By James Stalker
Anger is a sudden heating of the blood, which flushes the face with color, while it makes speech forcible and action swift and sure. It is, in fact, a kind of military equipment, provided by nature to repel wrong and to avenge injustice.
I. It is not in itself sinful. There is a verse of Scripture, which says, 'Be angry and sin not,' and this implies that there is an anger, which, so far from being wrong, is a duty. Many times in Scripture we read of the 'wrath of God,' and we read also of 'the wrath of the Lamb.' In the life-story of Jesus we read that on one occasion He looked round on a certain company 'with indignation, being grieved at the hardness of their hearts'; and what an image of indignant scorn He presented when He overturned the tables of the moneychangers and, with a scourge of small cords, drove the buyers and sellers out of the temple!
Such instances of holy indignation suggest what the legitimate use of anger is. It is an upboiling of resentment against unrighteousness, either to prevent it from happening or to antagonize it and sweep it out of existence when it has obtained a footing in the world. How natural it is we may learn from the well-known precept to parents, 'And you parents, provoke not your children to wrath.' Parents may act towards their children in such a way as to outrage the sense of justice in their little breasts and make them feel that they are betrayed and injured by those from whom they are entitled to expect protection.
It is not good for children that this force of indignant resistance to what is unreasonable should be broken in them, and it is not good for the mature. We may become too tame. As in a highly-bred horse, however docile it may be, there always slumbers its native temper, so the excellence of human character depends on a sensitiveness of honour latent beneath the outward aspect of civility. To be utterly blind to insult and injury is not the evidence of a superior but an inferior being.
Especially when the wrong is a public and impersonal one, it may be a sign of the debased state of moral feeling not to be roused by it to indignation. When the news of the Bulgarian atrocities reached this country, twenty years ago, the majority of politicians shook their heads and uttered lukewarm words of rebuke, but there was one statesman then among us by whom the outrage done to humanity was felt in the very marrow of his bones, and he went from end to end of the country denouncing, in season and out of season, the conduct of the unspeakable Turk. Politicians of all parties now agree that, in so doing, Mr. Gladstone was right; and it is a reproach to our statesmen on both sides that none of them felt the same consuming indignation at the recent repetition of the same atrocities in Armenia.
So far from it being wrong thus to glow with anger at public unrighteousness, it is a sin to be tame and silent. The other day I was reading a series of articles by a strong young American thinker on the Christian of the Twentieth Century, and, among other things, this passage occurred:-'There will be more and more need of great hatreds. Our talk of charity and tolerance must not blind us to the call for bitterness and wrath against all unrighteousness and ungodliness. The Christian of the Twentieth Century will know how to feel contempt as well as admiration and detestation as well as love.'
It is related of Joshua Leavitt that once he greeted an advocate of the free-love abomination, who came to see him, with the words, " Sir, I abhor you, I abhor you, I abhor you." "Do not I hate them, which hate Thee?" asks David, and he replies, "Yea, I hate them with perfect hatred." It was wrong to hate them as persons, but it would have been wrong to do other than hate their hatred of God. Soft and easy toleration of everything will be called by the honest names of treason and dishonor No feeling of love for the pure can long survive a decadence of the feeling of hatred for the impure.'
II. It was right to show that there is a legitimate and even an imperative indignation, but our chief business in this chapter is with the anger, which is a deadly sin.
1.) It is such when it is directed against wrong objects. The legitimate objects of anger are injustice and folly; but it may be provoked by the opposite objects. A man may, for instance, go into a towering passion because a religious friend displays anxiety about his soul. A son may sulk or even run away from home because of a reproof or a punishment thoroughly deserved. The thief is angry because his victim claims his own, and the tyrant because his subjects assert their rights.
