Charity, The End of the Commandment

“The end of the Commandment is charity, out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned.”—1 Tim. 1:5.

THE end of the Commandment. These words, my brethren, fall on us at this time with a peculiar force. The former half of another Christian year has gone by. From the manger at Bethlehem to the cloud that rose from Bethany, from the voices of the prophets in Advent to the crowning doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the whole drama of the glorious history, the whole system of resulting truth, has been once more before us. And all is summed up for us in the one word—“the Commandment.” God’s voice to man, beginning in Eden, continuing through all the strivings of the Divine Spirit with our spirit, seems to the Apostle as he writes, one Commandment, one great injunction laid upon man by his Maker: the many voices constitute but one utterance, the thousands of years are but one moment.

Now it is a blessed thing to be able thus to regard the Divine dealings with man. God is one, God’s dealings are one, God’s words are one. “A covenant,” says this same Apostle, “is not a covenant of one, but God is one.”* It is a difficult saying, but we may take it on its easy side, and use it for our purpose. In the great process of God towards us, there are not two kinds of terms, two minds, two propositions. All that has looked like this has been but transitory, has been only for teaching and for symbol: but God is one. His self-manifestation to man is one, not many. The populous outer world, that sets forth to us his handy work—the variously written books that declare to us His will—the many-colored histories that record for us His Providence, each of these in itself is one, and all of these together are one, proceeding from, declaring, revealing, one consistent and unbroken course of will and action.

It is not possible always to see this unity, nor is it easy always to believe in it. We live among a thousand breaks and inconsistencies, and our vision cannot reach high enough to perceive the point where these all run into one. And so they who have little faith see nothing but the breaks and inconsistencies, and believe at random, and despair of anything better. But it was for the very purpose of assuring to us men this unity in all His dealings with us, that God revealed Himself by Jesus Christ: that He might gather together in one all things in Him: that in Christ Jesus there might not be many distinctions, but that in Him all might be one. “In Him,” says this same Apostle,* “God’s promises (which are, as revealed to us, the measure of His purposes) are not yea and nay, but all are yea and amen,” all in harmony, and ratified forever.

So that to believe in this absolute unity, this whereby all God’s will is to us “the Commandment,” is of the essence of our Christian faith. And of all times ought it to dwell on our minds now, when we have again gone through the whole great process of our Redemption. All those events, and all that they brought about, are one, and there is one word that interprets them all. That one word, hardly longer than the name whereby we call Him, is at the root of every act, every word, every revelation of God. “God is love,” in all He does. The bright golden thread is not, again, always apparent to us, looking at his dealings from beneath. And sometimes it is hard enough even to believe its presence. Stand in the darkness under the cross at Golgotha, behold the Divine Victim bowing to His death of cruelty and shame. Is that love? Can that be in unity with the acts of Him whose tender mercies are over all His works? Nay, thus much were a small thing to say. That agony, that yielding up the righteous soul of the Son of God, is the very center and key of all God’s love. Herein, herein chiefly and of all other examples, is love: this was the choicest fruit and the fullest outpouring of the Father’s great love to man—the means whereby man, in his waywardness, his rebellion, his guilt, might become reconciled to God. Well, then, in the full consciousness, and in the blessed spirit of this unity, looking at God’s law and Christ’s Gospel as one Commandment, let us see what is the end, the purpose, of that manifestation of God to us.

“The end of the Commandment is charity,” “is love”.

Now, taking the declaration in its simplicity, and looking out over the Christian world, we are disposed, simply enough on our part perhaps, to say, What a pity it is that people do not oftener ask themselves amidst all their conscientious observance of Christianity, and all their life-long toil to do their duty by it, whereunto it all tends: what is the one general effect which He who ordained Christianity as a great Commandment for us, intended it to produce? For it seems to me that this is not, or at all events is not commonly, done. Look at the lives, listen to the words, of earnest faithful men and women. A noble utterance here, a blessed act of self-denial there, a firm testimony to great doctrines when it was required, these we may find; but is it not true that the lives of most religious people are but a heap of scattered efforts, the reachings of a hand in the dark, the utterances of thoughts without a center, the glitterings of unstrung jewels shed upon the ground? Mark the man as life goes on, and gray hairs gather upon him: follow him into his business, listen to him in society: what has the advancing Christian of our day gained by his Christianity? Here it has been for years. Blameless at school, blameless in ’prentice life, or in college life, constant at prayer in chamber and at church, having the pure heart, cherishing the good conscience, living by the faith unfeigned, wherein has he grown, whereby can men take ever more and more certain note of him, that he has been all these years with Jesus?

