"Surely I have behaved and quieted myself."
Peace bulks largely in all our dreams of ideal happiness. Without repose
of heart we cannot conceive of perfect contentment. But we must not
forget that the peace of inexperience is a fragile possession, and that
the only lasting rest is the repose that is based upon conquest. We
speak with languid longing and ease-seeking envy of the peace of Jesus,
because we forget that His peace was a peace constituted out of
conflict, maintained in the face of struggle, and made perfect through
suffering. Therefore it was a peace strong and majestic, and the story
of His life is the world's greatest epic. A life that commenced with
effortless attainment, proceeded in easy serenity, and ended in
tranquillity were a life without a history, pleasant but monotonous,
devoid of dramatic interest, and destitute of significance. The young
cadet, in his boyish bloom and unworn beauty, furnishes the painter with
a fairer model, but the grizzled hero of a hundred fights, with his
battered form and furrowed face, makes the greater picture. It means so
much more. And it means more precisely because the tried valour of the
veteran is so much more than the promise of the untested tyro. Innocence
unsullied and untried has a loveliness all its own, but it lacks the
pathos of suggestion, the depth of significance, and the strength of
permanence that make the glory of virtue that has borne the brunt of
battle, and has known the bitterness of defeat, the agony of retrieval,
and the exultation of recovered victory. We talk proudly of the faith
that has never felt a doubt, that has been pierced by no perplexity, and
shows no mark of the sweat and stress of conflict. We look askance on
difficulty of faith, have no mercy on lack of assurance, and reckon them
happy who are convinced without trouble and believe without effort. That
is not quite the Bible estimate. The Psalms echo with the prayers of
hard-pressed faith, and throb with the cries of agonised doubt. The New
Testament speaks of faith as a fight, counts them happy who endure, and
pronounces blessed the man who encounters and overcomes temptation. If
"strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leadeth unto life," how
should faith be easy, since faith is that gate, that way? The truth is
that we invert the Divine standard of values, and put last what God puts
first. We count enviable the land-locked harbours of unthreatened
belief, that are protected from assault by their very shallowness and
narrowness. We are blind to the providential discipline which ordains
that men should wrestle with difficulty, and in overcoming it attain a
tried and tempered faith possible only to those who have passed through
the furnace of temptation. For sinful men there can be no real strength
that is not transmuted weakness, no permanent peace that is not a
triumph over rebellion, no perfect faith that is not a victory over
doubt. The saints that have most reflected the spirit of Christ formed
their fair character, like their Master, in lives of which it may be
said, "Without were fightings, within were fears." The way of the cross
has ever been a way of conflict, and it is they who come out of great
tribulation that enter into the rest that remaineth. The deep lakes that
sleep in the hollows of high mountains, and mirror in their placid
depths the quiet stars, have their homes in the craters of volcanoes,
that have spent their fury, quenched their fires, and are changed into
pools of perpetual peace.
There breathes through our Psalm an atmosphere of infinite repose—a
subdued rest, like the hush of a cradle song. Nevertheless, if we listen
closely enough to its music, we catch under its lullaby the low echo of
a bygone anguish, the lingering sob of a vanished tempest. Nature's most
exquisite embodiment of calm is the sweet fresh air that is left by a
great storm; and the perfection of the Psalm's restfulness is that it
consists of unrest conquered and transmuted. For the poet's peace is the
result of a great struggle, the reward of a supreme act of
self-subjection. "Surely I have behaved and quieted myself;" or,
preserving the imagery of the words, "Surely I have calmed and hushed my
soul." His submissiveness had not been native, but acquired. His
lowliness of heart was not a natural endowment, but a laborious
accomplishment. His acquiescence in God's mysterious ways was a thing
not inborn and habitual, but was rather the calm that follows a storm,
when the tempest has moaned itself into stillness, and the great waves
have rocked themselves into unruffled rest. For his soul had once been
rebellious, like a storm-lashed sea dashing itself against the iron
cliffs that bounded its waves, and impetuous like a tempest rushing
through the empty air, seeking to attain the unattainable, and spending
its force vainly in vacancy. He had longed to flash thought, lightning
like, athwart the thick darkness that surrounded Jehovah's throne, and
to lay bare its hidden secrets. It was all in vain. Hemmed in on every
hand, beaten back in his attempts to pierce the high heaven, baffled in
every effort to read the enigma of God's ways, he had been tempted to
revolt, and either to renounce his trust in the Almighty's goodness or
to refuse to submit to His control. It cost him a hard and weary
struggle to regain his reliance, to restore his allegiance, to calm and
hush his soul.
There was nothing wonderful in this conflict, nor anything exceptional
in the experience. It is the common lot of men. True, there are some
natures for whom the tenure of faith is less arduous than it is for
others. But in almost every life there come crises when this same battle
has to be fought. For it is not always easy to be content to trust
without seeing, and to follow God's leading in the dark, when the way
seems all wrong and mistaken. There are things in life that rudely shake
our faith from its dreamless slumber, and sweep the soul away over the
dreary billows of doubt and darkness. There are times when, to our
timorous hearts, it seems too terrible to be compelled just to trust and
not to understand. Such conflicts come to us all more or less. Painful
and protracted the struggle sometimes is, but not necessarily evil, not
even harmful. For if we do but fight it out honestly and bravely the
fruits will be, as they were with our poet, wholesome, good, and
peaceable.