POST NAUFRAGIUM TABULA.

The attitude of the heart and will towards God differs so much in men whose past lives may have been equally guilty, that widely different motives are presented to the one and the other by those who would be God’s messengers to them. The voice of God is always the voice of love, for God is love; but as he invites and persuades and reassures some, so he uses terrors and denunciations with others, that, when they refuse to be drawn, he may scourge and drive his wanderers home.

There is a wide difference between you to whom I have been speaking, who are deeply persuaded of your own sinfulness, whose aching hearts conceal much of secret pain and sorrow, and others of whom I am about to speak. There are men around us who are daily poisoning the springs of our social and national life. They are the children of luxury, prosperous leaders in sin—heartless, self-indulgent, fashionable, audacious, triumphant sinners, who are selling their strength, and health, and rank, and manhood to Satan,—trading as long as they can on their personal advantages, graceful manners, light wit, knowledge of all the arts of seduction and ways of the world, and, if these fail, having recourse to solid gold, the price of iniquity, the price of blood and of souls. These men require costly sacrifices to be made at the shrine of lechery. They drag with them into the whirlpool of destruction everything they can lay their hands on that is sweetest and most beautiful in creation. Their haunts are the “dark places of the earth,” which are “full of the habitations of cruelty.” Cruel, ruthless, and desolating, they dispense plagues and death wherever they move by the very infection of their breath. Gentler natures, easily destroyed, and hardly if ever restored, fall before their devouring lusts; the bodies and souls of tender women are to them as though they had been expressly designed and created to be destroyed and broken to pieces for the relief of men’s basest needs, as sheep and oxen are provided to be slain for the satisfying of their hunger. These are they who have “the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart; who, being past feeling, have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness;” “filthy dreamers, who defile the flesh;” “speaking evil of those things which they know not; but what they know naturally as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves.” “Clouds are they without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots; raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.”

“Speaking evil of those things which they know not” is frequently in the sacred writings linked together with the practices of gross sensualists. Experience confirms this observation; these sensualists are also the cynics and scoffers, who continually sneer at the good of which they know nothing. In all their speech they aim at lowering the moral standard around them to the level of their own, and at reducing the general tone to the colour of their own minds; and thus they succeed in silencing the last whispers of conscience, which might disturb them in the midst of their profligacy by bringing to them from time to time the consciousness of a purer atmosphere not far off. They affect, until it becomes a reality to them, a profound scepticism as to the existence of any virtue, or possibility of virtue, or of any sincerity or unselfishness in the world. They see nothing but their own selfish and impure souls reflected in the society around them; they are unable to see anything else, a total blindness having fallen upon them, as upon the men of Sodom, from whose raging passions even the angels of God needed to be sheltered. They have become dead to the perception of moral worth and beauty. They are so given up to the flesh, that every thought which presents itself to the mind, every sight, every sound, comes to them loaded with heavy chains of impure and degrading associations. They are so petrified in scepticism, that if Christ himself in all his divine perfection of character were once again to appear among us, their estimate of him would be that of the fashionable profligates of his own time on earth, “a gluttonous man and a winebibber.” So tainted is the whole being of such men with the poisonous atmosphere of their Circean existence, that the divinest guests who should attempt an entrance into their breasts would be changed by them into swine; to them all that is best and sweetest in man, woman, or child, is born of evil, and tends to evil.

And this moral blight is not reserved for those alone who are long experienced in evil. In many lands, and now partially in our own, the foulest vice is so instituted and organised as to supply a training in impure principle and in guilty practice to our youth from their earliest years. “It strikes our youth at that unhappy moment when first they cross the threshold of the abodes of officially-regulated vice; and when they recross that threshold to the purer air, O God! what fatal deed has not been done! For them the spring of life has no more flowers; the very friendships of their youth are polluted; they become strangers to all the honourable relations of a pure young life: and thus it is that more and more in these days we see stretching wider and wider around us the circle of this mocking, faded, worn-out, sceptical youth, without poetry, without love, without enthusiasm, without faith, and without joy.”[4]

