The Bible and Life Part 7

The brightest things below the sky Yield but a flattering light; We should suspect some danger nigh Where we possess delight.

There is something morbid in this conception. The invitation to the religious life becomes gruesome. The sister of Pascal cared for him through a long and serious illness. Pascal came to love her so much that he feared that his affection was wicked. In a gloomy hour he wrote in his diary these words, "Lord, forgive me for loving my dear sister so much!"

Afterward his abnormal conscience worked again, and Pascal actually erased the word "dear." For such moods the Bible has a lesson. G.o.d "giveth us richly all things to enjoy." We would think it small glory for ourselves if our children should push our gifts away from their little hands with the idea that those selected gifts were perilous. G.o.d fills the world with possibilities of pleasure. Food and drink are not negative and tasteless.

The paths of earth are not flowerless. Voices are not without music.

Companionship is not lifeless. The Bible is the foe of wicked pleasure.

The Bible is the foe of excessive pleasure. The Bible is the friend of legitimate and proportionate pleasure.

But while pleasure needs to be guarded and curbed, it is not either a burden to be lifted or a pain to be endured. Sorrow is both. Therefore sorrow demands some positive services from the Bible. We may be impatient with those doleful folks who speak of this world as a vale of tears or as a wilderness of woe! We may be inclined to quote the lines:

I think we are too ready with complaint In this fair world of G.o.d's.

On the other hand, it is well to remember that the young, especially, see life almost exclusively from the standpoint of hope and courage. The minister of the gospel begins to feel, when he reaches the age of forty, that he has not given enough comfort to his people. As he identifies himself closely with their lives he finds that most homes carry some secret sorrow and that most men and women have their own personal tragedies. You will recall the myth about the boatman whose duty it was to carry over the Styx the souls who departed from earth. He noticed that these souls mourned much and took the voyage unwillingly. He thought that it must be a very beautiful and joyful land that laid such hold on their hearts. So he secured leave of absence from his post of duty and made an excursion into the world. He discovered that for every birth there must eventually be a death; that every home that was made must in due season be broken; that men and women were troubled and maimed and sick. On all sides he saw the evidences of sorrow. He went back to his ferry greatly wondering why people should be sad because they left a sad world. This mythical picture is overdrawn, but it has its suggestion of truth. Earth does have its manifold sorrows. If all the burdens and pains and problems and anguishes of a single day could focus their influence upon any single life, the result would be either a broken heart or an insane mind.

The Bible does not make light of sorrows. Its heroes have their troubles.

Call the roll of its sons and daughters and you will find that at some time each one of them was a child of grief. The Book does not a.s.sign burden and pain and sorrow to the cla.s.s of unrealities. Neither does it a.s.sign them to the cla.s.s of negations. In the Bible sorrow is real and sorrow is positive. When Rachel weeps for her children, the scene is real.

When David goes into the room in the tower over the gate and utters his pitiful lament over Absalom, the Book does not describe his anguish as an illusion. Paul's hunger and thirst, and stripes and shipwrecks, and perils and imprisonments were not the vain froth of a mortal mind. Jesus's cross, and the thorns and the nails and the spear, and the tauntings of the pa.s.sers-by, and the thirst, and the darkened face of the Father were not swept into the void by reciting a formula about the All. Jesus gave a promise to his disciples, "In the world ye shall have tribulation." He kept that promise. They walked the ways of martyrdom. Their spirits won victories over their flesh. Yet there is no hint that their persecutions and deaths were the fictions of error or the dreams of a night that did not exist. The Bible, being real, ministers to sorrow that is real.

