upon the outward facts of life and death, and see the steady,
unswerving march of law--the unbroken, irrefragable chain of causes
and effects--never yielding nor bending to all our needs, to all our
prayers. And God seems so far, so far away! We turn the pages of
our knowledge from the physical to the metaphysical, and we come
no nearer. Our philosophical, our theological, yes, our religious
meditations upon the nature and attributes of the infinite One--the
omniscient, the eternal, the unchangeable--set Him more and more
beyond the reach of our fellowship and prayer. But all the time,
one thing testifies to us of a heavenly Father that hears and loves
and answers, and that is our ineradicable need. The cravings of our
nature cannot be rebuked by scientific observation of the constancy
of law, nor by philosophic meditation of the properties of absolute
and infinite being. We need, we must have, a Father. Our heart and
flesh, our soul, crieth out for the living God.
In such a strait, there is true comfort in this word of the Lord
by His prophet, in which the full measure of the difficulty is set
forth, and the solution of it is found in faith.
It has seemed to me that we need not seek in vain in the created
works of God for helps to that faith by which we know that the
infinite and eternal God can have fellowship with us and can dwell
within the narrow precincts of a human heart.
That sight in visible nature which gives to us the highest sense
of vastness,--the aptest suggestion of infinity,--is doubtless the
aspect of the starry heavens;--to all of us, ignorant or learned,
poetic or unimaginative. It needs no diagrams nor distances from
a book of astronomy to tell the lessons of the firmament. "Their
sound is gone out into all the earth, and their words to the end of
the world."
And yet it is when we come to study the dimensions of this operation
in detail, that the sense of its vastness grows upon us and
overpowers us. David never could have felt, as we can feel, the
force of his own words:
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,
The moon and the stars which thou hast ordained,
What is man that thou art mindful of him,
And the son of man that thou visitest him!
They are like the chariot of Ezekiel's vision, "so high that it
was dreadful." It seems a fearful thing to have to do with such
magnitudes; and when we hear of scholars in their observatories
measuring the distances among the stars, it overcomes us with a
giddy feeling, as when we see men clambering on church spires, or
crossing the East River on a strand of wire. A row of figures on a
slate does seem such a frail support on which to go marching through
the starry spaces! We almost shudder when we see human science
springing clear of the narrow boundaries of the earth, and on such
attenuated threads of calculation venturing boldly forth to other
planets, and thence over chasms of space so vast that it is easiest
to call them infinite, until he reaches the fixt stars. No longer
content with numbering and naming the host of heaven, and marshaling
them in constellations, this tiny creature must take upon himself
to scrutinize their constitution, must weigh their floating bulk,
must
"Speed his flight from star to star,
From world to luminous world, as far
As the universe rears his flaming wall,"
and, as if bearing in this amazing flight the measuring-rod which
once the prophet saw in an angel's hand, must measure the paths
along which the planets travel, and tell in human language the
distances on the chart of heaven.
And how human language staggers under the burden thus laid upon it!
We begin with attempting to state the least of these distances in
numbers of a unit of earthly distance, but, when we speak of some
of our near neighbors in celestial space as being twenty trillions
of English miles away, the words will not hold the meaning--they
carry no conception to the mind. They are good to cipher with,
but that is all they are good for. We try to invent a new form of
speech, and for our unit we take the distance which a cannon-ball,
if retaining the velocity with which it leaves the gun, would travel
in twenty-four hours, and say that, at this rate of speed, it would
take so many months, and years, and centuries, to reach such and
such of the nearer stars. But this, too, is a clumsy failure; and
we resort, at last, to the heavens themselves for a standard of
measurement, and find it in the velocity of light. It shoots from
the sun to the earth, a distance of ninety-two millions of miles,
in eight minutes and seven seconds. And we attempt to represent the
distance of certain of the stars by stating how many years, how many
hundred years, how many thousand years, it takes a ray of their
light to reach the earth. But it is all in vain. We commonly speak
of imagination as outstripping, in its speed, the slow-paced reason;
but here it is the reason that has outrun the imagination. From
these unspeakable tracts of space, over which the reason of man has
not hesitated to go,
"Sounding along its dim and perilous way,"
the imagination shrinks back and refuses to follow. We know things
which we cannot conceive. In presence of such stupendous magnitudes,
"Imagination's utmost stretch
In wonder dies away."
We can only bow with awe in the presence of things which the
calmest computations have revealed, and seizing the words kindled on
the lips of inspiration, sing aloud in worship:
"O Lord, how great are they works!
In wisdom hast thou made them all!"
