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The True Basis of

A SERM6N

Preached in Broadway Church

TAdNTeN, eer. 3, 1556.

BY THE PASTOR

HEMAN PACKARD DEFOREST.

The True Basis of Righteousness

A SERM0N

Preached in Broadway Church

TAdNTeN, 0CT. 3, 1556.

BY THE PASTOR

HEMAN PACKARD DEFOREST.

PRESS OF JOHN S. SAMPSON, WEIR STREET, TAUNTON,

The True Basis of Righteousness.

"Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the
scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of
heaven."— Matt. 5:20.
This statement must have fallen with a startling effect on
those to whom it was spoken, for the men therein specified,
the scribes and Pharisees, were not regarded by them as
loose livers and self-indulgent time-servers, but rather as the
most devout and punctilious men of their time. They them
selves had a supreme contempt for the opposite class in soci
ety, called, in common parlance, "sinners." They were re
garded by all people as the pattern of orthodox and righteous
living. This has been said many times, but it is difficult for
us to take in the full significance of it. Suppose this Christ
should come into our community to-day and say to a little
band of people whom he might gather together, "Except your
righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the people and
the ministers in the evangelical churches here, you shall by
no means enter the kingdom of heaven!" That would
startle any sincere and really humble people to whom He
might say it. Yet that is almost exactly the equivalent of
what He did say to His disciples concerning the men of their
own day. For these scribes and Pharisees held a similar
moral eminence in the community which here in New Eng
land is accorded to the people in the churches considered

most orthodox; with this important exception, that then
there was but one orthodox church in place of the many
sects of these times; which only makes the force of His
words yet more startling.
Yet the events that followed proved more astonishing
than this proclamation. This was the great crisis of human
history. Once only in all the ages, just at this time, had the
Son of God come forth from the Father and entered into
the life of men. His life was the one true, pure, and benefi
cent life that ever shone like a white star amid the confused
glimmering of human lives. It was the Absolute Right
eousness in contact with the life of the world.
And the one most striking fact in all the connection of
this life with common human life was that it was not par
excellence, the " sinners " among men who rejected its light
and sought to quench it ; but it was the prevailing type of
righteousness that opposed and finally put to death the abso
lute Righteousness. Light came ; men rejected it ; that was
the condemnation. But those who rejected it most fiercely
were not the outcasts, but the conventionally righteous.
From the very first these respectable classes complained
that Jesus had too much to do with "sinners." Somehow
these disreputable people seemed rather to welcome him,
spite of their sin. The more obvious and coarser sins bring
their own condemnation along with them. A man who com
mits them knows he is a sinner, and, if he feels the pinch of
conscience and the ban of society, a kind offer of help at the
right time may turn him to penitence. But there is a phase
of sin more subtle, more unapproachable by redeeming forces,
more likely to rally in opposition to truth and goodness, be
cause it parades under the name of righteousness and sanctity.
Men are often very slow to detect it, even in others. It
passes well. But when, once in the history of the world, it
was brought into direct contact with the ideal righteous
ness which alone is acceptable to God, it hated it, and fought
it, and put to death him who manifested it. That one fact

is its complete condemnation. It crucified the Christ. That
writing across the page of human history can never be ef
faced. No wonder, then, that He said at the beginning of
His work, " The righteousness of the kingdom of heaven must
exceed that righteousness."
Let us endeavor to see clearly what was the radical error
in this righteousness condemned, and then what is the basis
of the righteousness of the kingdom of heaven.
It is of the utmost importance to ourselves and to the in
terests of the eternal kingdom here and now that we should
understand this matter. Once for all "the Prince of this
world," the spirit that lurks under this false righteousness,
has been condemned in open court. It was then the prevail
ing type of righteousness. Is it so now? Is it so to any de
gree? Is it infecting our time? Is it falling here and there
like mildew on the church? Is it dominating me unawares?
I do not see how any one can come to the consideration of
this matter, so central to the kingdom of heaven, without
deep heart-searching and earnest seeking for the true light
that lighteth every man who will come to it.
I. Let us see, first, what is the nature of this condemned
righteousness. 1. It is a righteousness that makes high claims. It be
lieves in itself absolutely. It seeks the highest seat in the
synagogue because it believes it belongs there and it will be
a credit to the cause to have it seen thus conspicuously. It
makes prayers, long ones, in market places and on the cor
ners of the streets, on purpose to be seen of men. It jingles
the coins it gives as alms, that all may take note of the
giving. It delights in public gatherings and in conspicuous-
ness of every sort. In a word, it is invariably ostentatious.
How grim an irony there was in that little paragraph the
other day, to the effect that a recent defaulter was in the
habit of preaching in pulpits occasionally and used to lecture
to young men on integrity in business ! Ostentatious piety
is always suspicious. It is not the radical defect of this false

