Stories from Genesis; sermons for children

Preface

I must ask the kind indulgence of my readers for a more personal explanation of the purpose of this little book than is usual or necessary in a preface. The book is the result of a promise in the fulfilment of which I have found more difficulty than I expected. For while it has been one of the privileges and pleasures of my ministry for many years to preach to children every Sunday afternoon (excepting during the holiday times), yet when I came to attempt to w T rite down these sermons I was met with two difficulties: first, the impossibility of writing in the familiar and colloquial style one uses in preaching to children, interspersed constantly with questions, homely illustrations and anecdotes ; then on the other hand, I felt that merely to

give an outline of the sermon would be quite useless if the book were, as I intended, to be read by children or by parents and teachers to their children. I have therefore attempted a middle course. The sermons as they stand were simply dictated to a stenographer, which will account both for the want of fulness of an extempore address and the absence of that terseness and precision which belong to a written sermon. The first, as I have said, seemed impossible; the latter, I think, would be unsuitable to children.

I have added to each sermon an analysis, in order that those who care to may try a plan which for many years I have found most successful :

1. I tell the children beforehand what chapters or passages of the Bible they are to read in preparation for the next Sunday's sermon.

2. At the end of each division, as I preach the sermon, in as few words as possible I sum up that point (as may be seen in the analysis) and make the children all repeat the summary together, sometimes two or three times over, until they have it quite clearly. I also make them repeat after me any important texts which I quote, and where they may be found. At the end of the whole sermon we go over together all the points, I asking them : " What was the first ? What was the second ? What text did I quote under this head % " etc.

3. The next Sunday, before beginning another sermon, the children again repeat all the headings of the last Sunday's sermon.

The attention and emulation which this stimulates among the children during the address, and the care which is taken by many of them during the week to really memorize what they have learned, is very striking. The memories of children are very quick and they retain with great ease such instruction if it be practically digested before it is given them ; I mean, if the points of the analysis be clear and more or less associated with one another by the sequence of thought. I have found more than a year after in preaching, that they could repeat every point of an old sermon.

Again a mistake which I venture to think is often made is that of confusing simplicity of statement with absence of thought. I believe children are quite able to grasp a great deal of theological truth, if it be clearly put, and, indeed, that they take great interest in so doing, and that a very valuable foundation of Church teaching may thus be laid. In these sermons, therefore, on the Book of Genesis, I have not so much aimed at telling the familiar stories of that most interesting book, as at drawing from each one some important lesson and so linking with it in the minds of the children, certain definite teachings as to doctrine and morals.

Except where needed to give definite point to the sermon, I have generally omitted anecdotes, because the same ones find a place in almost every book of children's sermons and may also be found collected in manuals of anecdotes, and so can easily be added by each preacher.

There are many books of children's sermons, and yet few seem to meet the need. This little book of mine is but an experiment. If it be successful, others may follow.

To Him Who said, " Feed Iffy lamba," I commit this work, with the prayer that 1 1 is Bleating, which alone can make it helpful, may rest

upon it.

ALFRED ft MORTIMER

St. Mark's Clkbm EfoUHB,

Philadelphia, All Saints, 18M,

Contents

I. Adam and Eve. — I. The Knowledge of God,

II. Adam and Eve— II. The Life of Work,

III. Adam and Eve— III. Curiosity, .

II Adam And Eve.— II

THE LIFE OF WORK

And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. — Gen. ii. 15.

In my last sermon on Adam and Eve we saw that the first great lesson their life teaches us was the importance of knowing God. Now let us learn another lesson from them — the importance of Work.

We are told in the words of my text that they were put into the Garden of Eden by God " to dress it and to keep it "; so that you see their life was not to be a life of idleness. Sometimes I dare say children think, " Oh, if I had nothing to do how happy I should be ! I should like every day to be a holiday.' 1 But, my dear children, those in this world who are idle, who think that they have nothing to do, and who do prac-

(ii)

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tically nothing, are just the people who are most unhappy. They are generally discontented and irritable and miserable, taking an interest in nothing, and as their life is all holidays it simply seems a dreary, uninteresting time. Holidays get their joy from being contrasted with working days.

