Nature, in a fashion whose details are still only
faintly hinted to us men, constitutes a vast society.
_Royce._
The Christian shows in his root principles, we are bound to confess, a
profound sense of personality and of the relations of persons. That this
comes of his relation to the Supreme Person from whom he has derived
them can hardly be denied. It is in a person, Jesus Christ, that he has
seen God and learnt about him; and the judgements and love of God that
he discerns he discerns in Christ. As the spirit of Christ becomes one
with his spirit so do his own judgements and his own love become those
of God in him, and his principles are embodied in his life. All wisdom
is divine, and all love, the Christian says. And, undoubtedly, men who
are earnestly and disinterestedly seeking these, and discovering how in
that search they penetrate into the truth and reality of moral and
practical affairs of life, must find that the Christian is worth
listening to, perhaps even worth watching. That is, when he has 'the
mind of Christ.' Otherwise he confuses judgement and blurs, if he does
not efface, his principles. In 'the mind of Christ' he is for us 'a
well-spring of water'; without that, if he only calls himself by the
name and is either the Scribe, the Pharisee, or the false prophet, he is
far more helpless, far more misleading and misled, than they are who
honestly seek truth and know they have not found it.
In the last chapter we heard what the man with the mind of Christ had to
say about punishment and forgiveness as between persons. And one
difficulty that disturbs others, many others, besides those who approach
the Christian religion from the direction of science, has surely been
lessened by him. But besides this, in that chapter we referred, in
passing, to the calamities of what we narrowly call 'nature,' the burnt
child, the man of ruined health; and we said that these were not
strictly affairs of punishment. But, undoubtedly, they are often
regarded as punishment by religious men, by Christian men. We may turn
to our Christian, whose best has been so good, and ask him what the mind
of Christ is on this matter. Does the Lover and Father of Jesus inflict
plague and pestilence, earthquake and fire, on evil-doers, as a human
judge inflicts prison or the hangman's cord, and once inflicted
mutilation and torture? The God of the Old Testament, so his prophets
said, was not unlike our judges. What is the God of the New, as Jesus
showed him? The answer is not far to seek.
'Ye have heard that it hath been said'—'But I say unto you.' He maketh
his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the
just and on the unjust.' ... 'those eighteen, upon whom the tower in
Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all
men that dwelt in Jerusalem?' And then the warning words—'I tell you,
Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.' Warning,
these last words are, and, it may be, puzzling. They seem to imply
punishment, doom, in this falling of a tower, though no sinners were
specially selected from others for the death it brought. What is there
behind this? Let us think, and bring to bear on the problem what we have
learnt about the world (and therefore about God) elsewhere. And let us
consult with the Christian. He is our authority now on his own affairs,
as the philosopher and the scientific man are on theirs. Well, in the
first place it is plain that no one of our authorities countenances
arbitrary enactment. Thus much is plain about the events of nature
(usually so-called), that they are no more arbitrary than the
judgements, or the punishment and forgiveness, of a just man or a just
God. What we want to know is the way in which their order is related to
the order of justice between persons. That a tower falls on eighteen
sinners who are not worse sinners than those upon whom it does not fall
looks bad for justice and consequently for love. But is it bad?
We are opening up one of the most formidable of problems. Let us bear in
mind, however, that we have seen one thing precluded by the mind of
Christ—a belief on our part that the man who suffers or dies from an
'accident' or catastrophe of nature is thereby pointed out as punished
by God. The selective, though equally natural, punishments of God are of
quite another order; they single out unerringly, with the utmost
subtlety and fineness, man from man. They are determined for himself by
each man; he works out his own damnation as he works out his own
salvation, God working with him for both. And that is why the adjustment
is so accurate between the man who will not be saved and the doom that
falls upon him. The calamities of earth are far too rough and ready to
be God's instruments of selection. When (or if) one Grand Duke is the
sole survivor of a wrecked ship and a Te Deum is sung in thankfulness to
God, the mind of Christ is ignored, his plain words are ignored. 'Think
ye that this Grand Duke was a man of God above all men that were on that
ship?' we hear him ask. And we do not hear him say that if we all repent
we shall all likewise be rescued. The kingdom of heaven is neither
bought nor sold, and no repentance will purchase safety upon earth.
All this lies on the face of these illuminating words spoken from the
mind of Christ. But there is more to be learnt about them and from them.
We are thrown back upon the mystery of the fundamental relation between
matter and spirit. And if we cannot do more, we can at least consider
what experience shows us every day concerning that relation and what we
find when we reflect upon it. There is that tower now. Towers may be
built to stand for centuries, perhaps thousands of years. There is no
indication that the fall of this particular tower was due to an
earthquake, against which its strength would have been useless. We may
reasonably suppose that it was not strong, that there were faults in its
design, or building or material, or all three or any two. A tower well
designed, well built and of good materials may, perhaps, outlast mankind
upon this earth. And at least it will not fall; it will only wear away
and crumble. This tower fell through the fault of sinners. Was the fault
moral, or was it, as we say, merely intellectual? Was there anything of
the spirit about it? And we must answer that as it was fault in a human
being, a spiritual and moral person, there certainly must have been
moral fault. The intellectual element is not separate from the moral.
