Things Which Cannot 
 be Shaken 
 
 JOHN HENRY JOWETT 
 M.A., D.D. 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2014 
 
 https://archive.org/details/thingswhichcannoOOj 
 
Things Which Cannot 
 be Shaken 
 
 A SERMON 
 
 Delivered in the 
 Fifth Avenue Pregbyterian Church 
 New York City 
 May 9th, 1915 
 
 By the Pastor, the 
 
 REV. JOHN HENRY JOWETT 
 
 M.A., D.D. 
 
 I -nil ltd by ill Filth Avenue I'icsbyleiiao Ctiunb 
 
All Rights Reserved 
 
Things Which Cannot be Shaken 
 
 By Dr. Jowett 
 
 "'Things which cannot be shaken."— Heb. 12:27 
 
 THERE are seasons in life when everything 
 seems to be shaking. Old landmarks are 
 crumbling. Venerable foundations are 
 up-heaved in a night, and are scattered abroad as 
 dust. Guiding buoys snap their moorings, and go 
 drifting down the channel. Institutions which prom- 
 ised to outlast the hills collapse like a stricken 
 tent. Assumptions in which everybody trusted 
 burst like air-balloons. Everything seems to lose 
 its base, and trembles in uncertainty and confusion. 
 
 Such seasons are known in our personal life. 
 One day our circumstances appear to share the un- 
 shaken solidity of the planet, and our security is 
 complete. And then some undreamed-of an- 
 tagonism assaults our life. We speak of it as a 
 bolt from the blue ! Perhaps it is some stunning 
 disaster in business. Or perhaps death has leaped 
 into our quiet meadows. Or perhaps some pre- 
 sumptuous sin has suddenly revealed its foul face 
 in the life of one of our children. And we are "all 
 at sea !" Our little, neat hypotheses crumple like 
 withered leaves. Our accustomed roads are all 
 broken up, our conventional ways of thinking and 
 feeling; and the sure sequences on which we have 
 
depended vanish in a night. It is experiences like 
 these which make the soul cry out with the psalm- 
 ist, in bewilderment and fear— "My foot slippeth!" 
 His customary foothold had given way. The 
 ground was shaking beneath him. The founda- 
 tions trembled. 
 
 And such seasons are known in a life of nations. 
 An easy-going traditionalism can be overturned in 
 a single blast. Conventional standards, which 
 seemed to have the fixedness of the stars, are blown 
 to the winds. Political and economic safeguards 
 go down like wooden fences before an angry sea. 
 The apparently solid structure begins to dissolve. 
 The customary foundations of society are shaken. 
 We must surely have had such experiences as these 
 during the past few weeks and more especially 
 during the last few days. What was unthinkable 
 has become a commonplace. The impossible has 
 happened. Our working assumptions are in ruins. 
 Common securities have vanished. And on every 
 side men and women are whispering the question- 
 Where are we? We are all staggered ! And every- 
 where men and women, in their own way, are whis- 
 pering the confession of the psalmist— "My foot 
 slippeth I" 
 
 Well, where are we? Amid all these violations 
 of our ideals, and the quenching of our hopes, in 
 this riot of barbarism and unutterable sorrow, 
 where are we? Where can we find a footing? 
 Where can we stay our souls? Where can we set 
 our feet as upon solid rock? Amid the many things 
 which are shaking what things are there which can- 
 
not be shaken? I wish this morning to explore the 
 Word of God, to recall one or two of these assur- 
 ances in order that we may stay our souls upon 
 them in the terrible strain and uncertainty through 
 which we are passing, and in which we may have 
 to live for many succeeding days. 
 
