The days of Lent

Introduction

Among those into whose hands this book will come, a number will feel that, for them, it requires no introduction. They have, in former days, found spiritual instruction and encouragement in “Helps to a Holy Lent,” “New Helps to a Holy Lent,” and “Forty Days with the Master,” as well as in other writings of the late Bishop of Central New York. They will recognize at once, in the present volume, his thought and utterance/

There will be others to whom a few words concerning the author of these pages, and the compilation itself, may be of service.

Frederic Dan Huntington was born , in a New England homestead, in the year 1819. He grew up in a religious atmosphere, the dominant char¬ acter of which was a hard and unlovely Calvinism. From the full effects of this system, “Augustinian predestination acidulated with Genevan fatalism,” as he himself described it, he was saved by the deep devotion and courageous piety of his mother. The sight of her sufferings, from an ecclesiastical iii iv

INTRODUCTION inquisition and condemnation, wrought in him, as a boy, an intense repugnance to the New Eng¬ land orthodoxy, and, in early manhood, be became an enthusiastic Unitarian, and entered the min¬ istry of that denomination. After a few years of much pastoral activity and effective preaching of the tenderer aspects of divine love, the reading of his mother’s journal, which came into his hands at her death, awakened him to a sense of the incompleteness of his own position. He said to a friend, “My mother had something in her religion that I do not find in my own.” What that was, it cannot be doubted, was a clear sense of the malignity of sin, and of the need of Re¬ demption, and the full provision for human res¬ toration in the Incarnation of the Eternal Son of God, His headship of the human race, and His victorious Passion, Death, and Resurrection, not as a Substitute for whose sake the sins of men could be condoned, but as a Saviour in whom man could be set free from sin and attain to personal righteousness and holiness, and perfect union with God.

Ceasing to be a Unitarian, Dr. Huntington went on to recognize the existence in the world of a divine Kingdom, the very Body of Christ, universal and Catholic, as standing in the Name,

INTRODUCTION v and living by the Spirit, of Him who is Son of God and Son of Man. It was natural to him, on reaching this final conviction, to lose no time in submitting to the authority of the Church, and seeking admission to the Apostolic priesthood.

As has been implied, this change of outward relation was accompanied by a growth and de¬ velopment of spiritual consciousness. And he was able, through many years of his life as priest and bishop in the Church, to meet the religious difficulties of numbers of earnest and sincere per¬ sons, to point souls to the ways of deeper conse¬ cration, to guide them onward in the knowledge of God, revealed in Jesus Christ, and to intensify their loyalty to Him.

It has been felt that his words, arranged in this volume by an experienced and gifted hand, have a message to many hearts that he would have been glad to deliver, that he must even now be anxious to impart. Though I have had no opportunity to examine these pages, I feel that it is not filial affection only that inspires the prayer that this book may find its way into the quiet places of many lives in this coming Lent.

James O. S. Huntington,

Holy Cross, West Park, February, 1906.

Superior OJI.C.

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I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me. — Ps., li., 3.

The fifty-first Psalm is the Ash-Wednesday cry of the guilty conscience of the ages. Every guilty conscience, sooner or later, takes it up and finds it the wonderful and inexhaustible expres¬ sion of its own wretchedness, its confession and final hope.