But perhaps you say, dear children, that work is so hard and difficult and you often get so tired and do the work so badly that you are only ashamed of it when you have done it. Ah, this was not the sort of work that Adam and Eve had to do before the Fall, when they were in the Garden of Eden. They had not sinned, and so work was always interesting and always successful and comparatively without difficulty. They were surrounded by a beautiful garden and it was their joy and delight to dress it and keep it and to see it responding to their loving toil in producing everything beautiful and good. Work then had none of the disappointments that it has now, because work then was work with God's blessing resting on it, and so full of most abundant results. But when Adam and Eve sinned by disobedience, that very work which had been their delight became their punishment, for we read in Genesis iii. 17-19, that on account of Adam's sin God cursed the ground so that it brought forth thorns and thistles, and gave Adam as part of his punishment that in the sweat of his face he should eat bread ; that is, that work should no longer be easy and always successful, that he should have to toil and labor with all sorts of difficulties in his path, that he should know what it was to be very tired and very weary and still have to go on working, and that instead of the ground bringing forth abundantly its fruits in response to his labors it should often disappoint him, and instead of the fruits that he sought there should be thorns and thistles and weeds that told of sin. When we find our lessons very hard to learn or our work very difficult to do, when we are quite tired and perhaps our heads ache and we are inclined to give up in discouragement, then, dear children, let us think, " This is the result of sin ; not only

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of the sin which Adam committed, but of my own sin "; and let us bear it patiently and cheerfully and toil on, remembering that God is watching us — toil on lovingly and gladly in spite of all our difficulties, realizing that they are the punishment of sin, which God in His love gives us now to bear, that in that true Home of ours, where sin shall be no more, we may enjoy the reward of our labor.

So let us to-day learn a special lesson from the words of my text — the charge that God gave to Adam and Eve when He put them into the Garden of Eden, — that they were to dress it and to keep it. Some people have thought of the Garden of Eden as though it were absolutely perfect and there were no signs of death or decay, no marks of sin there, and yet this does not seem to have been so. The very fact that Adam was to dress it and keep it implies imperfection, and that it needed his care. There was no sin in Adam, and so his heart was light and his labor was full of Joy and power, and the garden in which he worked was wonderfully responsive to his efforts ; but there had been sin in this world before Adam and Eve were created, which left its marks everywhere in the death of the lower creatures, for you know we cannot conceive of their growth without death. The animals could not have lived without food, and in getting their food they must have caused death to the creatures on which they fed. Sin had come into this world before Adam and Eve were created, probably from the fall of the Angels, for the Book of Revelation tells us that when Lucifer rebelled against God he was driven out of Heaven and cast out into the Earth, and his angels with him (Rev. xii. 9), and he brought sin and imperfection into the lower world around. But when God restored the earth which Satan ruined, while the marks of sin were still there, it was an earth iull of beauty and obedient to man's rule, so that Adam's charge to dress and keep the garden did not involve the difficulties that we have to meet with in our work.

But, my dear children, God has given exactly the same charge to us ; that is, He has given us

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a garden to take care of and to keep in order. Can you guess what that garden is ? Shall we say that Eden represents to us our souls, so pure and beautiful when God created them in His own image, and yet needing such care lest they should become all ruined and spoiled ? Think of your soul, my dear children, as a beautiful garden, capable of producing the most glorious fruit and the most lovely flowers, but, alas! capable also of growing dreadful weeds. Your work is to dress and keep this garden of your soul. Let us consider how best you can do this. First, there must be the negative work of weeding. How fast the weeds grow in a garden, how hard it is io understand how they get there ! Yet we know if our garden is to be kept in order we must be continually on the lookout to pull up the weeds. So you must go into your gardens continually and do a great deal of weeding, first by self-examination, to find out what are the weeds, the faults of your character — weeds in our thoughts, thoughts of pri le, vanity, anger, envy, jealousy, and unholy desires ; weeds in our words, impatient words, untrue words, irreverent words, perhaps even impure words ; weeds in our acts, sins both of omission and commission. We must find these out by self-examination. We should try to make a habit every night of looking over our garden to see what w 7 eeds have taken root there during the day, and then we must pull them up by penitence.

