insignificance from the seeds of sorrow sown in our hearts. We let our
cares dishonour us. The little cares rasp and fret and sting the manliness
and the womanliness and the godlikeness out of us. And the great cares
crush us earthward till there is scarcely a sweet word left in our lips or
a noble thought in our heart. A man cannot save his _soul_ in the day of
trouble. He cannot by himself make good the wear and tear of anxieties and
griefs. He can hold his head high and hide his secret deep, but he cannot
keep his life sweet. Only Christ can teach a man how to find the nameless
dignity of the crown of thorns. The kingship of suffering is a secret in
the keeping of faith and love. If a man accepts this deliverance of his God
folded in flashes of understanding, ministries of explanation, revivals of
faith, and gifts of endurance, he shall find the honour that is to be won
among life's hard and bitter things.
_With long life will I satisfy him, and show him My salvation._ We have
seen a grey-headed libertine, and we have missed from among the
clean-hearted and the faithful some brave young life that was giving itself
vigorously to the holy service. But perhaps we have had the grace not to
challenge the utter faithfulness of God. The measure of life is not written
on a registrar's certificates of birth and death. There is something here
that lies beyond dates and documents. Life here and hereafter is one, and
death is but an event in it. Who lives to God lives long, be his years many
or few. It is reasonable to expect some relationship between godliness and
longevity. But we are nearer the truth when we see how that faith and
prayer discover and secure the eternal values of fleeting days.
_And show him My salvation._ That is the whole text summed up in one
phrase. That is the life of the godly man gathered into the compass of the
divine promise. For every one who goes the way of faith and obedience, life
in every phase of it, life here and hereafter, means but one thing and
holds but one thing, and that is _the salvation of the Lord_.
VIII.
PETITION AND COMMUNION
Hear me speedily, O Lord....
Cause me to hear ...
For I lift up my soul unto Thee.
Ps. cxliii. 7, 8.
You will notice that the first verse begins 'Hear me,' and the second
begins 'Cause me to hear'; and the second is greater than the first. Let us
look, then, at these two attitudes of a man in his hour of prayer.
_Hear me._ The Psalmist began, where all men must begin, with himself. He
had something to utter in the hearing of the Almighty. He had something to
lay before his God--a story, a confession, a plea. His heart was full, and
must outpour itself into the ear of Heaven. 'Hear me speedily, O Lord.' We
have all prayed thus. We have all faced some situation that struck a note
of urgency in our life, and all your soul has come to our lips in this one
cry that went up to the Father, 'Hear me.' A sudden pain, a surprise of
sorrow, a few moments of misty uncertainty in the face of decisions that
had to be made at once, times when life has tried to rush us from our
established position and to bear us we know not where--and our soul has
reached out after God as simply and naturally as a man grasps at some fixed
thing when he is falling.
There are times, too, when prayer is an indefinable relief. We all know
something about the relief of speech. We must speak to somebody. Our need
is not, first of all, either advice or practical help. We want a hearing.
We want some one to listen and sympathize. We want to share our pain. That
is what 'Hear me' sometimes means. Whatever Thou shalt see fit to do for
me, at least listen to my cry. Let me unburden my soul. Let me get this
weight of silence off my heart. This fashion of relief is part of the true
office of prayer. Herein lies the reasonableness of telling our story in
the ear of One who knows that story better than we do. We need not inform
the All-knowing, but we must commune with the All-pitiful. We make our life
known unto God that we may make it bearable unto ourselves.
But let us look at the attitude of mind and heart revealed in this second
position, _Cause me to hear_. Now we are coming to the larger truth about
prayer, and the deeper spirit of it. Prayer is not merely claiming a
hearing; it is giving a hearing. It is not only speaking to God; it is
listening to God. And as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are the
words we hear greater than the words we speak. Let us not forget this. Let
us not pauperize ourselves by our very importunity. Maybe we are vociferous
when God is but waiting for a silence to fall in His earthly temples that
He may have speech with His children. We talk about 'prevailing prayer,'
and there is a great truth in the phrase. All prayer does not prevail.
