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Page 53
But more than the sinner wants to be free does he want to be kept.
Along with the passion for liberty is the desire for surrender. Again,
then, he wants something outside himself, some Being so far above the
world he lives in that it can take him, the whole of him, break his
life, shake it to its foundations, then pacify, compose it, make it
anew. He is so tired of his sin; he is so weary with striving; he
wants to relinquish it all; get far away from what he is; flee like
a bird to the mountain; lay down his life before the One like whom he
would be. So he wants power, he wants peace. He would be himself, he
would lose himself. He prays for freedom, he longs for captivity.
Now, out of these depths of human life, these vast antinomies of the
spirit, has arisen man's belief in a Saviour-God. Sublime and awful
are the sanctions upon which it rests. Out of the extremity and
definiteness of our need we know that He must be and we know what He
must be like. He is the One to whom all hearts are open, all desires
known, from whom no secrets are hid. Who could state the mingling of
desire and dread with which men strive after, and hide from, such
a God? We want Him, yet until we have Him how we fear Him. For that
inclusive knowledge of us which is God, if only we can bear to come to
it, endows us with freedom. For then all the barriers are down, there
is nothing to conceal, nothing to explain, nothing to hold back. Then
reality and appearance coincide, character and condition correspond.
I am what I am before Him. Supreme reality from without answers and
completes my own, and makes me real, and my reality makes me free.
But if He thus knows me, and through that knowledge every inner
inhibition melts in His presence and every damning secret's out, and
all my life is spread like an open palm before His gaze, and I am come
at last, through many weary roads, unto my very self, why then I can
let go, I can relinquish myself. The dreadful tension's gone and in
utter surrender the soul is poured out, until, spent and expressed,
rest and peace flood back into the satisfied life. So the life is
free; so the life is bound. So a man stands upon his feet; so he
clings to the Rock that is higher than he. So the life is cleansed in
burning light; so the soul is hid in the secret of God's presence. So
men come to themselves; so men lose themselves in the Eternal. There
is perfect freedom at last because we have attained to complete
captivity. There is power accompanied by peace. That is the gift which
the vision of a God, morally separate from, morally other than we,
brings to the inward strife, the spiritual agony of the world. This
is the need which that faith satisfies. It is, I suppose, in this
exulting experience of moral freedom and spiritual peace which comes
to those men who make the experiment of faith that they, for the most
part, find their sufficient proof of the divine reality. Who ever
doubted His existence who could cry with all that innumerable company
of many kindreds and peoples and tongues:
"He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay;
And he set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.
And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God."
Here, then, is the preaching which is religious. How foolish are we
not to preach it more! How trivial and impertinent it is to question
the permanence of the religious interpretation of the world! What
a revelation of personal insignificance it is to fail to revere the
majesty of the devout and aspiring life! That which a starved and
restless and giddy world has lost is this pool of quietness, this
tower of strength, this cleansing grace of salvation, this haven of
the Spirit. Belief in a transcendent deity is as natural as hunger
and thirst, as necessary as sleep and breathing. It was the inner and
essential needs of our fathers' lives which drove them out to search
for Him. It will be the inner and essential needs of the lives of our
children that shall bring them to the altar where their fathers and
their fathers' fathers bowed down before them. Are we going to be
afraid to keep its fires burning?
And so we come to our final and most difficult aspect of this
transcendent problem. We have talked of the man who is separate from
nature, and who knows himself as man because behind nature he sees
the God from whom he is separate, too. We have seen how he needs
that "otherness" in God to maintain his personality and how the gulf
between him and that God induces that sense of helplessness which
makes the humility and penitence of the religious life. We must come
now to our final question. How is he to bridge the gulf? By what power
can he go through with this experience we have just been relating and
find his whole self in a whole world? How can he dare to try it? How
can he gain power to achieve it?
Perhaps this is the central difficulty of all religion. It is
certainly the one which the old Greeks felt. Plato, the father of
Christian theology, and all neo-platonists, knew that the gulf is
here between man and God and they knew that something or someone must
bridge it for us. They perceived that man, unaided, cannot leap it at
a stride. We proceed, driven by the facts of life, to the point where
the soul looks up to the Eternal and confesses the kinship, and knows
that only in His light shall it see light, and that it only shall be
satisfied when it awakes in His likeness. But how shall the connection
be made? What shall enable us to do that mystic thing, come back
to God? We have frightful handicaps in the attempt. How shall the
distrust that sin creates, the hardness that sin forms, the despair
and helplessness that sin induces, the dreadful indifference which
is its expression,--how shall they be removed? How shall the unfaith
which the mystery, the suffering, the evil of the world induce be
overcome? Being a sinner I do not dare, and being ignorant I do not
believe, to come. God is there and God wants us; like as a father
pitieth his children so He pitieth us. He knoweth our frame, He
remembereth that we are dust. We know that is true; again we do not
know it is true. All the sin that is in us and all which that sin
has done to us insists and insists that it is not true. And the mind
wonders--and wonders. What shall break that distrust; and melt away
the hardness so that we have an open mind; and send hope into despair,
hope with its accompanying confidence to act; change unfaith to
belief, until, in having faith, we thereby have that which faith
believes in? How amazing is life! We look out into the heavenly
country, we long to walk therein, we have so little power to stir hand
or foot to gain our entrance. We know it is there but all the facts of
our rebellious or self-centered life, individual and associated alike,
are against it and therefore we do not know that it is there.
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