From “Love of Religion, A New Nature,” Parochial and Plain Sermons (1840)
We can do nothing right, unless God gives us the will and the power; we cannot please him without the aid of his Holy Spirit. If any one does not deeply feel this as a first truth in religion, he is preparing for himself a dreadful fall. He will attempt, and he will fail signally, utterly. His own miserable experience will make him sure of it, if he will not believe it, as scripture declares it.
But it is not unlikely that some persons, perhaps some who now hear me, may fall into an opposite mistake. They may attempt to excuse their lukewarmness and sinfulness, on the plea that God does not inwardly move them; and they may argue that those holy men whom they so much admire, those saints who are to sit on Christ’s right and left, are of different nature from themselves, sanctified from their mother’s womb, visited, guarded, renewed, strengthened, enlightened in a peculiar way, so as to make it no wonder that they are saints, and no fault that they themselves are not.
But this is not so. Let us not thus miserably deceive ourselves. St. Paul says expressly of himself and the other apostles that they were “men of like passions” with the poor ignorant heathen to whom they preached. And does not his history show this? Do you not recollect what he was before his conversion? Did he not rage like a beast of prey against the disciples of Christ? And how was he converted? By the vision of our Lord? Yes, in one sense, but not by it alone. Hear his own words, “Whereupon, O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision.” His obedience was necessary for his conversion. He could not obey without grace. But he would have received grace in vain had he not obeyed. And, afterwards, was he at once perfect? No, for he says expressly, “not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect,” and elsewhere he tells us that he had a “thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet him,” and he was obliged to “bruise his body and bring it into subjection, lest, after he had preached to others, he should be himself a castaway.” St. Paul conquered, as any one of us must conquer, by “striving,” struggling “to enter in at the strait gate.” He “wrought out his salvation with fear and trembling,” as we must do.
This is a point which must be insisted on for the encouragement of the fearful, the confutation of the hypocritical, and the abasement of the holy. In this world, even the best of men, though they are dead to sin, and have put sin to death, yet have that dead and corrupt thing within them, though they live to God. They have still an enemy of God remaining in their hearts, though they keep it in subjection. This, indeed, is what all people now have in common, a root of evil in them, a principle of sin…
Even those then who in the end turn out to be saints and attain to life eternal, yet are not born saints, but have with God’s regenerating and renewing grace to make themselves saints. It is nothing but the cross of Christ, without us and within us, which changes any one of us…
We are all by birth children of wrath. We are at best like good olive trees, which have become good by being grafted on a good tree. By nature, we are like wild trees, bearing sour and bitter fruit, and so we should remain, were we not grafted upon Christ, the good olive tree, made members of Christ, the righteous and holy and well-beloved Son of God. Hence it is that there is such a change in a saint of God from what he was at the first. Consider what a different man St. Paul was after his conversion and before — raging, as I just now said, like some wild beast, with persecuting fury against the Church, before Christ appeared to him, and meekly suffering persecution and glorying in it afterwards. Think of St. Peter denying Christ before the resurrection, and confessing, suffering, and dying for him afterwards…
That indeed will be a full reward of all our longings here, to praise and serve God eternally with a single and perfect heart in the midst of his temple. What a time will that be, when all will be perfected in us which at present is but feebly begun! Then we shall see how the angels worship God. We shall see the calmness, the intenseness, the purity, of their worship. We shall see that awful sight, the throne of God, and the seraphim before and around it, crying, “Holy!” We attempt now to imitate in church what there is performed, as in the beginning, and ever shall be. In the Te Deum, day by day we say, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth.” In the creed, we recount God’s mercies to us sinners. And we say and sing psalms and hymns to come as near heaven as we can. May these attempts of ours be blessed by Almighty God to prepare us for him! May they be not dead forms, but living services, living with life from God the Holy Ghost, in those who are dead to sin and who live with Christ!
I dare say some of you have heard persons who dissent from the church, say (at any rate, they do say), that our prayers and services, and holy days, are only forms, dead forms, which can do us no good. Yes, they are dead forms to those who are dead, but they are living forms to those who are living. If you come here in a dead way, not in faith, not coming for a blessing, without your hearts being in the service, you will get no benefit from it. But if you come in a living way, in faith, and hope, and reverence, and with holy expectant hearts, then all that takes place will be a living service and full of heaven.
Make use, then, of this holy Easter season, which lasts forty to fifty days, to become more like him who died for you, and who now lives for evermore. He promises us, “Because I live, you shall live also.” He, by dying on the cross, opened the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers… We, therefore, first commemorate his death, and then, for some weeks in succession, we commemorate and show forth the joys of heaven. They who do not rejoice in the weeks after Easter would not rejoice in heaven itself. These weeks are a sort of beginning of heaven. Pray God to enable you to rejoice, to enable you to keep the feast duly.
St. John Henry Newman (1801-1890) was among the most widely influential English theologians of the nineteenth century. One of the principal leaders of Anglicanism’s Catholic revival at Oxford in the 1830’s, he became a Roman Catholic in 1845, and was an Oratorian for the remainder of his life. He was made a cardinal shortly before his death and was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church in 2019.