Pride and selfishness make demands that are thoroughly unjust, and wax angry with everyone who does not concede them. Our sense of our own merits and rights is generally far in excess of our sense of the corresponding claims of others, and hence arises strife. Anger in one disputant breeds anger in the other; this, again, reacts on the first offender; and so it goes on till great sin is the result. It is no unusual thing in a prolonged quarrel to find that people have forgotten what at the first it was about. It was a triviality; but the injuries entailed by the contention arising out of it may be the reverse of trivial.
2.) Anger becomes sinful by excess. Even when there is a real cause for it, the outbreak may be out of all proportion to the offence. 'Let not the sun go down upon your wrath,' is a precept of both the Old Testament and the New; and it would be well if this ordinance of nature-the setting of the sun-were universally agreed upon, wherever the sun rises and sets, as a signal to make anger to terminate. Jeremy Taylor narrates that Leontius Patricius was one day extremely and unreasonably angry with John, the patriarch of Alexandria.
At evening the patriarch sent a servant to him with this message, 'Sir, the sun is set,' upon which Patricius refleeting, and the grace of God making the impression deep, he threw away his anger, and became wholly subject to the counsel of the patriarch. The very same indignation which may be useful in its first outbreak becomes poisonous if allowed to sour into the vinegar of hatred and revenge; and it is not less dangerous to the breast in which it is entertained than to the person against whom it is directed. Few more troublesome guests can harbour in the heart of man than an angry and revengeful spirit.
3.) Anger becomes sinful when it vents itself in ways that are unlawful. It is, for example, one of the principal causes of profane language. Of this sin it is the custom of the world to speak lightly, as if an oath or two here or there did not signify. But no one who knows anything of the love of God can think without horror of the name which angels adore being mixed up with the filth and dregs of our angry passions; and, therefore, those who revere the name of the Father and the Savior will avoid the occasions on which it is apt to be used profanely. It is not only, however, in words that anger vents itself, but in acts, and these are apt to be violent and excessive.
An angry man may inflict a blow that fills himself with horror as soon as the deed has been committed. It may even be a mortal blow; for he has so lost control of himself that his frenzy may carry him to any extreme. 'He that hates his brother is a murderer,' says the Scripture; he has surrendered himself to a passion, and he does not know how far it may carry him. Many a murderer who has expiated his crime on the scaffold has hated his victim less than the man of colder blood may hate his enemy while yet sparing to strike; but, the deeper the hatred, the greater is the crime in the eyes of God.
4.) The form of anger which has most to be guarded against is temper. This is a chronic disposition to anger. Perhaps some have more of a natural tendency this way than others; but it is very general. How many people will confess that they are naturally of a hot temper! But this is a poor excuse, for a swift temper is there to be controlled; and, if it is controlled, it becomes an ornament instead of a deformity to the character, imparting an elasticity and spring to action, which is otherwise too sluggish. But a hot temper uncontrolled becomes a curse in the home. There are no bounds to the violence some allow themselves; and all about them have to suffer from their strident voices, ill-natured looks, and unjust actions. A person with a temper can keep a whole household in continual hot water. Still more intolerable are those who shut themselves up in sulky reticence, brooding over imaginary injuries, while the other members of the household do not know how to approach them or get a civil word out of their mouth.
Anger is, in short, the special sin of the home, and, therefore, it is specially odious to Him who has set men in families and intends the family to be the nursery of love and peace. A young man may be preparing for himself, and for those who will have the strongest of all claims on his affection, years of bitterness and sorrow by failing to chasten his temper before the responsibilities of married life begin; whereas a successful effort at self-control, maintained in early years, will ensure a lifetime of happiness to both him and his.
III. Many cures for the sin of anger have been suggested.
Children are often told that, if they could see themselves when they are angry-the swollen veins, the bloodshot eyes, the distorted features-they would never again allow themselves to become so ugly. And this is a lesson, which the oldest of us may remember with advantage in a slightly altered form: anger is a triumph of the lower nature over the higher-a triumph of the beast over the angel.