There is that among men which passes for prayer but has no spiritual grip,
no assurance, no masterful patience, no fine desperation. There is a place
for all these things, and a need for them, in the life of prayer. We need
the courage of a great faith and the earnestness that is born of necessity.
We need to be able to lift up our faces toward heaven in the swelling joys
and the startling perils of these mortal hours and cry, 'Hear me,' knowing
that God does hear us and that the outcrying of every praying heart rings
clear and strong in the courts of the Heavenly King. But we need something
more; we need a very great deal more than this, if we are to enter into the
true meaning of prevailing prayer. The final triumph of prayer is not ours;
it is God's. When we are upon our knees before Him, it is He, and not we,
that must prevail. This is the true victory of faith and prayer, when the
Father writes His purpose more clearly in our minds, lays His commandment
more inwardly upon our hearts. We do not get one faint glimpse into the
meaning of that mysterious conflict at Peniel until we see that the
necessity for the conflict lay in the heart of Jacob and not in the heart
of God. The man who wrestled with the Angel and prevailed passes before us
in the glow of the sunrise weary and halt, with a changed name and a
changed heart. So must it be with us; so shall it be, if ever we know what
it is to prevail in prayer. Importunity must not become a blind and
uninspired clamouring for the thing we desire. Such an attitude may easily
set us beyond the possibility of receiving that which God knows we need. We
must not forget that our poor little plea for help and blessing does not
exhaust the possibilities of prayer. Our words go upward to God's throne
twisted by our imperfect thinking, narrowed by our outlook, sterilized by
the doubts of our hearts, and we do not know what is good for us. His word
comes downward into our lives laden with the quiet certainty of the
Eternal, wide as the vision of Him who seeth all, deep as the wisdom of Him
who knoweth all.
So, however much it may be to say 'Hear me,' it is vastly more to say
'Cause me to hear.' However much I have to tell Him, He has more to tell
me. This view of prayer will help to clear up for us some of the
difficulties that have troubled many minds. We hear people speak of
unanswered prayer; but there is no such thing, and in the nature of things
there cannot be. I do not mean by that, that to every prayer there will
come a response some day. To every prayer there is a response now. In our
confused and mechanical conception of the God to whom we pray, we separate
between His hearing and His answering. We identify the answer to prayer
with the granting of a petition. But prayer is more than petition. It is
not our many requests, it is an attitude of spirit. We grant readily that
our words are the least important part of our prayers. But very often the
petitions we frame and utter are no part of our prayers at all. They are
not prayer, yet uttering them we may pray a prayer that shall be heard and
answered, for every man who truly desires in prayer the help of God for his
life receives that help there and then, though the terms in which he
describes his need may be wholly wide of the truth as God knows it. So the
real answer to prayer is God's response to man's spiritual attitude, and
that response is as complete and continuous as the attitude will allow it
to be. The end of prayer is not to win concessions from Almighty Power, but
to have communion with Almighty Love.
'Cause me to hear'; make a reverent, responsive, receptive silence in my
heart, take me out beyond my pleadings into the limitless visions and the
fathomless satisfactions of communion with Thyself. Speak to me. That is
true prayer.
In the quietness of life,
When the flowers have shut their eye,
And a stainless breadth of sky
Bends above the hill of strife,
Then, my God, my chiefest Good,
Breathe upon my lonelihood:
Let the shining silence be
Filled with Thee, my God, with Thee.
IX.
HAUNTED HOURS
Wherefore should I fear in the days of evil,
when iniquity at my heels compasseth me about?
Ps. xlix. 5.