righteousness; it is only a way-mark; but it is rarely absent.
2. It is also a righteousness of stern exactions from oth
ers. It has very high ideas of what is incumbent on people.
"Ye bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay
them on men's shoulders." It checks the innocent and harm
less play of young people ; it denounces the common amuse
ments of society, not discriminately, but at wholesale. It
condemns the infringement of customary rules about Sab
baths and forms of worship and devotional practices, more
than the failure to preserve the spirit of them. It demands
high orthodoxy, and is very severe on any independent
thought. It separates sacred from secular, and thereby gains
a license for itself in secular ranges, while obtaining a means
of severer judgment on those who neglect the "sacred" duties
and rites.
It is very pitiless. It is positively sure in regard to its
judgments, for it is thoroughly familiar with all the conven
tional rules of morality and religion. It finds fault with
Christ and his disciples for neglecting to fast, and to perform
all the ceremonial washings, and for breaking the all-impor
tant sacredness of the Sabbath by plucking grain or healing
diseases. In cases where it can exercise the authority of
force it is quick to use its powers. Transgressors who are
people of influence and position can be gently handled, but
the poor, the degraded, the obscure classes must pay full
penalty. The sleek and portly villain who can get away with
the capital of a great insurance company may buy immunity ;
the starving girl who cribs a five-cent loaf of bread must go
to jail for sixty days. It wields the cudgel of excommuni
cation without compunction, and never thinks of the danger
of wrecking a soul so long as it enforces law.
3. But ostentation and severity are only characteristics of
this condemned righteousness : signs which help in its detec
tion in ourselves and in society. The radical defect of it is
this : It is a righteousness of outward conformity to law, cov
ering a spirit out of sympathy with truth and God.

It is a presentable outside: a "whited sepulchre," Jesus
called it, in uncompromising language. It deceives the peo
ple. They see the fair show; itis even flaunted in their
faces ; they do not, unless they are good detectives, see the
false heart of it. It deceives itself. It actually comes to
believe that it is genuine righteousness, and to think that a
less punctilious but more sincere righteousness is sin that
needs to be suppressed. It is on record that it said of the
Christ one day, piously, " Give God :the praise ! We know
that this man is a sinner !" There was a deep sadness in his
words afterward, " For judgment I am come into this world,
that they which see not might see, and that they which see
might be made blind." "Are we blind also?" this false
righteousness retorted, smiling inwardly at the very idea.
In the case of a recent Boston defaulter his pastor is re
ported to have said that the most bitter trial of all to him
was his inability to convince the man that he had done
wrong. It is not many years since a man, who had made
high professions of character, sentenced to the State prison
from the court-room in this city, published a statement in
which he called upon the public to discriminate and be less
severe in their denunciation of him, for he was no criminal ;
he had done no wrong ; he had only been unfortunate in
speculation, like a great many other gentlemen.
This false righteousness, "deceiving and being deceived,"
does not judge itself by the interior and essential sympathy
of its heart with or against truth and God, but by a certain
exterior image of itself, to which it has become accustomed.
" I am Mr. So-and-So, respected, honored, esteemed a leader
in all good things, consulted in matters of church and state,
a conspicuous figure in the ranks of the virtuous." This is
his mental conception of himself ; and it is carried to-day by
hundreds of men of unsound principles, of lax lives, of po
litical corruptness.
He cannot believe that he is anything different in heart
from that flattering exterior image of liimself so familiar to

8
him and to all about him. So thought a host of men in Judea,
as good and honored as he; and yet one day there rang
through the startled corridors of their sacred temple the
judgment of the Son of God: "Woe unto you scribes and
Pharisees, hypocrites!" "Behold your house is left unto you
desolate." These men were no worse than hundreds in
Christian America to-day.
The cause of the deception which arises is in the double
nature of their lives: on the exterior conformity to law;
inwardly lack of real sympathy with truth and God, and in
stead, the sway over their lives of essential selfishness.
The external conformity to law is good enough as far as it
goes. The real righteousness does not dispense with it. " I
came not to destroy the law but to fulfil," it says. But the
conformity of false righteousness is not symmetrical ; it is
strong at petty points, it is weak at great ones. " Ye tithe
mint and anise and cummin, and have left undone the weight
ier matters of the law, judgment and mercy and faith." " Ye
strain out a gnat and swallow a camel." It is a petty right
eousness. It is great on routines and rules of conduct; pre
scribes prayers, and regulates amusement, and tells how far
one may travel Sunday and whether by foot or carriage ; it
will hunt a man down for variance from theological stand
ards ; it is as ready to condemn the Christ for using and
making wine as thet original Pharisees were for healing a
blind man on the holy Sabbath. It exalts the mere words of
Scripture, the form of the prayer meeting or the revivalistic
method into a fetich, and worships them as a savage does his
idols. Means are more than ends ; appearances more than
facts. It compasses sea and land to make one proselyte to a
sect or a form of faith; it cannot see the shining of essential
truth under any other form of belief than its own. But
when it comes to such broad and secular matters as business
integrity, political incorruptness, the rights of man, the large-
heartedness that carries the needs and woes and sins of men
as a constant stimulus of its activity ; the breadth of outlook