Surely this is one of the great faults of our time, that we do not find any given end of the Commandment notably served in men who have been all their lives in the practice of it: that men and women move about among us, of whom we know that they have long been eminent in the Church of Christ, who are looked up to as examples and lights of the religious life, and yet they are none the better for all this, their temper none the sweeter, their words none the gentler, their acts none the more considerate to others.

And one of the chief reasons why Christianity is so much called in question in these days, so much pulled to pieces and caviled at, is, that it is not seen producing effect on society and on the members of society. We talk about our pure and apostolical faith in this land: we call it a high privilege, evermore to go close up to the fountains themselves and draw: the open Bible, the holy words of the loving One, the fervent sayings of His Apostles, heard in every household, taught to every child, these are the boasts which rise from our pulpits and our platforms. But men are beginning to ask what is the use of this familiarity with the person of Christ, if it does not make us like Christ? And where is the profit of an apostolical faith, if it takes no note of apostolical example?

And the eye naturally turns to others than us, who take their Christianity lower down, and who have surrendered to earthly authorities that freedom of judgment which we so jealously guard: and men see, or they seem to see, more visible effect produced for the faith and for the toil; they think they find tempers more subdued, spirits more calmed, livelier lives, more saintly devotion; and the consequences are, with those who cannot see through nor appreciate the truth of things, error, and perhaps defection; and with those who can, an indifferent contempt for all forms of that religion which cannot, in its purity, mould a man’s life to its image, and which, if it have any effect, is obliged to borrow it from lower motives and meretricious influences.

My brethren, these things ought not so to be. We have been a land of reformed churches long enough, to have made very visible progress towards the end and purpose of our faith, if it have an end and purpose. If we have not done so, it behaves us to stand and consider our ways.

And God has given us plenty of light in this matter to consider them by. It is not as if all were darkness: it is not as if over the broad world Christianity had failed of its effect. Viewed on the large scale, as an influence over nations, over the great international and supranational maxims which rule mankind, Christianity has, in the ages since the Lord went up from us, notably and visibly served its end. The collective conscience of nations has in more than one case yielded to the one continued protest against injustice and cruelty which is raised in the Gospel, and the latter of the two great Commandments has become in some measure at least a recognized standard of action.

And though even here some may be disposed to think the great work of leavening the lump as yet only begun, yet there can be no question that to the leaven we are to trace what good has been done, and that, in however slight a measure, and however slow a progress, the leavening is advancing age by age.

But, my brethren, when we look at our individual lives and enquire of them, surely the answer must be altogether different. Gentler maxims of conduct, larger heartedness, more words and deeds of love, these are not even so much as thought of in forming an estimate of progress or of character in our Church life. Nay, more, and worse, than this. Such effects of our religion are, if alleged respecting a man, openly and professedly despised, and repudiated as indicating any eminence or advance. We cast behind us our Lord’s rule, “By their fruits ye shall know them.” We proclaim that this is a deceptive rule, a lax and latitudinarian standard, and we take on us to amend it: “By their professions ye shall know them, by their opinions ye shall know them, by their words ye shall know them.” And so the great men in our Christian world are not the men of eminent Christian action, not the peacemakers, not the heroes of love and self-denial, but the vehement denouncers of differing opinion, the strong assertors of some narrow and well-marked line of doctrine in doubtful matters, the very persons who cause, instead of healing, division.

I know it is always easy to find excuse and justification for this. The cry of “the truth in danger” is ever ready on men’s lips: the assertion that the present time, be it when it may, is a great crisis, to be dealt with exceptionally, has I suppose been made in every age of the Church. At all events, those who can look back over the last half century will remember that such things have never ceased to be alleged as temporarily standing in the way of the “end of the Commandment.” Love, reconciliation, and reciprocal kindliness, between differing Christian men and differing Christian bodies, are confessed to be admirable things, if they could but be had; but this is not the time for them: we live amidst imminent perils: talk not of disarming, when the foe is at the door. All my lifetime, good men have been saying this: many have spent their strength in the protest and are passed away, many are running the same course now, champions of division, their hand against every man, and every man’s hand against them: and to judge by the promise of the younger men who are coming up, such will be more than ever the spirit and practice of the age that is to follow us. Their converse, their speeches, their books and journals, are bristling with tokens of war; doubtful things more strongly asserted, ill motives more rashly attributed, sweeping condemnations more recklessly pronounced. If the end of the Commandment is love, we of this Church, my brethren, have somehow missed the path, and are going altogether astray from it.

