'This know, that men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous,
boasters, proud, unthankful, without natural affection,
truce-breakers, false accusers, traitors, heady, high-minded: from all
such turn away.'--_Paul_.
'Pray, sir, said Academicus, tell me more plainly just what this self of
ours actually is. Self, replied Theophilus, is hell, it is the devil, it
is darkness, pain, and disquiet. It is the one and only enemy of Christ.
It is the great antichrist. It is the scarlet whore, it is the fiery
dragon, it is the old serpent that is mentioned in the Revelation of St
John. You rather terrify me than instruct me by this description, said
Academicus. It is indeed a very frightful matter, returned Theophilus;
for it contains everything that man has to dread and to hate, to resist
and to avoid. Yet be assured, my friend, that, careless and merry as
this world is, every man that is born into this world has all those
enemies to overcome within himself; and every man, till he is in the way
of regeneration, is more or less governed by those enemies. No hell in
any remote place, no devil that is separate from you, no darkness or pain
that is not within you, no antichrist either at Rome or in England, no
furious beast, no fiery dragon, without you or apart from you, can do you
any real hurt. It is your own hell, your own devil, your own beast, your
own antichrist, your own dragon that lives in your own heart's blood that
alone can hurt you. Die to this self, to this inward nature, and then
all outward enemies are overcome. Live to this self, and then, when this
life is out, all that is within you, and all that is without you, will be
nothing else but a mere seeing and feeling this hell, serpent, beast, and
fiery dragon. But, said Theogenes, a third party who stood by, I would,
if I could, more perfectly understand the precise nature of self, or what
it is that makes it to be so full of evil and misery. To whom Theophilus
turned and replied: Covetousness, envy, pride, and wrath are the four
elements of self. And hence it is that the whole life of self can be
nothing else but a plague and torment of covetousness, envy, pride, and
wrath, all of which is precisely sinful nature, self, or hell. Whilst
man lives, indeed, among the vanities of time, his covetousness, his
envy, his pride, and his wrath, may be in a tolerable state, and may help
him to a mixture of peace and trouble; they may have their gratifications
as well as their torments. But when death has put an end to the vanity
of all earthly cheats, the soul that is not born again of the
supernatural Word and Spirit of God must find itself unavoidably devoured
by itself, shut up in its own insatiable, unchangeable, self-tormenting
covetousness, envy, pride, and wrath. O Theogenes! that I had power from
God to take those dreadful scales off men's eyes that hinder them from
seeing and feeling the infinite importance of this most certain truth!
God give a blessing, Theophilus, to your good prayer. And then let me
tell you that you have quite satisfied my question about the nature of
self. I shall never forget it, nor can I ever possibly after this have
any doubt about the truth of it.'
1. 'All my theology,' said an old friend of mine to me not long ago--'all
my theology is out of Thomas Goodwin to the Ephesians.' Well, I find
Thomas Goodwin saying in that great book that self is the very
quintessence of original sin; and, again, he says, study self-love for a
thousand years and it is the top and the bottom of original sin; self is
the sin that dwelleth in us and that doth most easily beset us. Now,
that is just what Academicus and Theophilus and Theogenes have been
saying to us in their own powerful way in their incomparable dialogue.
All sin and all misery; all covetousness, envy, pride, and wrath,--trace
it all back to its roots, travel it all up to its source, and, as sure as
you do that, self and self-love are that source, that root, and that
black bottom. I do not forget that Butler has said in some stately pages
of his that self-love is morally good; that self-love is coincident with
the principle of virtue and part of the idea; and that it is a proper
motive for man. But the deep bishop, in saying all that, is away back at
the creation-scheme and Eden-state of human nature. He has not as yet
come down to human nature in its present state of overthrow,
dismemberment, and self-destruction. But when he does condescend and
comes close to the mind and the heart of man as they now are in all men,
even Butler becomes as outspoken, and as eloquent, and as full of passion
and pathos as if he were an evangelical Puritan. Self-love, Butler
startles his sober-minded reader as he bursts out--self-love rends and
distorts the mind of man! Now, you are a man. Well, then, do you feel
and confess that rending and distorting to have taken place in you?
