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Page 36
[Footnote 28: _Songs from the Clay_, p. 40.]
The Lord Jesus knew it, too. His teaching, unlike that of Paul, does
not throw into the foreground the divided will and its accompanying
sense of sin and guilt. But he does not ignore it. He brought it out
with infinite tenderness but inexorable clearness in the parables of
the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost boy. The sheep were but
young and silly, they did not wish to be lost on the mountain-side;
they knew no better; inexperience, ignorance were theirs, and
for their sad estate they were not held responsible. For them the
compassionate shepherd sought until he found them in the wilds, took
them, involuntary burdens, on his heart, brought them back to safety
and the fold. The coin had no native affinity with the dirt and grime
of the careless woman's house. It was only a coin, attached to anklet
or bracelet, having no power, no independence of its own; where it
fell, there must it lie. So with the lives set by fate in the refuse
and grime of our industrial civilization, the pure minted gold
effectually concealed by the obscurity and filth around. For such
lives, victims of environment, the Father will search, too, until they
are found, taken up, and somewhere, in this world or another, restored
to their native worth. But the chief of the parables, and the one that
has captured the imagination and subdued the heart of mankind, because
it so true to the greater part of life, is the story of the lost boy.
For he was the real sinner and he was such because, knowing what
he was about and able to choose, he desired to do wrong. It was not
ignorance, nor environment, nor inheritance, that led him into the far
country. It was its alien delights and their alien nature, for which
as such he craved. How subtle and certain is the word of Jesus here.
No shepherd seeks this wandering sheep; no householder searches for
this lost coin. The boy who willed to do wrong must stay with the
swine among the husks until he wills to do right. Then, when
he desires to return, return is made possible and easy, but the
responsibility is forever his. The source of his misery is his own
will.
So the disposition of mankind is at the bottom of the suffering and
the division. There is rebellion and perverseness mingled with the
helplessness and ignorance and sorrow. No man ever understands or can
speak to the religious life unless he has the consciousness of this
inner moral cleft. No man will ever be able to preach with power about
God unless he does it chiefly in terms of God's difference from man
and man's perilous estate and desperate need of Him. Indeed, God is
not like us, not like this inner life of ours; this is what we want
to hear. God is different; that is why we want to be able to love Him.
And being thus different, we are separated from Him, both by the inner
chasm of the divided soul and the outer chasm of remote and hostile
nature. Then comes the final question: How are we, being helpless, to
reach Him? How are we, being guilty, to find Him?
When men deal with these queries, with this range of experience, this
set of inward perceptions, then they are preaching religiously. And
then, I venture to say, they do not fail either of hearers or of
followers. Then there is what Catherine Booth used to call "liberty
of speech"; then there is power because then we talk of realities.
For what is it that looks out from the eyes of religious humanity?
Rebellion, pride? no! Humility, loneliness, something of a just and
deserved fear; but most of all, desire, insatiable, unwavering, an
intense desire. This passion of the race, its never satisfied hunger,
its incredible intensity and persistency of striving and longing,
is at once the tragedy and glory, the witness to the helplessness,
the revelation of the capacity of the race. The mainspring of human
activity, the creative impulse from which in devious ways all the
thousand-hued motives of our lives arise, is revealed in the ancient
cry, "My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God!" That unquenched
thirst for Him underlies all human life, as the solemn stillness of
the ocean underlies the restless upper waves. The dynamic of the world
is the sense of the divine reality. The woe of the world is man's
inability to discover and appropriate that reality. Who that has
entered truly into life does not perceive beneath all the glitter of
its brilliance, the roar of its energy and achievement, the note of
melancholy? The great undertone of life is solemn in its pathetic
uniformity. The poets and prophets of the world have seized unerringly
upon that melancholy undertone. Who ever better understood the
futility and helplessness of unaided man, the certain doom that tracks
down his pride of insolence, or his sin, than the Greek tragedians?
Sophocles, divided spirit that he was, heard that note of melancholy
long ago by the �gean, wrote it into his somber dramas, with their
turbid ebb and flow of human misery. Sometimes the voices of our
humanity as they rise blend and compose into one great cry that is
lifted, shivering and tingling, to the stars, "Oh, that I knew where I
might find Him!" Sometimes and more often they sink into a subdued and
minor plaint, infinitely touching in its human solicitude, perplexity
and pain. Again, James Stephens has phrased it for us in his verse
_The Nodding Stars_.[29]
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