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SERMON IX:

THE SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST:

PREACHT IN TRINITY COLLEGE CHAPEL,

ON WHITSUNDAY 1832.

Matthew xii. 31, 32.

Wherefore I say to you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven to men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven to men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in the world to come.

HARDLY any passage in the New Testament has given rise to so much discussion as these words. Hardly any passage has been interpreted so variously and discordantly, or been made the ground of so many speculative inferences. Yet the attention and curiosity which the text has excited, have been no way beyond its deep and manifest importance. The very manner in which the words are introduced and repeated, gives them a peculiar emphasis and solemnity: a lesson thus enforced, it is plain, must be of more than ordinary moment. even if we had no personal concern in it, but were merely looking on as spectators of the transactions of another world, we could not but be awestruck by such an appalling denunciation. The mind recoils from the contemplation of everlasting, irremediable, hopeless woe: it sinks

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beneath the weight of such a thought. Let any ray of comfort, however faint and distant, glimmer through the darkness; and the prospect becomes supportable. It seems as though the intensity of the suffering be comparatively immaterial, provided it is to have an end. Thus our very feelings acknowledge in a manner that no finite quantity, however vast, bears any proportion to the infinite.

The words of the text embrace a twofold declaration; and even the narrower of the two is of all but infinite capacity. They stand, as it were, between heaven and hell, and lay open both the one and the other to our thoughts. For our Saviour did not come to destroy, but to give life. He never speaks of destruction, except to draw us away from it. When He terrifies, it is in order that He may bless. His call to repentance was a call to the kingdom of heaven. On the one hand the text proclaims the boundless reach of mercy: on the other hand it warns us that there is a sin so heinous as to transcend the reach of mercy, although boundless. All manner of sin and blasphemy, we are told, shall be forgiven to men. In these words it has been attempted to draw a specific distinction between sin and blasphemy, as though sin meant an offense against man, blasphemy an offense against God. But such a distinction would be unscriptural: every sin, according to the scriptural view, is a sin against God; and this constitutes its chief sinfulness. He gave the law, which sin breaks. Blasphemy too is plainly a branch of sin, not a thing contradistinguishable from it; though mentioned in this passage, along with the generic term which embraces it, because the particular sin, which gave occasion to the declaration in the text, was a sin of

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blasphemy; and because a kind of blasphemy is the sin, which is here declared to be excluded from forgiveness. All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven to men; or rather, may be forgiven, may obtain forgiveness; that is to say, on the use of the appropriate means for purifying and sanctifying the heart, through faith in Him, who came to save us from our sins. But the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven to men. He who is guilty of that sin must remain for ever an outcast from the presence, from the grace, from the love of God. To him alone "hope never comes, That comes to all." His sin is unto death, deadly; and every vital germ withers within him.

Such being the terrific character of the sin, which is here termed blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, it must needs concern us deeply, to inquire what that sin is, which alone is excluded from all possibility of mercy. So may we be watchful to shrink from whatever might lure us within its poisonous contagion, and to stifle every movement that might bear the heart toward it. That this can be ascertained, sufficiently for all practical and moral purposes, we may be confident; not only because the contrary supposition would be inconsistent with every conception that we can form of justice; but also because the whole moral code of the Gospel is plain and broad and clear and simple, because its letters are of light, and are graven on the forehead of the day. At the same time we may discern, why those who have tried to give a precise definition of the sin against the Holy Ghost, and to determine what specific act constitutes it, should have been much puzzled and perplext; so that this question has been a matter of lively controversy from the first ages of the

Church down to the present (AR). For the law of the Gospel, being designed to apply to every form and condition of humanity, never stops short at the outward act, either in what it commands or forbids, but goes straight to the heart, which is the only thing it cares for, and which alone gives the outward act its worth. Herein its procedure is the reverse of that followed by human law. Even when, for the sake of illustration, or with reference to a particular occasion, its prohibitions are directed against outward acts, the outward acts are not condemned for their own sake, or for the sake of any external mischief that may spring from them, but as manifesting and issuing from the evil principle in the heart; and the object of the prohibition is to root out this evil principle, not to cut it down, or merely clip off the blossoms. In fact it is evidently impossible to lay down definitively what particular acts will prove a person to have been guilty of the irremissible sin; seeing that the sinfulness of an act does not lie in the act itself, but in the agent, and varies according to his knowledge, his motives, and his intention. And even had this not been so, we may perceive a twofold reason why our Lord, in His mercy, should have left this sin involved in obscurity; on the one hand lest any person, committing the particular act, to which, from the waywardness of our nature, the very prohibition might with many have proved a temptation, should abandon himself to absolute despair; and on the other hand lest those, who see a brother committing such an act, should rashly consign him to perdition. As it is, both these sins, the sin of despairing of God's mercy, and the sin of dooming a brother to damnation, - have been lamentably common in Christendom: and doubtless they would have been much more frequent,

had there been any single act that men could have fastened on as the irremissible sin.

Nevertheless it is certain that our Saviour's words were not spoken to the winds. It is certain that there must be a sin, against which He purpost to warn His hearers; and that here, as ever, His words bear, not only on His immediate hearers, but on all after generations. For it is scarcely necessary to pause, in order to refute a notion entertained by some modern expositors, that the sin against the Holy Ghost, spoken of in the text, is a sin which could only be committed by the contemporaries of the Saviour. Among the theologians, who, having framed no conception of anything in God higher than bare naked power, have narrowed the whole evidence of Christianity to the physical miracles wrought by its Author, some have been fain to persuade themselves that the sin against the Holy Ghost lay wholly in the rejection of this evidence, and that none could be guilty of it except those who saw the miracles performed with their own eyes (AS). Yet even on their own premisses, as the evidence of our Lord's miracles ought according to them to be no less compulsory at this day, than at the moment when they were wrought, it is hard to understand how the sin of rejecting that evidence should have totally changed its nature, how it should be so much less sinful in us than in the Jews, although we have those miracles confirmed by all the spiritual miracles which the Holy Ghost has accomplisht in nations as well as individuals from the day of Pentecost downward; and although we behold them in the light which the history of the Church has shed on the meaning and purpose of its Founder. Besides, what in such case would be the difference between speaking against the Son of Man, which