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Page 13
The moment that the soul realizes that God is not far away, but within;
that all the divine voices did not speak in the past, but that many are
speaking now; that whosoever will listen may hear within his own being a
message as clear and sacred as any that ever came to prophet or teacher
in other times, it will begin to realize the luxury of its liberty, and
something of the grandeur of its destiny. Truth and right are not
fictions of the imagination, they are realities opening before the
growing soul like continents before explorers. They always invite
entrance and possession. They have horizons full of splendor and beauty
and music. They alone can satisfy. But the soul has not yet fully
escaped from the mists and fogs and glooms of the earth. It is
surrounded by those who still wallow in animalism, and the sounds of the
lower world are yet echoing in its ears. But at last its face is toward
the light; the far call of its destiny has been heard; it knows itself
to be in a moral order; it is assured that, however closely the body may
be imprisoned, no bolts and no bars can shut in a spirit; that before it
is a fair and favored land, far off but ever open; and, best of all,
that within its own being, impervious to all influences from without, is
a guide which may be implicitly trusted and which will never betray. Why
not follow its suggestions at once and press on toward that fair land
of truth and beauty which so earnestly invites? Ah! why not? Here we are
face to face with other facts. There are hindrances, many and serious,
in the pathway of the soul, and they must be met and forced before that
land can be entered. This is the time for us to consider them.
HINDRANCES
And many, many are the souls
Life's movement fascinates, controls;
It draws them on, they cannot save
Their feet from its alluring wave;
They cannot leave it, they must go
With its unconquerable flow;
* * * * *
They faint, they stagger to and fro,
And wandering from the stream they go;
In pain, in terror, in distress,
They see all round a wilderness.
--_Epilogue to Lessing's "Laocoon"._ Matthew Arnold
IV
_HINDRANCES_
When the soul has heard the far call of its destiny and realizes that it
may respond to that call, and that it has, in conscience, a guide which
will not fail even in the deepest darkness, it turns in the direction
from which the appeal comes and begins to move toward its goal. Almost
simultaneously it realizes that it has to meet and to overcome numerous
and serious obstacles. To the hindrances in the way of the spirit our
thought is to be turned in this chapter.
The moral failure of many men and women of superb intellectual and
physical equipment is one of the sad and serious marvels of human
history. What a pathetic and significant roll might be made of those
who have been great intellectually and pitiful failures morally! It has
often been affirmed that Hannibal might have conquered Rome, and been
the master of the world except for the fatal winter at Capua. Antony,
possibly, would have been victor at Actium if it had not been for
something in himself that made him susceptible to the fascination of the
fair but treacherous Egyptian queen. Achilles was a symbolical as well
as an historical character. There was one place--with him in the
heel--where he was vulnerable, and through that he fell. Socrates was
like a tornado when inflamed by anger. Napoleon laid Europe waste and
desolated more distant lands, but he was an enormous egotist and morally
a blot on civilization.
The life-history of many of the poets is inexpressibly sad. Chatterton,
Shelley, Byron, Poe--their very names call up facts which those who
admire their genius would gladly conceal. Many artists are in the same
category. It explains nothing to ascribe their moral pollution to their
finer sensibilities, for finer sensibilities ought to be attended by
untarnished characters. It is, perhaps, best not even to mention their
names lest, thereby, we dull the appreciation of noble masterpieces
which represent the better moods of the men. One of imperial genius was
a slave to wine, another to lust, another was too envious to detect any
merit in the work of others of his craft. There are statesmen of whose
achievements we speak, but never of the men themselves; and there have
been ministers of the Gospel, unhappily not a few, who have suddenly
disappeared and been heard of no more. Into a kindly oblivion they have
gone, and that is all that any one needs to know. What do such facts
signify? That many, or most, of these men have been essentially and
totally bad? Or that they are moral failures? They signify only that
they have not yet risen above the hindrances which they have found in
their pathways. The world knows of the temporary obscuration of a fair
fame; it does not see the grief, the tears, the gradual gathering of the
energies for a new assault upon the obstacles in the road; and it does
not see how tenderly, but faithfully, Providence, through nature, is
dealing with them. Some time they will be brought to themselves--The
Eternal Goodness is the pledge of that. It is not with this unseen and
beneficent ministry of restoration, however, that I am now dealing, but
with the awful wrecks and failures which are so common in human history,
and concerning which most men know something in their own experiences.
How shall they be explained?--since to evade them is impossible. In
other words when a man is awake, when he feels that he is in a moral
order, is free, and hears the call of his destiny, why is his progress
so slow and difficult? No one has ever delineated this period in the
soul's growth with greater vividness than Bunyan. The Valley of
Humiliation, the Slough of Despond, Giant Despair, Doubting Castle are
all pictures of human life taken with photographic accuracy. What are
some of these hindrances?
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