Moses, adds one commentator significantly, was then eighty years of age.
By the ordinary standards, he was an old man, yet he had not lost his
youthful sense of wonder. It is a good sign, the best of signs, when a
man has lived so long and yet finds wonder in his heart. It is a bad
sign when a man at any age, or when a generation of men, find nothing in
all God's world to wonder at.
Yet in many quarters it is regarded as the correct attitude to refrain
from expressing surprise at anything, no matter how striking. The
utmost concession to be made to what is really wonderful is a languid
and patronising "Really?" That is always a pitiful thing. For where
there is no wonder there can be no religion worthy of the name.
The instinct of worship and the instinct of wonder are very intimately
related. And where the one has died, the other cannot be in a very
healthy state. "I had rather," said Ruskin once, "live in a cottage and
wonder at everything, than live in Warwick Castle and wonder at
nothing." And his preference is to be commended. For he who has never
wondered has never thought about God in any way to be called thinking.
It was our Lord Himself who said that the ideal of religion was the
child-like heart. Everyone knows that these little people are always
being brought to a halt to wonder at something. And Heaven is in very
truth nearer to them then, and they are more truly filled with its
spirit, than either you or I are when the glory and bloom of this world
unfold before our eyes, or the thought of the Infinite and Eternal God
comes to us and we have not felt impelled to bow our heads in silence
and worship, spell-bound, and in a godly fear.
It is not hard to lay one's finger on some of the causes that have
brought about this state of things. A silly fashion, for one cause, has
decreed that wonder is vulgar. Why that should be so, no one can tell.
But if there be higher intelligences than ours in God's Universe, and
they see the sons of men, as they have plenty of chances to do, casting
an indifferent glance at the full pomp and majesty of the setting sun,
or reading such a Psalm as the 103rd with an untouched heart, how they
must marvel indeed!
And then, of course, familiarity tends to blunt the sense of wonder in a
certain and common type of mind. The best men have always resisted that
tendency and recognised that it works harm to life and character. They
have remembered to look for God in the common and familiar, and that is
a search that goes far to make a man a saint, just because it is a
continual prayer, a continual holding open of the heart to God. His
answer is to fill the wondering heart, bit by bit, with Himself.
Ignorance, too, is often a cause, the kind of ignorance that calls
itself knowledge. It is an innocent delusion on the part of the
youthful tyro in Science that after he has made a little experiment with
a prism and a beam of sunlight, there is nothing wonderful in the
rainbow. Pure, profound Science on the other hand, speaks very
humbly--and wonders all the while.
Nature is dumb and silent concerning the Infinite behind it to him who
goes but to catalogue and dissect. Take a heart that can wonder with
you on your country-walk, open your eyes and look, open your heart like
a child and listen, and you will find, as Moses found, that even in a
bush there may be the Voice of God. Hold the door of your heart ajar in
simple wonder, and some thing of God will enter to cleanse and freshen
it, as the hot and dusty street is washed by the rain from Heaven.
Just as he who goes to Nature with a heart that cannot wonder, will find
no message there for him, so he who looks out upon the sanctities of
home, of human life and love, in that dull mood of mere acceptance, must
often find himself hard pressed for material when he makes his
thanksgiving to God. George Eliot has spoken somewhere of the agony of
the thought that we can never atone to the dead for the stinted
affection we gave them, for the "little reverence we showed to that
sacred human soul that lived so close to us, and was the divinest thing
God has given us to know." The divinest thing God has given us to know!
Have we realised that that gift of God to us lives now in the same home
with us? Do you know what it is? It is a wife's devotion, a mother's
care, a brother's comradeship, a sister's love. It is the trust and
affection of little children, and the patience of those who love us. And
yet there have been men--judge ye if this be not true--who have lived
close to gifts of God like these, and taken them all unquestioned and
never wondered at the undeserved bounty of them or their continuance
from day to day.
How easy it is to discover the gifts and charm of a stranger, how easy
to wonder at that! But to wonder at the sacrifice and the patience of
the love that dwells under the same roof with us, and stoops, in Mrs
Browning's happy phrase, "to the level of each day's most quiet need,"
how few of us do that! And yet, without daily wonder, how can we be
sure that we do not slight it, or requite it ill, how can we truly give
our thanks to God whose gift it is?
Most important of all, he who brings no wonder in his heart can never be
touched with the sense of God. The lack of the great deep and awful
wonder of our fathers in all their thought and speech about God, has
brought it about that our religious speech to-day is too often either
superficial, flippant and easy, or syllogistic, mechanical, and hard. It
is the absence of wonder that tempts men to imagine that God can be
enclosed in any formula whatever, or brought to the hearts of men in so
many rigid propositions. If men would but give their wonder expression
when they frame their creeds, there would be less chafing where the
edges are too sharp.
I am bound to confess that my sympathies are altogether with a working
man who once listened to a fervid evangelist at a street corner
unfolding a scheme of salvation as clean-cut and mechanical as a problem
of Euclid, and buttonholed him afterwards to inquire if he had ever read
any astronomy. No, he said, he had not. "That's a pity," said the
artisan, "for, eh, man, but ye have an awfu' wee God." In all
reverence, my brothers, that is what the absence of wonder brings us to,
a small God, a small salvation, and a merely mechanical Christ.
Men have sometimes asked what that childhood of the Kingdom is on which
Jesus laid so much stress, and some have taken it to mean renunciation
of intellect and reason in favour of a Church's dogma. But it means,
says John Kelman, something far more human and more beautiful--"it means
wonder and humility and responsiveness, the straight gaze of childhood
past conventionalities, the simplicity of a mind open to any truth, and
a heart with love alive in it." That is surely right. That is what
becoming a little child in Christ's sense does mean. First of all,
wonder.