and of spiritual sympathy that rallies its energies and its
support for the far-reaching purposes of the wide Kingdom
of God ; it is found wanting. Its greatness is in little things ;
its littleness is in great things.
But aside from this, its radical falsity lies in the other char
acteristics mentioned — the lack of real inward sympathy
with the truth and with God, because of the sway of selfish
ness. The truth is greater than any form of it.
" Our little systems have their day,
They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of thee,
And Thou, O Lord, are more than they."
And God is not righteousness simply ; that is a very par
tial conception of him. The deep foundation of his charac
ter is the unselfish love which found its highest utterance
to men on Calvary.
To one who is truly a son of God, truth is lovely in itself,
whether it agree with his preconceptions and his conduct
hitherto or not. He will seek rather to conform his life to
the truth than to warp the truth to fit his schemes, original
or inherited. The Pharisees of Christ's day had a scheme of
ritual and conduct ; they dated it from Moses, though it had
received much tinkering since his day. They called it the
One Law of God, although it had very much of human con
trivance connected with it. This was their fetich. When
Christ came, stripping off the human concretions from
this ancient law, and revealing the spirit of it in its
simple and searching truth, they were not glad to see
the truth thus sifted out of its accumulations; they
were only horrified to see the accumulations go, on whose
observance they had built the system which was their pride.
It was not truth but their system they were in league with,
and that, because, while it produced a good exterior, it never
interfered with their essential selfishness. So in regard to
sympathy with God. They had great respect for the God of
their imagination, who had singled out the Jews for sal-

10
vation out of all the world, and had given such promises to
the man who kept the cumbrous system of the law unbroken.
But when Christ came, revealing the real heart of God,
showing that what he cared for was not a Jew, as such, but a
humble, sincere man; that the one he sought was not the
proud keeper of outward rules, but the confessed and peni
tent sinner, though he came from the despised class " who
knew not the law ; " when they found that God was repre
sented by Jesus as the
"Love Divine that stooped to share
Our sharpest pang, our bitterest tear,"
and that his love received penitence anywhere, and rejected
the pretence of righteousness everywhere ; they turned away
from such a representation of their God, and pursued even
unto death his messenger, who asked of them penitence and
confession. That is the supreme test of false righteousness, anywhere
and always. When it knows the truth, and knows God as
revealed in Christ, does it go out in hearty loyalty thereto,
or does it draw back in pride and indignation ? Is it in sym
pathy with the Christ when it sees Him, or is it the spirit
that crucified Him because He was not of its kind, and be
cause he attacked its selfishness ?
4. Does it need to be repeated that this false righteous
ness is worse than open sin in its effects and influences.
Has not the true judgment of mankind always reserved its
severest frown for him
" Who stole the livery of the Court of Heaven
To serve the Devil in ?"
Better a blatant scoffer than a pretended saint. The
crimes of the criminal classes tempt few to their ways who
are not born or bred in them. The disclosure of the falsity
of a trusted and honored professor of righteousness and
Christianity produces a multitude of disbelievers in Christian
ity whom it will be hard to turn again to the truth. The
blight of a few cases of insincere profession in a community

11
will lie upon society and handicap the church for half a cen
tury. Vainly will good men and women struggle against
that direful influence. It is like the tide that submerges a
district by the settling of the territory. Only another geo
logic change can sweep out that brine for good and all.
II. Let us turn for a moment to the other side of the
picture and ask what the ideal righteousness is. No wonder
the Christ said " It must exceed this of the scribes and
Pharisees." But none the less is it true that He demands
a righteousness for the kingdom of Heaven. The law of
righteousness is sacred. "Not one jot or tittle shall pass
from it until it be fulfilled." What is it, in its nature, and
its method?
1. To get a true answer look at the one only full mani
festation of it the world has seen, in the life of the Son of God
who became the Son of man. There is no ostentation about
it, no display. The old picture was a true one
" He shall not cry nor lift up
Nor cause his voice to be heard in the street.
A bruised reed shall he not break
And the smoking flax shall he not quench,
He shall bring forth judgment in truth."
Perhaps nothing strikes us more forcibly in the righteous
ness he manifested than the spontaneity of it. It is not
strained ; it is not measured by rule ; it is not forced from an
unwilling spirit. It comes out as the simple, natural action
of the man ; it is his true heart expressing itself. There
fore it has a hidden power of discriminating between what
is shell and what is kernel, what is essential and what
is unimportant in codes and rules of conduct. He will break
the letter of the Sabbatic law, in order that he may keep
the spirit of it by deeds of mercy. He cares nothing for
ceremonial defilement, so long as his heart is pure. He at
tacks with stern reprobation the cumbrous structure of rules
of conduct which makes the life of the people a burden. His
righteousness is his freedom. He acts from the impulses and

