(see also previous Homily on Acts 23:1-35. 6).
A hope grown from a deep add man old root.
The hope that there shall be a resurrection of the dead is here described as a "hope toward God." It is hope pre-eminently resting upon God. For—
I. IT IS THE INSTINCTIVE HOPE TOWARD GOD OF OUR NATURE GIVEN BY HIM. The deep-seated instincts of nature are necessarily among the strongest moral arguments of which we can take cognizance.
II. IT IS THE HOPE TOWARD GOD THAT COMES OF THE CONCLUSIONS OF OUR TRAINED REASON, A REASON GIVEN ALSO BY HIM. Reason's arguments upon certain highest subjects, by themselves, may easily be uncertain and fallacious. But as guides on the way to other arguments, and as supports of other arguments, they are often very significant, very suggestive, very helpful. And it is so to a high degree in this instance.
III. IT IS THE HOPE OF THE CHRISTIAN HEART TOWARD GOD. It is the end of the gospel to him who believeth. If this hope fall through, all falls through. The Christian's deception becomes an absolutely typical and leading instance of deception for the whole world's whole length of history; and the Christian's disappointment the keenest of all disappointments—his collapse making him the most miserable of all men.
IV. The hope that this resurrection shall include all—the "unjust" as the "just" IS A HOPE TOWARD GOD NESTING EMPHATICALLY ON THE TESTIMONY OF HIS OWN REVELATION, AND CONTRIBUTED TO LARGELY BY CERTAIN ASPECTS OF HIS JUSTICE WITH. WHICH THAT REVELATION MAKES US FAMILIAR. In this theme the mystery of unfathomable depths of unsearchable wisdom is before us. It enwraps the height of highest hope, the deepest things of fear.—B.
The highest powers eluded by the heart's subterfuges.
The immediate connection reminds us very forcibly how the man who is the worst friend to himself is sometimes environed with opportunities charged with the offer of mercy, Providence and the God of all providence long wait upon him in natural relationships, in his very weaknesses, in suggestions and inducements of almost every various kind. How many things conspired now to give Felix the opportunity of hearing and knowing the truth! His position, his popularity, his knowledge "of that Way," the fact of his having married a Jewess, and even the itching of his hand for a bribe (Acts 24:26)—things so strangely at variance with one another and some of them with goodness—did nevertheless all combine to make him a hearer of the things greatest and best to be heard. He heard, felt, resisted, and lost. And Felix is a great and long-enduring illustration of—
I. THE POWER THAT LIES IN THE APPEALS OF RELIGIOUS, AND SPECIALLY OF CHRISTIAN TRUTH. There are deep valid reasons for this.
1. Right lies with them, by the verdict of
In every one of these directions, even to all their ramifications, there is nothing like a mere beating of the air, nothing like mere sound and fury, nothing like vox et praeterea nihil, in the appeals of religious truth. Each appeal is a home-thrust, that purports to reach and is fitted to reach what is deepest and most enduring in a man. And each appeal is a manifesto in the name of one or more of these grand authorities and arbiters of human life.
2. The imaginings, as just as they are instructive (if not flint stifled) of the mysterious looming future, lend a large contribution to the power of religious appeal Sometimes they are roused as by the mutterings of distant thunder, sometimes as by strains and snatches of celestial music. The echoes are for some so rich with sound, so mellow; or for others they wander as though haunting the empty chambers of hollow hearts. The apprehension of the infinite and the infinite future "hangs in doubt" before many eyes. But it is not always the apprehension of fear, and whether one or the other it does its work.
3. Love, and of an unusual kind, dwells in them. The interference with the sacredness and the retiredness of individual thought and feeling which is offered by religious appeal, and offered also with a certain appearance of arbitrary authority, is remarkably counterbalanced by its undisputed disinterestedness, men would never bear to be addressed on any other subject whatsoever in the way and in the tone and with the persistency to which they readily yield themselves in the matter of the appeals of religion. And that they sufficiently know nothing but their own deepest advantage is aimed at, is the sufficient account of it.
4. No doubt the commanding power of religious appeal—in the sense of convincing power—is due to the operation of the Holy Spirit.
II. THE POWER OF RESISTANCE TO THE APPEALS OF RELIGION, WHICH EMPHASIZES SO TERRIBLY HUMAN RESPONSIBILITY. The deep reality of such power of resistance is testified with certainty from the too well-known fact of it. Notice such causes of it as are traceable amid the deeper and inscrutable mysteries that cloud the subject.
1. A mind really turned from the light and truth.
2. A heart that is strong in its own pride. How many a heart knows the love that is intended for it, yet of pride refuses it!
3. An aversion to effort, specially moral effort; and to the demand of change which it involves in habit and action, specially that form of change called reform.
4. The grievous facilities for yielding to temptation. Legion is the name of subterfuge in things moral. The wide sweep of opportunity for resisting, courts the very spirit of him who is open at all to the approach of temptation. The shifts to which such will condescend to have recourse are innumerable, unaccountable, and find their strict description only as of those "devices of Satan, of which we are not ignorant," indeed—"not ignorant" in a double sense—but against which so many are unarmed and irresolute in their presence. The versatility also of subterfuge in order to gain the cud of resistance is amazing. It can blind the eyes of reason and of self-interest. It can stifle the conscience and hush to silence the deepest, justest sources of fear. It can defy the lessons of practical life. It will induce a man to use the responsible advantages of his own highest position to stay, in feeling's most favored and critical moment, the pressure and all the persuasion of moral importunity itself. And to all else, to elude the one precious moment of grace, temporizing, procrastinating, playing with time, it condescends to the mournfully vain expedient of attempting to throw dust with one hand into the eyes of others, and into its own with the other. The moment when Felix trembled as he heard the great verities of life announced and urged, was the fairest moment of his life. But it vanished. And the darkest moment succeeded it all swiftly, when Felix not only resisted the pleadings of knowledge, of truth and grace, and of the Spirit, but resisted them by the aid of the subterfuges of procrastinating, "Go thy way for this time; when I have a convenient season, I will call for thee."—B
HOMILIES R. TUCK