The fight of faith is no aimless affair. If we have to struggle, we struggle to win. To gain this end, then, some method must be pursued. How do we fight?
1. By faith.—TheChristian life is not only a contest of faith, it is a contest by means of faith. It is inspired by faith as the spring of its activity, and the condition of its success. At first thought it seems a paradox to think or to speak of a fight by faith, or to connect a contest, which implies individuality and independence, with the idea of faith, which implies dependence and help. Perhaps we cannot state the problem, or solve it, better than by tracing its history in human experience. Before the times of Christ and of Paul, earnest men of many nations, and under a great variety of circumstances, had made an earnest business of the contest with passion and sin in their own souls and in the world about them. The need of this strife they saw and felt, with a clearness and strength of feeling to which the most of men in these easier times are utter strangers. They felt the burdens and sorrows of individual and collective human life. They experienced the impulses to evil as they were constantly revived within their own souls. They were appalled at the energy and strength with which sin organized itself afresh to resist and defy both the individual and the joint desires of those who would reform themselves and reform society.
On a sudden, and yet as not wholly unexpected, a few of the race are confronted with a Person who overawes them by the mystery of His being, and attracts them by the strangeness of His condescension; who wins their confidence by the largeness of His invitations, and subdues their hearts by His love in death. The effect upon their character and springs of action is a new creation. The few who describe it, like Paul and Peter and John, declare that they were born by it into a new life; and their writings give jubilant expression to the new life of hope and victory which they began to live, through their joyful gratitude to the living Christ. What they say of themselves is observed of others. Scores and hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands, share in the new impulse which has come into human society. This new life is all comprehended in faith in the matchless personality of the dying and risen Christ. “This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.” “The life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the love of Christ, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
This good fight is a fight of faith; a fight which not alone is born from living faith in Christ, but to which faith supplies desire, courage, and strength, whilst it moreover assures us of the victory on the ground of God’s own promise. “Through faith, through faith”; who shall reckon up all which, by the light of the history of God’s kingdom, may be ascribed to this word? And what Christian has not earlier or later experienced the truth of this passage: “All things are possible to him that believeth”? Nay, we ourselves do not know what we might accomplish, if our faith were firm and unshaken. Faith has not only power to remove mountains, but to overcome the world. Faith is the first, faith is the most exalted, faith is the last requirement in the struggle of spiritual life. No one is overcome by sin, I boldly assert, till first the shield of faith has fallen from his enfeebled hand. [Note: J. van Oosterzee, The Year of Salvation, ii. 224.]
(1) The faith by which we fight and win this battle is personal. It is the act or attitude of a person toward a person. We fight the battle of life under a leader and master and friend, whom we follow and love and obey, and in whom we trust and triumph and rejoice; in one word, in whom we believe. But though we fight the battle by Christ’s help and by gratitude towards Him, we fight it out each man for himself. Subjectively, faith is an act, a disposition, a loving and obedient will; objectively, it rests on the living Christ, to whom all power is given in heaven and earth, and with whom is all sympathizing, all forgiving, and, therefore, all subduing love.
(2) And this fighting is positive. If faith is to help us against our adversaries, it must be confident and certain. If faith connects us with a person, we must know in whom we believe: who he is, so far as to be assured what he will be to us—what in our joys, what in our sorrows, what in our griefs, and what in our fears, what in our life, and what in our death. It follows that if we are to contend by our faith, we are to contend for our faith; simply because a man without positive convictions cannot contend at all, especially in an age which is shivering with doubt and uncertainty in every fibre of its intellectual life. At a time when every volume presents a novel theological theory or a new ethical speculation, either a new negation or a new sneer; when the foundations of all sorts of truth were never so confidently questioned, the best accredited facts so freely challenged, when the extremest needs of man’s nature were never so boldly, or the most sacred of his hopes and aspirations so flippantly, disposed of—at a time when not a few believing souls are terrified with an undefined alarm, lest perhaps the foundations of their hopes and sacrifices shall sink into a yawning abyss—at this time the cry of distress is whispered from many lips, and the anguish is felt in many hearts: “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.” At such a time love to others, as well as duty to ourselves, requires that every man who has a faith should make it positive, clear, and energetic. No man is worth much, in such a strife of opinion and of tongues as now prevails, who does not believe with positiveness, and believe with energy—the energy of that clear and calm conviction which is sustained by a life which is bid with Christ in God.
The personal character of our conflict is strikingly exhibited in the letters which Christ dictated to the seven churches of Asia. He had something to allege against most of them: laxity in discipline, heresy in doctrine, abatement of zeal, all of which faults belong to a community. But from the manner in which He concludes the epistles, it is evident that these faults sprang from individual declension in the vigour and courage of every man’s inward fight. “He that overcometh” is blended with every salutation, not, they that overcome; and in the last letter He joins Himself with every bold and patient fighter of sin: “To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne.” [Note: E. E. Jenkins, Life and Christ, 98.]