The Book, too, touches on all the phases of comfort that we may gather from the surface of life, only it does not make them either a full gospel of consolation or a large part of that gospel. Sometimes a word of Scripture will suggest the method of comparison implied in the statement, "It might be worse." Paul does this with one quick word. "Our _light_ affliction," he puts it. We have lost one hand; we might have lost two! We have lost one eye; we might have lost both! We have been sick one week; it might have been a year! Sometimes this method carries us off into rather graceless comparisons of ourselves with other people as if, indeed, we were divine favorites. Can a man prove more divine providence for himself by a.s.suming that there is less for another person? This road of comparison leads to phariseeism unless we watch carefully against a despicable by-path. Tennyson in his "In Memoriam," which is a poem of comfort, shows much impatience with this false form of consolation:

One writes, "that other friends remain,"

That loss is common to the race; And common is the commonplace, And vacant chaff well meant for grain.

That loss is common would not make My own less bitter, rather more; Too common! Never morning wore To evening but some heart did break.

This method of comparison is inadequate. Whether the word "light" makes our imagination furnish the details of the worse affliction, or whether it contrasts our sorrows with the greater sorrows of others, it does not do enough for our smitten hearts.

Nor are we fully satisfied with the plea that sorrow is but "for a moment"

and that we can be thankful for its brevity. There is comfort here, to be sure, but it has no final quality. Paul knew that, and so he gave the idea an incidental part of a sentence, and then went on to the deeper consolation. One poet puts it:

Since the scope Must widen early, is it well to droop For a few days consumed in loss and taint?

O pusillanimous heart! be comforted; And like a cheerful traveler, take the road, Singing beside the hedge. What if the bread Be bitter in thine inn, and thou unshod To meet the flints? At least it may be said, "Because the way is short, I thank thee, G.o.d."

The truth is that there is real comfort in all this only when pain's brevity contributes something to the good of the years and even to eternity. Thus the Bible does not give much s.p.a.ce to the slight comforts of either comparison or brevity. These have their function, but they are the small helpers of the larger consolations.

The Bible likewise gives as one of the comforts of sorrow that sorrow prepares us to console others' sorrows. Saint Paul uses this in his message to the Corinthians: "Blessed be G.o.d, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the G.o.d of all comfort; who comforteth us in all our tribulations, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of G.o.d." Here we are pushed back to the deepest sources of comfort. G.o.d comforts the sorrowful in order that other sorrowful ones may have comfort. The consolers are delegated by the great Consoler. It requires this reach clear back to the heart of G.o.d to rescue this suggestion from the superficial. One man has sorrow. He consoles others who have sorrow. Then you have two sorrows in your problem. In this way you would keep playing off sorrow against sorrow, without any fundamental explanation of any sorrow. The question is, Why any sorrow at all? If one of the by-products of sorrow is the power to comfort the sorrowing, we must still find some main product that will put the two sorrows together in a meaning of good. The G.o.d of comfort must preside over both sorrows ere either sorrow shall yield its contribution to the sufferer. Paul saw this, and so he related our power to comfort others to the fact that we had gotten our comfort from the Father of all consolation.

It is thus clear that the Scriptures give place to all the minor elements in the ministry of sorrow. Its comparative lightness, its sure brevity, and its tuition for sympathy have their part in the Bible curriculum. The Scriptures also move onward to the vision of a G.o.d who cares. "Like as a father pitieth"--this is the message even of the Old Testament. It gives an answer to that piercing cry:

What can it mean? Is it aught to Him That the nights are long and the sun is dim?

Can he be touched by the griefs I bear Which sadden the heart and whiten the hair?

Around his throne are eternal calms, And glad, strong music of happy psalms, And bliss unruled by any strife!

How can he care for my little life?

The answer of the Bible is the vision of the pitying G.o.d. Our earthly friends have helped us in our sorrows by simply caring. They have come to us in the shadows, and their words and faces have told us that they cared.

It is a strange feature of human psychology that just this gives us comfort. Our friends do not solve the problem for us. They do not remove the cause of our pain. But they feel with us, and this is aid. Every sympathizer seems to lift a bit of the weight from our own hearts. When the Bible gives us the revelation of One who pitieth "like as a father pitieth," it brings G.o.d into that circle of helpfulness.

