The greater part of most lives is spent in mechanical, unreflecting
repetition of daily duties and pleasures. We are all apt to live on the
surface, and it requires an effort, which we are too indolent to make
except under the impulse of some arresting motive, to descend into the
depths of our own souls, and there to face the solemn facts of our own
personality. The last place with which most of us are familiar, is our
innermost self. Men are dimly conscious that things within are not well
with them; but it is only one here and there that says so distinctly to
himself, and takes the further step of thoroughly investigating the
cause. But that superficial life is at the mercy of a thousand
accidents, each one of which may break through the thin film, and lay
bare the black depths.
But there is another aspect of this discovery of sickness, far graver
than the mere consciousness of unrest. Ephraim does not see his sickness
unless he sees his sin. The greater part of every life is spent without
that deep, all-pervading sense of discord between itself and God. Small
and recurrent faults may evoke recurring remonstrances of conscience,
but that is a very different thing from the deep tones and the clear
voice of condemnation in respect to one's whole life and character which
sounds in a heart that has learned how 'deceitful and desperately
wicked' it is. Such a conviction may flash upon a man at any moment, and
from a hundred causes. A sorrow, a sunset-sky, a grave, a sermon, may
produce it.
But even when we have come to recognise clearly our unrest, we have gone
but part of the way, we have become conscious of a symptom, not of the
disease. Why is it that man is alone among the creatures in that
discontent with externals, and that dissatisfaction with himself? 'Foxes
have holes, and the birds of the air have roosting-places': why is it
that amongst all God's happy creatures, and God's shining stars, men
stand 'strangers in a strange land,' and are cursed with a restlessness
which has not 'where to lay its head'? The consciousness of unrest is
but the agitation of the limbs which indicates disease. That disease is
the twitching paralysis of sin. Like 'the pestilence that walketh in
darkness,' it has a fell power of concealing itself, and the man whose
sins are the greatest is always the least conscious of them. He dwells
in a region where the malaria is so all-pervading that the inhabitants
do not know what the sweetness of an unpoisoned atmosphere is. If there
is a 'worst man' in the world, we may be very sure that no conscience is
less troubled than his is.
So the question may well be urged on those so terribly numerous amongst
us, whose very unconsciousness of their true condition is the most fatal
symptom of their fatal disease. What is the worth of a peace which is
only secured by ignoring realities, and which can be shattered into
fragments by anything that compels a man to see himself as he is? In
such a fool's paradise thousands of us live. 'Use and wont,' the
continual occupation with the trifles of our daily lives, the fleeting
satisfactions of our animal nature, the shallow wisdom which bids us
'let sleeping dogs lie,' all conspire to mask, to many consciences,
their unrest and their sin. We abstain from lifting the curtain behind
which the serpent lies coiled in our hearts, because we dread to see
its loathly length, and to rouse it to lift its malignant head, and to
strike with its forked tongue. But sooner or later--may it not be too
late--we shall be set face to face with the dark recess, and discover
the foul reptile that has all the while been coiled there.