relief? Is the world greater than God? We may be sure that any
comfort the world can give, as against God's affliction, must be
dangerous. It is a contest with God, which God may allow to be
successful, but only for the greater condemnation thereafter. The
world's relief is not a cure but an opiate. It stupefies, but does
not give health and strength. The world's relief is a temporary
application--a lull before a fiercer storm. The world's relief
is a determination not to heed the lesson God sends us; it is the
invention of frivolity, and not the device of wisdom. More slumber,
more pleasure, and more worldly care are three favorite medicaments
the world uses in these cases--anodynes which only weaken the system
and prepare it for more fearful suffering. God wishes to awaken
the mind by affliction, and man immediately prescribes a narcotic.
The great Physician brings the affliction for our good; we turn to
quackery to destroy the effects of the divine medicine. Ah! the
day is coming when God shall appear as no longer our Savior but
our Judge, if this be our treatment of His love. "Because I have
called and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand and no man
regarded; but ye have set at naught all my counsel, and would none
of my reproof; I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when
your fear cometh; when your fear cometh as desolation, and your
destruction cometh as a whirlwind."
Secondly. If God prepares worms, then worms at once form an
interesting study for us. We cannot see a caterpillar upon the leaf,
but we know God has a mission for that worm. He is an ambassador
of the Most High on his way to perform his Master's will. The
headache, which unfits us for our ordinary occupation, is more
than a headache. It is the voice of our God. Let us listen to the
next headache and hear what God would have us learn. Every bird
and beast, every raindrop and sunbeam, every breath of wind, and
every event, however small, are the writings of a heavenly scribe.
Let us study God's providence. It is all a message of love to us.
We shall find out infinitely more in this study than in deciphering
the hieroglyphics of Egypt. We shall find correction, expostulation,
comfort, encouragement and instruction; and the more we look,
the more we shall see. We shall become adepts in the high art of
interpreting the acts of God toward us, and in this, as in prayer,
hold constant communion with our divine Redeemer.
Thirdly. When our gourds wither it is a proof that God is near.
We should be ready to say with Jacob, "Surely the Lord is in this
place." Prayer and humiliation are now our appropriate exercises.
God has put forth His hand to summon us to these duties. Our gourd
is gone, but our God is not gone, He can protect far better than a
gourd. He will more than make up all our losses. Let us go to Him,
and our dark night will make the day-dawn more brilliant. My dying
fellow-sinner, do not, I beseech you, grow angry under God's severe
dispensations. You do not well to be angry. God is near you with a
blessing in His hand for you. He has a lesson for you to learn which
will make you wise unto salvation.
Say, will you learn it? If not, God is near you to condemn you. Oh!
dread the alternative, and be wise to say in your heart, "Blest be
my God and Father, who prepared the worm to destroy my broad-leaved
gourd!"
DALE
THE ARGUMENT FROM EXPERIENCE
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Robert William Dale was born in London, England, in 1829 and died
in 1895. His long and fruitful ministry was confined to Birmingham,
where he preached with great power. He believed, as he once said,
that if a minister had anything from God to say to his fellow men,
they would gladly come to hear him. He favored extemporaneous
preaching, was a devoted student of English style, and advocated
in his Yale lectures a more thorough attention to this important
subject. He said:
"There is no reason why, when you have at your service the noblest
language for an orator that was ever spoken by the human race,
you should be satisfied with the threadbare phrases, the tawdry,
tarnished finery, the patched and ragged garments, with the smell
like that of the stock of a second-hand clothes shop, with which
half-educated and ambitious declaimers are content to cover the
nakedness of their thought. You can do something better than this,
and you should resolve to do it."
DALE
1829-1895
THE ARGUMENT FROM EXPERIENCE[4]
[4] Reprinted by permission of Messrs. A. C. Armstrong & Son.
There are large numbers of people who suppose that modern science
and modern criticism have destroyed the foundations of faith, and
who can not understand how it is possible, in these days, for
intelligent, open-minded, educated men to believe in the Lord Jesus
Christ.