2. By works.—Thebattle is the Lord’s, but His arm and shield never take from us the necessity of fighting.
(1) We use diligence and determination. No victory is possible, first of all, without will, without determination, resolve, absolute unwavering purpose by God’s grace to subdue our evil passions.
On this all depends. We must first give ourselves to our Saviour Christ, and to the influence of His Holy Spirit. We do not deceive ourselves with the silly notion that our personal temptations are abnormal, and exceptional; that it is more difficult for us than for others to escape from destruction. There has no temptation taken any one of us but such as is human, such as we are able to bear, such as is common to man. But with every temptation which besets us, even with those which, because of our yielding to them in past times, now attack us with tenfold force and fury, even for those God provides usnot only with a way, but, as it is in the original, with the way, the very way, to escape.
It is under the guise of warfare that morality always presents itself to Browning. It is not a mere equilibrium of qualities—the measured, self-contained, statuesque ethics of the Greeks, nor the asceticism and self-restraint of Puritanism, nor the peaceful evolution of Goethe’s artistic morality: it is valour in the battle of life. His code contains no negative commandments, and no limitations; but he bids each man let out all the power that is within him, and throw himself upon life with the whole energy of his being. It is better even to seek evil with one’s whole mind than to be lukewarm in goodness. Whether you seek good or evil, play for the counter or the coin, stake it boldly!
Let a man contend to the uttermost
For his life’s set prize, be it what it will!
The counter our lovers staked was lost
As surely as if it were lawful coin :
And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
Is, the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin
Though the end in sight was a vice, I say.
You, of the virtue (we issue join),
How strive you?—“De to fabula!”
Indifference and spiritual lassitude are, to the poet, the worst of sins. “Go!” says the Pope to Pompilia’s pseudo-parents,
“Never again elude the choice of tints!
White shall not neutralize the black, nor good
Compensate bad in man, absolve him so:
Life’s business being just the terrible choice.”
In all the greater characters of The Ring and the Book, this intensity of vigour in good and evil flashes out upon us. Even Pompilia, the most gentle of all his creations, at the first prompting of the instinct of motherhood, rises to the law demanding resistance, and casts off the old passivity.
Dutiful to the foolish parents first,
Submissive next to the bad husband,—nay,
Tolerant of those meaner miserable
That did his bests, eked out the dole of pain,
she is found
“Sublime in new impatience with the foe.”
“I did for once see right, do right, give tongue
The adequate protest: for a worm must turn
If it would have its wrong observed by God.
I did spring up, attempt to thrust aside
That ice-block ’twixt the sun and me, lay low
The neutralizer of all good and truth.
Yet, shame thus rank and patent, I struck, bare,
At foe from head to foot in magic mail,
And off it withered, cobweb armoury
Against the lightning! ‘Twas truth singed the lies And saved me.”
Beneath the mature wisdom of the Pope, amidst the ashes of old age, there sleeps the same fire. He is as truly a warrior priest as Caponsacchi himself, and his matured experience only muffles his vigour. Wearied with his life-long labour, we see him gather himself together “in God’s name,” to do His will on earth once more with concentrated might :
“I smite
With my whole strength once more, ere end my part,
Ending, so far as man may, this offence.” [Note: H. Jones, Brimming as a Philosophical and .Religions Teacher, 104.]
(2) We use prayer.—The victory for ourselves cannot be won without prayer; for prayer—earnest, agonizing, heart-felt prayer —will make us leave off sinning, or else sinning will make us leave off praying. Real, passionate prayer—prayer like Jacob’s wrestling with God by the midnight watch when be rose from being Jacob, the mean supplanter, into Israel, the prince of God —is inconsistent with any continued indulgence in any known sin, secret or open.
It is possible so to be overborne by the pangs and losses and defeats of the Christian soldier as to lose faith in Divine love and providence. There is an awful possibility of giving over prayer, of coming to think that the Lord’s ear is heavy that He cannot hear, and His arm shortened that He cannot save. There is a terrible significance in this passage, which we quote from a recent book: “Old Mr. Westfield, a preacher of the Independent persuasion in a certain Yorkshire town, was discoursing one Sunday with his utmost eloquence on the power of prayer. He suddenly stopped, passed his hands slowly over his head—a favourite gesture—and said in dazed tones: ‘I do not know, my friends, whether you ever tried praying; for my part, I gave it up long ago as a bad job.’ The poor old gentleman never preached again. They spoke of the strange seizure that he had in the pulpit and very cheerfully and kindly contributed to the pension which the authorities of the chapel allowed him. I knew him five-and-twenty years ago, a gentle old man addicted to botany, who talked of anything but spiritual experience. I have often wondered with what sudden flash of insight he looked into his own soul that day, and saw himself bowing down silent before an empty shrine.” [Note: W. Robertson Nicoll, The Garden of Nuts, 224.]
In the anguish of prayer
It is well! it is well!
Then only the victory of love is complete,
When the soul on the cross
Dies to all save its loss.
