One Day at a Time Part 10

In one of his letters, Paul declares that he knows both how to be abased and how to abound. Most people, who did not stop to think, would be inclined to a.s.sert that the second of these lessons did not require much learning. It's an easy enough thing to be content, they would say, when you have plenty. Far harder is it to learn how to do without. I am not at all sure that that is right. I rather think that, of the two, abundance is a more searching test of a man's true quality than scarcity ever is. Carlyle has declared that for one man who will stand prosperity there are a hundred that will stand adversity.

But whether that be so or not, there is no question that it is a great thing to have the secret of doing without. And the merest glance abroad convinces us that it is of the utmost importance. In literature, for example, the quality which confers most distinction upon style is the art of omission. Did not Stevenson, himself a master, say that one who knew what to omit could make an Iliad of the daily newspaper? And the commonest blunders in the great business of living spring from ignorance of this secret. Why do some people make themselves disagreeable in a community by their touchiness and sulkiness? Simply because they have not learned how to be abased, how to live without getting their own way always, or without getting the praise or recognition to which they feel themselves ent.i.tled. It's an art, you see, which is well worth studying.

It has to be added that opportunities for practising it are never long wanting from anybody. We don't need to choose what things we shall do without, as a rule. The things are simply taken from us, or we never get them. It may be our own fault, or it may not. The result is the same. We have to do without. And we give away our inmost self by the fashion in which we do it.

There is, for example, the question of material goods. It's easy to talk unreal nonsense here, and we all must confess to wishing to have more of this sort of property than we do possess. But I honestly believe that the Apostle Paul did not greatly concern himself whether he was, materially speaking, well-off or ill-off. There are other men that one knows who have attained to the same point of view. There's no question either that for those whose religion is a vital thing it is the right point of view. The real man is independent of either riches or poverty, because the real man is the man inside. Riches is not you.

Poverty is not you. You are what you are in your inner spirit. The riches there are invisible, but they are eternal--love, faith, hope, peace. And the man who has these, as Paul had them, can honestly say that it is of relatively small moment whether he is in a material sense, rich or poor.

Or take the question of friendship. Who can tell in adequate words what it means to have one true, loyal friend? But it has happened sometimes that the very closest friendships are broken and a man has to stand alone, not by his own choice, but in the grim ordering of things. There is a higher obligation than that you keep faith with your friends.

First and foremost you must keep faith with yourself, with your own conscience, with the voice within. And it may be that obedience to that involves seeming disloyalty to your friends, either for a while or permanently.

Such a time came to Paul. He had for conscience' sake to stand alone; and he did it. He was able to do it because his life did not rest for its ultimate pillar on his friendships any more than on his riches.

Paul's real life was within. That inner life of his was enriched and made radiant and constant by one supreme fact--he believed that Jesus Christ his Lord deigned to share it with him in spirit. It is not irreverent to say that in his inner soul Paul lived with Christ.

Maybe his words are too big for us to use, but each of us who, at some hard bit of our journey, has appealed beyond friends to the Christ within, saying, "I have done, O Lord, what seemed to me right. And my friends are hurt and angry. But Thou knowest"--that man has learned, even in a slight degree, that there is a nearer and truer blessing possible for sinful men than even human friendship.

Then there is another thing that has sometimes to be done without. There are privileges that belong to every Christian man and woman, and are in a sense their birthright--the sense of G.o.d, confidence, quietness of heart, hope. There is no doubt that every real Christian should be walking and working in the light and gladness of G.o.d's presence.

But it is just as clear that not all are so blessed. It may be their own fault. Doubtless in many cases it is. Or it may be temperament or outward circ.u.mstances that determine it. Anyhow, many have to walk, not in the light but in uncertainty, perplexity, and misgiving, and sometimes even in darkness.

But "a bird is a bird even though it cannot sing." And a Christian is a Christian still even though his soul is dark within him, and he goes on in fear, never daring to look up and hope at all.

That is spiritual abas.e.m.e.nt. It ought not to be. It is never to be lightly acquiesced in. But it happens sometimes to earnest men and women, and it seems to be the settled condition of a few. Is it possible to do without these things? Can a man manage to exist and even move forward who has for a while lost his hold on his faith and on G.o.d?

There are good and G.o.dly men who have done it. Brother Lawrence did it.

Robertson of Brighton did it. Horace Bushnell did it. And many, many more. When all that they held most precious in faith had been eclipsed for the time, they steered still by the little light they knew. Though there should be no heaven, they resolved that they were called to be pure, truthful, patient, kind, since these things could never be wrong.

