4 - Matthew Henry: The Pleasantness of a Religious Life
ISBN 978-1-84550-651-3
4
MATTHEW HENRY
The Pleasantness of a Religious Life
I
This write-up of a set of six sermons was Matthew Henry’s final literary labour. It was in the press when he died, aged 52, in 1714, and came out shortly after as The Pleasantness of a Religious Life opened, and proved, and recommended to the consideration of all, particularly of Young People. J.B. Williams, Henry’s biographer, called this an ‘attractive title’, but I doubt whether many today will find it attractive.
That however is not Henry’s fault. The reason this title strikes us as leaden-footed is that during the almost three centuries separating him from us ‘pleasantness’ has become a weak word, stating only that something is not too bad; ‘religious’ has become a vague word, covering all faiths and attitudes that involve ‘God’ or ‘gods’ (or, nowadays, ‘goddesses’) at some point; ‘consideration’ has become a cool word, suggesting thought that is consciously detached rather than committed; and ‘young people’ has become a patronizing phrase that creates expectations of being talked down to and so turns real young people off. If, however, the latter-day associations of Henry’s title discourage us from digging into his book, it will be a pity; for what he is actually writing about, in his smooth, fulsome, and turn-of-the-seventeenth-century style is, the joy of Christian life, and as I usher his book back from obscurity into a world that has welcomed volumes on the joy of cooking and of sex and such like, I cannot help wishing that he had given it that kind of title.
Henry is quite up-front about what he is doing. Working from Proverbs 3:17, which the NIV renders ‘(wisdom’s) ways are pleasant ways, and all her paths are peace,’ he first observes that ‘nothing draws more forcibly than pleasure’, and then lays it down that ‘true piety has true pleasure in it’. More fully:
Pleasure is a tempting thing. What yields delight cannot but attract desire... religion has pleasure on its side... Here is a bait that has no hook under it... a pleasure which God himself invites you to, and which will make you happy, truly and eternally happy... it is certain that there is true pleasure in true religion (p. 49f.).
Henry’s aim is to make us see that real Christianity is a journey into joy, always moving us on from one joy to another, and that this is one of many good and strong reasons for being excited and wholehearted in our discipleship. He makes his point well, and this is how:
First, he lists twelve pleasures that Christians as such enjoy: (1) knowing God and the Lord Jesus Christ; (2) resting in God; (3) being God’s child; (4) tasting God’s gracious goodness in all creature comforts; (5) relying on God’s care; (6) delighting in God; (7) praising God; (8) escaping slavery to our appetites and (9) passions; (10) loving and doing good to others; (11) communing with God constantly; (12) looking forward to heaven’s glory.
Then he reviews what God has done to bring sinners joy: made peace for them through the cross; promised them peace plus pleasure; and given them the Holy Spirit, the Scriptures, the ordinances of worship in prayer and song, and the gospel ministry, to bring home to them the blessings prepared for them. He lists those blessings as pardon, assurance, access to God, contentment, the calmness and confidence of a good conscience, and actual foretastes of glory.
Then he confirms what he has said so far by appealing to the facts of Christian experience, which fully verify his argument, and by picturing the Christian life as a journey made pleasant by its worth-whileness, by the gift of strength for travel, by the presence of the Holy Spirit to guard and guide, by good company, delightful terrain, good weather, and ample provisions en route, and by knowing that we shall experience journey’s end as home.
Finally, having dismissed the scepticism of the irreligious and the misrepresentations of the morose regarding the delights of devotion, and having countered the idea that the pains of repenting, the demands of self-discipline and self-denial, and the constant experience of opposition, destroy the joy of discipleship, he urges his readers directly, starting from where they are, to enter into the fulness of the spiritual life that he has been describing.
Some things do not change. What Henry wrote nearly three centuries ago, wrapping it up in language that must strike us as old-fashioned, is as true and wise today as ever it was. We too get told, sometimes by our secular friends, sometimes by our own morbid thoughts, that being a Christian is a bleak and burdensome business, and not being a Christian would be more fun; we too, like Henry’s first hearers and readers, need to be reminded that it is absolutely not so. Henry’s reminder comes from his heart: ‘herein, I confess,’ he writes, ‘I indulge an inclination of my own; for this doctrine of the pleasantness of religion is what I have long had a particular kindness for, and taken all occasions to mention’ (p. 20). Christian life, though not a joy ride, is a joy road! As a connoisseur and veteran of spiritual pleasures, Henry will help us verify that today.
II
Who was Matthew Henry, who wrote this precious little book? He was a Silver Age Puritan. Let me explain.