A dilution of this moral poison, this disbelief in God and in goodness, creeps upwards into the higher moral strata; it is communicated from the “lewd fellows of the baser sort” (for of the baser sort they are, though often the proudest blood of the aristocracy flows in their veins), to the minds of many who are worthy of a better creed; and we feel it around us, entering our homes through the pages of many books and writings, wherein these mournful cynics treat, in a hard and untruthful spirit, of all the most holy relations of life, of the tenderest and deepest secrets of the heart, as well as the deeper and more sacred mysteries of Providence, of which, indeed, they cannot but speak falsely and blindly, since they are ignorant of them, and have not the key wherewith to unlock such knowledge. These also are guilty, though it may be unconsciously so, of cruelty, because they rob men of hope, without which earth is darkness; “because,” saith the Lord, “with lies ye have made the heart of the righteous sad, whom I have not made sad;” because, in envy of the good which they have not found or have forfeited, they perpetually deny its existence, and spread around them the infection of despair.

“A licentious age is parent of a cruel age,”[5] and in the case of the individual, cruelty follows quickly as the twin-companion of profligacy. It is not to himself alone that the impure man is cruel; indeed, so far as this life is concerned, he constantly saves himself and his reputation, while he destroys another. Men too commonly profess to believe that to further degrade and oppress a being already degraded and enslaved is a venial fault; that the sin of fornication is not the “deadly sin” it has been pronounced to be, because, they say, they do not destroy what is good, but only, under the force of temptation, take a sinful advantage of a great evil already existing. This is a fatally false judgment. The soul of the most forlorn outcast was redeemed by Christ, and is dear to him. Most certainly the souls of women are as precious to God as the souls of men; and God has never and nowhere said, that that which brings certain and utter destruction to the souls of women is a light offence on the part of men. Our Lord said, “It must needs be that offences will come;” but he added those awful words, “Woe unto _that man_ through whom the offence cometh.” No one can say that any one man is responsible for the existence of the horrible fact that thousands of women, of young girls, of mere children, are continually dragged and driven to the fashionable markets of lust, and there slain like sheep appointed for slaughter. The offence is distributed among many, both of men and women, and the exact measure of the _woe_ shall assuredly be dealt, by the God who judges not as man judges, to every one who has put forward a hand, even once, to help to crush the helpless, or to prevent the fallen from rising. The line is untenable between the first seducer of a woman, and the men who, cowardly, rush in when the victim is once down, to seize upon and devour her in their wickedness, until every trace of the divine stamp of womanhood is effaced. The case is as though a woman were buried alive by each man in a crowd flinging on her a handful of earth, or as though she were trampled to death by the marching over her prostrate form of a company of soldiers. Though no one singly seems to kill, yet collectively they kill her, and each one is guilty. The judgment of men of the world on this matter is for the most part shallow, selfish, and cruel; and when I look at the question in the light which Christ’s solemn words flash upon it, then I see how falsely or how wickedly some men speak and act. It avails not to plead, “The woman solicited me.” What if she had solicited you to assassinate her? Would her solicitation justify you in that? And after all, what is it that she wants of you when she solicits you? It is your money: if you are disposed to give that freely, no law of God forbids it; but the law of God forbids, and humanity forbids, your buying of her the permission to degrade her body and ruin her soul.

“Sophistical defences all vanish in the clear daylight of truth. When a _sale_ is hideously unnatural, intrinsically unlawful, productive of cruel miseries to soul and body, the _purchaser_ also is guilty,—and here is thrice guilty, beyond the seller; because _he_ is seeking for carnal pleasure only; _she_ can have no pleasure, but much rather misery, and is in quest of money only; nay, of the poorer women we may say, they are in quest of a bare livelihood only. The fine flaunting courtesans who are carried away by vanity, and obtain high prices from rich profligate men, less deserve our pity in their present phase of life; only that we know them to be on the fatal slope down which a large number of them will be carried, when the men who have bought them one by one abandon them, each justifying himself by the large sums which he has paid! What, then, will a thoughtful man say is the legitimate price of virtue? Either virtue is empty talk, or it is above all price. If any hardened man hold virtue to be mere talk, stern fact replies, that at least vice is a hideous fiend, a substantial and terrible reality, and its propagators are agents of cruelty.”[6]

Your offence—my guilty brother—recall it! Though it be but that of which men speak so lightly, of having helped to trample down in the dust, so as to make rising again impossible for ever, one of those over whom the multitude tread every day, it is recorded against you, and your portion of the woe (you who set but one foot upon her), is waiting for you. “Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish;” and the only true repentance is a practical repentance, which hastens to make restitution, to restore fourfold.