Our text not only points out to us the fact that the end of the Commandment is love; it goes deeper than this, it shows us out of what that love ought to spring. Now if there be a defect of water down the stream, we may expect to find its fountains yielding but scantily. There it will be that the origin of the mischief must be sought, and there that the remedy must be applied. It may appear that the springs are shallow and want deepening; or are uncared for, and have become choked up; or both these faults may exist together. The end of the Commandment is love out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned.

Doubtless these latter clauses may be regarded as putting a limitation on and conditioning the love which is the end of the Commandment. Its stream is not to receive impure accessions, nor is it to lose its own distinctive character and quality. And this negative meaning of such expressions in Scripture, has ever been the more welcome one in the Church. It admits of being pushed so far as to nullify the real force and stress of the precept or declaration.

Thus, for instance, when St. James tells us that “the wisdom which is from above is first pure, then peaceable,”* there are not wanting persons among us, who persuade themselves that the duty of being peaceable does not begin till the perfection of purity has been reached, and in this way they evade altogether the bearing of the declaration on their own conduct.

Thus too, when St. Paul concludes his Epistle to the Ephesians with the large-hearted Christian benediction, “Grace be with all them that love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity,”† or “in incorruption,” these same persons will narrow down the import of this last word till it comes to include only their own religious body; nay, within that body only their own set of doctrinal opinions.

And thus, not in these alone, but in a hundred other instances, we are literally doing that with which our Lord charged the Scribes and Pharisees, making void the word of God for the sake of, in order to maintain, our tradition.

But, if these specifications in our text are in some sense limitations, that sense is but a secondary one. They have not only a negative, but also a strong positive and declaratory force, full of instruction to us of this day. Let us see what this is. The phrase, “a pure heart,” occurs in Holy Scripture sometimes in its most obvious sense of a heart cleansed from defilement, but perhaps oftener in that which it seems to bear here, the sense of a single undivided purpose. Thus we have in the Epistle of St. James, “Purify your hearts, ye double-minded;”* thus too we read of them that serve the Lord, out of a pure heart; thus again St. Paul says of himself that he served God from his forefathers with a pure conscience;† thus again in Old Testament language we are told that “the fear of the Lord is clean, and endureth for ever.‡ And the pure heart in our text, out of which that charity which is the end of the Commandment is to spring, is plainly of this kind—singleness of purpose; without admixture of side-aims and selfish views.

And here is one chief root of the evil among ourselves, that the stream with us does not run pure. Our hearts are not set, our lives are not devoted, to the simple glorification of God by Christ, but to the furtherance of some certain system of opinions, or some defined set of agencies, which have gathered round, and for us embodied, the great central purpose of Christianity.

Let us not conceal from ourselves the truth, however unwelcome to a self-satisfied and boastful Church. Want of singleness of heart in devotion simply to God and God’s work, is the cause of the wars and fightings which are so grievously prevailing within our own body, and of the unsympathizing spirit which we show towards those who, differing in outward forms, are as much servants of Christ as ourselves. If the Commandment be one, and have one end, then I submit to you that it is impossible that this end can be attained, any more than other ends in life, except by those whose energies are centered towards its attainment.

But is this so with us? Is not our judgment of one another, is not our judgment of those without, evermore complicated by considerations over and above the simplicity which is in Christ? He may be never so devoted a servant of Christ, but if his opinions are not mine, if he take not the same view with myself of that Church of which we both are members, I will not love him, I will not sympathize with him, I will judge hardly of his motives, I will look coolly upon and counteract his endeavors for good. This is the language, not which men speak and write—that they are afraid and ashamed to do—but on which they act, each towards his neighbor. And who does not see that this kind of feeling is even becoming systematized and embodied in public action in the organs of the various Church parties, whose vocation it is to thwart and to vilify one another?

Now this singleness of heart is even more conspicuously wanting in our conduct towards those who serve and love the Lord Jesus Christ, but not with our outward forms. For here we exhibit not only the accretion of secondary aims over the one single aim of the Christian heart, but also a demonstrable doubleness and inconsistency in our words and acts, which is wholly unworthy of earnest or of intelligent men.