In the world of literary study and history of ideas, a distinction is often drawn between the Golden and Silver Ages of creative movements. The Golden Age is the period in which the pioneers do the creative work, establishing themselves as the masters by the classical, landmark quality of their achievements. The Silver Age follows: it is a period in which those who lead seek first and foremost to follow in the footsteps of the forerunners, laying out, polishing up, and faithfully passing on the tradition of wisdom they have inherited. They dot its i’s and cross its t’s and develop its details as they go along, and, standing on their predecessors’ shoulders, they sometimes top them in clarity and precision of statement; yet they remain conservers rather than creators, and settlers rather than explorers. Their goal is to maintain a heritage, and it is to this end that they dedicate their powers and devote their efforts.
In Christianity, the Golden-Silver distinction applies in different ways, according to one’s angle of vision. Thus, from one standpoint you can label Luther’s volcanically creative career as the Golden Age of the Reformation, and see the systematizing skill of Calvin and Melanchthon as its Silver counterpart. From another standpoint, the era of Luther, Calvin, Bucer, Martyr, Cranmer, Knox and their colleagues is the Golden Age of reformational theology, and the Puritan theological century from Perkins to Owen, with its continental counterpart from Beza to Turretin, is the Silver Age that succeeded it. From a third standpoint, master teachers of the Christian life like John Newton, Murray McCheyne, C.H. Spurgeon, J.C. Ryle, and Arthur Pink are the Silver Age in relation to the Golden Age of Puritan pioneers such as Perkins, Sibbes, Baxter, Bunyan, Owen, Gurnall, Thomas Goodwin and Thomas Hooker, for mapping the inner realities of the Christian life of faith, hope, and love. And from a fourth standpoint three men whose best work adorns the early eighteenth century should be seen as Silver Age figures in relation to the entire theological and practical output of the Puritan Golden Age that preceded them: namely, Cotton Mather, Isaac Watts, and Matthew Henry. All three are under-appreciated and need to be revalued, but here our focus is on Henry alone.
He was born in 1662, the year in which his godly Puritan father, Philip Henry, was one of two thousand ejected from pastoral ministry in the restored Church of England. His parents grounded him in Puritan beliefs and behaviour patterns (daily prayer, Bible reading, self-watch and self-examination; journal-keeping, and practice of the presence of God; scrupulous morality and generous philanthropy; thorough-going Sabbatarianism, and hard work for the other six days of the week). Precocious, bright, lively and Bible-loving, he never wanted to do anything else with his life other than serve his Lord in pastoral ministry; and in 1687, having passed through a nonconformist academy and read some law in Gray’s Inn, he received Presbyterian ordination and began pastoring a congregation in Chester. It grew to over three hundred fifty during the twenty-five years he served it. In 1712, two years before his death, he relocated in Hackney, just outside London.
As a good preacher of the Puritan type, he was much in demand. As a matter of conscience he never refused an invitation to preach if he could possibly accept it, and throughout his ministry he was constantly in some pulpit or other, sometimes three times a day in different places.
Both Sunday services in his own church lasted up to three hours, since he not only preached for an hour from a text but also spent an hour expounding a chapter of the Bible. Out of this practice grew his famous Commentary, which he began to publish in 1704, and of which he completed five volumes, taking him to the end of Acts, before his death. (Friends later composed volume six on the basis of his surviving notes.)
Simple and practical in style while thoroughly scholarly and well-informed for substance, the Commentary remains an all-time classic, standing head and shoulders above any other popular exposition produced either before or since.
III
How should modern readers tune in to The Pleasantness of a Religious Life, in order to get the best out of it? This is a necessary question, for Henry assumes much that cannot be taken for granted today, and unless we adjust to this at the outset we may well be left feeling that his material is bland and facile, and does not really speak to our condition – or, putting it more bluntly, that you need to be a pretty old-fashioned person to appreciate such old-fashioned stuff! The following points are made in hope of pre-empting any such reaction.
First, we must get clear on the Puritan understanding of Christianity: which is a connected view of God, of the Bible, of the world, of ourselves, of salvation, of the church, of history and of the future. Few, it seems, even in Bible-believing churches, grasp this whole picture, and in liberal churches, where attention to scholars’ fads and fancies replaces the teaching of the Bible, there is virtually no grasp of it at all. Once, churches taught it to all their children, using catechisms, but not any more. I state it here, therefore, in summary form.
God, who within the unity of His being is intrinsically a society, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit together, and who is infinite, unchanging, and almighty in His wisdom, goodness, and justice, created the universe and ourselves within it, so that He might love and bless us, and we might love and praise Him. But things have gone wrong.
Original sin is the radical distortion of every human being’s moral nature, making love and honour to God from our hearts impossible and self-centredness at deepest level inevitable. We sin because we are sinners, and human history, from one standpoint, is original sin writ large.