At first it might appear that the two parts of the text were a repetition; but a closer examina¬ tion discovers a striking and instructive distinc¬ tion between them. The “transgressions” are not the same thing with the “sin.” To trans¬ gress is to step over, to go beyond, a certain fixed line. We transgress when we go, in whatever direction, with our feet or our thoughts, with our hands, or desires, or tongue, or temper, beyond the line of right. A very little motion, one way or the other, will bring us up against this necessary restriction. We are constantly stumbling against our limits. Tossed this way and that by unholy ambitions, — avarice on one side and parsimony on the other, over-much worldly business on one side and indolence on the other, — we are liable to continual transgressions, and are punished for them. A regenerate heart, loving only goodness, longing only for purity, following only Christ, — this is the only real liberty. Without this, the prohibitions perpetu¬ ally torment us. The Bible reads like an inter¬ minable threat. The commandments gird us in with awful severity. “The strength of sin is the law.” So in the painful and miserable alter¬ nation — from doing wrong to suffering for it, from overpassing the line to paying the penalty of fear and remorse, from offence to retribution — we fill out the wretched experience of the trans¬ gressor, and find that his “way is hard.” Any¬ thing, then, like these forty days of Lent, which imposes voluntary self-denials, masters natural appetite, mortifies pride, keeps the body under, or lifts the soul into a heavenlier air, — anything that leads us up and away from that picket¬ line of prohibitions, liberates us. We taste the glorious freedom of the sons of God. “If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.”

ASH-WEDNESDAY

Let us turn to the other clause: “And my sin is ever before me.” The Greek word, commonly used in the New Testament where our translation says “sin,” signifies a coming short, something radically wanting, the failure of a design. Trans¬ gression is breaking over the line of positive com¬ mandments; it is going too far, going beyond duty and law. But we are by no means sure of safety, the Gospel says, by merely avoiding this. We are made to love and serve and honor Christ, and to glorify Him forever. What if we fail of that? That is sin. We are made to live in a state of earnest, active, vital union with the Saviour’s living body of the Church, keeping His ordinances of prayer and sacrament. What if we fail of that ? That is sin. We are made to bring forth daily the sweet and gracious fruits of our faith in charitable services to men, in our house¬ holds, among our neighbors, the poor, the suffer¬ ing, the ignorant all round us. If we fail of that, it is sin. We do not escape sin by merely observ¬ ing the prohibitions of the law, or by not doing the things of which God says: “Thou shalt not” do them.

Let us carry the subject one step farther for¬ ward. Not only is there a real distinction be¬ tween the transgressions and the sin, but the sin sustains to the transgressions the relation of a mother to her offspring. There must be, down somewhere under the surface, one great root — a bad principle, a bad spirit, one power of evil, clinging, working, active, in your heart — giving birth to all forms of evil, just according to your temperament, your weakness, your mood, the exposed side where Satan knows how to tempt you and bring the mischief out. Now, that in¬ ward state, that parent-source of special evils, — that is sin; the others are transgressions.

The Scriptures are very careful to fix attention on this difference. The apostle Paul dwells always on “the evil heart of unbelief.” The Saviour Himself distinguishes the two when He says, “A corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.” “Make the tree good, and the fruit will be good.”

But, after all, nothing permanent, nothing decisive, nothing that ensures salvation, is done till one makes confession of the great alienation of his heart from the holy God above him. This is the emphatic thought of the text. Be it special transgressions coming out, or be it that deepstruck sin of the heart from which they spring, the guilty but repentant David sees that he can¬ not be right with the God he has offended till he owns them both: “I acknowledge my transgres-

ASH-WEDNESDAY sions, and my sin is ever before me.” Confess often with the congregation; the opportunity is now opening for you to do it, day by day, for forty days of humiliation. Confess oftener and with more particular and personal specification in your closet, where no human eye or ear can come between you and your Judge. Examine yourself, what manner of person you are in your family, in your daily employment, in society, in the sanctuary, in view of eternity. Not only couple confession with self-examination, but self-examination with prayer, and prayer with self-denial, and self-denial with inward charity, and inward charity with larger offerings on God’s altar, unloosing heavy burdens and dealing bread to the hungry. So shall you keep a fast which God hath chosen, and you shall be His chosen, and your light shall break forth as the morning.

Above all, remember what each heart would be, under the load of all this acknowledged trans¬ gression and sin, but for Him who shed His precious blood for the cleansing of all sin. And so be preparing, with a true penitent heart and a lively faith, to celebrate both the day of His Cross and Passion and the day of His Resurrec¬ tion, that you may be found risen with Him, your affections fixed on things above, where He ever liveth to make intercession with the Father.