When temper is allowed to have its way, we are reverting to the savage. In the Middle Ages the aid of art was resorted to sometimes in order to impress the truth about the Seven Deadly Sins; and anger was represented as a figure riding on a camel, the most vicious of all animals, while on the shield which it carried was painted a mad dog.
Anger is a brief madness; but we advance along the sunny pathway of our own evolution when we leave anger behind and cultivate thoughts of helpfulness and charity.
All have heard the practical rule, to count twenty before speaking when angry; and, joking apart, any device or practice which allows the first few moments of anger to pass without an explosion is of the utmost utility, because the second wave of angry emotion is much less lofty and crested than the first. Sometimes, when an angry quarrel is imminent, it is a good thing to walk off, to be out of harm's way; and it may shame an angry opponent if one is seen thus to avoid the triumph of unreason.
Richard Baxter suggests that it is good to tell the person we are with when we feel the access of angry passion coming on; and certainly there are hours of inexplicable moody humour when we know beforehand that we are dangerous, but have enough reason and good nature to be able thus to give warning against ourselves.
St. Augustine, writing to a friend, the Bishop Auxilius, counsels him, when the winds and waves of angry passion rush down on his soul, to do what the disciples did in the boat when the tempest descended on them-call to Christ. If we could stay to interpose an ejaculatory prayer between the first fiery sensation of anger and its expression in word or deed, we should not often fall into sin of this kind; and our self-control would be still further confirmed by the frequent contemplation of Him who, 'when He was reviled, reviled not again, when He suffered, threatened not, but committed Himself to Him that judges righteously.'
There are many people who have had hot and violent tempers in early youth but now exhibit a calm and even disposition; and the change is due to many struggles, many humiliations, many prayers; for it is by such means, as a rule, that the victory is gained. But it seems to be possible, at a single step, to leave the angry habits of a lifetime behind and enter at once into the placidity and sweetness of the Christian temper. One may get such a sight of how displeasing a bad temper is to God, and how unworthy of a follower of Christ, that all at once the violent or morose mood will be slipped off, like a filthy garment, and the Christ-like spirit put on.
Of this I came across a remarkable illustration in a book I was reading the other day-the life of the Rev. George H. C. Macgregor, a well-known Presbyterian minister in London, who was taken prematurely away last May from a life of great promise. His biographer, a gentleman of good sense and studied moderation, in describing a spiritual crisis through which he passed, says-'One striking effect was very soon discernible, of a kind which may well be recorded, because it is fitted to afford encouragement and hope to others. Nature had given him a peculiarly high-strung nervous temperament. This was specially seen from his childhood in sudden paroxysms of temper, in which he would quiver from head to foot or fling himself passionately on the floor. Even when he grew up, these appear to have sometimes recurred.
It was one of those things which, because they have to some extent a physical basis, even good men sometimes almost acquiesce in. One has heard a bad temper spoken of as a trial or a cross, as if it were, like lameness, a thing to regret, but beyond one's control or power to alter, to be accepted as a permanent fact of a human personality. That it is a cross, indeed, every Christian man cursed with such a disposition sadly knows. The struggle against it is often deeply discouraging; sometimes the only hope seems to be that it will mellow and soften somewhat as life advances. It was at Keswick that Mr. Macgregor first learned to think differently about this. There he learned first of all, as never before, to understand that yielding to any evil tendency, no matter how rooted in one's nature, were it hereditary twenty times over, is sin.
In that season of self-examination and soul abasement, when, as he wrote, " I have been searched through and through, and bared and exposed and scorched by God's searching Spirit," he had a special sense of the evil, and made a special agonizing confession to God, of this besetting sin. And when, after these days of consecration, he left Keswick, certainly, to a large extent, the evil temper was left behind. From that time, he was really, in this respect, a different man. He would never have said, or dreamed of saying, that his inward disposition was all that it might be, or ought to be, absolutely conformed to the mind of Christ. Man's goodness is always defective. Doubtless at times our friend was ruffled. But there were no more paroxysms, and those who knew him best knew how all but unvaryingly serene his temper was.'
