The poor results of the exiles' toil did not avail to stay gnawing
hunger nor slake burning thirst, and the same result applies only too
sadly to lives lived apart from God. There are a multitude of desires
proper to the human soul besides those which belong to the bodily frame,
and these have their proper objects. Is it true that the objects are
sufficient to satisfy the desires? Does any one of the things for which
we toil feed us full when we have it? Do we not always want just a
little more? And is not that want accompanied with a real and sharp
sense of hunger? Is it not true the appetite GROWS with what it feeds
on? And even if a man schools himself to something like content, it
comes not because the desire is satisfied, but because it is somehow
bridled. Cerberus often breaks his chain, in spite of honied cakes that
have been tossed into the wide mouths of his tripled heads. What do
wealth and ambition do for their votaries? And even he who thirsts for
nobler occupations and lives for higher aims is often obliged to admit,
in weariness, that 'this also is vanity.'
But even when the desire is satisfied, the man desiring is not. To feed
their bodies men starve their souls. How many longings are crushed or
neglected by him who pushes eagerly after any one longing! We have
either to race from one course to another, splitting life into
intolerable distractions, or we have to circumscribe and limit ourselves
in order to devote all our power to securing one; and if we secure it,
then a hundred others will bark like a kennel of hounds.
And if you say, 'I know nothing about all this; I have my aims, and on
the whole I secure a tolerable satisfaction for them,' do you not know a
nameless unrest? If you do not, then you are so much the poorer and the
lower, and you have murdered part of yourself. Some one single tyrannous
desire sits solitary in your heart. He has slain all his brethren that
he may rule, as sultans used to do in Constantinople. One big fish in
the aquarium has eaten up all the others.
God only satisfies the soul. It is only the 'bread which came down from
Heaven,' of which if we eat our souls shall live, and be filled as with
marrow and fatness. That One is all-sufficient in His Oneness.
Possessing Him, we know no satiety; possessing Him, we do not need to
maim any part of our nature; possessing Him, we shall not covet divers
multifarious objects. The loftiest powers of the soul find in Him their
adequate, inexhaustible, eternal object. The lowest desires may, like
the beasts of the forest, seek their meat from God. If we take Him for
our own and live on Him by faith, our blessed experience will be, 'I am
full: I have all and abound.'