My God, my God, have mercy on my sin,

For it is great; and if I should begin To tell it all, the day would be too small To tell it in.

My God, Thou wilt have mercy on my sin,

For Thy love’s sake; yea, if I should begin To tell this all, the day were far too small To tell it in!

Receive my confession, O my only Hope of salvation, my Lord and my God. Thou who justifiest the sinner, and quicken - est the dead, justify me and revive me. Vouchsafe me pardon for past evil, amendment for present evil, and be my ever ready Help against evil to come. Forget my sins and remember Thy mercies. Cast me not away, but receive me according to Thy word, that I may live and not be disappointed of my hope. For my hope is in no works of mine, but hangs simply on the boundlessness of Thy love, and confides only in the multitude of Thy mercies. Help me, pity me, O Lord most holy, O God most mighty, and deliver me from evil: For Christ’s dear sake. Amen.

Jesus saith unto him: If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? Follow thou me. — St. John, xxi., 22.

What is the true sense of that “ Follow thou me,” which, with slight variations, Christ so often repeats in His personal ministry to men? If we take His own teaching, the teaching of His mouth, the teaching of His actions, and the teaching of His sacrifice, there can be but one answer. It is such a choice of Him as admits of no hesitation and no division of the mind as to who shall have the first affection, the first honor, the first service, in all places. And it is such a going after Him as will admit of no delay, no competition, no excuses of self-indulgence, secular business, or domestic comfort. “What is that to thee? Follow thou me.”

With some minds nowadays, as it was with St. Peter, the things which prevent their so fol¬ lowing are curiosity about some point of obscure and unpractical knowledge, or subordinate and unessential articles of human opinion, the im- 7 penetrable mysteries of Providence, the recreant will refusing to do the one plain duty it is directed to do, till this speculative curiosity is satisfied. “What is that to thee?”

More frequent and more fatal, however, than the sidewise wanderings of the mind are the evasions of the heart. Men ask themselves, when the narrow way of Christ looks not only narrow but rough: What will become of my comfort ? What will become of my pride ? What will become of all that scheme of daily provision for enjoyment, the zest of enterprise or luxury, the pleasant recurrence of indoor indulgence and outdoor recreation, if I am really to take up in earnest the business of a good soldier of Christ, and bear my cross consistently after Him? Tem¬ perament, as being either nervous or indolent, may turn itself into a tempter or an apologist. What is that to thee — to thee, bought with a price, redeemed by precious blood, set apart for a service to which this body and all its acces¬ sories are but as a flying speck of dust to the light of the everlasting life? Whether you belong in your temperament to the class of St. Peter, the representative of action, or to that of St. John, the type of contemplation, what matters it which you belong to? Each has his sphere and work.

THURSDAY AFTER ASH-WEDNESDAY

God knew your constitution, its weakness, its sensibility, its capacity, when He called you to be a disciple. Are you following in earnest with all the strength you have?

What is a Christian’s duty as to certain kinds of public entertainment, especially on the stage, which are questionable ? Men and women whose hearts lie close to the heart of Christ, having all their tastes and affections molded by His will and penetrated and flavored by His spirit of holiness, put the whole matter instantly and almost unconsciously as far from their thoughts as it is from their desire. They are separate from it by disrelish, touching not the unclean thing, gladly pledged to avoid even the appear¬ ance of evil. Those, on the other hand, who have no real principle at the root of their action, led chiefly by the senses, consulting only inclination, always eager to relax the stricter restraints of God’s law, go, of course.