You are sceptical concerning these victims of men’s vices. To blacken them, to speak of them as beyond all hope of restoration, seems perhaps to lessen the uneasy sense of guilt which stirs at times within your breast. As one who knows something of the heart of the outcast, I can tell you that these victims on their part are sceptical concerning _you_ and the possibility of your redemption; and the doubt has assuredly as much foundation to rest upon in the one case as in the other.

The minds of these poor women are frequently distracted with speculations concerning the lives of their male partners in guilt. They are perplexed to conceive how it is that a man can for years, for his whole life perhaps, act a _double part_. They say, “We are sinners indeed, but we are not _hypocrites_; we do not, after plunging into impurity under cover of the darkness of night, take our place smilingly in the daytime among pure men and women, and go to church, it may be, on a Sunday. We receive all the blows and all the curses from society which we deserve, and sometimes more; but these men! tell us, is it possible for their consciences ever to be cleansed?” I wish to make it clear to you that these poor women consider the reclaimability of profligate men accepted by the world to be a doubtful possibility _because of the hypocrisy of their lives_. Their estimate of that hypocrisy is, that it must be death to the whole character. They feel themselves incapable of practising such an hypocrisy, deeply sinful as they are. They see their nightly male visitors received in society, courted by the world, surrounded by wife and children, holding offices of responsibility; and their poor souls are perplexed. Now, men who doubt the reclaimability of fallen women look upon _unchastity_ as the one damning sin. The women, on the other hand, look upon the _hypocrisy_ as the damning sin which shuts a man out from hope of heaven, if not from the London drawing-room. Thus, while one class of persons may be looking upon another class as utterly vile and irreclaimable, the very class so judged may be holding the same view with regard to their judges. Now, let me recall to your minds the story of the Pharisee and the Publican: the one would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but only said, “God be merciful;” the other, you know, was a reputedly respectable person. He who “knew what was in man,” asserted that the one was justified rather than the other. We find this Divine Person more in agreement with one of the judgments referred to above than with the other. That quality of mind which made the attitude of the publican more hopefully directed towards moral reformation than the other—namely, the quality of _humility_—is not unfrequently found in the character of outcast women. It is this honest humility, combined sometimes with a passionate desire to seem no better than she is, which constitutes the redeeming feature in the character of the poor outcast. She is not acting a double part. I fear it may be said as truly now as it was said long ago to persons who contemptuously speak of outcast women as a hopeless class—“The publicans and the _harlots_ enter into the kingdom of heaven before you.”

I would ask you who, after years of shameful wallowing in sin, have taken to yourselves the comforts of home life, whose praises are in the mouths of men, who are smiled upon by pure women, and caressed by loving children, to come with me and look at this degraded woman, sobbing her poor broken heart out in a corner of some hospital ward, consumed by disease and misery. What was her life, and what was yours? She was perhaps slain through her heart’s best affections. The abandonment of herself to a person beloved was perhaps her first step to ruin; and who shall say that that self-abandonment in woman, which will make her fling herself away for another, is altogether devoid of some trace of unselfishness, which men would do well to mark and shield in her, and to imitate for themselves in a pure and good cause? What is there in such an one which makes her a greater sinner than yourself? Be honest! She is lost to society; you are petted by society. She is killed by the poison she drank; you survive. No after sweetness, no late consolations of home, nor the love of children, are reserved for her. She dies prematurely, and her place knows her no more. Your own past life could reveal sins as great before God as hers have been; and you are—I will not say happy, for a little knowledge of the secrets of hearts forbids me to use that word—but you are not in your coffin, in an unhonoured, unvisited grave. You are alive, and counting your solid blessings around you, and receiving the right hand of fellowship every day from the best part of society, of which, may be, you become gradually soothed into the belief that you are an honourable and worthy member. It would be vain to say to you, “Put away your blessings, strip yourself of earthly goods, come down into the dust, and proclaim yourself what you are.” I can but say to you, and I do so with grief and shame for you, “Take, if you will, all the delights of life, but take them in deep self-abhorrence and confession to God who bears with you so far. Take them, but fear! Your present prosperity is no sign of the favour of God towards you; it is his frown, not his smile; wheresoever you go, whether alone or in company, there is an invisible unbending finger pointing at you, and a voice more awful than that of the seer of Israel saying of you, ‘Thou art the man!’”