Then the next thing to do to our garden, I suppose, would be sowing good seed. The good seed was sown in our Baptism, the germ of a Christlike nature ; but besides this we must be trying to sow the seeds of all the Christian virtues. And then, we know a garden often requires watering in order that w-hat grows there may not wither away for lack of moisture, and we must water our garden by constant prayer, and when we are old enough, by the regular use of the Sacraments.

Then Adam and Eve were not only to dress the garden, but also to keep it ; and that's the hardest part, dear children, for it is com para-

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tively easy for us in Lent to try to pull up the weeds and to sow a great deal of good seed and to water our garden with a great many prayers and to get it, perhaps, into beautiful order before Easter, but it's so hard to keep it so ! When the Church's festival seasons have passed away and the hot summer-time comes and we are not being continually reminded about holy things, then it's so hard to watch our gardens and see that Satan doesn't come and sow tares among the wheat, the seeds of all sorts of sins ; so hard to be watchful lest our garden should become dried up because we do not water it enough with our prayers ! Yes, dear children, those who are older than you, I suppose, could tell you that it is always harder to " keep it " than it is to " dress it."

And then, just one other thought. For whom are we to dress and keep our garden ? For our dear Lord. I will give you a text which, when you are getting tired of keeping your garden, you can sometimes think of : "AwaTce, O north wind / and come, thou south / blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my leloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits" (Cant. iv. 16). Here, you see, we learn for whom we work and toil in our garden, for our Beloved. And who is our Beloved % Who is it that we love best in all the world ? I am afraid some of us, if we tell the truth, would have to say, self. Some of us simply work and toil for self, and the fruits which our garden produces are only the fruits which we like, the fruits of self-will. But w T e must try to conquer self and remember that we are not our own, but " bought with a price "; that the garden of our soul belongs to our dear Lord, and it is to Him that we must say the prayer, "Let my heloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits" We could not dare to say that prayer unless we were really trying to have some fruits which we knew our Lord would delight in, the fruits of charity and humility and purity and gentleness and patience and obedience. These are the pleasant fruits in which our Lord can delight.

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But our text tells us something more than for whom we are to work. It tells us of some one who can help us in our labor. What does that mean, "Awake, north wind / and co?ne, thou south ; and blow upon my garden" 1 It means the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of God, for you know, in the language in which the Bible was written, the words "spirit" and "w 7 ind" are the same. The north wind is the Holy Ghost as the Spirit of Penitence, blowing upon our garden and helping us to kill all the weeds ; and the south wind is the Holy Ghost as the Spirit of Prayer, enabling us to make Acts of Faith and Love and Oblation. We are not left to till our garden alone, the Holy Spirit will help us.

And so you see to-day, my dear children, we have learned another great lesson from Adam and Eve. An enemy came to them in the Garden of Eden and tempted them to disobey and to sin, and then the thorns and thistles began to grow. An enemy will come often to us and tempt us to disobey and to sin, and then our garden, our soul, will look like a tangled mass of thorns and thistles and weeds. We must watch and we must work in order that our souls may be like Eden, fair and beautiful, a place where God may love to dwell, as He loved to walk with Adam in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day. If God be in our garden and we be striving to keep it always for Him, Satan will not be able to get in, for God and Satan cannot dwell in the same soul. Satan cannot get in unless we listen to his temptation and open the gates to him. Let us begin at once our work, put our gardens in order, root up the weeds, cast out the stones, sow the good seeds, water them with prayer, and then watch and ask our Beloved to come into His garden and dwell w T ith us always.

ANALYSIS.

Adam and Eve put into Eden to dress it and to keep it.

I. So their's not a life of idleness, but of work : i. What makes work so hard now ? Sin.

ADAM AND EVE

[II.

ii. Adam had not sinned ; so his work was not

hard, iii. The marks of sin in Eden caused by the

Fall of the Angels.