The lesson goes farther and deeper than this. Though we have not here used the words technically, the soul's dictionary draws a distinction between pity and sympathy. The pitier may never have walked the way that allows him to understand our grief; the sympathizer comes to us from some experience that permits him to remember those that are in bonds as bound with them. We cannot read the Bible long ere we discover that there is in G.o.d the capability of joy and sorrow. The pa.s.sages are abundant that justify this statement. G.o.d can be pleased. G.o.d can be grieved. If men and women have been made in his image, and if we find in them the capability of pain and sorrow, we are driven to the conclusion that something corresponding thereto must be in the divine nature. The father in the parable of the prodigal son, sitting lonely and mournful in his home, represents G.o.d. The father in that same parable meeting his son in the roadway and giving him glad welcome, and calling to his neighbors, "Rejoice with me," likewise represents G.o.d. The truth seems to be that the farther up we go in the grade of being, the more capability of pain and of pleasure do we find. The polyp can neither suffer much nor enjoy much. The oyster can enjoy more and suffer more. The bird has its note of joy and its note of pain. Human beings have exquisite powers of enjoyment and equally exquisite powers of suffering. We may well believe that when we reach the perfect being of G.o.d both of these capabilities come to their highest. This is the meaning of that verse:

Can it be, O Christ Eternal, That the wisest suffer most?

That the mark of rank in nature Is capacity for pain?

That the anguish of the singer Makes the sweetness of the strain?

We are allowed to believe, then, that the pity of G.o.d pa.s.ses over into sympathy. We are visited in our sorrows not by a G.o.d whose mood toward us is abstract, but whose own infinite heart knows grief. "The human life of G.o.d" is a phrase that has been used to describe the incarnation. That phrase enters into our problem here. If Jesus shows us what G.o.d is like, then the Christ who wept over Jerusalem brings us one revelation of the divine life. The pitying G.o.d becomes the sympathizing G.o.d.

The biblical lesson of comfort does not halt even here. It is given a closer and more personal quality. A pitier and sympathizer may be very distant, and his aid may reach us over the abysses. If the Bible gives us the vision of a pitying father, it gives us also the vision of the G.o.d who comforteth even as a mother comforteth. In the various kinds of trouble men become aware of reserve forces in their nature. They endure what they thought they could not endure. In crisis times the muscles secure extra strength, the mind secures extra alertness, and the spirit secures extra power either to do or to bear. These reserves must be of G.o.d's giving, whether they lie ready in the nature always, or are special gifts sent direct to help us in the troublous hours. There is, however, a still more personal interpretation that the Bible offers for these experiences. They are the special visits of G.o.d to the afflicted. If the creed of the divine sympathy gets its meaning from "the human life of G.o.d" as seen in the incarnation of Christ, this part of the creed gets its meaning from the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. It is true that the Greek word which is translated "Comforter" might be given other meanings such as Adviser or Helper. But this does not change the point for the present discussion. An Adviser in sorrow is a Comforter, and a Helper in sorrow is a Comforter.

It is significant that the consciousness of the church followed the translators eagerly and adopted the word Comforter as if it met some need of life and as if it answered to some deep experience of life. We may not go into a labored discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity. We may affirm that a humanity that sorrows is glad for a doctrine of the G.o.dhead that magnifies the office of consolation. The comforting quality in Barnabas led the early disciples to change his name from Joses to Barnabas because he was a "son of consolation." They rejoiced in their human comforter. The church has ever found satisfaction in the revelation of a divine Comforter. In this revelation it sees the pitying G.o.d and the sympathizing G.o.d become the Comforting G.o.d.

Related to this is the scriptural idea that G.o.d conquers our sorrow not by removing it but by making us equal to its burden. The clearest concrete ill.u.s.tration of this is seen in Paul's words about his "thorn in the flesh." His thrice-repeated prayer was that the thorn might be removed; his answer was that, while the difficulty would not be taken away, he would be given grace sufficient for his trial. Paul's experience has impressed men as being typical of the inner kind of divine aid. The sorrow may be of many kinds; but the powers of resistance are strengthened by the grace of G.o.d and the sorrows are borne in a brave and patient spirit.