How fares it, I might ask of many, with the soul of her whom, having cherished as a wife for a time, you put away when you deemed it expedient to enter the estate of marriage, and with the souls of those children, hers and yours, whose existence (unacknowledged perhaps by you) cries every day to heaven against you? To you it is not difficult to step back into paths of virtue, and to establish yourself in a home, with a companion from whom you have been obliged to conceal the fact that you have yourself lived in adultery up to the time when you made the offer of yourself to her, and that your soul is stained with the sins of inconstancy and treachery. But for her who is set aside, the return to virtue is not easy. You dare not calmly contemplate _her_ future. You know that should she even escape being carried away by that law of downward gravitation which so frequently governs the life of a woman who has once erred, and should retire into seclusion, yet she goes to her grave wronged, and marked with the world’s badge of shame. But I ask not of any duty fulfilled in regard to her temporal state. I ask you of her soul and eternal destiny. You think you have done well in bestowing large gifts of money. Take heed lest God say to you, “Thy money perish with thee!” because you have thought to atone with wretched gold for a moral nature wrecked and an immortal soul betrayed! You have tardily become convinced (you perhaps reply), that your relationships of an immoral nature must be broken off; but when you have broken off these, have you done all? Does God allow you to think only for your own restored respectability and your own salvation, while she who shared your guilt, it may be loved you truly, goes down to perdition? I beseech you to consider that we shall be called to answer before God for the souls of those with whom we have held close and intimate intercourse, for those whose nature was weaker than our own, and who strengthened themselves in sin by leaning against our stronger hearts; and that those children, of whose being you are the author, will be confronted with you in that awful day when it will not avail you any longer to ask, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Where is that woman, that child, whom you inoculated with your vices, or in any way injured through the weakness and cruelty of passion? Can you rest in peace one night upon your bed, until you have sought out those whom you have injured, and moved heaven and earth to repair the injury you have done? Or, if they have gone beyond your reach into the darkness whence you can never recall them, can you rest, enjoying your comforts and honours, until you have made restitution of other souls to God for those whom you have destroyed? There may be consciences more tender than your own, organisations more delicate than yours, which are now suffering, year after year, pains and miseries and darkness which _you_ brought upon them. There may be companions of your youth who are now enduring the lifelong blight which you inflicted upon them, and who, when they meet you in public places now, and see you courted as leaders in society, are filled with contempt and hatred of you, knowing not that your outward success is no sign of God’s favour. You have brought souls into darkness and unbelief, causing them to ask, “Are God’s ways equal?” “Why dost thou show me iniquity, and cause me to behold grievance?... Wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy tongue when the wicked devoureth the man that is more righteous than he?”

Men who have been selfish in the indulgence of their evil nature are too often selfish even in repentance, content to recover themselves, with scarcely a thought for those who have suffered through them. I have deep sympathy with the sinful and sorrowful, and tempted and self-condemned; but with this self-love which will flee even to the right source for health and recovery, forgetting others, I have not the shadow of a thought of sympathy. It moves my deepest scorn.

Wherever the true sorrow has penetrated, wherever the lesson of the compassionate Saviour has been learned, however imperfectly, selfishness disappears; those who have no deep care for, and make no active effort for other sinners, especially for the victims of their own sin (if there be such), are strangers to the true inner life, however correct, and however highly praised, their outward life may be.