Between these two classes remains a third class with whom the question stands, in a measure, open; often perplexed and anxious for direction, hesitating as to what the law of Christ requires of them, not quite satisfied or at peace if, to gratify others, or from being over-persuaded, they yield; or, if they hold out in refusing, still a

IO little undecided whether they have been overscrupulous or needlessly disobliging. It is just here that some positive word or influence from the Divine Guide may be of great service or great comfort. To every such faint questioning, parley¬ ing, self-excusing, Christ says: “Christian, what is that to thee? Follow thou me.” Go back to your plainly spoken Bible: “The friendship of the world is enmity with God.” “Come out from among them, and be ye separate, touch not the unclean thing.” “If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” “She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth.” Find out an application of these sentences for yourself — not mine or your neighbor’s — but your own, intelligent, honest, brave, no matter where it strikes or what it cuts off. It is not necessary to be censorious or bitter, or to become Pharisees. There is no need of any mutual judgments. But it is necessary to accept none but the highest standards for the conscience, and to keep ourselves unspotted if we can.

It would be easy to try the same great holy rule of undivided fealty to Christ, in many other cases of conduct. One thing only is safe, is right, is needful: the clear, straight following in faith. The heart that says: What is all else, — all

THURSDAY AFTER ASH-WEDNESDAY

II other gain, all other delight, all other good, — what is it all to me compared with following my Lord and helping forward His kingdom ? — that heart will know itself, and will somehow be known and read of all men, to be Christ’s and to have a peace that the world never gave.

We have entered upon a new season of peni¬ tential purification and spiritual grace. Let us make it a season of sacred and determined reso¬ lution for Christ; of a hearty turning unto Christ, of purer living, new watchfulness, and more con¬ scientious self-denial in Christ. The Lents that are left to us are not many. The ventures grow more uncertain. The great voyage is not far off. What you are, what you have done, what you give for God and His Church, is all you can take with you, or remember with peace. The blessings promised are more than eye hath seen or ear heard, or the heart of man conceived.

O Christ, our All in each, our All in all!

Thee wholly will I love, Thee wholly seek,

Follow Thy foot-track, hearken for Thy call . . .

O Christ, my All in all, my flesh is weak,

A trembling, fawning tyrant unto me:

Turn, look upon me, let me hear Thee speak!

Then, though the billows of Thine utmost sea

Swathe me, and darkness build around its wall,

Yet will I rise — Thou lifting when I fall —

And, if Thou hold me fast, yet cleave to Thee.

O Lord God, who alone knowest our infirmities, have pity upon me, and mine, and all men. Weak we are, strengthen us; afraid, encourage us; rash, sober us; slothful, arouse us; igno¬ rant, instruct us; destitute, enrich us; lost, find us; dead, quicken us: that with the strength, courage, soberness, energy, knowl¬ edge, riches, place and life which Thou givest us, we may follow Thee henceforth and forever. Amen.

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God be merciful to me a sinner. — St. Luke, xviii., 13.

All our evil, in act, or word, or wish, or thought, is a direct wrong against the God of all goodness and purity. A wound is given to the infinite and loving Heart. “He that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul”: but mark the first clause, — “sinneth against me.” Sin is a personal affront, whose bitter consequences only the forgiveness of God Himself can remove, and toward which, with the publican, we must implore Him to be merciful. Not “Nature be merciful,” nor “Laws of my constitution be merciful,’’ nor “I will be merciful to myself,” but “God be merciful”; nor yet “God be merciful to sin in general,” but “to me a sinner.”

We may try many plausible coverings and apologies; for the sophistry of sin is as old as pride. We may admit the offence, but plead the violence of the temptation, the treacherous opportunity, the necessities of business. The first man that sinned cried, “The woman tempted 13 me, and I did eat/’ and the tens of thousands of his descendants who sinned yesterday protested that they did not sin willingly. Yet all the while we know these to be poor, pitiful pretences, which never wholly satisfy the minds that make them. Deeper down, in some spot of your nature which the gracious Spirit has not permitted to be hard¬ ened and perverted utterly, is there not another verdict, a voice that is ready sometimes to cry, “ God be merciful to me a sinner ” ?