 "Things which cannot be shaken." Let us be- 
 gin here: The supremacy of spiritual forces can- 
 not be shaken. The obtrusive circumstances of the 
 hour shriek against that creed. Spiritual forces 
 seem to be overwhelmed. We are witnessing a 
 perfect carnival of insensate materialism. The 
 narratives which fill the columns of the daily press 
 reek with the fierce spectacle of barbaric labor and 
 achievement. And yet, in spite of all this appalling 
 outrage upon the senses, we must steadily beware 
 of becoming the victims of the apparent and the 
 transient. Behind the unchartered riot there hides 
 a power whose invisible energy is the real master 
 of the field. The ocean can be lashed by the winds 
 into indescribable fury, and the breakers may rise 
 and fall in crashing weight and disaster ; and yet 
 behind and beneath all the wild phenomena there 
 is a subtle, mystical force which is exerting its 
 silt;nt mastery even at the very height of the storm. 
 We must discriminate between the phenomenal and 
 the spiritual, between the event of the hour and 
 the drift of the year, between the issue of a battle 
 and the tendency of a campaign. All of which 
 means that "While we look at the things which 
 are seen, we are also to look at the things which 
 a"-e not seen." Well, look at them. 
 
The power of truth can never he shaken. The 
 force of disloyalty may have its hour of triumph, 
 and treachery may march for a season to victory 
 after victory; but all the while truth is secretly ex- 
 ercising her mastery, and in the long run the labor 
 of falsehood will crumble into ruin. There is no 
 permanent conquest for a lie. You can no more 
 keep the truth interred than you could keep the 
 Lord interred in Joseph's tomb. You cannot bury 
 the truth, you cannot strangle her, you cannot even 
 shake her ! You may burn up the records of truth, 
 but you cannot impair the truth itself ! When the 
 records are reduced to ashes truth shall walk 
 abroad as an indestructible angel and minister of 
 the Lord! "He shall give His angels charge over 
 thee," and truth is one of His angels, and she can- 
 not be destroyed. 
 
 There was a people in the olden days who 
 sought to find security in falsehood, and to con- 
 struct a sovereignty by the aid of broken covenants. 
 Let me read to you their boasts as it is recorded by 
 the prophet Isaiah : "We have made a covenant 
 with death, and with hell are we at agreement : 
 when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, 
 it shall not come unto us, for we have made lies 
 our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid our- 
 selves." And so they banished truth. But ban- 
 ished truth is not vanquished truth. Truth is never 
 idle; she is ever active and ubiquitous, she is for- 
 ever and forever our antagonist or our frieriid. 
 "Therefore thus saith the Lord God . . . yoiir 
 covenant with death shall be disannulled, and your 
 6 \ 
 
agreement with hell shall not stand: . . . and 
 the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the 
 waters shall overflow the hiding-place." Thus 
 saith the Lord ! We may silence a fort, but we 
 cannot paralyze the truth. Amid all the material 
 convulsions of the day the supremacy of truth re- 
 mains unshaken. "The mouth of the Lord hath 
 spoken it." 
 
 "Things which cannot be shaken!" What is 
 there which cannot be shaken? The passion of 
 freedom is a spiritual force which abides unshaken. 
 The passion of freedom is one of the rarest of 
 spiritual flames, and it cannot be quenched. Make 
 your appeal to history. Again and again militar- 
 ism has sought to crush it, but it has seemed to 
 share the very life of God. Brutal inspirations 
 have tried to smother it, but it has breathed an in- 
 destructible life. Study its energy in the historical 
 records of this Book or in annals of a wider field. 
 Study the passion of freedom amid the oppressions 
 of Egypt, or in the captivity of Babylon, or in the 
 servitude of Rome. How does the passion ex- 
 press itself? "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may 
 my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, and 
 may my right hand forget her cunning!" Study 
 it in the glowing pages of the history of this coun- 
 try, that breath of free aspiration which no power 
 of armament, and no menace of material strength 
 Was ever able to destroy. The mightiest force in 
 all those days was not the power of threat, and 
 jVKwder, and sword, but that breath of invincible 
 (aspiration which was the very breath of God. And 
 
when we gaze upon stricken Belgium to-day, and 
 look upon her sorrows, and her smitten fields, 
 and her ruined cities, and her desolate homes, we 
 can firmly and confidently proclaim that the breath 
 of that divinely planted aspiration, her passion of 
 freedom, will prove to be mightier than all the 
 materialistic strength and all the prodigious arma- 
 ments which seem to have laid her low. It is a 
 reality which cannot be shaken. 
 
