Virtue kindles at the touch of joy.
We know it in our own experience. We notice it in every great revival of
religion. We trace it through the history of Christianity. The story of
the early days of Jesus is, as Renan called it, "a delightful pastoral."
In the person of humanity's greatest idealist, the highest joy of the soul
was set in the framing of one of nature's brightest scenes. Even from the
shadows of the garden of Gethsemane, He bequeaths to his little flock the
legacy of his free spirit: My joy I leave with you. The Christian Society
entered into that bequest, and in its first exhilaration overflowed the
hard coast lines of property, and realized a happy brotherhood.
And all that believed were together, and had all things common; and
sold their possessions and goods and parted them to all men as any man
had need. And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and
breaking bread at home did take their food with gladness.
The prophets were filled with a buoyancy of spirit that scarce would let
them keep down to the plodding steps of social progress; that constantly
rapt them away into the future, whence their voices echo back the gladness
of their visions. The good time is coming on the earth. The longings of
man's soul are to be realized. Crushed by no disappointments, wearied out
by no delays, the prophets maintain an indomitable hopefulness; their
voices the carollings of the birds that greet the dawn of day:
Sing, O Heavens; and be joyful, O earth;
And break forth into singing, O mountains.
For the Lord hath comforted his people;
And will have mercy upon his afflicted.
One treads here the upper zones, where the air is rare and every draught
an inspiration; where the Laws are seen majestically sweeping every force
into the measured movement which is making all things work together for
good to them that love God.
With a tact truer than any theory, our canon of scripture has been closed
in the Book of the Revelation; whose visions look beyond the break-up of
Jerusalem and shadow on the far horizon, where earth and heaven melt in
one, the fair form of the City of God, coming down from out the skies upon
the new world wherein dwelleth righteousness.
In these days, when "joy is withered from the sons of men," it is like
drinking from the Castalian springs to draw within our souls from the
Bible the sense of that kingdom of God which is joy in the Holy Ghost;
into which men are to come
With everlasting joy upon their heads:
They shall obtain joy and gladness
And sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
You learn the power of the Bible as you find how the joy of the Lord is
your strength.
8. _The Bible leads this sense of Law into that awful vision wherein
"Conscious Law is King of kings."_
The Laws appear substantial and real inasmuch as they are seen to be but
phases of the Infinite and Eternal Being, the Righteous Lord who loveth
righteousness. It is a conscious, intelligent, holy Being, whom Israel
worships through these ideal forms of goodness. However He transcended
their poor personalities, as transcend them they knew He must, God was yet
best expressed in the form of the human, conscious personality. Man, the
highest creature, must be, they said, most nearly in the form of God. As
man takes up the noblest characteristics of the life below him, so his own
noblest characteristics must be taken up into the Lord of Life. God cannot
be less than personal, however much more than personal He may be. He is to
be thought of by us, in lack of nobler imagination, as personal. Israel
thus grew into the conception of the Infinite Power, manifest in the order
of nature and in the order of conscience as conscious Power; One in whose
image man was made, the Father of the mystic "I"; whose nature is the law
of creation, whose purpose is its plan, whose will is its exhaustless
energy.
This is the secret which has kept the religions inspired by the Bible from
lapsing, as other religions have done, into lifelessness.
Egypt was the land of a religion which had won a high conception of the
Divine unity; a religion which was scientific in its forms of thought, and
earnestly moral in its spirit; but which failed to keep distinct in mind
the order of nature from the Being on whom it reposes, and thus sank into
the dreamy pantheism of its cultured classes, and the poetic polytheisms
of its people. Of this lapse, Renouf writes:
All gods were in fact but names of the One who resided in them all. But
this God is no other than Nature. Both individuals and entire nations
may long continue to hold this view, without drawing the inevitable
conclusion, that if there is no other God than this, the world is
really without a God. But the fate of a religion which involves such a
conclusion, and with that conclusion the loss of faith in immortality,
and even in the distinction of Right and Wrong, except so far as they
are connected with ritual prescriptions, is inevitably sealed.[62]
Neither Judaism, nor Mohammedanism, nor Christianity, the religions fed
directly or indirectly from the Bible, have run, or can well run into this
fatal error. The Divine Being who is mirrored in the Bible is the
Conscious Intelligence to whom alone of right belongs that ineffable
name--GOD. This is the thought and this is the word which hold the spell
of the Bible power over the human soul. Nowhere else is the sense of God
so alive, nowhere else does it so thrill the whole being of man. It was
this living God whom these holy men of old were seeking; not simply the
august ideals of the soul, but the Eternal Being who casts them as his
shadows upon man:
Unto Thee lift I up mine eyes,
O Thou that dwellest in the heavens.
* * * * *
My soul truly waiteth still upon God,
For of Him cometh my salvation.
* * * * *
Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks,
So longeth my soul after Thee, O God.
My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the Living God;
When shall I come to appear before the presence of God?
It is God whom these holy men find. The Ineffable Presence rejoices their
souls, and as we keep company with them rejoices our souls also:
Lord, Thou hast been our home
From one generation to another.
* * * * *
Whoso dwelleth in the secret-place of the Most High
Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.
* * * * *
O Lord, Thou hast searched me out and known me.
Thou knowest my down-sitting and mine up-rising;
Thou understandest my thoughts afar off.
Thou art about my path and about my bed,
And spiest out all my ways.
For lo, there is not a word in my tongue
But Thou, O Lord, knowest it altogether.
The inspirations which we feel from the Bible-words are the breathings of
the Eternal Spirit. The Divine whispers, which are too often inarticulate
in nature and even in our souls, are articulate in the great
Bible-words--the words proceeding from out of the mouth of God, on which
man liveth. The power of the Bible is that the deafest souls can therein
hear--GOD.