12
convictions of a true heart, and has no compulsions from
without. And the next most noticeable feature of his righteousness
is that it is absolutely unflinching in acting itself out in life.
It is opposed by the ideas of the time ; it goes on serenely.
It is attacked by the most respected classes ; it is nowise turned
aside thereby. It is met in full antagonism by the combined
authority of state and church, backed by hoary religious tra
dition, and by the letter of the word of God ; still it changes
not, wavers not, but speaks out, finally, in uncompromising
condemnation of the spirit of the time, the traditions of the
fathers, and the authority of the supreme tribunal. It brings
the Christ at last face to face with the cross. One hour of
struggle in Gethsemane, and that not with his true purpose
and decision, but with the sufferings of His soul, " sorrowful
unto death," and the last post is won ; the goal is reached ;
the absolute sacrifice becomes a joy, and like a king He walks
through that last day of horrors.
And most radical of all distinctions, this righteousness of
the kingdom of Heaven is grounded in unselfishness, as the
Pharisaic righteousness is in selfishness. The Pharisee seeks
his own standing and influence and power, The Christ for
gets Himself in the service of helpless and needy man. In
the one, righteousness cares only for appearance, for respecta
bility, for public adulation ; by these means it gains its end.
In the other, righteousness is a voluntary yielding of self to
the truth, to goodness, to beneficence, out of a heart that is
unselfish and whose motive power is love.
The Pharisee sits in Moses' seat ruling the people with a
rod of iron. The Christ gives His life to ministering to them
and dies for them on the cross.
Certainly it were needless to say, Here is a righteousness
that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees as far as the
heaven is above the earth.
2. What is the method of it? How can it be attained ?
It is not "imputed and received by faith alone", as the

13
old catechism had it ; for it is a real righteousness and not a
fictitious one ; a ripe fruit of character, and not transferable.
' Neither is it of the sort which a veteran teacher during
our national currency discussions dubbed a " fiat " righteous
ness ; obtained, as certain childish theories assume, by merely
"believing" that one has it.
It cannot be obtained by any passive waiting or inactive
praying ; as though it were a gift to be imparted wholly from
outside. Neither is it to be won by the worship of duty in the form
of rules and laws. That produces only the Pharisaic right
eousness, as we have seen.
But it is gained in the discipline qf life by him who waits on
the ever present Spirit in personal allegiance. That is the
essential, radical difference of method between the righteous
ness of the scribes and Pharisees and the better righteousness
of the kingdom of heaven, as manifested in the life of the
Christ. The former is a conformity of conduct to rules ; the
latter is unison and harmony of spirit with the Divine Spirit.
It is the righteousness of faith, because that spiritual reliance
and loyalty is essential to it. It is a free gift, not as a trans
ferable commodity, but as born and developed and matured
in the spirit by the constant guidance and aid of the Divine
Helper. Yet it is the man's own righteousness in that it is
a real growth in his own character, for which he is indebted to
God, as for all real growth, but which has become an element
of his own being. The promise of the Christ to the world
was the gift of a life, an eternal, perennial life, in the spirit
of the man, renewing and sanctifying him in his inner being.
That life, a real and present power, is the Spirit of God,
whose breath unnoticed falls with healing and developing
power on the human spirit that waits on Him ; a Life which
never fails, a Help which never wearies ; by which the heart
grows into higher and deeper sympathy with the truth and
with God, and into His hatred of sin and evil, and his un
selfish love of men.

14
, That was the source of the righteousness of the Son of
God : He was led by the spirit. It must be the only source
of any righteousness that is not fictitious or false, in all the
sons of men,
I have spoken of the direful power of Pharisaic righteous
ness to blast communities and destroy faith. It crucified
the Christ. Its influence is of that sort forever. But on the
other hand there is no power among men so great, so bene
ficent, so uplifting, — saving only the power of the Unseen
Spirit, as this power of the true human righteousness, devel
oped in fellowship with Him. It has the power of reality;
it has the power of unselfishness ; it has the power of spirit
ual life. It can renew the world.
My friends, let us make ourselves certain which kind of
righteousness is ours. Any mistake here is radical. The
first duty of man is as Christ stated it : " Seek His kingdom
and His righteousness."

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