(Preached on the Cessation of Cholera, Feb. 1832).
TEXT: HEB. xii. 11, 12.
MY devout friends, the terrific form of the devastating -L-l- disease which has so long been raging in this great city has now left us, though we cannot feel entire confidence that it will not return; for it would not be the first instance if it appeared a second time, in a place so densely populated, to repeat its devastations. But are we right in availing ourselves of the apparent cessation which has been granted to us through God’s kind providence, merely for the purpose of offering Him our thanks that the chastisement is past? Not so! that would not exhaust the meaning of the sacred words which we have just heard. Although this disease has been a chastisement which has brought forth the peaceable fruits of righteousness only in so far as we have allowed ourselves to be exercised by it; yet it assuredly befits us to give thanks not only that it is past, but also that it has been here. In a preceding verse, the writer speaks thus of the divine chastenings, saying, if we were left entirely without chastening, of which all the children of God are partakers, we should have no right to consider ourselves sons, but only bastards. Therefore it is most fitting on an occasion like this that we should consider God’s providential dealings, which are the cause of our meeting, in their whole connection.
I do not, of course, wish to be here understood to mean that we must be able to discern and comprehend why exactly this or any other chastisement of the same or of a different kind has been needful. But as soon as the chastisement is so far past that we are able to breathe more freely, and to raise our thoughts to calm meditation, our minds should be disposed to give thanks to God by such considerations as these. We feel that we must not remain without chastisement; and even a small amount of self-knowledge suffices, in general, to convince us that the manifold forms of chastisement that we meet with in the course of our life are arranged for us all by the Father of spirits in His fatherly love, in order to exercise us now in this, now in that lesson of Christian piety.
Regarded in this way, my dear friends, the words of our text form, as it were, an explanation and application of those words of the Apostle Paul which we so often weave into our united prayer, to which also reference is not unfrequently made in our meditations, that to those who love God—and they are assuredly only those who not only regard all that comes from Him as sent for their exercising and training, but who use it to that end—that to them all things must work together for good. And our text has a similar relation to those other words of the same apostle, in which he calls on Christians in all things to give thanks to God, whether they seem at the time to be joyful or sorrowful things. And it is to be thanksgiving with prayer and supplication, proceeding from the consciousness that we shall always need new chastisements as means of training, as well as new tokens of favour. In order, then, that we may present our present thanksgiving to God, as it becomes His children, let us see what the words of our text represent to us as the good which our chastisement is to effect for us. It mentions two things: in the first place it is said there grows out of it a peaceable fruit of righteousness; and then, secondly, we are encouraged—and who would not count this just as great a blessing—after having endured chastisement, to lift up again the hands that hang down and the feeble knees; that is, to rise again to undiminished courage and to cheerful activity.
I. As to the first point, then—the statement of the writer of our epistle that chastisement when it is present seems not to be joyous, but grievous; but that afterwards it brings forth the peaceable fruit of righteousness—let us, first, for a moment turn our attention to this point, which of course he believes and by no means denies, that chastisement seems to us grievous. If now and then strong-minded people claim that a man should always stand unshaken, not bowed down by the heaviest trouble; that the sharpest and bitterest trial is to leave no trace on his features; the Scriptures make no such demand on us. If a severe, unwonted calamity interrupts the peaceful course of human life; if we make unexpected and disastrous experiences of the powerlessness of all art and science when opposed to the inscrutable forces of Nature; if it seems to us that, as it were, every sinew of the noble power over the earth, to which God has appointed us, were cut, and as if our mind could only slowly recover from a great defeat which it has suffered in its struggle with Nature;—Scripture does not require us to think that joyful; it must rather, according to human nature, be grievous to us. Only we must not understand the words of our text in so limited a sense as to suppose that the peaceable fruit of righteousness may not appear until the affliction is entirely past. That could only apply in the case of sufferings that pass quickly over, such as do no doubt often fall on individuals, but not as to those which press for a length of time on the same community, though, it may be, passing from one to another, and thus daily renewing the affliction. And so it has been with us in the past months. When we read in the public papers the daily number of the sick and the dead; and the list of those who had recovered, beginning from a very small number and only very slowly increasing, the great disproportion was grievous to us; if a faint hope had begun to dawn upon us that the force of the disease was broken, and it spread afresh with increased virulence, that bowed us down in deeper affliction; but the peaceable fruit of righteousness was already springing up between these alternations of sorrow, and was nourished by them. I am not speaking especially of those members of the Christian congregations in this city who have made sad acquaintance with this frightful disease at close quarters: from whom members of their domestic circle have been snatched away by death—and how often have the dead in one house been many! Even so early as the end of the year, when we kept our usual day of remembrance, this terrible form stood in painful distinctness before us; even then, we were all most profoundly sharing this sorrow with those on whom the stroke fell, while, full of the deepest sympathy, we looked round over the circle of its devastations. Now let us rather, so far as we can, fix our eyes on the whole compass of our common life, which, however, is hardly to be taken in at one view; let us look at the form which it has gradually assumed; then shall we become conscious what is pre-eminently the peaceable fruit of righteousness which proceeds from such affliction; which indeed must go on showing itself during a longer continuance of public and general suffering, and must grow and ripen in proportion as we are compelled to struggle with that which is pressing on us.