Iniquity _at my heels_. Temptation is very often indirect. It is compact of
wiles and subtleties and stratagems. It is adept at taking cover. It does
not make a frontal attack unless the obvious state of the soul's defences
justifies such a method of attempting a conquest. The stronger a man is,
the more subtle and difficult are the ways of sin, as it seeks to enter and
to master his life. There are many temptations that never face us, and
never give us a chance of facing them. They follow us. We can hear their
light footfall and their soft whisperings, but the moment we turn round
upon them they vanish. If they disappeared for good, they would be the
easiest to deal with of all the ill things that beset our lives. But they
do not. The moment we relax our bold, stern search for the face of the
enemy, there the evil thing is again--the light footfall and the soft
voice. It is terrible work fighting a suggestion. There are the thoughts
that a man will not cherish and cannot slay. They may never enter the
programme of his life, but there they are, haunting him, waiting, so to
speak, at the back of his brain, till he gets used to them. When he seeks
to grapple with these enemies his hands close on emptiness. One straight
blow, one decisive denial, one stern rebuke, one defiant confession of
faith will not suffice for these things. They compass a man's heels. He
cannot trample them down. The fashion of the evils that compass us
determines the form of the fight we wage with them. Preparations that might
amply suffice the city in the day when an army with banners comes against
it are no good at all if a plague has to be fought. So there is a way we
have to take with 'the iniquity at our heels.' It calls for much patience
and much prayer. If we cannot prevent sin from following us, we can at
least prevent ourselves from turning and following it. A man can always
choose his path if he cannot at every moment determine his company. And as
a man goes onward and upward steadfastly toward the City of Light, the evil
things fall off and drop behind, and God shall bring him where no evil
thing dare follow, and where no ravenous beast shall stalk its prey.
The battle with sin is not an incident in the Christian life; it is the
abiding condition of it. While there are some temptations that we have to
slay, there are others we have to outgrow. They are overcome, not by any
one supreme assertion of the will, but by the patient cultivation of all
the loftiest and most wholesome and delicate and intensely spiritual modes
of feeling and of being.
Again, let me suggest that iniquity at our heels is sometimes an old sin in
a new form. You remember the difficulty that Hiawatha had in hunting down
Pau-puk Keewis. That mischievous magician assumed the form of a beaver,
then that of a bird, then that of a serpent; and though each in turn was
slain, the magician escaped and mocked his pursuer. Surely a parable of our
strife with sin. We smite it in one form and it comes to life in another.
One day a man is angry--clenched fingers and hot words. He conquers his
anger; but the next day there is a spirit of bitterness rankling in his
heart, and maybe a tinge of regret that he did not say and do more when his
heart was hot within him and fire was on his lips. The sin he faced and
fought yesterday has become iniquity at his heels. Having failed to knock
him down, it tries to trip him up. Maybe many waste their energies trying
to deal with the _forms_ of sin, and never grapple with the _fact_ of sin.
Hence the evil things that compass men's souls about with their dread
ministries of suggestion, and flutter on unhallowed wings in the wake of
life. The sin that confronts us reveals to us our need of strength, but the
sin that dogs our steps has, maybe, a deeper lesson to teach us--even our
need of heart-deep holiness. Good resolution will do much to clear the path
ahead, but only purity of character can rid us of the persistent haunting
peril of the sin that plucks at the skirt of life. The deliverance God
offers to the struggling soul covers not only the hour of actual grappling
with the foe, but all the hours when it is the stealth and not the strength
of evil that we most have cause to fear.
_Iniquity at my heels._ These words remind us that sin is not done with
after it is committed. God forgives sin, but He does not obliterate all its
consequences, either in our own lives or in the lives of others. A man may
have the light of the City of God flashing in his face, and a whole host of
shameful memories and bitter regrets crowding at his heels. We do not know
what sin is till we turn our backs on it. Then we find its tenacity and its
entanglement. What would we not give if only we could leave some things
behind us! What would we not do if only we could put a space between
ourselves and our past! The fetters of evil habit may be broken, but their
marks are upon us, and the feet that bore the fetters go more slowly for
them many days. The hands that have been used to grasping and holding do
not open without an effort, even though the heart has at last learned that
it is more blessed to give than to receive.
