"Things too high for me."
We are apt to think and speak as if difficulty of faith were an
experience peculiar to our age. It is indeed true that at particular
periods speculative uncertainty has been more widely diffused than at
others, and our own age may be one of them. But the real causes of
perplexity in things religious are permanent and unchanging, having
their roots deep-seated in the essential nature of man's relation to the
world and to God. There has never been a time when men have not had to
fight hard battles for their faith against the dark mysteries and
terrors of existence, that pressed in upon their souls and threatened to
enslave them. What is this brief Psalm, echoing like a sea-shell in its
tiny circle the heart-beat of a vanished world, but the pathetic record
of a soul's dread struggle with doubt and darkness, telling in its
simple rhythm and quiet cadences the story how through the breakers of
unbelief it fought its way to the firm shores of faith, and peace, and
hope? It reads like a tale of yesterday. It is just what we are seeking,
suffering, achieving. Yet more than two thousand years have come and
gone since the brain that thought and the hand that wrote have mouldered
into dust.
The poem must have been penned at a time when the poet's own
misfortunes, or the general disorders of the age, were such as seemed to
clash irreconcilably with his preconceived notions of God's goodness,
character, and purposes. The shock of this collision between fact and
theory shook to its foundations the structure of his inherited creed,
and opened great fissures of questioning in the fabric of his personal
faith. He was tempted to abandon the believing habits of a religious
training and the confiding instincts of a naturally devout heart, and
either to doubt the being and power of the Almighty, or to deny His
wisdom and beneficence. For a long time he was tossed hither and thither
on the alternate ebb and flow of questioning denial and believing
affirmation, finding nowhere any firm foothold amid the unstable tumult
of conflicting evidence and inconclusive reasoning. At last out of the
confusion there dawned on his mind a growing persuasion of something
clear and certain. He perceived that not only was the balance of
evidence indecisive, but also that the issue never could but be
indeterminate. For he saw that the method itself was impotent, and could
never reach or unravel the themes of his agonised questioning. A settled
conviction forced itself upon his mind that there are in life problems
no human ingenuity can solve, questions that baffle man's intellect to
comprehend, "great matters, and things too high" for him. It was a
discovery startling, strange, and painful. But at least it was something
solid and certain; it was firm land, on which one's feet might be
planted. Moreover, it was not an ending, but a beginning, a
starting-point that led somewhere. Perchance it might prove to be the
first step in a rocky pathway, that should guide his footsteps to
heights of clearer light and wider vision, where the heart, if not the
intellect, might reach a solution of its questioning and enter into
rest. The quest he had commenced had turned out a quest of the
unattainable, but it had brought him to a real and profitable discovery.
He had recognised and accepted once and for ever the fact of the fixed
and final limitation of human knowledge.
It is an experience all men have to make, an experience that grows with
age and deepens with wisdom, as we more and more encounter the mysteries
of existence, and fathom the shallowness of our fancied knowledge. What
do we know of God, the world, ourselves? How much, and how little! How
much about them, how little of them! Who of us, for instance, has any
actual conception of God in His absolute being? You remember how in
dreamy childhood you would vainly strive to arrest and fasten in some
definite image the vague vision of dazzling glory you had learned to
call God, which floated before your soul, awing you with its majesty and
immeasurable beauty, but evading every effort to grasp it. With
gathering years and widening horizon you watched the world's changeful
aspects and ceaseless movements, till nature seemed the transparent
vesture of its mighty Maker, but it was all in vain that you tried to
pierce the thin veil and behold the invisible Worker within. You took
counsel with science, and it told you much concerning the properties of
matter and the sequences of force, but the ultimate cause, that which is
beneath, that which worketh all in all, it could not reveal. You turned
to philosophy, and you traced the soaring thoughts of the sages, that
rushed upward like blazing rockets, as if they would pierce and
illuminate the remotest heaven; but you saw how, ere they reached that
far goal, their fire went out, their light was quenched, and they fell
back through the darkness, baffled and spent. You betook yourself to
revelation, counting that at last you were entering the inner shrine,
and you did indeed learn much that was new and precious; but soon came
the discovery that here also we do but see through a glass darkly, and
that our best knowledge of God is no more than a knowledge in part. "Lo,
these are but the outskirts of His ways; and how small a portion we know
of them! But the thunder of His power, who can understand?" We are, as
it were, surrounded on every hand by mighty mountain peaks, whose rocky
sides foil every effort to explore the pinnacles that lie hidden in
distant cloud and mist. The achievements of the human intellect are many
and marvellous, but above and beyond its realm remain, and doubtless
ever shall remain, "great matters, and things too high" for us.