
He lives because God is true; and he is able to know that he lives
because he knows, having once understood the word, that God is truth.
He believes in the God of former vision, lives by that word therefore,
when all is dark and there is no vision.

We now come to the second attempt of the Enemy. "Then if God is to be
so trusted, try him. Fain would I see the result. Shew thyself his
darling. Here is the word itself for it: He shall give his angels
charge concerning thee; not a stone shall hurt thee. Take him at his
word. Throw thyself down, and strike the conviction into me that thou
art the Son of God. For thou knowest thou dost not look like what thou
sayest thou art."

Again, with a written word, in return, the Lord meets him. And he does
not quote the scripture for logical purposes--to confute Satan
intellectually, but as giving even Satan the reason of his conduct.
Satan quotes Scripture as a verbal authority; our Lord meets him with a
Scripture by the truth in which he regulates his conduct.

If we examine it, we shall find that this answer contains the same
principle as the former, namely this, that to the Son of God the will
of God is Life. It was a temptation to shew the powers of the world
that he was the Son of God; that to him the elements were subject; that
he was above the laws of Nature, because he was the Eternal Son; and
thus stop the raging of the heathen, and the vain imaginations of the
people. It would be but to shew them the truth. But he was the _Son_ of
God: what was his _Father's_ will? Such was not the divine way of
convincing the world of sin, of righteousness, of judgment. If the
Father told him to cast himself down, that moment the pinnacle pointed
naked to the sky. If the devil threw him down, let God send his angels;
or, if better, allow him to be dashed to pieces in the valley below.
But never will he forestall the divine will. The Father shall order
what comes next. The Son will obey. In the path of his work he will
turn aside for no stone. There let the angels bear him in their hands
if need be. But he will not choose the path because there is a stone in
it. He will not choose at all. He will go where the Spirit leads him.

I think this will throw some light upon the words of our Lord, "If ye
have faith and doubt not, if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou
removed, and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be done." Good people,
amongst them John Bunyan, have been tempted to tempt the Lord their God
upon the strength of this saying, just as Satan sought to tempt our
Lord on the strength of the passage he quoted from the Psalms. Happily
for such, the assurance to which they would give the name of faith
generally fails them in time. Faith is that which, knowing the Lord's
will, goes and does it; or, not knowing it, stands and waits, content
in ignorance as in knowledge, because God wills; neither pressing into
the hidden future, nor careless of the knowledge which opens the path
of action. It is its noblest exercise to act with uncertainty of the
result, when the duty itself is certain, or even when a course seems
with strong probability to be duty. [Footnote: In the latter case a man
may be mistaken, and his work will be burned, but by that very fire he
will be saved. Nothing saves a man more than the burning of his work,
except the doing of work that can stand the fire.] But to put God to
the question in any other way than by saying, What wilt thou have me to
do? is an attempt to compel God to declare himself, or to hasten his
work. This probably was the sin of Judas. It is presumption of a kind
similar to the making of a stone into bread. It is, as it were, either
a forcing of God to act where he has created no need for action, or the
making of a case wherein he shall seem to have forfeited his word if he
does not act. The man is therein dissociating himself from God so far
that, instead of acting by the divine will from within, he acts in
God's face, as it were, to see what he will do. Man's first business
is, "What does God want me to do?" not "What will God do if I do so and
so?" To tempt a parent after the flesh in such a manner would be
impertinence: to tempt God so is the same vice in its highest form--a
natural result of that condition of mind which is worse than all the
so-called cardinal sins, namely, spiritual pride, which attributes the
tenderness and love of God not to man's being and man's need, but to
some distinguishing excellence in the individual himself, which causes
the Father to love him better than his fellows, and so pass by his
faults with a smile. Not thus did the Son of God regard his relation to
his Father. The faith which will remove mountains is that confidence in
God which comes from seeking nothing but his will. A man who was thus
faithful would die of hunger sooner than say to the stone, _Be bread_;
would meet the scoffs of the unbelieving without reply and with
apparent defeat, sooner than say to the mountain, _Be thou cast into
the sea_, even if he knew that it would be torn from its foundations at
the word, except he knew first that God would have it so.

And thus I am naturally brought to consider more fully how this should
be a real temptation to the Son of Man. It would be good to confound
his adversaries; to force conviction upon them that he was the
God-supported messenger he declared himself. Why should he have
Adversaries a moment longer to interfere between him and the willing
hearts which would believe if they could? The answer to all this was
plain to our Lord, and is plain to us now: It was not the way of the
Father's will. It would not fall in with that gradual development of
life and history by which the Father works, and which must be the way
to breed free, God-loving wills. It would be violent, theatrical,
therefore poor in nature and in result,--not God-like in any way.
Everything in God's doing comes harmoniously with and from all the
rest. Son of Man, his history shall be a man's history, shall be The
Man's history. Shall that begin with an exception? Yet it might well be
a temptation to Him who longed to do all he could for men. He was the
Son of God: why should not the sons of God know it?

But as this temptation in the wilderness was an epitome and type of the
temptations to come, against which for forty days he had been making
himself strong, revolving truth beyond our reach, in whose light every
commonest duty was awful and divine, a vision fit almost to oppress a
God in his humiliation, so we shall understand the whole better if we
look at his life in relation to it. As he refused to make stones bread,
so throughout that life he never wrought a miracle to help himself; as
he refused to cast himself from the temple to convince Satan or glory
visibly in his Sonship, so he steadily refused to give the sign which
the human Satans demanded, notwithstanding the offer of conviction
which they held forth to bribe him to the grant. How easy it seems to
have confounded them, and strengthened his followers! But such
conviction would stand in the way of a better conviction in his
disciples, and would do his adversaries only harm. For neither could
not in any true sense be convinced by such a show: it could but prove
his power. It might prove so far the presence of a God; but would it
prove that God? Would it bring him nearer to them, who could not see
him in the face of his Son? To say _Thou art God_, without knowing what
the _Thou_ means--of what use is it? God is a name only, except we know
_God_. Our Lord did not care to be so acknowledged.

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