 There are other spiritual forces which we might 
 have named, and which would have manifested the 
 same incontestable supremacy: there is the energy 
 of meekness, that spirit of docility which com- 
 munes with the Almighty in hallowed and receptive 
 awe: there is the boundless vitality of love which 
 lives on through midnight after midnight, unfaint- 
 ing and unspent: there is the inexhaustible energy 
 of faith which holds on and out amid the massed 
 hostilities of all its foes. "And at midnight Paul 
 and Silas sang praises unto God!" You cannot 
 defeat spirits like these, you cannot crush and de- 
 stroy them. You cannot hold them under, for 
 their supremacy shares the holy sovereignty of the 
 eternal God. "Not by might, nor by power, but 
 by my spirit, saith the Lord ;" and these spirits, the 
 spirit of truth, the spirit of freedom, the spirit of 
 meekness and love, are in fellowship with the di- 
 vine Spirit, and therefore shall they remain un- 
 shaken. 
 
 Look again over the field of "things which can- 
 not be shaken" amid all the boastful and callous 
 materialism of our time, and consider this: Th\ 
 
law of moral retribution cannot be shaken. What- 
 ever is happening just now on the Continent of 
 Europe cannot for one moment abrogate or shake 
 the eternal law that unrighteousness is rottenness, 
 and that iniquity is disease. Nothing that is hap- 
 pening can bribe the nature of things and inter- 
 fere with the dire and deadly sequence of cause 
 and effect. And what is the law of moral retribu- 
 tion? It is this: "The wages of sin is death." 
 Nothing can shatter that ! By no possible human 
 device or expedient, and by no brilliancy of mo- 
 mentary triumph can we cheat that law, and escape 
 the long reach of its inevitable process. "The 
 wages of sin is death." Not a death far-away re- 
 moved, which allows a long interval of undisturbed 
 vitality. The invasion of death is immediate. The 
 entrance of death is coincident with the sin. This 
 kind of death is not a final crisis, it is a 
 present process, it is not a swift annihilation, 
 it is a sure decay. When we sin our nobler 
 powers at once begin to die, our nobler strength 
 begins to waste. There is no escape from 
 the sequence. "The wages of sin" is coma, cal- 
 losity, benumbment, death. Every sinful deed 
 houses its own nemesis, and the nemesis becomes 
 active at once. Nay, we may give the statement a 
 more piercing inwardness still. Every iniquitous 
 thought and purpose harbors its own nemesis, its 
 own hostile and destructive germ, a germ which 
 proceeds to immediate consumption. When we sin 
 something dies, the nobler man or woman shrinks 
 and shrivels, and is despoiled of some of the forces 
 
of vitality. That is the law of moral retribution. 
 Study that law of retribution in the recorded his- 
 tory of King Saul. You can watch the gradual 
 process of benumbment, like a creeping paralysis, 
 stealing over the soul. Study that law in the 
 tragedy of Macbeth. It would not be impertinent, 
 from the standpoint of our present thought, to de- 
 scribe the entire narrative as the record of the 
 dying of Macbeth. Or study the law in the won- 
 derful pages of Richard III. In that great drama, 
 as also in Macbeth, the outer activity increases as 
 the inward vitality shrinks. Nay, now and again 
 there are spasms, or even seasons, of seeming 
 triumph, while all the time you can almost see the 
 fell law at work, dismantling the soul, drying up 
 its vital energies, and holding it in the clammy grip 
 of inevitable and unbribable death. "The wages 
 of sin is death :" amid all the tremblings and the 
 uncertainties of life that law remains unshaken. 
 
 And the law applies, with equal inevitableness, 
 to the individual and the nation. "The wages of 
 sin is death." That is to say, in the corporate life 
 of a nation unrighteousness is always associated 
 with disease and decay. A nation can never remain 
 intensely virile if she is in fellowship with wrong. 
 There is an inward deterioration whatever flush of 
 transient victory may rest upon her arms. Her 
 conquests are only apparent, for she herself is thl,e 
 victim of a most awful and corroding defeat. 
 