Although the idea be trite, it claims a place in the discussion, as indeed it was worthy of a place in the ritual of comfort. We are not dealing with any mere law of reaction. It was not the thorn that was making Paul strong; it was G.o.d who was making Paul strong to endure the thorn. He himself describes the transaction as if it had involved a direct gift of the divine grace, as it had involved a direct message from the divine heart.

Yet great as are all these types of biblical consolation, we all feel that we have not reached the conclusion of the matter. Comparison is not enough. Brevity does not explain why sorrow should be just brief. Pity does not tell us why we should need to be pitied. Direct spiritual reserves do not fully justify the hard experience that calls for them.

Direct and personal comfort does not solve the problem since no one would seek trouble in order to have the visits of a comforting friend. The gaining of inner strength comes nearer to a positive warrant for the sorrows of life; yet it does not quite reach the satisfying conception.

All these things are parts of the program, but they are not its conclusion. The tale of life's sorrow is not all told by their recital.

The full story we cannot understand now; still we may be able to glimpse its meaning. In the epic of Job there are traces of the revelation. The patriarch gathers a harvest out of his troubles. They never reach the uttermost extreme. They do not last forever. They bring him pity, however crude; sympathy, however bungling; comforters, however mistaken; reserve forces, however tardy; inner strength, however won. But his sorrows do more than this; they are represented in the last chapter as having been made the servant of Job. The richer and stronger man returns to the richer and stronger life. The testings have been turned into gains.

This deeper lesson of comfort is often given to us in the Bible by means of a very positive verb. Our afflictions "work" for us. All things "work"

together for us. As men are sent to the fields, and as the forces of nature are sent along the wires, so sorrows are sent to become our servants. This service is not inevitable; it is conditioned on the att.i.tude of the sorrowing life; but it is a very real service when the conditions are met. Our afflictions work for us--when we get the spiritual vision so that we can receive the things that are eternal. All things work together for good for us--when we fulfill the innermost requirement of loving G.o.d. The condition in both cases is located within the spiritual life. This condition being met, the promise of the Bible is that sorrow is made our efficient servant. Paul in his famous verse of consolation states the case with marked confidence. The afflictions work for us until they produce "a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." Language could scarcely be stronger. Nor were the words used by one who lolled in the high places of ease and delight and shouted down his abstract comforts to the strugglers in the vale. The a.s.surance to the sorrowing comes from their comrade. His experiences ranged all the way from the petty hardships of a wandering life on to the Appian Way and the block of death. It was the sure faith of the apostle that all his sorrows had been made to work for him. He was not their victim; he was their master and their beneficiary.

The persons who have seen much of the world's better living will not deny this conception. Le Gallienne in his booklet, If I Were G.o.d, admits that suffering does often work toward the making of character and becomes a real servant. His skepticism does not lie at this point. His inquiry is whether a just and good G.o.d could not have found some easier way, some servant for which we would not have to render such a painful cost. This, of course, is that old method of debate that flees for refuge to some imaginary world and conceives of people who do not exist. Our task is with the people now on earth, and with them we must deal in our efforts at consolation. Some of them we have seen driven to bitterness of spirit by their sorrow. They themselves made sorrow an evil servant which filled the garden of life with noxious weeds, shut the windows of hope in the home of life, put the poison of despair into the water of life, and spread the clouds of gloom over all the sky of life. Others we have seen mellowed and sweetened by the servantship of sorrow. All our visits to them showed clearly that sorrow was doing gracious service. The "weight of glory" was more and more apparent. The "good" produced by the "all things" gave increasing evidence that the "servant" was doing his work. When any close observer of life writes down his lists of saints he will always find that he has been compelled to canonize many who, like their Master, have been made "perfect through suffering."