Few things are more sad to contemplate than the sight of men covering their deep, unhealed wounds with a late-attained outward virtue and decency, plastering their terrible griefs and diseases with the rewards which belong to the virtuous. These things ought not to be. Yet among those who have weakly, passionately, or in greediness of all that life can give, clutched and gathered round them all that is sweetest and best, there are some whose aching hearts still attest that they have brought them no real health, that they are but external props to an outward decency of conduct, leaving the deep sore untouched. To these I would speak gently and sorrowfully, not in anger. You know well that you are not healed by simply becoming outwardly moral. You know that only the Infinite can penetrate the necessities of your immortal being, and that only his hand can reach and apply healing to the deep wounds of your soul. The remedies you have chosen are to your soul’s disease only as the stimulants used for a person in consumption, which build him up for a while, and bestow a false health, an unreal vigour, a temporary excitement and fulness of the veins, which only make his decline more rapid and death more sudden, when sooner or later the disease breaks forth again. I beseech you, by the love of God, not to suffer these present good things to withdraw your eyes from the only cure, the only source of spiritual life and health. Better that you should suffer, that your heart should ache, and that your old wounds should torment you still, than that, in losing the sense of pain and shame, you should lose your own soul. These good things may be a support to your weakness in the regulation of your outward life, but they cannot give you eternal life nor cleanse the moral nature.

O my erring brothers! be warned, and be aware before the night cometh of the dangers of this later bliss, this earthly happiness or prosperity, as you are aware of the perils into which your first choice of evil brought you. There is an opiate in the purer cup which you now drink, as there was poison in the former cup of intoxication which at first was to you so pleasant, and afterwards stung like a serpent. Will you submit that this opiate should cause you to slumber with the poison not cast out, but working in you still—the poison which you can escape only by deep cutting, and cauterising with the fire which he brings who came “to bring fire on the earth,” who came to baptize us “with the Holy Ghost and with fire”?

“Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?” Is there hope, not only for the erring and self-destroyed, but for the criminal who has misled and destroyed another, upon whose head rests the guilt of cruelty and treachery? With God all things are possible. “Nazarene, thou hast conquered,” were the last words of Julian the Apostate, closing the rebellion and defiance of a lifetime. The heart of the most scornful of the rebels against his holy laws may, by the hand of God, with whom nothing is impossible, be broken, softened, and laid bare to the kind and healing dews of heaven. If at some happy season an angel should descend and stir the deep waters of his soul, now so stagnant and congealed beneath the upper froth, I believe they might prove to be waters of healing. Would that he could hear through the dry air of the wilderness where he is dying of thirst the Divine voice, “What aileth thee?” and that his eyes might be opened to see close by his hand the well of water which he knew not of. “I will give to him that is athirst of the water of life freely.” “If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink.” Thousands are dying of thirst and of the fever which accompanies it—dying with a deep well of water by their side, and with words of profane mockery and despairing denial on their lips.

A strong yearning possesses my soul to stretch forth my hand to the most hopeless creature that lives, to the wildest prodigal who ever fled from his father’s house, to call him brother, and to speak to him of life and of love. When there arose a mighty famine in that land, he began to be in want, and would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat, “and no man gave unto him.” This, that “no man gave unto him,” has often seemed to me the most sorrowful part of that story of the Prodigal. These suicides rush downwards to destruction, and men fear to put forth a hand to stop them, or hearts fail for want of love. We too readily include them all in one hopeless class, supposed to be sick beyond recovery, lost beyond recall. There is not one among us who possesses in its perfection “the intuitive decision of a bright and thorough-edged intellect to part error from crime.” But God does not judge men in masses. He, and he alone, takes exact account of every individual soul, with every particular of the circumstances, and the forces without and within the man which combined to hurl him down to his present estate of wretchedness. To us indeed they all appear as wandering stars, but God alone knows to which among them the “mist of darkness” is verily reserved for ever. There are moments of sanity and of sadness, in which the eyes are opened to see that they are selling their manhood and their immortality for—a mess of pottage!—moments in which a little thing—a word, a look, a hand held out—might mature disgust of self into the humble and firm resolve, “I will arise and go to my Father.” But that little thing “no man gave unto him.”

