Now, that is true, in the deepest sense, about all men; for the one
thing that makes the difference between the man and the beast is that
the beast is perfectly at home in his surroundings, and gets all that
he needs out of them, and finds in them a field for all that he can do,
and is fully developed to the very highest point of his capacity by
what people nowadays call the 'environment' in which he is put. But the
very opposite is the case in regard to us men. 'Foxes have holes,' and
they are quite comfortable there; 'and the birds of the air have
roosting-places,' and tuck their heads under their wings and go to
sleep without a care and without a consciousness. 'But the Son of man,'
the ideal Humanity as well as the realised ideal in the person of Jesus
Christ, 'hath not where to lay His head.' No; because He is so 'much
better than they.' Their immunity from care is not a prerogative--it is
an inferiority. We are plunged into the midst of a scene of things
which obviously does not match our capacities. There is a great deal
more in every man than can ever find a field of expression, of work, or
of satisfaction in anything beneath the stars. And no man that
understands, even superficially, his own character, his own
requirements, can fail to feel in his sane and quiet moments, when the
rush of temptation and the illusions of this fleeting life have lost
their grip upon him: 'This is not the place that can bring out all that
is in me, or that can yield me all that I desire.' Our capacities
transcend the present, and the experiences of the present are all
unintelligible, unless the true end of every human life is not here at
all, but in another region, for which these experiences are fitting us.
But, then, the temptations of life, the strong appeals of flesh and
sense, the duties which in their proper place are lofty and elevating
and refining, and put out of their place, are contemptible and
degrading, all come in to make it hard for any of us to keep clearly
before us what our consciousness tells us when it is strongly appealed
to, that we are strangers and sojourners here and that this is not 'our
rest, because it is polluted.' Therefore it comes to be the great glory
and blessedness of the Christian Revelation that it obviously shifts
the centre for us, and makes that future, and not this present, the aim
for which, and in the pursuit of which, we are to live. So, Christian
people, in a far higher sense than Moses, who only felt himself 'a
stranger there,' because he did not like Midian as well as Egypt, have
to say, 'We are strangers here'; and the very aim, in one aspect, of
our Christian discipline of ourselves is that we shall keep vivid, in
the face of all the temptations to forget it, this consciousness of
being away from our true home.
One means of doing that is to think rather oftener than the most of us
do, about our true home. You have heard, I dare say, of half-reclaimed
gipsies, who for a while have been coaxed out of the free life of the
woods and the moors, and have gone into settled homes. After a while
there has come over them a rush of feeling, a remembrance of how
blessed it used to be out in the open and away from the squalor and
filth where men 'sit and hear each other groan' and they have flung off
'as if they were fetters' the trappings of 'civilisation,' and gone
back to liberty. That is what we ought to do--not going back from the
higher to the lower, but smitten with what the Germans call the
_heimweh_, the home-sickness, that makes us feel that we must get
clearer sight of that land to which we truly belong.
Do you think about it, do you feel that where Jesus Christ is, is your
home? I have no doubt that most of you have, or have had, dear ones
here on earth about whom you could say that, 'Where my husband, my wife
is; where my beloved is, or my children are, that is my home, wherever
my abode may be.' Are you, Christian people, saying the same thing
about heaven and Jesus Christ? Do you feel that you are strangers here,
not only because you, reflecting upon your character and capacities and
on human life, see that all these require another life for their
explanation and development, but because your hearts are knit to Him,
and 'where your treasure is there your heart is also'; and where your
heart is there you are? We go home when we come into communion with
Jesus Christ. Do you ever, in the course of the rush of your daily
work, think about the calm city beyond the sea, and about its King, and
that you belong to it? 'Our citizenship is in heaven' and here we are
strangers.