 Brethren, on the continent of Europe to-day the 
 law of moral retribution is at work. Our newsn 
 papers to-day record one form of death, and the^ 
 
lists wring our hearts with the suggestion of im- 
 measurable agony and woe. But there is another 
 form of death, far more terrible than this, and of 
 which our papers can give us no account — the 
 wasting decay of national soul, a decay which is 
 the wages of sin, the effects of the violation of the 
 pure and holy law of God. It cannot be escaped. 
 It is as inevitable as God. Sin is death: for the 
 mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. I find a 
 steadying confidence in all this, and I quiet my own 
 bewildered heart in its assurance. Our worship 
 to-day is darkened with an appalling gloom. We 
 cannot drive the darkness from our minds, and we 
 ought not to do so if we could. It is our sacred 
 duty to feel the heaviness of the pall, to be crushed 
 before it, to let its chilling blackness fill every 
 chamber of the soul. There are grave times when 
 it is moral treachery even to wish to shake things 
 off; when the only way to an enlightened and 
 courageous action is to feel an occurrence upon the 
 raw nerves, and upon the exposed and undefended 
 heart. 
 
 I call you to witness that during the past eight 
 months not a word has been spoken from this pul- 
 pit which could in the least degree tend to inflame 
 the passions of war, or deepen and widen the gulf 
 of misunderstanding and prejudice between peoples 
 who are now at strife. I have sought for the wider 
 view, and the larger truth, and the august aims and 
 purposes of the Kingdom, in which we could all 
 find inspiration and communion. I have remem- 
 bered that I am an Englishman, and that I have in 
 
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the fellowship of this congregation men and women 
 of German blood who are bound up with German 
 ties and affections. I hold these friends in the 
 dearest admiration and regard, and it is my hap- 
 piness to believe that I enjoy their esteem and con- 
 fidence. But here is a happening which pushes 
 far beyond questions of racial frontier lines. It 
 is not a restricted matter of nationality. It is a 
 tremendous issue of common humanity, and for 
 any pulpit to be silent on such an issue would be 
 rank- recreancy to the just and holy Lord. The sink- 
 ing of the Lusitania, and sinking her without warn- 
 ing, and without giving any opportunity even for 
 women and little children to escape, is a stupendous 
 crime against our race and a colossal sin against 
 our God. It is not manly and honorable warfare. It 
 is foul and premeditated murder. It is not an ad- 
 vance into more chivalrous methods of struggle. It 
 is a relapse into dark and savage barbarism ! Two 
 weeks ago there sat in this church, and worshipped 
 with us, one of nry people, a young mother, who 
 sailed on this ill-fated liner. To-day two of her 
 little ones, such wee ones, just the smallest span of 
 years, are lost in the waste of waters. Men, how- 
 does that help the war, and what issue is advanced 
 by outrages like these? It is altogether unthink- 
 able, and in these supposedly enlightened and pro- 
 gressive days it seems to be so unreal that one 
 half expects at any moment to awake as from a 
 horrible dream. But the grim reality is here; it is 
 here in weeping widows, and lonely little children, 
 and cold and desolate homes. And in this house 1 
 
 1? 
 
of God, the house of a just and righteous God, I 
 join with tens of thousands of my fellow -ministers 
 in this country in execrating the terrible deed, and 
 most fervently do I pray that a great wave of pure 
 and purposeful and active indignation may sweep 
 round the globe, and that even Germany herself 
 may rise in stern and holy protest against the in- 
 famy which on Friday was perpetrated in her name. 
 
 Amid all the ruins of things which are being dis- 
 solved the sovereignty of the Lord God remains 
 unshaken. Earth-born clouds may veil His throne, 
 they cannot destroy His decrees. The heavy cloud 
 of circumstance gathered about the life of the 
 prophet Isaiah, and he walked in uncertainty and 
 confusion, as though his Lord had been taken 
 away. But "in the year that King Uzziah died I 
 saw the Lord, high and lifted up!" Yes, but in 
 the day of obscurity, before the robe of darkness 
 was rent, the holy Lord was still there, and so 
 were the cherubim, and the seraphim, and all the 
 ministering angels of righteousness and grace. 
 "The Lord cometh in the thick cloud!" When 
 Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, and the 
 American people were stunned by the blow, a vast 
 crowd gathered in their bewilderment around the 
 White House, and James Garfield came out upon 
 the balcony of the house and cried aloud, in the 
 words of an ancient Psalmist: "Clouds and dark- 
 ness are round about Him, righteousness and judg- 
 ment are the habitation of His throne." 
 