I know that in speaking of life and of love to some of these, I may be speaking into the ears of a corpse. The man is dead; he has died the death of a suicide; his day of grace is past long before his natural life is ended; he cannot be restored, not because God cannot or will not restore him, but because there is no longer left in his will or conscience or affections any spark of life or of power to respond any longer to the calls of God. But love will not easily be persuaded that the moment of death has arrived, nor that it is time to leave the bier of the dead and to return among the living; love, like Rizpeh, will watch with a constancy stronger than death by the silent corpses of the “dearly beloved and longed for,” fiercely denying that they shall be given as carrion to the wolves and the vultures. I do not know when life becomes extinct. God only knows. But I know that “_charity never faileth_;” that charity believeth all things, and hopeth all things; that she holds on in faith and hope, hearing the words, “enthusiast! fanatic!” uttered by those who have not made full trial of the long-suffering of God, and with the cautionings and doubtful questionings of some even of the followers of Jesus sounding in her ears. None know what God can do, and is ready to do, for the maddest, wickedest, vilest, and most self-destroyed of men or of women, save those who can say of themselves, “_De profundis clamavi_,” who have kneeled, in spirit, side by side with the Lord in the garden of Gethsemane, and have seen his sweat as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground, and who, in that awful hour of love and sorrow, have dared to say to him, “Lord, take of my heart’s blood also, and let it be poured forth for thee and thine.”

“I am the resurrection and the life; whosoever believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.” “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” So spake the Holy One. The soul of man is insatiable, for good or for evil. Fulness of life is desired by all; the breaking up of the frosts of winter, and the bursting forth of spring; the dreams of childhood restored, but restored as actual possibilities for us to grasp. The human heart thirsts for life, and for the utmost expansion of life.

The demoniac of Gadara, he who had the legion, seemed to possess life enough; he never rested day nor night, every moment straining to the utmost all the energies of his animal nature; no man could tame him, none could bind him, for he had often been bound, and had torn his fetters and broken his chains in pieces. Yet his dwelling was _among the tombs_. There is enough of demoniacal energy among us, which is not life, but a hideous mockery of life. Christ has not come to destroy life, but to save it, and by his own divine energy to cast out the demoniacal energy. “What a word is this!” it was said of him, “for with authority and power he commandeth the unclean spirits, and they come out.” Our Lord said, in his last conversation with his disciples, “This sign shall follow them that believe: in my name shall they cast out devils.” And before this his disciples had told him with gladness and wonder, “Lord, even the devils are subject unto us in thy name.” It has been recorded by historians of the earliest Christian times how the Christians triumphed over evil spirits, how they insulted and tormented the devil wherever they found him, making him remove his lodgings from the bodies of men “by a writ of ejectment from the name of Jesus Christ;” and how “Christians, of the meaner sort” even, did, without any ceremony, but only by their prayers and calling on the name of Christ, what was beyond the power of all the heathen sorcerers, with their Ephesian letters and magical incantations.

Not only from possessed persons were the evil spirits driven forth, but from every temple wherein they were worshipped as gods. Christ overturned shrines and temples in abundance; he “spoiled principalities and powers, making a show of them openly;” dethroned the false gods, from the most brutish to the highest, and quenched the false lights with the true.

“Torquetur Apollo Nomine percussus Christi, nec fulmina verbi Ferre potest.”...

Behold the power of Christ! the hope of those who are afflicted by the indwelling of some demon of uncleanness, or haunted by beauty, or dazzled by light which are not of God.

“Be not drunk with wine, but be filled with the Spirit.” For the drunkards of earth, maddened by whatsoever powerful excitements, who renounce their master-passion, God has in store “the new wine of the kingdom.” They need not fear to faint and die beneath the sudden withdrawal of what has been to them till now the sole sustaining stimulant of life. It was said of the followers of Jesus, “These men are full of new wine.” It is true! And there are such men among us at this day; and through this divine inebriation, this new passion, the love of Christ, which has cast out all opposing elements, you shall hear them speak, not as they have hitherto spoken, but “with other tongues, as the Spirit gives them utterance.”

The eye of faith and of love, surveying the infinite and eternal possibilities of redemption for the ruined soul, shall see, not the Magdalene only, not the woman only who was a “sinner,” but the still guiltier one, stronger in wrong-doing and deeper in treachery, bowing low before the all-conquering love. Lo! even

“Iscariot washes the Saviour’s feet, And wipes them with his hair.”