In our graver estimate of these our brethren, we never for a moment deny them the title of Christians, we never presume to doubt their part in Christ, nor their co-operation with us in the work of God in the world. In our more serious moments, and when we speak and write before the public, these are our professed sentiments; but in private, and in social life, many of us cast such thoughts entirely aside. Coldness of behaviour, and disparaging words, take the place of our former generous admissions. Nay, more than this; many are content to violate the first laws of liberty of conscience, and as far as their influence goes in matter of patronage and support, to make a neighbour suffer for the fact of his belonging to a different Christian body from themselves.

It is impossible that this self-contradiction can spring out of the pure heart insisted on in my text. A fountain cannot send forth out of the same place sweet waters and bitter. The fountain must have two sources, not one only, which can thus flow in two streams of a complexion and taste so diverse.

Nor, again, can such conduct be cleared of guilt of another kind in the sight of Almighty God. What is this loving Him and His work a little, and loving our own Church, or our own party in that Church, more, but a setting up in our heart of idols other than Him? What can a Church expect, which in the main thus approaches Him, but to be answered according to the multitude of its idols?

And has it not been so with us, and is it not so now? Can we say that He has blessed, can we say that He is blessing, our agencies for good at home and abroad? Ample reason for humble thankfulness indeed we have, that He is pleased to use us in any degree for His work in the world; but my question regards the relative condition of that work and its prospects; and I answer it without fear of contradiction, that neither here in England, nor in our colonies, have we as a Church at this time any cause for self-congratulation: that a blight seems to be resting upon us, rather than a blessing.

And among the reasons for this, I cannot but reckon this our divided heart in God’s service, this love of ourselves rather than of Him, this setting up of the idols of our position and our emoluments, and the accidents of our ecclesiastical and liturgical traditions, as a bar to our attaining the end of His Commandment, love out of a pure heart. We are verily guilty concerning our brethren: and of that guilt we are reaping the consequences, in coldness, and confusion, and distrust among ourselves, in paralysed action at the present, and dark misgivings for the future.

But there is always in those who are furthest from attaining Christian love, a ready answer to such pleadings as these. We must maintain purity of doctrine. Such a course as you are by inference recommending, tends to break down those bulwarks which the Church in her wisdom has set up, and to bring about an indifference to Christian truth. And therefore we consider it the wiser and safer path, to keep to ourselves, to company only with those of our own views, or at widest with those of our own body, and thus to preserve the deposit of apostolical doctrine and order unimpaired.

No answer can be more specious than this; at the same time, none can be more convenient, nor more calculated to save trouble. And in consequence it is cherished and acted on by a multitude of persons within our Church.

Of course, like every other self-deceit, it has a real and a true side. No one can deny that there exists for us the danger of indifference towards truth of doctrine, or that it is a mood widely prevalent in our day. But I entirely deny that such danger lies in the path of that love, which is enjoined in our text. For that text carefully guards itself, by its concluding words, against being perverted in this direction. “The end of the Commandment is love out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned.” Thus it precludes, on the one side, that laxity of practice which might issue in carelessness concerning manner of life and testimony of conscience, and on the other that vagueness of belief which might lead to casting down the bulwarks of the faith.

But these words have also another voice for us. The fact of the specification here of a good conscience, and the epithet attached to the word faith, suggest to us an unwelcome, but an unavoidable inference, that there is such a thing among those who hold the Commandment, as an evil conscience; that there is such a thing as a faith which is not unfeigned. We need not thereby mean that consciously-sustained hypocrisy is rife among us. The hypocrisy of self-deceit is, though not the more criminal, yet far the more hopeless form: and that, it is to be feared, is always widely prevalent. A man believes himself to be upright in matters of conscience, and sound in the faith, nay, prides himself in his zeal for correctness of life and of doctrine, but at heart is without any personal apprehension of the Lord whom he serves, lives not in the practice of a good conscience towards God, and simple personal faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. His rule is one not framed directly on the voice of Him that sitteth on the throne: Christ Himself is not present in his thoughts, nor communed with in his prayers. The human system again which has grown up around the facts of redemption, this is his object of reverence, not the Heavenly Father, not the Redeemer himself. And this kind of life necessarily hinders that charity which is the end of the Commandment. The single-hearted servant of an unseen God looks for those who serve Him likewise: the simple believer in the Lord Jesus Christ loves those who love Him. Differences may exist, in opinion, in practice; but the good conscience, the faith unfeigned, does not dwell on these; it looks above them; it regards those who hold the common Master and Head as having common interest, and belonging to a common family. Whereas he who looks and fixes his thought less on the Lord Himself than on His accessories, is sure to find points of difference, causes of alienation and irritation, wherever he turns. And seeing that the good conscience, and faith unfeigned, are the real source of charity, the charity which flows from these is no breaker down of conscientious conviction, nor of doctrinal purity, no bringer in of indifferentism. That charity which necessitates compromise is of this world, not of Christ.