Though there were no Christ, they would still follow where He had once seemed to invite them. And so doing and so following they came again to know. The darkness pa.s.sed, and faith and gladness returned. They had lost hold of G.o.d for a little, but He had never lost hold of them. And, brethren, whatever the doubt or darkness be, that's always true. That is what makes it possible at all. That is what may make it even blessed. For

"It's better to walk in the dark with G.o.d Than to walk alone in the light; Better to walk with G.o.d by faith Than to walk alone by sight."

PRAYER

Our Gracious G.o.d and Father in Heaven, whether Thou dost appoint for us poverty or riches, save us from thinking that a man's life consisteth in the abundance of the things which he possesseth. Beyond all our friendships, be Thou our Friend and Helper, and grant us to seek first the blessing of our G.o.d. Make us very sure, for their comforting and our own, that when men in their darkness sorely seek Thy face, the very ache of their quest is token that Thou hast already found them. For Jesus' sake. Amen.

"_And Moses said, I will now_ _turn aside and see this great sight._"

(EXODUS iii. 3.)

XXVII

WONDER

Moses, adds one commentator significantly, was then eighty years of age.

By the ordinary standards, he was an old man, yet he had not lost his youthful sense of wonder. It is a good sign, the best of signs, when a man has lived so long and yet finds wonder in his heart. It is a bad sign when a man at any age, or when a generation of men, find nothing in all G.o.d's world to wonder at.

Yet in many quarters it is regarded as the correct att.i.tude to refrain from expressing surprise at anything, no matter how striking. The utmost concession to be made to what is really wonderful is a languid and patronising "Really?" That is always a pitiful thing. For where there is no wonder there can be no religion worthy of the name.

The instinct of worship and the instinct of wonder are very intimately related. And where the one has died, the other cannot be in a very healthy state. "I had rather," said Ruskin once, "live in a cottage and wonder at everything, than live in Warwick Castle and wonder at nothing." And his preference is to be commended. For he who has never wondered has never thought about G.o.d in any way to be called thinking.

It was our Lord Himself who said that the ideal of religion was the child-like heart. Everyone knows that these little people are always being brought to a halt to wonder at something. And Heaven is in very truth nearer to them then, and they are more truly filled with its spirit, than either you or I are when the glory and bloom of this world unfold before our eyes, or the thought of the Infinite and Eternal G.o.d comes to us and we have not felt impelled to bow our heads in silence and worship, spell-bound, and in a G.o.dly fear.

It is not hard to lay one's finger on some of the causes that have brought about this state of things. A silly fashion, for one cause, has decreed that wonder is vulgar. Why that should be so, no one can tell.

But if there be higher intelligences than ours in G.o.d's Universe, and they see the sons of men, as they have plenty of chances to do, casting an indifferent glance at the full pomp and majesty of the setting sun, or reading such a Psalm as the 103rd with an untouched heart, how they must marvel indeed!

And then, of course, familiarity tends to blunt the sense of wonder in a certain and common type of mind. The best men have always resisted that tendency and recognised that it works harm to life and character. They have remembered to look for G.o.d in the common and familiar, and that is a search that goes far to make a man a saint, just because it is a continual prayer, a continual holding open of the heart to G.o.d. His answer is to fill the wondering heart, bit by bit, with Himself.

Ignorance, too, is often a cause, the kind of ignorance that calls itself knowledge. It is an innocent delusion on the part of the youthful tyro in Science that after he has made a little experiment with a prism and a beam of sunlight, there is nothing wonderful in the rainbow. Pure, profound Science on the other hand, speaks very humbly--and wonders all the while.

Nature is dumb and silent concerning the Infinite behind it to him who goes but to catalogue and dissect. Take a heart that can wonder with you on your country-walk, open your eyes and look, open your heart like a child and listen, and you will find, as Moses found, that even in a bush there may be the Voice of G.o.d. Hold the door of your heart ajar in simple wonder, and some thing of G.o.d will enter to cleanse and freshen it, as the hot and dusty street is washed by the rain from Heaven.

Just as he who goes to Nature with a heart that cannot wonder, will find no message there for him, so he who looks out upon the sanct.i.ties of home, of human life and love, in that dull mood of mere acceptance, must often find himself hard pressed for material when he makes his thanksgiving to G.o.d. George Eliot has spoken somewhere of the agony of the thought that we can never atone to the dead for the stinted affection we gave them, for the "little reverence we showed to that sacred human soul that lived so close to us, and was the divinest thing G.o.d has given us to know." The divinest thing G.o.d has given us to know!

Have we realised that that gift of G.o.d to us lives now in the same home with us? Do you know what it is? It is a wife's devotion, a mother's care, a brother's comradeship, a sister's love. It is the trust and affection of little children, and the patience of those who love us. And yet there have been men--judge ye if this be not true--who have lived close to gifts of G.o.d like these, and taken them all unquestioned and never wondered at the undeserved bounty of them or their continuance from day to day.