The quotation of these words about Christ reminds us that the world turns to him as to the last resort for the sorrowing. Here, as in all other studies, we find the climax in him. As he entered into all forms of work, so did he enter into all forms of sorrow. Is it homelessness? Is it privation? Is it misunderstanding? Is it anxiety for others? Is it antic.i.p.ated suffering? Is it evil accusation? Is it ridicule? Is it shame?

Is it mockery? Is it torture? Is it utter disgrace? Is it abandonment? Is it denial? Is it betrayal? Is it death? All these he knew. If the wisest and holiest suffer most, he knew all these sorrows at their deepest. None could really join with him in chanting the real De Profundis. He trod the winepress alone, and of the people there was none with him. The world that left him alone in his sorrow does not wish him to leave it alone in its sorrow. It seeks him then. It hears him as he promises, not immunity from suffering, but the experience of overcoming in suffering: "Be of good cheer: I have overcome the world." He put a deeply personal quality into his a.s.surance, "I will not leave you comfortless; I will come to you." "I am with you always, even unto the end of the aeons." So runs the promise.

It is no wonder that the troubled flee to him. The Man of Sorrows draws the men of sorrows. His benediction of peace is not formal. With the authority and with the reserves of comfort at his command, he still says, "Let not your heart be troubled."

To the usual messages of consolation he now adds the eternal reason, "In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you." Well did Carlyle say that if Jesus were only man, he had no right to utter these words. But Jesus said much more. He would prepare the place. He would come again. He would receive them into his company. If some doubter shall ask about the way, his reply shall be the same as of old, "I am the way." Through him alone we come to the Father. Full trust in him removes all bitter tears: and the remainder of tears he does not rebuke. He inspires the visions wherein we see those who have come up out of great tribulation hungering no more, nor thirsting any more, nor smitten by the sun or any heat; but fed by the Lamb and led by him amid fountains of living waters, while G.o.d wipes away all tears from their eyes.

This doctrine of heaven as a consolation for sorrow is not born of selfishness, as is often charged. The rankest of infidels said, "In the night of death, hope sees a star, and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing." Not "listening selfishness," but "listening love"! The love that we bear to our own and to all mankind seeks this vision and finds it waiting in the divine plan. Is it selfish to desire that for ourselves which will injure none others? Is it selfish to long for that which will meet the longings of the whole world? Verily some critics discover strange dictionaries when they define words in reference to the holy faith. But all the while the afflicted seek the face of Christ. Troubles look unto him and are lightened. The poor man cries and the Lord still delivers him out of his troubles. Our Bibles and our Hymnals personalize the haven for us. He is the Rock of Ages. His bosom is the Refuge. To him we go when shadows darkly gather. A present help is he. The last low whispers of our dead are burdened with his name. The suffering world states its comfort in terms of Christ himself.

For the final sorrow of death he offers the full consolation. The tragedy of separation remains. Our indictment against death is that of Tennyson:

He puts our lives so far apart, We cannot hear each other speak.

The more worthy of immortality our beloved seems to be, the keener is the pang of parting. Lowell felt it so "After the Burial":

Immortal! I feel it and know it, Who doubts it of such as she?

But that is the pang's very secret-- Immortal away from me.

The Bible has no rebuke for the sorrow of separation. But it does have the healing hope of eternal reunion. Jesus said: "I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth on me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die." These words, fully believed, still our fear, confirm our hope, and comfort our final sorrow.

To all the burdened, Jesus says, "Come unto me, and I will give you rest."

To all the joyless he says, "I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you." To all the lonely and mourning he comes with the message, "Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in G.o.d, believe also in me." The world may have difficulty in securing that belief; but the world knows well that this belief alone is the defeat of sorrow. In their best and most desperate and most hopeful hours men flee to the Bible as to the only tent in which their anguish can be soothed. Within that tabernacle walks the form of the Fourth. When they turn from him, they must return with the question, "Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life." The eternal life that he gives is the only consolation for our pa.s.sing sorrows.

CHAPTER VIII

THE BIBLE AND PRACTICE