Think—if all the men concerned in building that tower had been
disinterested seekers after goodness and truth and beauty, would it have
fallen as it did? What, you may say (but I am assured that you will not,
if you have read thus far), what is the connexion between a love of
goodness, truth and beauty, and the building of a tower? What, in fact
(and this you may well ask), is the true relation between spirit and
life on the one hand, and the successful use of material things on the
other? Does a man use them better, that is, more successfully, because
he is as God would have him be, morally and spiritually?
The narrow outlook of some religious men, and their abstraction of
religion from the wide range of its concerns into the narrowness of
theirs, blinds them to the wide range of goodness, of beauty, and of
truth. The man who is as God would have him be (according to the mind of
Christ), if he had to build a tower, would seek as he seeks salvation to
find out the truth of towers, of their materials, of their design and of
their building. He would not only know that this was his duty, but he
would know or feel that it was his heart's desire. He would throw
himself into the pursuit of this truth because he was a lover of truth.
And in loving truth he would show his love of God. Therefore he would
use good materials, not bad, good stone, good mortar, and he would put
these together with due regard to their characters, their truth. And his
love of beauty would conspire with his love of truth to bring about the
strength and stability of his tower. Beauty in these things is a
guarantee of truth, or rather its evidence. So closely are the three
linked in the love of them and the realization of them, that we may know
them to be one. They are to be distinguished, but they cannot be
separated, one from another. And so those builders of our tower who
should be disinterested in their worship of the three in one, would (we
may well say) have set up at Siloam a tower very different from that
which fell. It might have endured, like the Tower of David, to this day.
Sin, then, that is, the refusal to follow after truth, beauty and
goodness, and thus after God made known to the soul, had a very real
connexion with the fall of that tower. But in this respect of sin its
builders were no worse than other men 'who dwelt at Jerusalem.' All
these men had come short of full devotion to God as they saw God, to the
light they perceived, the truth they might attain, the beauty that
summoned them and the goodness that should have been theirs. Not in this
regard is the fall of the tower selective. Indeed there is nothing to
show that it fell upon a single one of its builders, any more than that
it selected the worst of the sinners. It may have caused to 'perish' a
party of mere sight-seers.
Only through that solidarity of man which links 'the crimes of each to
the sorrows of all' is the fault of the builders linked with the
perishing of those eighteen. And again we have testimony against any
selection of the bad from the good by the calamities of earth. Not even
the retribution of the kind of badness which bad building is falls, by
God's determination, upon the evil-doer, through instruments of the
earth. They are far too rough, these things, too indiscriminating. They
do not pierce to the joints and the marrow; they hit like a blind man's
bludgeon.
Yet this they assuredly are not. As the personal punishment and
forgiveness of God seek and find the sinner himself in the depths of his
being and to the utmost of his activity, so these things, Towers of
Siloam, Armageddons, plague and pestilence, search out our corporate sin
and sinfulness, reach the community of sinners in their interaction. By
pain and sorrow for all, they bring to light both the sins and the
shortcomings of each. Our responsibility for Armageddon extends over the
devastation it has wrought, as the responsibility of those builders of
the tower made the deaths of the eighteen it killed their own work. In
the community of life is community of crime and suffering and all their
consequences. There is an identity one with another among men, which
they cannot escape. They are one body even when they are not one spirit,
and every member of the body may entail disaster on the rest, as he may
bring redemption. If we could not hinder life we could not help it. And
therefore that word of Christ which was no doubt primarily addressed to
those men of Jerusalem whose sins were inviting doom, has other points
of significance we need to note. 'Unless ye repent, ye shall all
likewise perish.' All—the community; likewise—through aid from the
calamities and catastrophes of that outer world of things and persons
with which we are so closely bound, as well as from the snares and the
beguiling, the temptations and betrayal, we make for ourselves in our
misuse of it.
We are one with the earth—let us remember that. And even those
catastrophes of earth for which we seem to have no responsibility, storm
and flood and earthquake, are not cut off from a relation with ourselves
that may some day be more clear. We are but beginners in the task of
entering upon our heritage of earth. And when we try to look deep into
the mystery of matter and spirit what we see makes us think that they
are not unlike the red and violet ends of a spectrum, which between them
passes from colour to colour, but which, when our analytical stretching
out is over, returns to the multiplicity in unity of white light. The
Christian, by his sacramentalism and his emphasis on incarnation,
confesses their kinship, as does the artist when out of three sounds he
frames 'not a fourth sound, but a star,' and out of mud or marble, a
vision.
We cannot penetrate this mystery; but when we recognize the solidarity
of man with man, we may try to remember that it must reach beyond man,
not only above him but below.
* * * * *
When the Christian sends us to the tower of Siloam he does us good
service. If all Christians had learnt their lesson from that instead of
from an older tradition and many superstitions, there would have been no
need to send us. We should have known long ago what it tells of the
judgements of God and the heavy responsibilities of men. And if the
objection is made that the immediate application of the words of the
prophet was far narrower than this to which we have carried it, our
answer is that the mark of prophetic teaching is its inexhaustible
richness of meaning and its proof that wisdom, of its essence, applies
to life in every aspect and mode that life may display.
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