There are many persons who are convinced that the ascertained
conclusions of modern science and of modern criticism are
destructive of the authority which has been attributed both to the
Jewish and the Christian Scriptures, that the traditional opinions
concerning the authorship and the dates of many of the books of the
Old Testament are false; and that most of the writings contained
in the New Testament are spurious. Or, if some of the extreme
conclusions of the destructive criticism are not regarded as finally
established, it is known that great names can be quoted for, as
well as against, them. And as it is assumed that the Jewish and the
Christian Scriptures are the foundations of Christian faith, that
we must believe in the genuineness and historical trustworthiness
of these ancient books, and even in their inspiration, before we
can believe in Christ, they argue that, until these discussions are
finally closed in favor of the traditional opinions, faith in Christ
is impossible. The controversies have not, in any large number
of cases, destroyed faith where faith already existed; but where
faith does not exist, they appear to very many persons to create an
insuperable obstacle to faith.
To such persons, if they are serious and well informed, there is
something perplexing in the persistency of the faith of the great
majority of Christian believers. Among those who remain Christian
there are men whose intellectual vigor, patience, and keenness
are equal to their own; men who are their equals in general
intellectual culture, and who know as much as they know about the
currents of modern thought; candid men; men who are incorruptible
in their loyalty to truth; men who have a due sense of the immense
importance, in relation to the higher life of the human race, of the
questions at issue:
How is it that the faith in Christ of such men is unshaken?
The substance of the answer that I make here to the question, why
it is that those who believe in Christ continue to believe, may be
given in a single sentence: Whatever may have been the original
grounds of their faith, their faith has been verified in their own
personal experience.
They have trusted in Christ for certain great and wonderful things,
and they have received great and wonderful things. They have not
perhaps received precisely what they expected when their Christian
life began, for the kingdom of heaven cannot be really known until
a man has entered into it; but what they have received assures them
that Christ is alive, that He is within reach, and that He is the
Savior and Lord of men.
That they have received these blessings in answer to their faith in
Christ is a matter of personal consciousness. They know it, as they
know that fire burns.
Their experience varies. Some of them would say they can recall acts
of Christ in which His personal volition and His supernatural power
were as definitely manifested as in any of the miracles recorded
in the four Gospels. They were struggling unsuccessfully with some
evil temper--with envy, jealousy, personal ambition--and could not
subdue it. They hated it; they hated themselves for being under its
tyranny; but expel it they could not. If it seemed supprest for a
time, it returned; and returned with its malignant power increased
rather than diminished. They scourged themselves with scorpions
for yielding to it; still they yielded. In their despair they
appealed to Christ; and in a moment the evil fires were quenched,
and they were never rekindled. These instantaneous deliverances are
perhaps exceptional; but to those who can recall them they carry an
irresistible conviction that the living Christ has heard their cry
and answered them.
The more ordinary experiences of the Christian life, tho less
striking, are not less conclusive. The proof that Christ has
heard prayer is not always concentrated into a moment, but is
more commonly spread over large tracts of time. Prayer is offered
for an increase of moral strength in resisting temptation, or for
the disappearance of reluctance in the discharge of duties which
are distasteful, or for a more gracious and kindly temper, or for
patience and courage in bearing trouble, or for self-control, or for
relief from exhausting and fruitless anxiety; and the answer comes.
It comes gradually, but still it comes. We had lost hope. It seemed
as if all our moral vigor was dying down, and as if nothing could
restore it. The tide was slowly ebbing, and we were powerless to
recall the retreating waters; but after we prayed it ceased to ebb;
for a time it seemed stationary; then it began to flow; and tho with
many of us it has never reached the flood, the wholesome waters have
renewed the energy and the joy of life.
Or we prayed to Christ to liberate us from some evil habit. The
chains did not fall away at His touch, like the chains of Peter
at the touch of the angel; but in some mysterious way they were
loosened, and at the same time we received accessions of strength.