Yes, and our sins come to life again in the lives of others. The light word
that ought to have been a grave word and that shook another's good
resolution, the cool word that ought to have been a warm word and that
chilled a pure enthusiasm--we cannot have done with these things. Parents
sometimes live to see their sins of indulgence or of neglect blighting the
lives of those to whom they owed a debt of firmness and kindness. It is
iniquity at the heels. These passages of carelessness and unfaithfulness
haunt men, be their repentance never so bitter and their amendment never so
sincere and successful. But all this is for discipline and not for despair.
It casts us back upon God's mercy. It keeps the shadow of the cross upon
all our path. It has something to do with the making of 'a humble, lowly,
penitent, and obedient heart.' The memory of the irreparable is a sorrow of
the saints.
Saint, did I say? With your remembered faces,
Dear men and women whom I sought and slew!
Ah, when we mingle in the heavenly places,
How will I weep to Stephen and to you!
Only let us not be afraid nor wholly cast down. Rather let us say,
'Wherefore should I fear when the iniquity at my heels compasseth me
about?' By the grace of God the hours of the soul's sad memory and of
clinging regrets shall mean unto us a ministry of humility and a passion of
prayer. And through them God shall give us glimpses of the gateway of that
life where regret and shame and sorrow fall back unable to enter. There is
a place whither the iniquity at a man's heels can no longer follow him, and
where in the perfect life the soul, at last, is able to forget.
X.
THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
And I said, Oh that I had wings like a dove!
Then would I fly away, and be at rest....
I would haste me to a shelter
From the stormy wind and tempest.
Ps. lv. 6, 8.
These words are the transcript of a mood. The writer is not unfolding to us
any of the deep persistent longings of his spirit; he is telling us of a
thought that shadowed his soul for an hour. Let us look into this mood of
his. It is not his in any unique or even peculiar sense. In moods, as in
manners, history is wont to repeat itself. The writer of this poem has
voiced one of the great common experiences of humanity. But let us be quite
clear as to what that experience really is. Let us not be misled by the
music and the seeming unworldliness of these words about winged flight from
a world of trouble and strife. The Psalmist was not looking heavenward, but
earthward, when this plea for wings broke from his heart. He was moved to
speak as he did, not by the surpassing charm of a heavenly vision, but by
the dark unrest of the earthly outlook. The emphatic note here is that of
departure, not of destination. It is necessary to remind ourselves that
this is so, for these words have become the classic of the home-sick soul.
They have been used to voice the farthest and most truly divine desires of
the human heart. And by virtue of such use they have gathered a meaning
which was not theirs at the beginning. At that meaning we will presently
look, but let us first of all look at this longing as it stands in the
psalm and as it represents an experience that is threaded through the
history of humanity.
_Oh that I had wings ... then would I fly away._ Here the idea of fleeing
away suggests itself as a possible solution of life; and whenever it comes
to a man like this it is a source of weakness. It is not a desire to find
the joys of heaven; it is a desire to escape the pains of earth. There is
no vista, no wistful distance, no long, alluring prospect. The soul is
hemmed in by its enemies, crushed down by its burdens, beset on all sides
by the frets of the earthly lot; and there comes a vague desire to be out
of it all. It is not aspiration, it is evasion. It is not response to the
ideal, it is recoil from the actual. It is not the spell of that which
shall be that is upon the soul, but the irksomeness or the dreadfulness of
that which is. This is a mood that awaits us all. No man faces life as it
should be faced, but some can hardly be said to face it at all. Their face
is ever turned towards a seductive vision of quietness. The solution of
life for them is not in a fight, but in a retreat. Of course we know there
is no going back, and no easy deliverance from the burden and the battle,
but in the thick of any fight there is a great difference between the man
who wants victory and the man who merely wants a cessation of hostilities.
This plea for wings does not necessarily betoken 'a desire to depart.' It
rather indicates a desire to remain under more favourable and comfortable
conditions. Such a mood is not the highest and the healthiest experience of
the soul. It is rather something against which we must fight relentlessly.
Very often the longing for wings results only in lagging footsteps.
