I.
A Right Feeling towards God.
To fear God is to have a heart and mind rightly affected towards Him. It is to have scriptural and realizing views of His being and perfections, of His holy law and government, of His redeeming grace and mercy. It is to know, to reverence, and to love Hira, as He is in Christ. Hence it is said that " the fear of the LfOrd is the beginning of wisdom " (Ps. cxi. 10). To be destitute * W. Boyd Carpenter, The Spiritual Message of Dante, 189.
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of it, whatever be the natural gifts and endowments a man may possess, is to be in reality a fool. The fear here in question is not the " fear which hath torment " — the slavish terror resulting from conscious guilt, the dark and disquieting apprehension of coming wrath that haunts the soul laden with unconfessed, un- repented, and therefore unpardoned, sin. No ; it is a sentiment wide as the poles asunder from that spirit of bondage. This fear of God of which the author speaks, is the very spirit of adoption. It is the spirit with which the affectionate and dutiful child regards a father — a father whose wisdom he reveres, whose authority he owns, whose goodness has won his heart, whose favour is his chiefest joy, and whose displeasure fills him with grief and shame. The fear of God, accordingly, is, in Scripture, generally put for the whole of true religion in the heart, and is, not infrequently, inclusive also of its practical results in the life. Those who " fear God," and those who have " no fear of God before their eyes," are the two great descriptions of mankind.
1. Fear is not a characteristic of the religion of our age. Increasing knowledge has, according to its usual law, brought increasing familiarity. And it may be questioned whether pious affections have not been weakened and effeminated by the absence of it. In this, as in almost everything else, the pendulum explains the story. We have swung to the extreme on one side, because we had gone too far on the other. Not long ago, we heard little of love, and too much of fear ; now, it is almost all love, and no fear. "Love God." "Love God," with our whole heart, — for He is " love." He is our Father. He has " loved us with an ever- lasting love." There never was a time, in all eternity, when He did not love us. No love like that love, so deep, so true, so faithful, so comprehensive, so minute, so like Himself, — for ever and ever ! Love as we will, we shall never reach the deep echo of His love. And all other love, however dear, is only a drop in that one fountain ! But let us remember that He is " a great God, and a terrible," " of purer eyes than to behold evil " ; and who cannot " look on iniquity." Mercy and truth go before His face ; but justice and judgment are the habitation of His throne.
% As long as every opportunity that is offered to us means the choice between a wiser and a more foolish, or a nobler and
436 THE WHOLE DUTY OF MAN
more ignoble alternative, we shall be liable to choose the worse — not in blindness, but in weakness or passion — and then to recognize our lost opportunity, to feel the actual discord emphasized by the ideal harmony, and to know the anguish of the sense of sin. And when this experience has been ours, we shall know the meaning of the fear of God. Not that fear which drives us in terror to divorce our actions from our affections, and scares us from doing the thing we should still love to do; not the fear of God as of the Divine policeman who is always ready to bring the terrors of the law upon us ; but the fear of God which is hardly even another aspect of the love of Him. We see the beauty of holiness, we see the mark of our high calling in com- munion with Him, we see the greatness of the opportunities of life ; and this is the love of God. And we know that if, in yielding to sloth or to passion, we neglect these opportunities, and are content with the lower and the baser part, that harmony which we now feel will have its counterpart in the discord which we shall wake, in the hurt and miserable sense of > sin. We know that we cannot escape, though we climb to the top of Carmel, or plunge into the depths of the sea ; and this is the fear of God. It is the love of God which inspires our lives ; it is the fear of God which protects us in our moments of weakness, when we love the part, rather than the whole, and would find a momentary and local harmony at the price of a permanent and universal discord.^
2. How are we to obtain this right feeling ? That filial emotion which here and throughout the Old Testament is often called " fear," that blended emotion of reverence and trust, awe and affection, can arise only where the spirit of sonship recipro- cates God's revealed aspect of compassionate and forthgoing fatherliness. It matters little whether we call the affection fear, or, with the first and great commandment, call it love. In that fear which realizes God's fatherliness, there cannot be terror ; and in the love which recollects that its Father is God there cannot be petulant boldness.