How easy it is to discover the gifts and charm of a stranger, how easy to wonder at that! But to wonder at the sacrifice and the patience of the love that dwells under the same roof with us, and stoops, in Mrs Browning's happy phrase, "to the level of each day's most quiet need,"

how few of us do that! And yet, without daily wonder, how can we be sure that we do not slight it, or requite it ill, how can we truly give our thanks to G.o.d whose gift it is?

Most important of all, he who brings no wonder in his heart can never be touched with the sense of G.o.d. The lack of the great deep and awful wonder of our fathers in all their thought and speech about G.o.d, has brought it about that our religious speech to-day is too often either superficial, flippant and easy, or syllogistic, mechanical, and hard. It is the absence of wonder that tempts men to imagine that G.o.d can be enclosed in any formula whatever, or brought to the hearts of men in so many rigid propositions. If men would but give their wonder expression when they frame their creeds, there would be less chafing where the edges are too sharp.

I am bound to confess that my sympathies are altogether with a working man who once listened to a fervid evangelist at a street corner unfolding a scheme of salvation as clean-cut and mechanical as a problem of Euclid, and b.u.t.tonholed him afterwards to inquire if he had ever read any astronomy. No, he said, he had not. "That's a pity," said the artisan, "for, eh, man, but ye have an awfu' wee G.o.d." In all reverence, my brothers, that is what the absence of wonder brings us to, a small G.o.d, a small salvation, and a merely mechanical Christ.

Men have sometimes asked what that childhood of the Kingdom is on which Jesus laid so much stress, and some have taken it to mean renunciation of intellect and reason in favour of a Church's dogma. But it means, says John Kelman, something far more human and more beautiful--"it means wonder and humility and responsiveness, the straight gaze of childhood past conventionalities, the simplicity of a mind open to any truth, and a heart with love alive in it." That is surely right. That is what becoming a little child in Christ's sense does mean. First of all, wonder.

PRAYER

Almighty and eternal G.o.d, Creator and Ruler of the Universe, dwelling in light that is inaccessible and full of glory, whom no man hath seen or can see, what is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou visitest him? Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us that we should be called the sons of G.o.d! Such knowledge is too wonderful for us; it is high, we cannot attain unto it.

O come let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker. Amen.

"_If ye then, being evil, know_ _... how much more ... your_ _heavenly Father._"

(LUKE xi. 13.)

XXVIII

THE FATHERHOOD OF G.o.d

If it were a conceivable thing that we had to part with all the words of Scripture save one, and if we were allowed to choose that one, there are some of us who would elect to retain that great declaration of Jesus--"If ye being evil know ... how much more ... your heavenly Father." For, having that, we should still be rich in knowledge of the Love and Fatherhood of G.o.d. We should still know Christ's dominating conception of G.o.d, and have His last and highest word regarding Him. We should still be able to rise, as Jesus not only warrants but invites us to do, from the little broken arc of true fatherhood on earth to the perfect round in Heaven.

At the warm rea.s.suring touch of that "How much more your heavenly Father" whole systems of brainy divinity vanish away! The truth of the Fatherhood of G.o.d, vouched for and lived on by Jesus, kills men's hard and unworthy and hurtful thoughts about G.o.d as sunshine kills the creatures that breed and prevail in darkness and ignorance. They can no more live alongside of a realisation that Christ's name for G.o.d is His true name, and really describes His att.i.tude to all the sons of men, than the dark, creepy things that live under the stone can remain there when you turn it over and let in the air and the light.

But, say some, you must not carry the truth of G.o.d's Fatherhood too far.

What is too far? I ask. I want to carry it, and I believe Christ means us to carry it, as far as ever it will stretch, and that is "as far as the East is from the West." Think of a father's GOOD-WILL. It is conceivable that other men may do you a deliberate wrong. But you are ent.i.tled to believe that your father won't. You may not understand what he proposes, but you can be quite sure that he means only your good.

Henry Drummond tells how his early days were made miserable by the conception he had of G.o.d as of some great staring Eye in the heavens watching all he did. But that is a policeman's eye, not a father's.

There are many tokens that, even yet, we have not realised what these blessed words of Jesus mean and imply. A mother vainly trying to answer the old, old question why her little one was taken from her, will say, "Perhaps I was too fond of him." Or, should sudden sorrow come, the explanation suggested by the troubled one himself is, "I was too happy."

There are plenty of people who are afraid to declare that they feel very well or are very happy, in case the upper Powers should hear and send trouble, apparently out of sheer malice! "Bethankit, what a bonny creed!" Oh! what a dreadful caricature of G.o.d! How it must pain the Father to hear His children talking so!