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Page 37
[Footnote 29: _Songs from the Clay_, p. 68.]
"Brothers, what is it ye mean,
What is it ye try to say
That so earnestly ye lean
From the spirit to the clay.
"There are weary gulfs between
Here and sunny Paradise,
Brothers! What is it ye mean
That ye search with burning eyes,
"Down for me whose fire is clogged,
Clamped in sullen, earthy mould,
Battened down and fogged and bogged,
Where the clay is seven-fold."
Now we understand the tragic aspect of nature and of the human soul
caught in this cosmic dualism without which corresponds to the ethical
dualism within. This perception of the One behind the many in nature,
of the thing-in-itself, as distinguished from the many expressions of
that thing, is the chief theme for preaching. This is what brings men
to themselves. Herein, as Dr. Newman Smyth has pointed out, appears
the unique marvel of personality. "It becomes conscious of itself as
individual and it individualizes the world; it is the one discovering
itself among the many. In the midst of uniformities of nature, moving
at will on the plane of natural necessities, weaving the pattern of
its ideas through the warp of natural laws, runs the personal life.
On the same plane and amid these uniformities, yet itself a sphere of
being of another order; in it, yet disentangled from it, and having
its center in itself, it lives and moves and has its being, breaking
no thread of nature's weaving, subject to its own law, and manifesting
a dynamic of its own."[30]
[Footnote 30: _The Meaning of the Personal Life_, p. 173.]
The source, then, as we see it, of all human hopes and human dignity,
the urge that lies behind all metaphysics and much of literature and
art, the thing that makes men eager to live, yet nobly curious to die,
is this conviction that One like unto ourselves but from whom we have
made ourselves unlike, akin to our real, if buried, person, walketh
with us in the fiery furnace of our life. There is a Spirit in man
and the breath of the Almighty giveth him understanding. Starting from
this interpretation, we can begin to order the baffling and teasing
aspects, the illusive nature of the world. Why this ever failing, but
never ending struggle against unseen odds to grasp and understand
and live with the Divine? Why, between the two, the absolute and the
changeless spirit, unseen but felt, and the hesitant and timid spirit
of a man, would there seem to be a great gulf fixed? Because we are
wrong. Because man finds the gulf within himself. He chafes at the
limitations of time and space? Yes; but he chafes more at the mystery
and weakness, the mingled deceitfulness and cunning and splendor of
the human heart. Because there is no one of us who can say, I have
made my life pure, I am free from my sin. He knows that the gulf is
there between the fallible and human, and the more than human; he does
not know how to cross it; he says,
"I would think until I found
Something I can never find
Something lying on the ground
In the bottom of my mind."
Here, then, can we not understand that mingling of mystic dignity
and profound humility, of awe-struck pride and utter self-abnegation,
wherewith the man of religion regards his race and himself? He is the
child of the Eternal; he, being man, alone knows that God is. "When I
consider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars
which Thou hast ordained, what is man that Thou art mindful of him,
or the son of man that Thou visitest him?" Here is the humility: "Why
so hot, little man!" Then comes the awe-struck pride: "Yet Thou hast
made him a little lower than the angels and crowned him with glory and
honor." "Alone with the gods, alone!" God is the high and lofty one
which inhabiteth eternity, but He is also nigh unto them who are of a
broken and a contrite heart.
Here we are come to the very heart of religion. Man's proud
separateness in the universe; yet man's moral defection and his
responsibility for it which makes him know that separateness; man's
shame and helplessness under it. Over against the denial or evasion
of moral values by the naturalist and the dullness to the sense
of moral helplessness by the humanist, there stands the sense of
moral difference, the sense of sin, of penitence and confession. No
preaching not founded on these things can ever be called religious or
can ever stir those ranges of the human life for which alone preaching
is supposed to exist.
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