So profoundly rooted is this religious instinct, — the feeling that any thorough and effectual religious life must be born through the pains of penitence, — that you will probably have heard some persons deploring their feeble sense of sin. Men under moral conviction at once lament that they are insensible to their bad state, and' yet show a lively sense of it in this very regret. They grieve because their grief is so small, and their condition contradicts itself. An apathy is on the soul; and till the subduing sight of the Cross unseals the fountains of holy emotion, there is self-accusation, but no peace. Repentance has stung the conscience, but has not reached, re¬ newed, and comforted the heart.

Notice — and it seems to me a very striking fact — that while the Pharisee enumerates his

FRIDAY AFTER ASH-WEDNESDAY 15

merits, his abstinences and proprieties and alms¬ givings, the publican does not pretend to enu¬ merate his offenses. Now, goodness that can be counted and measured off is not enough. Good¬ ness is a principle, and that is measureless. Christ would show this publican as knowing that down underneath all particular sins there lies the one worse sin of a wrong soul, from which all the little ones spring, the parent sin of self-love that brings all the whole vile progeny forth. It is not so much sins as sin that we have to confess and deplore. A mere indifference to the right, a mere unfilial forgetfulness of God, the mere cold¬ ness of disregard to Christ’s compassion, make up that godless condition. The Father asks a filial spirit in His child; the Saviour asks a dis¬ ciple’s affection. “This is life eternal, to know Thee and Thy Christ.” “Thou shalt love thy God.”

We all shrink from the Pharisaic reputation. Yet this must be true: if any of us are not peni¬ tent with the publican, the prodigal, the woman at the Redeemer’s feet; if any of us are going on with habitual self-satisfaction, with no burning uneasiness, no bitter self-accusations, no sad shame within; if the days pass over us and bring no feeling with them that we are far from where we ought to be and might be, and far from what our Saviour has come to make us to be; we may be sure that, though we should lack effrontery to stand up and repeat the effrontery of the Phari¬ see, yet we are with him in spirit, and shall go on our usual rounds to-day no more justified than he.

Finally, recall the truth that an irresistible Power, penetrating below our delusions, will bring all that is dark to light, and make every soul stand face to face with its sins. How rea¬ sonable that, seizing on all helps towards reckon¬ ing the departures of our transgressions, we should try to see what is the sin that most easily besets us! Plunge down into the darkest corners, not only among sins of the tongue and the street, of society and of business, of the house and the hand, of the market and the church, but among sins of forbidden desires, of subtile indulgence, of the temper and of the imagination, sins that ally themselves, if they can, with noble impulses and warm affections. This will be a worthy sacrifice, an acceptable Lenten service, such a Fast as God hath chosen. And it will be a new wonder, if, at the end of that solemn scrutiny, we do not all implore “God be merciful to me a sinner!”

FRIDAY AFTER ASH-WEDNESDAY 17

In the Castle of Despair, Christian found the key of promise in his bosom. And this is the promise: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness,” “Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath trans¬ lated us into the kingdom of His dear Son, in whom we have redemption through His blood, even the forgiveness of sins.”

Love, that caused us first to be, Love, that bled upon the tree, Love, that draws us lovingly,

We beseech Thee, hear us.

Sick, we come to Thee for cure, Guilty, seek Thy mercy sure, Evil, long to be made pure:

We beseech Thee, hear us.

Blind, we pray that we may see; Bound, we pray to be made free; Stained, We pray for sanctity: We beseech Thee, hear us.

By the love that bids Thee spare; By the heaven Thou dost prepare, By Thy promises to prayer:

We beseech Thee, hear us.

O Lord my God, be not Thou far from me; haste Thee to help me. Have mercy upon me, and deliver me out of the i8 mire, that I may not stick fast therein, and may not remain utterly cast down for ever. Strengthen me with heavenly courage, lest the “old man,” the unruly flesh, not yet fully subject to the spirit, prevail and get the upper hand. Neither let the world and the brief glory thereof deceive me. Give me strength to resist, patience to endure, and constancy to per¬ severe. Grant to me above all things that I can desire, to de¬ sire to rest in Thee, and in Thee to have my heart at peace. Let thy mercy be upon me, as my trust is in Thee. Amen.