The old habit continued to trouble us; it still impeded our
movements: but we could move; we recovered some measure of freedom,
and were conscious that we were slaves no longer. There still
remained a mechanical and automatic tendency to the evil ways of
thinking, speaking, or acting; but we had become vigilant and alert,
and were prompt to resist the tendency as soon as it began to work;
and we were strong enough to master it. In the course of time the
tendency became weaker and weaker, and at last, in some cases, it
almost disappeared.
Some men have appealed to Christ when they have been seized with
a great horror through the discovery of their guilt. It was not
the awful penalty which menaces the impenitent that haunted and
terrified them. Nor was their distress occasioned chiefly by the
consciousness of moral evil. They feared the penalty, and they were
humiliated and shamed by the contrast between ideal goodness and
their own moral and spiritual life; but what stung and tortured
them, sunk them into despair, filled heaven and earth with a
darkness that could be felt, and made life intolerable, was their
guilt--guilt which they had incurred by their past sins, and which
they continued to incur by their present sinfulness.
When once this sense of guilt fastens itself on a man, he cannot
shake it off at will. The keen agony may gradually pass into a dull,
dead pain; and after a time, the sensibility of the soul may seem to
be wholly lost; but a man can never be sure that the horror will not
return.
The real nature of this experience is best seen when it has been
occasioned by the grosser and more violent forms of crime. Men
who have committed murder, for example, have been driven almost
insane by the memory of their evil deed. Their agony may have had
nothing in it of the nature of repentance; they were not distrest
because their crime had revealed to them the malignity and the
fierce strength of their passions; they had no desire to become
gentle and kindly. They were filled with horror and remorse by
their awful guilt. They felt that the crime was theirs, and would
always continue to be theirs; that it would be theirs if it remained
concealed as truly as if it were known; indeed, it seemed to be in
some terrible way more truly theirs so long as the secret was kept.
It was not the fear of punishment that convulsed them; they have
sometimes brought on themselves public indignation and abhorrence,
and have condemned themselves to the gallows by confessing their
crime in order to obtain relief from their agony.
Suppose that a man possest by this great horror discovered that, in
some wonderful way, the dark and damning stain on his conscience had
disappeared; that, altho he had done the deed, the iron chain which
bound him to the criminality of it had been broken; that before
God and man and his own conscience he was free from the guilt of
it;--the supposition, in its completeness, is an impossible one; but
if it were possible, the discovery would lift the man out of the
darkness of hell into the light of heaven.
But to large numbers of Christian men a discovery which in substance
is identical with this has actually come in response to their trust
in Christ. Nothing is more intensely real than the sense of guilt;
it is as real as the eternal distinction between right and wrong
in which it is rooted. And nothing is more intensely real than
the sense of release from guilt which comes from the discovery
and assurance of the remission of sins. The evil things which a
man has done cannot be undone; but when they have been forgiven
through Christ, the iron chain which so bound him to them as to
make the guilt of them eternally his has been broken; before God
and his own conscience he is no longer guilty of them. This is the
Christian mystery of justification, which, according to Paul--and
his words have been confirmed in the experience of millions of
Christian men--is "the power of God unto salvation to every one that
believeth." It changes darkness into light; despair into victorious
hope; prostration into buoyancy and vigor. It is one of the supreme
motives to Christian living, and it makes Christian living possible.
The man who has received this great deliverance is no longer a
convict, painfully observing all prison rules with the hope of
shortening his sentence, but a child in the home of God.
There are experiences of another kind by which the faith of
Christian men is verified. Of these one of the most decisive and
most wonderful is the consciousness that through Christ he has
passed into the eternal and divine order. He belongs to two worlds.