Butler is a philosopher, and Goodwin is a preacher, but you are more: you
are a man. You are the owner of a human heart, and you can say whether
or no it is a rent and a distorted heart. Is your mind warped and
wrenched by self-love, and is your heart rent and torn by the same wicked
hands? Do you really feel that it needs nothing more to take you back
again to paradise but that your heart be delivered from self-love? Do
you now understand that the foundations of heaven itself must be laid in
a heart healed and cleansed and delivered from self-love? If you do,
then your knowledge of your own heart has set you abreast of the greatest
of philosophers and theologians and preachers. Nay, before multitudes of
men who are called such. It is my meditation all the day, you say. I
have more understanding now than all my teachers; for Thy testimonies are
my meditation. I understand more than the ancients; because now I keep
Thy precepts.
2. 'Self-love has made us all malicious,' says John Calvin. We are
Calvinists, were we to call any man master. But we are to call no man
master, and least of all in the matters of the heart. Every man must be
his own philosopher, his own moralist, and his own theologian in the
matters of the heart. He who has a heart in his bosom and an eye in his
head can need no Calvin, no Butler, no Goodwin, and no Law to tell him
what goes on in his own heart. And, on the other hand, his own heart
will soon tell him whether or no Calvin, and Butler, and Goodwin, and Law
know anything about those matters on which some men would set them up as
our masters. Well, come away all of you who own a human heart. Come and
say whether or no your heart, and the self-love of which it is full, have
made you a malicious man. I do not ask if you are always and to
everybody full of maliciousness. No; I know quite well that you are
sometimes as sweet as honey and as soft as butter. For, has not even
Theophilus said that whilst a man still lives among the vanities of time,
his covetousness, his envy, his pride, and his wrath may be in a
tolerable state, and may help him to a mixture of peace and trouble;
these vices may have their gratifications as well as their torments. No;
I do not trifle with you and with this serious matter so as to ask if you
are full of malice at all times and to all men. No. For, let a man be
fortunate enough to be on your side; let him pass over to your party; let
him become profitable to you; let him be clever enough and mean enough to
praise and to flatter you up to the top of your appetite for praise and
flattery, and, no doubt, you will love that man. Or, if that is not
exactly love, at least it is no longer hate. But let that man
unfortunately be led to leave your party; let him cease being profitable
to you; let him weary of flattering you with his praise; let him forget
you, neglect you, despise you, and go against you, and then look at your
own heart. Do you care now to know what malice is? Well, that is malice
that distorts and rends your heart as often as you meet that man on the
street or even pass by his door. That is malice that dances in your eyes
when you see his name in print. That is malice with which you always
break out when his name is mentioned in conversation. That is malice
that heats your heart when you suddenly recollect him in the multitude of
your thoughts within you. And you are in good company all the time. 'We,
ourselves,' says Paul to Titus, 'we also at one time lived in malice and
in envy. We were hateful and we hated one another.' 'Hateful,' Goodwin
goes on in his great book, 'every man is to another man more or less; he
is hated of another and he hateth another more or less; and if his nature
were let out to the full, there is that in him, "every man is against
every man," as is said of Ishmael. _Homo homini lupus_,' adds our brave
preacher. And Abbe Grou speaks out with the same challenge from the
opposite church pole, and says: 'Yes; self-love makes us touchy, ready to
take offence, ill-tempered, suspicious, severe, exacting, easily
offended; it keeps alive in our hearts a certain malignity, a secret joy
at the mortifications which befall our neighbour; it nourishes our
readiness to criticise, our dislike at certain persons, our ill-feeling,
our bitterness, and a thousand other things prejudicial to charity.'
