COWARDICE AND CANT
‘I heard Thy voice … and I was afraid.’
I. ‘I heard Thy voice … and I was afraid.’ The words are Adam’s words, spoken after that first sin, which we are told about in to-day’s first morning lesson. Was Adam a coward when he uttered them?
Yes, he was—a conscience-made coward, like many a one after him. He is a coward after his sin, not before it; in his rebellion against God, and not in His service. And the same thing has been true in the case of thousands of His children. For fear is the unhappy firstborn of sin. It is not religion that makes man a coward, but the want of it. We do wrong, and then ‘conscience doth make cowards of us all.’
But while in Adam’s mouth the words of the text are the words of a coward, in themselves they are not, by any means, necessarily so. They might well be, under different conditions, as, doubtless, they have often been, the words of the bravest, truest spirits breathing. For, over and over again, absolute fearlessness is found to go hand in hand with, even as it is the direct outcome of fear—the only fear which has no trace of shame in it; holy fear, the fear of God—the fear of sin!
‘He feared man so little because he feared God so much,’ was once said of a great Indian statesman. Who could desire a better epitaph—a nobler record of a finished life? It describes a man who stands a head and shoulders above the common run of men—a man in a generation, perhaps. One who has confidence in himself, and inspires confidence in others. One who would regard an invitation to do wrong as an insult, so jealous is he of the honour of God. Who, in answer to the seemingly bold, but really uneasy taunt of the scoffer, ‘What! you’re afraid, are you?’ looks his accuser in the face, and answers, ‘Yes; I am afraid. I am not afraid of you, or of any man living, but I am afraid of God, and afraid to do what He forbids’?
If a man is truly religious, he is, he must be, above all things a fearless man. And yet many a man—many a young man especially—shrinks from being marked down ‘religious,’ because he imagines that religion is not manly enough for him; because some have told him, and he has believed it, that it is all cant and cowardice.
Now let us say a word about cant.
‘I hate cant,’ a man says, and thinks that he has, therefore, given a very good reason for despising religion. Now the sentiment he expresses is a very good one, as far as it goes. Every honest man should, and does hate cant. But what is cant? Let us see.
Literally, cant is whining—practically, it is unreality. Well, there is religious cant—and this is of two kinds.
II. Some people make religion, and a stock of religious phrases, a cloak for their evil lives. This is cant, and of a very bad kind.
Others, again, who are very far from being hypocrites, uncharitably condemn, nay, anathematise, innocent amusements, and many things, which though innocent in themselves, are abused by many. Of course, we can make anything sinful; but to condemn cards and theatres, for instance, as in themselves works of the devil, is to give, not the enemies of religion alone, good reason for identifying religion with cant.
But now, do people ever stop to consider that there is at least as much cant outside of religion as ever was found within it? And the very people who cry out against religious cant make a very liberal use of cant of their own. It reminds one of the old story that tells how the philosopher Diogenes paid a visit to a brother philosopher, Plato, and finding the other amid luxurious carpets, and other comforts, entered his room with the remark, ‘I trample upon the ostentation of Plato.’ ‘Yes,’ answered Plato, ‘with an ostentation of your own.’
Now the man who speaks of sin as ‘seeing life,’ ‘enjoying life,’ ‘being a bit fast,’ and so on, is canting, and in a very mischievous way.
Not only is the religious man a braver man than the godless, but he needs to be. His is the harder life. God, the angels, God’s people, do not at least jeer the wicked man, subject him to petty annoyances, make his life a burden to him, but the religious man must stand out against all these patiently.
—Rev. J. B. C. Murphy.