Picturing to ourselves the luxury of laying life down will not help us to
face the duty of taking life up. The secret of enervation is found not in
the poverty of our resources, but in the cowardliness and selfishness of
our attitude towards life. The battle is half won when we have looked the
enemy in the face. The burden is the better borne as we stoop under the
full weight of it.
_Oh that I had wings like a dove!_ That is a short-sighted and a selfish
desire. Supposing you had wings, what would you do? Fly away from the moil
of the world and find rest and shelter for yourself? Is that the best and
noblest thing to desire to do? After all, we know other and loftier moods
than this. We know that staying is better than going when there is so much
to stay for. We know that working is better than resting when there is so
much to do. We have something better to think about than a quiet lodgement
in the wilderness, we who live in a world where the strength of our hands
and the warmth of our hearts count for something. To give your tired
brother a lift is a vastly more profitable occupation than sitting at the
roadside and wishing you could fly. Man, you ought to be glad that you can
walk--in a world where there are so many cripples that want help.
_Oh that I had wings!... then would I fly away._ That desire has never
taken any one to heaven, but it has made them less useful upon earth. The
breath of this desire is able to blight the flowers of social service. No
one would be foolish enough to indict suburbanism as a mode of life. The
day must surely come when few or none will dwell in the smoke-grimed heart
of the city. But in as far as a man seeks the fairest suburb open to him in
order that he may see little of, and think little of, 'the darkness of the
terrible streets,' then the very life that restores health to his body
shall sow seeds of disease in his soul.
There is only one way to rest, and that lies right through the heart of the
world's work and pain. Rest is not for those who flee away from life's
difficulties, but for those who face them. 'Take my yoke ... and ye shall
find rest.' It were not well for our own sakes that we had wings. It were
not well for us to be able to avoid the burden-bearing and the tale of
tired days, for God has hidden the secret of our rest in the heart of our
toiling. They who come unto the City of God come there not by the easy
flight of a dove, but by the long, slow pilgrimage of unselfishness.
Yet there is a beauty and a fitness in this longing. It is expressive of
more than the weariness of a world-worn spirit, or the thinly disguised
selfishness of one who fears to pay the price of life.
When the long working-day of life is wearing away its last hours and
verging towards the great stillness, the voices of time fall but faintly on
the ear, the adorations and ideals and fashions and enthusiasms of the
world come to mean little to a man who in his day has followed them as
eagerly as any, and the heart within him asks only for rest.
God, if there be none beside Thee
Dwelling in the light,
Take me out of the world and hide me
Somewhere behind the night.
When, like Simeon the seer with the Christ-Child in his arms, a man feels
that for him life has said its last word and shown its last wonder and
uttered its last benediction, the desire for rest is a pure and spiritually
normal thing; it is just the soul's gaze turned upward where
beyond these toils
God waiteth us above,
To give to hand and heart the spoils
Of labour and of love.
And maybe this mood of which we are thinking may have a not unworthy place
in a strenuous life. As a tired woman pauses amid her tasks and looks out
of her cottage window to take into her heart the quiet beauty of the woods
where she knows the ground is fair with lilies, so do we find ourselves
looking out of life's small casement and thinking upon the fresh, free,
'outdoor' life the soul will some day live. And such a mood as this is
surely a sign of the soul's growth, a testimony of its responsiveness to
the divine touch, a sudden sense of its splendid destiny borne in upon it
among the grey and narrow circumstances of its service.
Oh that I had a dove's swift, silver wings,
I said, so I might straightway leave behind
This strife of tongues, this tramp of feet, and find
A world that knows no struggles and no stings,
Where all about the soul soft Silence flings
Her filmy garment, and the vexèd mind
Grows quiet as there floats upon the wind
The soothing slumber-song of dreamless things.
And lo! there answered me a voice and said,
Man, thou hast hands and heart, take back thy prayer;
Covet life's weariness, go forth and share
The common suffering and the toil for bread.
Look not on Rest, although her face be fair,
And her white hands shall smooth thy narrow bed.
XI.
A NEW SONG
O sing unto the Lord a new song.
Ps. xcvi. 1.