He is just as certain that he is environed by things unseen and
eternal as that he is environed by things seen and temporal. In the
power of the life given to him in the new birth he has entered into
the kingdom of God. He is conscious that that diviner region is
now the native land of his soul. It is there that he finds perfect
rest and perfect freedom. It is a relief to escape to its eternal
peace and glory from the agitations and vicissitudes, the sorrows
and successes, of this transitory world. It is not always that
he is vividly conscious of belonging to that eternal order; this
supreme blessedness is reserved for the great hours of life; but
he knows that it lies about him always, and that at any moment the
great Apocalypse may come. And even when it is hidden, its "powers"
continue to act upon him, as the light and heat of the sun pass
through the clouds by which the burning splendor is softened and
concealed.
Further, "in Christ" Christian men know God; they know Him for
themselves. The mere conception of God is as different from the
immediate knowledge of Him as the mere conception of the Matterhorn
from the actual vision of it as an external objective grandeur; and
it is not the conception of God, but God Himself, that fills them
with awe and wonder, and with a blessedness which trembles into
devout fear. Sometimes the "exceeding weight of glory" is too great
to bear, and human infirmity is relieved when the vision passes. At
other times God is more than a transcendent glory to be contemplated
and adored. His infinite love, to use Paul's words, is shed abroad
in their hearts, like the sun's heat under tropical heavens; it is
immediately revealed. How, they can not tell, any more than they
can tell how the material world is revealed to sense; they only
know that, apart from any self-originated effort, apart from any
movement of their own towards Him, the eternal Spirit draws near to
their spirit and reveals God's love to them. It is as if the warm
streams of the love which have their fountains in the depths of
His infinite life were flowing round them and into them. They are
conscious of that love for them of which God is conscious.
And this blessedness is not the prerogative of elect saints, or
of those who may be said to have a natural genius for spiritual
thought. It is the common inheritance of all that are "in Christ,"
altho there is reason to fear that many Christian people rarely
reach the height of its joy. But among those who reach it are men
of every degree of intellectual rank and every variety of moral and
spiritual temperament. It is reached by ignorant men, whose thoughts
are narrow and whose minds are inert, as well as by men with large
knowledge and great powers of speculation; by men destitute of
imagination, as well as by men whose imagination kindles as soon
as it is touched by the splendors of nature or by the verses of
poets. Men whose life moves slowly and sluggishly reach it, as well
as men who are impulsive, ardent, and adventurous. And where this
experience is known, it becomes an effective force in the moral
life. Peter, writing to slaves, says, "For this is acceptable,
if through consciousness of God a man endureth griefs, suffering
wrongfully."
I have said that "in Christ" men know God--not merely through
Christ. It is true that during His earthly ministry He revealed
God; so that, in answer to the prayer of one of His disciples,
"Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us," He said, "Have I been so
long time with you, and dost thou not know me, Philip? he that hath
seen me hath seen the Father." That revelation has eternal power
and value; but there are other words spoken by Christ that same
night which suggest that it is not merely by the revelation of God
during His earthly ministry that Christ has made it possible for
men to know the Father. He said: "I am the true vine, and ye are
the branches.... Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot
bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; so neither can
ye, except ye abide in me. He that abideth in me, and I in him,
the same beareth much fruit: for apart from me ye can do nothing."
It is not certain that when Paul wrote his Epistle to the Galatian
Christians he had heard of these words; but what they meant he had
learnt for himself. He said, "I live: and yet no longer I, but
Christ liveth in me." In various measures the experience of Paul has
been the experience of Christian men ever since. Their relationship
to Christ--their conscious relationship to Christ--has been most
mysterious, but most intimate and most certain. They have meditated
on the infinite love which moved Him to descend from the heights
of God and to become man, upon His graciousness and gentleness,
His purity, His spontaneous goodness, His pity for suffering, His
merciful words to the sinful, His patience and His long-suffering,
and His fiery indignation against hypocrisy; they have meditated
on His teaching, on all the words of His that have been preserved
concerning the love and grace of God, concerning the remission of
sins, the gift of eternal life, the judgment to come, the eternal
blessedness of the righteous, and the doom of the lost; they have
felt the spell and the charm of that ideal perfection to which He
calls them in His precepts, and which He illustrated and transcended
in His own character: but they have been conscious that it was not
merely by the power of the great and pathetic story of His earthly
history, or by the power of His spiritual and ethical teaching, that
He gives to men the life of God, and constantly renews, sustains,
and augments it. They shared the very life of their Lord. He lived
in them. They lived in Him. And it was in the power of this common
life that they knew God.