When in utmost defeat
The light that was fair
And the friend who was sweet
Flee away, then the truth of its love is laid bare
In the anguish of prayer. [Note: E. Underhill, Theophanics, 49.]
(3) Another and most indispensable rule, for one who would have victory over sin, is watchfulness over the thoughts of the heart, without which they would only be evil continually. The heart must be kept pure, or the life will be impure. Let us not deceive ourselves with the pretence that thoughts are nothing; they are as real as deeds to that eye ten thousand times brighter than the sun which burns into the very secrets of our hearts. Out of the heart, said our Lord Jesus Christ, proceed evil thoughts, and then, as though the very flood-gates had been opened and the destroying waves let loose, the evil thought develops into the evil wish, and the evil wish into the evil purpose, and the evil purpose into the evil deed, and the evil deed into the evil reputation, and the evil reputation into the evil habit, into the deadly seeming of a tyrannous necessity. And so evil thoughts end in murders, adulteries, fornication, theft, deceit, false witness, covetousness. All these things come from within, and these defile a man. Never think lightly of an evil thought. Remember that there is a reverse process. Begin with faith; add to it virtue, and all the strands of Peter’s rope, and you will not fear the tyranny of evil habit but will enjoy the liberties of the sons of God.
Methought I saw a beautiful blind sister open the gates of Heaven; her name was Faith, and she just opened them wide enough for the soul to enter. But after her there came a brother, brave, a soldier, in arms; he opened them wider still—his name was Virtue-Bravery. Then after him there came another brother, pale, student-like, with a book in the one hand; his name was Knowledge—he opened them wider still. After him there came another sister, a nymph of ruddy, healthy hue; her name was Temperance—she opened them wider still. Another sister came, with downcast eyes; her name was Patience—she opened them wider still. After her a brother, with prayerful lips and countenance; his name was Godliness—he opened them wider still; and was followed by another, called Brotherly-Kindness, who, with outstretched arms, opened them wider still. I wondered if there were any more; yes, there was one, a sister. Up she comes; she has been visiting in the huts where poor men dwell, with a basket on her arm and a bible in her hand, and she opens the gate widest of all—her name, they said, was Charity. And as I wondered what this might mean, I heard a voice saying, “Add to your faith virtue, and to virtue knowledge, and to knowledge temperance, and to temperance patience, and to patience godliness, and to godliness brotherly-kindness, and to brotherly-kindness charity. For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that you shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ,” and, if so, a blessing shall be ministered to you abundantly in the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour. [Note: Robertson of Irvine, Poet Preacher, 242.]
(4) Last of all the battle must be fought with discrimination. To let the battle against wickedness and cruelty pass over into a personal hatred of the wicked and cruel man, and exhaust itself in personal attacks on him for other things besides his wickedness —that is the constant peril. How often does the hot agitator need these calm, strong words (Eph_6:12): “Not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, and the world-spirit of darkness, and the evil that is in the air”? We know the answer that will come: “Evil incorporates itself in man. How can you strike out the evil without beating down the men in whom it is embodied?” But surely no such statement as that, which is most absolutely true, can be stretched wide enough to cover the personal hatred, the wilful or careless misrepresentation, the petty spite, with which the earnest advocate of some cause which he thought indubitably right has very often followed up the man upon the other side, whom he believed of course to be indubitably wrong.
Just see what some of the personal disadvantages of such a disposition are. First, it puts it absolutely out of the angry partisan’s power, in case he is not wholly right, to get any advantage or correction from the opposite light in which his opponent sees the same transaction which he thinks so wrong; second, it robs the furious hater of the chance to learn charity and personal consideration, for of course the chance to think tolerantly of a man who differs from us conies to us when we differ from him, and if, the moment that we differ from him, we begin to hate him, it is as if we shut up the door of one of our best schoolrooms and turned the key of prejudice upon it; and yet again, it makes turbid and heavy and dull that stream of simple indignation against evil and love for righteousness which, when it is absolutely fresh and pure, is the most strong and persistent power in the world. These are the reasons why it is a sad loss when the fighter with wickedness turns his struggle against wickedness into angry attacks on men against whom perhaps their wickedness has first provoked him, but whom he has come now to hate for themselves.
This was the spirit of our Lord’s disciples when they wanted to call down fire on the village of Samaria. This was Luther’s spirit when at Marburg he lost sight of the simple fight with error and plunged into a personal attack on Zwingle. It is the danger of all earnest men. It seems sometimes to be so inseparable from earnestness that the world thinks that it must not call it a vice or take any note of it in the earnest man. But no really earnest man can be so self-indulgent. Ever he must struggle to know who his true enemy is, and to fight finally with him alone. With wickedness we may be unmitigatedly indignant. We may hate it with all our hearts. Towards it there is no chance, there is no right, of indulgence or consideration. But with the wicked man, because he is both man and wickedness, we may be at once full of anger and full of love, and out of the spirit of the highest justice, both to him and to ourselves, insist always that it shall be the wickedness and not the man that we hate! [Note: Phillips Brooks, The Mystery of Iniquity, 81.]