II. Our Eden is our souls ; we are to dress them :

i. By weeding ; self-examination and penitence, ii. By sowing good seed ; Baptism, Christian

virtues, iii. By watering ; Prayer and Sacraments.

III. We are not only to dress the garden, but to keep it. This is the hardest part, because, if we grow careless and do not watch, Satan comes and sows Tares, seeds of sins.

IV. For whom do we work in our garden ? For our dear Lord. Text, Cant. iv. 16.

i. Who is our Beloved ? Our Lord, ii. What are His pleasant fruits? Christian graces, iii. Who will help us? The Holy Ghost. The north wind, the Spirit of Repentance. The south wind, the Spirit of Prayer. Conclusion. We must work and watch, watch and pray, pray that our Beloved may always dwell with us.

Ill

ADAM AND EVE.— Ill CUBIOSITY

And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die : for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. — Gen. iii. 4, 5.

We have learned two lessons already, my dear children, from the story of Adam and Eve. Let us to-day try to learn a third.

Among the many good things which God has implanted in our nature is the passion of Curiosity, the thirst to know. You see I call Curiosity a good thing and given us by God, but it is like a sharp tool, very sharp so as to cut easily and to enable us to do our work well, but if our hand slips and the tool cuts us instead of the work, its very sharpness will cause it to make a deeper and more dangerous wound. Curiosity is one of our greatest gifts, for it is

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the gift which if disciplined makes for knowledge. It is the gift which enables people to become wise, to learn ? to conquer the difficulties of ignorance ; but its tremendous danger is that it often leads us into forbidden paths. Curiosity, guided by the Holy Spirit, will lead ns to become wise unto salvation, will lead us to search into the deep things of God, will make ns love to know all that is good ; but we know, alas! too well, that there is another spirit, a spirit of evil, the Devil, who will try to guide our curiosity into the paths of sin, who will try to make us wish to know what is naughty, that the very knowledge of which poisons and defiles our souls.

So in the Garden of Eden we are told that there was a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, a tree against which Adam and Eve were warned that they were not to eat of it. How hard it is, dear children, to be obedient when our curiosity is excited ! How many stories there are, of which you all know, in which curiosity has been the great factor leading to sad in.] CURIOSITY 25

and terrible consequences. We all remember the story which we listened to with such delight when we were very little children, about Blue Beard and the key which opened the one closet w T hich was not to be entered ; and while that was only a fable and we know was not true, how like the experience of our life it is, how like the experience of every life, even the life of Adam and Eve ! There in the midst of the Garden was that strange, mysterious Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam and Eve had a knowledge of good, for they knew God, who is Good, and every day they lived they learned to know Him better and so knew more of good. They had a knowledge of partial goodness in the creatures around them which God had made for their use. The food which they ate w r as good, the beautiful flowers which delighted their eyes, the waving grass, the sparkling streams, the birds and insects as they flitted about through the air, the stars that shone at night, all were good. They knew what goodness w r as ; but evil — what was that ? Of that

ADAM AND EVE they had no knowledge except of the name. And so we can imagine Eve wondering what this knowledge of evil would be, wondering and perhaps talking to Adam about it, and trying to imagine what this naughtiness, this sin would be in its effects upon them. They knew the joy of communion with God, they knew the pleasure of communion with Nature, they knew 7 the strange sensations of delight as they drank in the beautiful sights around them in Eden, the delicious taste of its fruits. Would a knowledge of evil be like that % Would it thrill their nature with some new delight ? Might it not be something even deeper and more satisfying than the knowledge of good ? What was it ? What could it be ? And all to be within the reach of their hand ! One moment and they could put forth their hand, take the fruit, eat it and know this great secret, open the door which w r as to usher them into the mysterious chamber of Evil and show them the strange sights which w T ere hidden there. And yet God had w T arned them that they must not do this, aye, not only in.] CURIOSITY 27