Nor is it only the immediate knowledge of God that is rendered
possible by this union with Christ. Christian men are conscious that
they do not receive strength from Christ for common duty, as they
might receive strength from One who, while He conferred the grace,
stood apart from them, but that in some wonderful way they are
strong in the strength of Christ Himself. They are too often drawn
down into the region of baser forces, and then they fall; but their
very failure verifies the truth of their happier experiences, for it
brings home to them afresh what they are apart from Christ; and when
they recover their union with Him--which indeed had not been lost,
tho for a time it was not realized--they recover their power.
The man who has had, and who still has, such experiences as these
will listen with great tranquillity to criticisms which are intended
to shake the historical credit of the four Gospels, altho the story
they contain may have been the original ground of his faith in
Christ. The criticism may be vigorous; he may be wholly unable to
answer it: but what then? Is he to cease to believe in Christ? Why
should he?
Let me answer these questions by an illustration. Towards the
close of our Lord's ministry, when He was in the neighborhood of
Jericho--just leaving the city or just entering it--Bartimeus, a
blind man, who was begging at the side of the road, heard that Jesus
of Nazareth was passing by, and He appealed to the great Prophet to
have mercy upon him. Jesus answered his appeal, and gave him sight.
Now it is possible that Bartimeus may have been told by some passing
traveler, of whom he knew nothing, the story of a similar miracle
which Jesus had worked a few weeks before in Jerusalem, and this
may have been the ground, and the only ground, of his confidence
in our Lord's supernatural power. If, after he had received his
sight, some sagacious friend of his had asked him how it was that he
came to believe that the Nazarene Teacher could give sight to the
blind, nothing would have been easier than for his friend to show
that, whether the story of the Jerusalem miracle was true or not,
Bartimeus had no trustworthy evidence of its truth. A tale told by
an unknown stranger! This was no sufficient reason for believing
that Jesus had given sight to a man born blind. Did the stranger
who told the tale know the beggar who was said to have been cured?
Was it certain that the man was blind? Had the stranger examined
his eyes the very morning of the day on which he received sight?
Was it certain that the vision was not gradually returning? Was the
stranger present when Jesus made the clay, and put it on the blind
man's eyes; close enough to see that no delicate operation was
performed during the process? The sending of the blind man to wash
at the Pool of Siloam was suspicious: what could that washing have
to do with a miracle? Did the stranger go with the man to the pool,
and keep his eye upon him while he was there? Was it quite certain
that the blind beggar who was sent to Siloam was the man who came
back to the city and declared that Jesus had healed him? Might not
one man have been sent to the pool, and another man have come back
to Jerusalem? It looked very much as if there were some previous
understanding between the blind man and the Nazarene Prophet. The
Prophet had rich friends; they could have made it worth the man's
while to come into the plot. Had Bartimeus considered all these
difficulties? Was it not more probable that the stranger's story
should be false than that the miracle should be true? Would it not
be well for Bartimeus to suspend his faith in Jesus until he had
made further inquiries about the miracle?
We can imagine the answer of Bartimeus. I think that he would have
said: "At first I believed in the power of Jesus of Nazareth,
because I was told that He had given sight to another blind man;
now I am sure of His power, because He has given sight to me. It
is possible, as you say, that the story about the blind man in
Jerusalem is not true. You have asked me many questions which I
can not answer. I can not explain why he should have been sent to
the Pool of Siloam. I acknowledge that the evidence which I have
for the miracle is not decisive. As Jesus has restored my sight, I
think that the story is probably true; but whether the story is true
or not can not disturb my faith in Him, for if He did not heal the
other man, He has healed me."