Probably no Christians since have ever differed more widely on important matters of Church practice, than did St. Paul and the Apostles who ruled the Church at Jerusalem. Read, with our modern ideas, the 2nd chapter of the Epistle to the Galatians, read that whole Epistle as compared with the Epistle of St. James, and you would wonder how the actors in the scene which that chapter describes, how the writers of those two Epistles, could ever work together with a common creed and under a common master. But, notwithstanding, the rigid upholders of the law gave to the great innovator of Tarsus the right hand of fellowship: notwithstanding, they agreed that he should go to the Gentiles, while they ministered to the circumcision: and at the root of the heart, St. Paul and St. James loved and obeyed the same Lord; the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ the Lord of glory, to be held with no respect of persons enforced by the one,* is the same as the faith working by love, in Him in whom there is no Jew and Gentile, no bond nor free, no male and female, but we are all one in Him,† so gloriously set forth by the other.

Let these be our examples. Let us follow them, as they followed Christ. They could not help differing: no more can we. One of them had grown up into his unfeigned faith in Christ in the midst of his temple worship and his traditional beliefs; the other had had the traditions of his fathers, all but their root in God, shattered to pieces when the glory of that light shone round him at Damascus. And in like, or in some other fashion, may God’s Spirit, dividing to every man severally as He will, bring in differences among ourselves; differences of modes of thought and of cherished associations, differences in our ways of approach to the Father by the same blessed Redeemer. We need not surrender these differences: they are ingrained into the very texture of our conscientious life; the faith has taken hold on our hearts by their means; if we surrender them, in many cases, not the differing belief would be our lot, but the intermediate gulf of unbelief.

Nay, let us evermore cherish them, seeing that with them is bound up the consistency of our inner life, and the unfeignedness of our faith. We love this our Fathers Church, thus constituted, thus administered: we can give our reasons for her ordinances: our hearts beat high as we read her struggles and triumphs in history: the halls of her worship are these venerable aisles, a very heaven to us of sight and sound: her praise is for us bound up with the varied Psalm and Canticle, and the massive chords of the organ: her liturgy has its appointed place, and its seemly vesture, and its becoming adornment. All this and more, belongs to the outward Church life, in the recurrence and under the influence of which our conscience can best be clear, in the process of which the faith unfeigned is for us enshrined.

And as we have no right to require of another that he should adopt these, so neither ought he to require of us that we should sacrifice them. If he finds himself nearer to God for the absence of both the historical and the material fabric, let us not depreciate his faith: on the other hand let him not question ours.

But meantime let neither of us forget the end of the Commandment; let neither of us, with or without intent, put a bar to its attainment by the substitution of other aims for that which it prescribes, by aggression under the guise of friendliness, or impracticable schemes of unity whose very terms are insult.

We live in a time in which conflict is rapidly superseding charity; nay, in which men are ever readier to fight even than to work. Be it ours to remember, that not victory over one another, not victory in this world at all, is the end of the Commandment: that every blow struck at a member of Christ, is a loss to the Church, a loss to the stricken, a greater loss to the striker.

Let us bear in mind, that there may be many stirs among men, many striking displays, many choruses of human applause in the Church, as well as in the world; but that in the keeping of the Commandment, as indeed in all things, but especially in the keeping of the Commandment, because it is the voice of the eternal One, it is he that looketh to the end who shall never do amiss.

* Gal. 3:20.

* 2 Cor. 1:20.

* James 3:17.

† Eph. 6:24.

* James 4:8.

† 2 Tim. 1:3.

‡ Ps. 19:9.

* James 2:1.

† Gal. 3:28.

Alford, H. (1869). Essays and Addresses: Chiefly on Church Subjects (pp. 113–134). Strahan & Co. (Public Domain)