Jesus Christ the Saviour, the Jew who died, rose, reigns and will return for retribution to everyone, past, present and future, is God the Son incarnate, whose death atoned for our sins, whom we trust for forgiveness and acceptance and serve as our living Lord, and who unites us to Himself for the renewal of His image in us, dethroning original sin and giving us resources against its down-drag in the process. This is present salvation.
The Holy Spirit, the third divine person, acts for the Father and the Son by convincing us of our sin and need of Christ’s reality as Saviour; by drawing us to Him in penitent faith through regeneration; by witnessing to our pardon, adoption and hope of glory; and by progressively working in us Christlikeness of character as we pursue what is in truth our journey home. This is the application of redemption.
The church is the supernatural society of all regenerate persons united by the Holy Spirit to Jesus Christ, called to worship, witness and work together for Christ’s glory, and enriched with stated pastors, sacramental ordinances, and abundant serving abilities, for that purpose. Every Christian belongs to the church as God knows it, needs it as his supportive family, and should fellowship within it committedly in one of its particular local expressions. Christian life is corporate life.
The Bible, the written Word of God, is the divine source of knowledge of these things.
Such, in a nutshell, is the Puritan understanding of Christianity, which Henry assumes in his readers.
Second, we must get clear on the antithesis between Puritan Christianity and Western secularism, in both its modernist and post-modernist forms. Where Puritanism looks to the Word of God for self-knowledge and life-guidance, modernity looks with optimism to human reason as expressed in the sciences and philosophies, while post-modernism, of which today’s universities are full, tells the modernists with pessimism that their enterprise is hopeless, since what philosophers and scientists, like Christians before them, offer as universal truth is really only an improper venture in mind-control.
Whatever be thought of this claim (does it, for instance, apply to post-modernism itself?), it is clearly as much an expression of secularism as is the modernity it seeks to undermine, and from the battlefield where modernists and post-modernists slug it out, the fumes of relativism, scepticism, and despair drift everywhere, producing a mind-set in which nothing seems certain, nothing feels quite worthwhile, and grabbing such pleasures as each moment offers seems the only thing to do. So human nature is devalued, human life is cheapened, human thought is blocked, and we live aimlessly, prompted only by instinct, appetite and various forms of greed in the manner of what we used to call the lower animals. Our idea of life is of drifting along, and our idea of pleasure stops short at the momentary satisfying of instinctual, sensual, body-based, self-absorbed cravings, urges and itches. (I grade these according to their strength: an urge is a strong itch, and a craving is a strong urge). This is where our secularism has brought us, and it is a sad story.
In direct antithesis to all aspects of this secular trend stands Henry’s forceful recall to the eternal truth – ‘true truth’, as Francis Schaeffer would have said – about human nature.
The soul is the man.... [‘soul’ here means personal, conscious, thinking, continuing self]. I hope it will be readily granted me, that man is principally to be considered as an intellectual, immortal being, endued with spiritual powers and capacities, allied to the world of spirits; that there is a spirit in man, which has sensations and dispositions of its own, active and receptive faculties, distinct from those of the body: and that this is the part of us, which we are, and ought to be most concerned about; because it is really well or ill with us, according as it is well or ill with our souls. Believe, that in our present state, the soul and the body have separate and contesting interests; the body thinks it is in its interest to have its appetites gratified, and to be indulged in its pleasures; while the soul knows it is in its interest to have the appetites of the body subdued and mortified, that spiritual pleasures may be the better relished.... Be wise, therefore; be resolute, and shew yourselves men who are actuated and governed by reason, and are affected by things as reason represents them to you: not reason as it is in the mere natural man, clouded and plunged and lost in sense; but reason elevated and guided by divine revelation to us and divine grace in us. Walk by faith, and not by sense (p. 50f.).
Only as we grasp the antithesis between the historic Christian and modern secular approaches to the business of living, and programme ourselves to shake off cultural prejudice and take the Christian, biblical, Puritan view of human nature and human welfare seriously, shall we be able to profit from the flood of wisdom that Henry here pours out as he gets into his stride.
The popular idea of a Puritan has always been of a pharisaical sourpuss who spreads gloom wherever he goes. In fact, however, as the real-life Puritan practised the disciplines of serious Christianity, praying, fasting, keeping his heart, warring against the world, the flesh and the devil, maintaining an ordered life and doing all the good he could, he found mental pleasure and joy at every turn of the road – in quiet, in tumult, in peace and prosperity, in sorrow and strain – and this is the experience that Henry wants to share and deepen. Thought-control, in realising the reality of God present each moment to bless, is the secret, and Henry’s discourse, read and re-read, can lead us directly into it. I hope that very many will prove this to be so.