Perfection Through Love

The Sermon of the Beatitudes

Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, America's most famous man throughout the 1800's and the brother to Harriet Beecher Stowe the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," gives a sermon on perfecting your life through love. Beecher popularized the Gospel of Love in America, which took hold of mainstream attention during and after the Civil War.

SUNDAY MORNING,  August 29, 1875 

Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, NY

Rev. Henry Ward Beecher

I want to ask for your attention on a few remarks from St. Matthew's Gospel:

"Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” 

Is this an encouragement to perfection, or is it encouragement to a particular way of becoming perfect? This passage is not used in the traditional sense of the term perfection, which is to signify the rising of men into a state in which they are at perfect peace with God. It is used to signify a particular condition of benevolence which is characteristic of God. If we are to be his children, then it must be characteristic of us.

"Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy." This was on the principle that “half a loaf is better than no bread.” People fulfill the last part of this statement, without taking very much pains about the first part. 

The art of hatred is very thoroughly developed among mankind. It is one of those graces that does not need much nourishing. It feeds itself. But the art of loving one's neighbor is a different one considering people are not altogether lovely. Anybody can love something intrinsically lovely; but nobody, without God's grace in his soul, can love those who are naturally unlovely.

It is motherly-love where one loves unlovely things. A babe is not lovely. It is nothing at first; it is neuter; it is all yet to be: but the mother discerns wonderful things in the child. There is a love that can love beauty, and nothing else; there is a love that can love excellence, and nothing else; there is a love that can love a being that is without excellence or beauty, and love him into it. There is such a thing as loveliness being developed by love in the object loved. That is Divine love.

St. Matthew and the Angel

Men and women, you are in danger of losing your souls on this verse more than on any other part of the whole Bible. There are more people that make shipwreck on this passage of Scripture than on any other. The whole shore along here is thick with wrecks. “I say unto you, love your enemies.” “Oh yes,” say many, “if they confess, if they acknowledge their wrong, I will forgive them, and love them.” Well, let us read on. “Bless them that curse you (and while they are cursing), do good to them that hate you (and whose hatred is like burning fire), and pray for them which spitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven (that is the spirit which is to make you children of God): for he helps the sun to rise on the evil and on the good (on pirates, on murderers, on debauchees; for, though they are corrupt, they are human beings that have eternity before them; and if God does not love them, who shall? and if he does not send kindnesses to win them back, who will?), and send rain on the just and on the unjust."

God sends rain on the just and on the unjust, not based on merit, because by nature as well as by spiritual grace he is seeking perpetually to win men, through gratitude, to service and to obedience of love. 

“For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye?"

The Spirit of Christ is a Spirit of charity. If you are tender-hearted, if you are gentle, if you are kind, if you are slow to anger, if you are easy to forgive, if you love your enemies, and even those that spitefully use you and persecute you, then you have Christ's spirit, and you belong to God's family. But no matter what church you belong to, or what creed you subscribe to, or what religious services you attend—though you give your body to be burned, and give your goods to feed the poor, from ostentation or vanity, or what not—and have not this charity of heart, then you are as wasting your time. I perceive that the urging of our Master is to perfection in a given direction.

Rev. Beecher Speaking at Plymouth Church

Rev. Beecher Speaking on Abolishing Slavery

Perfection suggests what we call character: what we call character means simply that condition to which training, whether conscious or unconscious, brings the whole of a person's faculties; but what a man's character usually depends on the central or dominant faculty in them. He who loves money more than anything else, is avaricious. His character is formed around the predominant feeling in them of love for money. Not that he has no other feelings; he thinks good things and does good things: but the main faculty in him, the one that builds him and gives shape to everything in him, is avarice; and that spoils him. There are many worthy qualities in him, it may be; but the real Ego, the central man, is the selfish, avaricious man.

That which is true of avarice is also true of pride and vanity. There is but one central faculty around which any man can afford to form his character, and that is the one of which I have already spoken—the great warming, radiating center of benevolence and charity.

The teaching of our Savior was not theological. It was supremely, though not exclusively, directed to the formation in men of what he technically called “The kingdom of God.” “The kingdom of God is in you." “Thou art not far from the kingdom of God.” “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God.” That figure of the kingdom, which is interpreted elsewhere in the New Testament, we learn is that state of mind and character in which we are like God. In other words, it is the state of holiness. Christ taught that the supreme object of life was the establishing in men of this character or kingdom of holiness.

The Sermon on the Mount was delivered as a personal teaching of men how to become like God. Its objective was to teach them how to become Christians; to teach them what to avoid, and what to take on; what not to do, and what to do; what they should not be, and what they should be.

He then shows that love is the great central principle of the universe. You will find, throughout both the gospel and the epistles, that, whatever discussion took place, the final result was, how to build people up into perfect men in Christ Jesus. In one passage-and it is the only one that I remember—the apostle Paul was asking what the church was for, what apostles were for, what prophets were for, what teachers were for, what workers of miracles were for, what the whole apparatus of Christian life was for; and the conclusion to which he came was, that they were to be employed in bringing men, in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. There is a measure of manhood: Jesus Christ, reproduced in our feelings and in our lives.

Rev. Henry Ward Beecher in his 30's

Christianity consists of everything that there is in you. No man can be perfect outside of the line of God's creation. The typical man is one in whom the various parts of the body, the appetites and passions, the reason, the social affections, and the moral sentiments, all harmonize, each working in proper subordination. It takes the whole being, molded according to the divine conception, to make a typical Christian man.

Christianity is that which makes the body honorable, the reason divine, and the moral sense luminous and sweet. It is that which infuses into life the blessings of love. It strengthens every affection, making the higher faculties dominant over the passions, and the whole body pure, fresh, and healthy. The man who is first a man in body, and then a man in affection, and then a man in reason, and then a man in moral experience—his spirit in all these stages being inspired by the Spirit of God is a typical man.

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