'Downcast,' you say; 'is not that an unworthy word to use about a
minister of Jesus Christ inspired as Paul was?' By no means. We shall
very much mistake both the nature of inspiration and the character of
this inspired Apostle, if we do not recognise that he was a man of many
moods and tremulously susceptible to external influences. Such music
would never have come from him if his soul had not been like an Aeolian
harp, hung in a tree and vibrating in response to every breeze. And so
we need not hesitate to speak of the Apostle's mood, as revealed to us
in the passage before us, as being downcast.
Now notice that in the verses preceding my text his conduct is
extremely abnormal and unlike his usual procedure. He goes into
Corinth, and he does next to nothing in evangelistic work. He repairs
to the synagogue once a week, and talks to the Jews there. But that is
all. The notice of his reasoning in the synagogue is quite subordinate
to the notice that he was occupied in finding a lodging with another
pauper Jew and stranger in the great city, and that these two poor men
went into a kind of partnership, and tried to earn a living by hard
work. Such procedure makes a singular contrast to Paul's usual methods
in a strange city.
Now the reason for that slackening of impulse and comparative cessation
of activity is not far to seek. The first Epistle to Thessalonica was
written immediately after these two brethren rejoined Paul. And how
does the Apostle describe in that letter his feelings before they came?
He speaks of 'all our distress and affliction.' He tells that he was
tortured by anxiety as to how the new converts in Thessalonica were
getting on, and could not forbear to try to find out whether they were
still standing steadfast. Again in the first Epistle to the
Corinthians, you will find that there, looking back to this period, he
describes his feelings in similar fashion and says: 'I was with you in
weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling.' And if you look forward
a verse or two in our chapter you will see that a vision came to Paul,
which presupposes that some touch of fear, and some temptation to
silence, were busy in his heart. For God shapes His communications
according to our need, and would not have said, 'Do not be afraid, and
hold not thy peace, but speak,' unless there had been a danger both of
Paul's being frightened and of his being dumb.
And what thus brought a cloud over his sky? A little exercise of
historical imagination will very sufficiently answer that. A few weeks
before, in obedience, as he believed, to a direct divine command, Paul
had made a plunge, and ventured upon an altogether new phase of work.
He had crossed into Europe, and from the moment that he landed at the
harbour of Philippi, up to the time when he took refuge in some quiet
little room in Corinth, he had had nothing but trouble and danger and
disappointment. The prison at Philippi, the riots that hounded him out
of Thessalonica, the stealthy, hurried escape from Beroea, the almost
entire failure of his first attempt to preach the Gospel to Greeks in
Athens, his loneliness, and the strangeness of his surroundings in the
luxurious, wicked, wealthy Greek city of Corinth--all these things
weighed on him, and there is no wonder that his spirits went down, and
he felt that now he must lie fallow for a time and rest, and pull
himself together again.
So here we have, in this great champion of the faith, in this strong
runner of the Christian race, in this chief of men, an example of the
fluctuation of mood, the variation in the way in which we look at our
duties and our obligations and our difficulties, the slackening of the
impulse which dominates our lives, that are too familiar to us all. It
brings Paul nearer us to feel that he, too, knew these ups and downs.
The force that drove this meteor through the darkness varied, as the
force that impels us varies to our consciousness. It is the prerogative
of God to be immutable; men have their moods and their fluctuations.
Kindled lights flicker; the sun burns steadily. An Elijah to-day beards
Ahab and Jezebel and all their priests, and to-morrow hides his head in
his hands, and says, 'Take me away, I am not better than my fathers.'
There will be ups and down in the Christian vigour of our lives, as
well as in all other regions, so long as men dwell in this material
body and are surrounded by their present circumstances.
Brethren, it is no small part of Christian wisdom and prudence to
recognise this fact, both in order that it may prevent us from becoming
unduly doubtful of ourselves when the ebb tide sets in on our souls,
and also in order that we may lay to heart this other truth, that
because these moods and changes of aspect and of vigour _will_ come to
us, therefore the law of life must be effort, and the duty of every
Christian man be to minimise, in so far as possible, the fluctuations
which, in some degree, are inevitable. No human hand has ever drawn an
absolutely straight line. That is the ideal of the mathematician, but
all ours are crooked. But we may indefinitely diminish the magnitude of
the curves. No two atoms are so close together as that there is no film
between them. No human life has ever been an absolutely continuous,
unbroken series of equally holy and devoted thoughts and acts, but we
may diminish the intervals between kindred states, and may make our
lives so far uniform as that to a bystander they shall look like the
bright circle, which a brand whirled round in the air makes the
impression of, on the eye that beholds. We shall have times of
brightness and of less brilliancy, of vigour and of consequent reaction
and exhaustion. But Christianity has, for one of its objects, to help
us to master our moods, and to bring us nearer and nearer, by continual
growth, to the steadfast, immovable attitude of those whose faith is
ever the same.
Do not forget the plain lesson which comes from the incident before
us--viz., that the wisest thing that a man can do, when he feels that
the wheels of his religious being are driving heavily, is to set
himself doggedly to the plain, homely work of daily life. Paul did not
sit and bemoan himself because he felt this slackening of impulse, but
he went away to Aquila, and said, 'Let us set to work and make
camel's-hair cloth and tents.' Be thankful for your homely, prosaic,
secular, daily task. You do not know from how many sickly fancies it
saves you, and how many breaches in the continuity of your Christian
feeling it may bridge over. It takes you away from thinking about
yourselves, and sometimes you cannot think about anything less
profitably. So stick to your work; and if ever you feel, as Paul did,
'cast down,' be sure that the workshop, the office, the desk, the
kitchen will prevent you from being 'destroyed,' if you give yourselves
to the plain duties which no moods alter, but which can alter a great
many moods.