 Yes, we must distinguish between the earth-born 
 clouds and the divine judgments, between the battle- 
 
smoke and the great white throne. God's sover- 
 eignty may be hid, it can never be stayed or broken. 
 This book of the Scriptures is a stormy book, 
 stormy from end to end. And yet it reveals the 
 sovereignty of God. The revelation of the sover- 
 eignty of God is not given only in green pastures, 
 and in a balmy air, and under a blue and radiant 
 sky. It is given amid social convulsions and up- 
 heavals, in the presence of menace and terror, 
 amid the massed assemblies of material hosts. The 
 revelation of His sovereignty is given when the 
 pestilence is walking in darkness, and it is given 
 when destruction is wasting at noonday. It is 
 given when the hurricane is sweeping the land, 
 and when all the watercourses have overflowed 
 their banks. The Lord is revealed as King in the 
 flood! I turn to the Book of Revelation. It is full 
 of dread and appalling movement. Dragons and 
 beasts are rising mysteriously out of the sea, and 
 upon their heads is the name of blasphemy. Mul- 
 titudes are worshipping the beast, and the earth is 
 choked with abominations. But in the thick of all 
 the fierce, rebellious movement, and in the very 
 hey-day of unclean and hateful things, there is 
 "the voice of a great multitude, as the voice of 
 many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunders, 
 saying, 'Hallelujah : for the Lord God omnipotent, 
 reigneth !' " 
 
 Brethren, the sovereignty of the Lord God can- 
 not be shaken. "God's in His heaven!" But the 
 assurance of that sovereignty is not to lull us into 
 laxity and ease. The revelation can be abused. It 
 
can be used as a sedative by the indolent, when it 
 is purposed to be a tonic for the faithful. I do 
 not know any word which has been more perverted 
 than Browning's great line: "God's in His Heaven! 
 All's right with the world!" It has been frequently 
 used as a lullaby, when it is intended to be a 
 clarion. It has been proclaimed as an invitation 
 to the green pastures and the still waters, when it 
 is in reality a call to tread the steep and thorny 
 ways of righteousness, and if need be to march 
 fearlessly into the valley of the shadow of death 
 "God's in His heaven! All's right with the world!" 
 That song of wandering little Pippa invaded the 
 hell of the sensualist not with the ministry of light 
 but of lightning. It smote the ears of one who 
 was being betrayed to ignoble ease, and it recovered 
 him to the stern uplands of a chivalrous crusade. 
 It stole upon one who had become entangled in 
 ways of treachery and dishonor, and he arose and 
 freed himself from his toils. "God's in His 
 heaven !" "The Lord reigneth !" Every man, then, 
 to his duty, that with both hands and a consecrated 
 soul he may whole-heartedly do the King's will. 
 
 " The Son of God goes forth to war, 
 A kingly crown to gain, 
 His blood-red banner streams afar. 
 Wlio follows in His train ? " 
 
 The supremacy of spiritual force cannot be 
 shaken. The law of moral retribution cannot be 
 shaken. The holy sovereignty of the eternal God 
 c,-,nnot be shaken. What then? Let us endow all 
 cir doings with the indestructible energy of recti - 
 is 
 
 i 
 
tude. Let us make to ourselves friends of the law 
 of moral retribution, and transform its processes 
 into ministries of vital fellowship. Let us in all 
 things "grow up into God," and seek the crown 
 and consummation of life in perfected conformity 
 to His will. And what shall be the strength and 
 protectives of such a life? Even this: "Thou 
 shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for 
 the arrow that flieth by day, for the pestilence that 
 walketh in darkness, nor for the destruction that 
 wasteth at noon-day." And what shall be the se- 
 curity of such a people? Even this: "God is our 
 refuge and strength ! . . . Therefore will we 
 not fear though the earth be removed, and *7 
 though the mountains be shaken into the heart of 
 the seas. . . . God is in the midst of her, she 
 shall not be moved." "He that doeth these things 
 shall never be moved." "Hallelujah, the Lord God 
 omnipotent reigneth !" 
 
 16