3. 'Myself is my own worst enemy,' says Abbe Grou. That is to say, we
may have enemies who hate us more than we hate ourselves, and enemies who
would hurt us, if they could, as much as we hurt ourselves; but the
Abbe's point is that they cannot. And he is right. No man has ever hurt
me as I have hurt myself. There are men who hate me so much that they
would poison my life of all its peace and happiness if they could. But
they cannot. They cannot; but let them not be cast down on that account,
for there is one who can do, and who will do as long as he lives, what
they cannot do. A man's foes, to be called foes, are in his own house:
they are in his own heart. Let our enemies attend to their own peace and
happiness, and our self-love will do all, and more than all, that they
would fain do. At the most, they and their ill-will can only give
occasion to our self-love; but it is our self-love that seizes upon the
occasion, and through it rends and distorts our own hearts. And were our
hearts only pure of self-love, were our hearts only clothed with meekness
and humility, we could laugh at all the ill-will of our enemies as
leviathan laughs at the shaking of a spear. 'Know thou,' says A Kempis
to his son, 'that the love of thyself doth do thee more hurt than
anything in the whole world.' Yes; but we shall never know that by
merely reading _The Imitation_. We must read ourselves. We must study,
as we study nothing else, our own rent and distorted hearts. Our own
hearts must be our daily discovery. We must watch the wounds our hearts
take every day; and we must give all our powers of mind to tracing all
our wounds back to their true causes. We must say: 'that sore blow came
on my mind and on my heart from such and such a quarter, from such and
such a hand, from such and such a weapon; but this pain, this rankling,
poisoned, and ever-festering wound, this sleepless, gnawing, cancerous
sore, comes from the covetousness, the pride, the envy, and the wrath of
my own heart.' When we begin to say that, we shall then begin to
understand and to love Thomas; we shall sit daily at his feet and shall
be numbered among his sons.
4. And this suffering at our own hands goes on till at last the tables
are completely turned against self-love, and till what was once to us the
dearest thing in the whole world becomes, as Pascal says, the most
hateful. We begin life by hating the men, and the things, who hurt us.
We hate the men who oppose us and hinder us; the men who speak, and
write, and act, and go in any way against us. We bitterly hate all who
humble us, despise us, trample upon us, and in any way ill-use us. But
afterwards, when we have become men, men in experience of this life, and,
especially, of ourselves in this life; after we gain some real insight
and attain to some real skill in the life of the heart, we come round to
forgive those we once hated. We have come now to see why they did it. We
see now exactly how much they hurt us after all, and how little. And,
especially, we have come to see,--what at one time we could not have
believed,--that all our hurt, to be called hurt, has come to us from
ourselves. And thus that great revolution of mind and that great
revulsion of feeling and of passion has taken place, after which we are
left with no one henceforth to hate, to be called hating, but ourselves.
We may still continue to avoid our enemies, and we may do that too long
and too much; we may continue to fear them and be on the watch against
them far too much; but to deliberately hate them is henceforth
impossible. All our hatred,--all our deliberate, steady, rooted, active
hatred,--is now at ourselves; at ourselves, that is, so far and so long
as we remain under the malignant and hateful dominion of self-love. When
Butler gets our self-love restored to reasonableness, and made coincident
with virtue and part of the idea; when our self-love becomes uniformly
coincident with the principle of obedience to God's commands, then we
shall love ourselves as our neighbour, and our neighbour as ourselves,
and both in God. But, till then, there is nothing and no one on earth or
in hell so hateful to us as ourselves and our own hateful hearts. And if
in that we are treading the winepress alone as far as our fellow-men are
concerned, all the more we have Him with us in all our agony who wept
over the heart of man because He knew what was in it, and what must
always come out of it. Evil thoughts, He said, and fornications, and
murders, and thefts, and covetousness, and wickedness, and deceit, and an
evil eye, and pride, and folly, and what not. And Paul has the mind of
Christ with him in the text. I do not need to repeat again the hateful
words. Now, what do you say? was Pascal beyond the truth, was he deeper
than the truth or more deadly than the truth when he said with a stab
that self is hateful? I think not.
5. 'Oh that I were free, then, of myself,' wrote Samuel Rutherford from
Aberdeen in 1637 to John Ferguson of Ochiltree. 'What need we all have
to be ransomed and redeemed from that master-tyrant, that cruel and
lawless lord, ourself! Even when I am most out of myself, and am best
serving Christ, I have a squint eye on myself.' And to the Laird of
Cally in the same year and from the same place: 'Myself is the master
idol we all bow down to. Every man blameth the devil for his sins, but
the house devil of every man that eateth with him and lieth in his bosom
is himself. Oh blessed are they who can deny themselves!' And to the
Irish ministers the year after: 'Except men martyr and slay the body of
sin in sanctified self-denial, they shall never be Christ's. Oh, if I
could but be master of myself, my own mind, my own will, my own credit,
my own love, how blessed were I! But alas! I shall die only minting and
aiming at being a Christian.'