had forbidden them on pain of displeasing Him by disobedience, but had told them plainly of the terrible results evil would have in their own nature — they would die. They thought they knew what death was, for they saw animals dying around them. Death seemed to them simply the end of existence. They thought they knew what it was to die, but ah ! they did not, for their death meant not only the death of the body, but the death of the soul, eternal death ! that living death w r ith every craving and appetite intensified and w 7 ith no possibility of ever satisfying it ; that death which was separation from God, Who was the joy and end of their w r hole being. They did not know this. How could they ? God had warned them that if they ate of the tree they must die, but Satan came and tempted them. As long as they were alone they could resist the desire to know, they could restrain curiosity, they were held back partly by fear of the strange penalty, still more, let us hope, by love — love, which made them look pon disobedience to God as impossible.

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But Satan came to them and tempted them. And first he suggested a doubt as to the truth of God's revelation (Gen. iii. 1.) : "He said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden f " He called in question the truth of God's revelation, whether God had really said that, whether God had really meant it. He insinuated that it was hard that they should not know this wonderful secret, and that God could not have meant them not to eat of it, that it could not be wrong for them to take of it. And so with every sin into which curiosity leads us, Satan begins by suggesting to us that it cannot be wrong for us to know about it, that we need not go on to do the wrong that others do, but that there can be no great harm in our knowing what it is, what evil is.

And then when Eve plainly replied that God had said, "Ye shall not eat of it, ... . lest ye dier Satan went on further and denied the truth of what God had said, and replied, " Ye shall not surely die." And so, when we are tempted to in.] CURIOSITY 29

evil curiosity, Satan having first tried to make ns think that there will be no great harm in knowing, when our conscience rises up and says to us, " Yes, but you have been warned that in the knowledge of evil great punishment must follow," Satan replies, tempting us, " Oh, no, there will be no punishment, for you need not do anything at all, only you ought to know about it." And then, alas! too often we yield to the temptation, and that knowledge which we then acquire, oh, what would we not give to get rid of it ! The knowledge of sin coming up in our thoughts to tempt us again and again and again, the knowledge of evil leading us not to be content merely with the knowledge, but to wish to taste it. Adam and Eve not only took the fruit, but they ate it, and then the knowledge of evil coursed through their veins, poisoning their whole life, descending to their children and children's children. What a punishment ! Not only that they were driven out of Eden, not only that they lost that daily communion with God, not only that they were punished by having

3 o ADAM AND EVE [in.

to toil in the sweat of their face for their daily bread, not only that the earth brought forth thorns and thistles, but that there was in them a strange, terrible knowledge, continually impelling them to wish to sin.

In the life of Mahomet, the false prophet, the founder of Islam, we read that a certain Jewish captive determined, in revenge for the evils which Mahomet had inflicted on her countrymen, that she would poison him. When they w 7 ere at Khaibar she made the attempt. She cooked a piece of lamb for his dinner and put poison into it. Mahomet ate but a mouthful when he detected the strange taste and suspected poison. He ate so little that it did not kill him, but the poison got into his system and ruined his health, and years and years after, as he felt its deadly effects, he used to say that he felt the poison of Khaibar coursing and throbbing in his veins. So it is with evil curiosity. One may repent of the sin committed and learn to hate it, but w r eeks and months, perhaps years, afterwards that knowledge of evil will come up in.] CURIOSITY 31

in our memory, tempting us; will, like that poison of Mahomet, continue to race, as it were, through our veins.

Again, dear children, let me remind you that curiosity is not sin ; no, that it is an awful power given us by God to enable us to attain to a knowledge of what is good ; but that it must be disciplined and guided by His Holy Spirit and restrained from ever wilfully tasting the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of evil. I say wilfully tasting, because as we grow older we shall have to know a great deal about evil ; but oh, dear children, put it off as long as you can, for that knowledge will sadden your lives and make it harder to resist sin. How merry and light-hearted is the laughter of an innocent child, how pure and unclouded is its brow, how clear and fearless is its eye ! But when the knowledge of evil comes into life it robs us of our light-heartedness, clouds our brow with the furrows of care, and it takes away from our glance the fearless joy of innocence. When we must know it, we must contemplate

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