Arise ye, and depart; for this is not your rest. — Micah, ii., io.

Unless it is the emptiest of sentimental excla¬ mations, the penitential prayer, “God be merci¬ ful to me a sinner,” will be followed by an arising and departing, with new-born affections, energies that are not of the flesh but the Spirit, from the old and far country for the Father’s house.

This, in fact, is the test of the sincerity of faith, — the willingness to give up all that has been precious but not holy, and launch out upon the future, trusting only to the unseen Hand, like the Patriarch of whom that beautiful thing is written, that when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive, he obeyed and went out, not knowing whither he went, dwelling in the land of promise, and looking for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. Great difficulties will threaten every such obedient foot, — the wilderness before, the bondage to evil behind; but God is mightier than they, a pillar of fire for the night and of 19 bright cloud by day: “ Greater is He that is for us than they that are against us.”

No period of our life becomes quite intelligible and clear to us till we quit it for the next; not childhood till we have left it; not youth till it has departed; not life itself as a whole, till it verges to its close. There is certainly truth here; and there is a much larger and more sacred truth connected with it. Retrospect is not all outlook.

Our best wisdom is not gained from what is behind us, but from what is above. The de¬ ficiencies of knowledge find at once a cause and a compensation in the immeasurable certainties of faith. “I know,” said the Apostle, “in whom I have believed.” Our great want is to look up with just that assurance. For that we have to be moved and dislodged. For that we have to change our state, our mind, our heart. As there are arms to take up the reluctant child and carry him along, so God lifts us along. We are born that we may be born again. We live that we may have life everlasting.

When the heart is really made new, and is filled with the holy life of its Lord, it matters not what the outward place or scenery may be. There is no restless thirst for novelty, no con¬ tempt or complaint of commonplace task-work.

SATURDAY AFTER ASH-WEDNESDAY

Even in the new country, the old and familiar has to be taken back. There is much in com¬ mon in the forms of the old life and the forms of the new. The same people have to be met, and served, and endured. The same body has to be fed, clothed, exercised, kept under. The same crosses of temper, self-disgust, baffled aspiration, have to be borne. No emigration transports us out of the reach of mortal annoy¬ ance and infirmity. If the old duties look small, the old labors irksome, it is probably a sign that the “new heart” is not really in us, but only some vain and specious imagination instead. After His high communion in the temple, Jesus, the Lord of souls, went back to Nazareth, con¬ tent with the companionships of His childhood, for eighteen years more, cheerful with a village repu¬ tation, and was “subject” to Joseph and Mary.

For all this that we have said, there is a state¬ ment far more strong and complete, of simpler speech and sublimer authority, in the Gospel of the New Testament. There you may find again and again, repeated in as many .forms as the heart and customs of men could need it, from the lips of the Redeemer and His first dis¬ ciples: “ Except a man be born again, he can¬ not see the Kingdom of God.” There you find that to “arise” there must be repentance toward God and faith in Jesus Christ, since “it is God that worketh in us, both to will and to do.” There you see revealed what is to be departed from, — “the evil heart of unbelief,” “the old man and his deeds” “corrupt according to the deceitful lusts.” And there you behold the “rest” that is not here, but remaining “for the people of God,” the peace that is given “not as the world gives.”

And then all that is earthly can be freely sacri¬ ficed for this life divine. When we go out from one resting place after another, it may feel at first as if it were an exile from joy. But as the old roof drops away, the Almighty arms will close us round; and lo! another house, not built with hands, begins already to reveal its spiritual symmetry, its fairer form and eternal strength, around us. Though father and mother forsake us, the Lord will take us up.