I have shown you what is wonderful. Come now and I will show you
what is more wonderful. For I will show you these infinite spaces
of the sky, and the glory of them, and the innumerable host of
starry worlds, gathered up in a moment of time, within the tiny
pupil of a human eye. It is wonderful that the heavens and the host
of them should be so great; but that, being so great, they should
be able to become so infinitely little,--this passes all wonder.
The shepherd stretched upon the ground amid his sheep gazes up into
the starry depths, and finds them wonderful; but never thinks how
far more wonderful than the heavens which he beholds is himself
beholding them. As he lies gazing, long lines of light, from planet
and star and constellation, come stretching on through the infinite
void spaces, to center on the lenses of his drowsy eye. Side by
side, and all at once, yet never twisted or confused, these ten
thousand rays of different light enter the little aperture in the
center of the eye which we call the pupil. There they cross, in a
point which has no dimensions, and separate again, and paint in
microscopic miniature upon the little surface of the retina, behind
the eyeball, the inverted facsimile of the visible heavens. There,
in the ante-chamber of the brain, marches Orion, with his shining
baldric and his jeweled sword; there glow Arcturus and Sirius, and
the steadfast North Star; there pass the planets to and fro; and
the far-off nebulæ are painted there with suffused and gentle
radiance--all the heavens and the glory of them gathered in that
slender filament of light, threaded through that tiny aperture,
painted by their own rays upon that little patch of nervous network,
apprehended, felt, known through and through by that finite human
mind. How far stranger and sublimer a thing is this than the mere
bulk of the worlds, or the mere chasms of void space in which they
hang weltering!
By this sublime fact of God's visible creation, we are led on to
apprehend and feel the sublimest of the glories of God Himself, set
forth in the prophet's words,--that He whose lifetime is infinite
duration, whose dwelling-place is infinite space,--He who before
the earth and the world were made was no younger, neither will be
older when they are all consumed,--whose presence reaches out to the
farthest fixt star that eye or telescope has ever described floating
upon the far verge of the universe, and occupies beyond in all the
orbits of worlds yet undiscovered, and still beyond in the regions
of space where is naught but the possibility of future worlds, and
fills all this immensity to repletion,--that this "high and lofty
One that inhabiteth eternity" should enter into some poor, crusht
and broken spirit, that trembles at the very whisper of His voice,
and should make the narrow recesses of that heart His abode, His
home. This is the mystery and glory of the Godhead,--not alone that
He should be infinite, eternal, immortal, invisible, but that being
all these, He should yet be apprehended by the little mind of a man,
and call Himself that man's Friend and Comforter and Father.
For it is not more evident that the tiny pupil of human eye can take
in the expanses and abysses of the heavens, than it is that the
little soul of man can receive into itself the infinite God.
I. Man receives God into himself by the intellect. We trifle with
the facts of our own consciousness, if we suffer the theological
description of God as incomprehensible to divert us from the fact
that our minds are made for nothing more expressly than for this,
that they should receive God. The lowest rudiments of the knowledge
of the simplest forms of matter are the beginnings of the knowledge
of God. If we could remember, you and I, now that we are grown, all
that came to us in infancy--the first struggles of the childish mind
with the questions that we are not done with yet, we should see how
soon the knowledge of God comes to the little one. Beyond the cradle
in which it wakes up to the wonders of a new day is the nursery, and
beyond the nursery is the house, and beyond the house is the garden,
and beyond the garden there lies all the world, and beyond the
world shuts down the sky with its stars, and beyond the sky--what?
"Tell me, father--tell me, mother, what is there beyond the sky?"
And, according to your knowledge or your ignorance, your faith or
your unbelief, you may tell the little questioner of heaven, or of
infinities of other worlds, or of infinite waste room and empty
space, and he will believe you. But attempt to tell him that beyond
is nothing, and not even room for anything, and will he believe you?
He may seem to believe you, but it is impossible that he really
should believe. The infant mind--any mind--rejects it as impossible.
It cannot live in anything less than infinite space. It stifles. It
leaps up and beats its wings against any bars with which you would
cage it in, but that it will break through and take possession of
its inheritance.
And as with infinite extent, so with infinite duration. How well I
remember, as a very little child, when men were talking of the end
of the world, and the great comet stretched amain across the sky,
and men's hearts were failing them for fear, how the thought of
infinite duration prest in, inexorably, on my soul! Come judgment
day, come final conflagration, come end of all material things, come
cessation and extinction of all angels, all souls, all sentient
creatures, still this could not be the end. Eternity must needs go
on and on, tho there were never an event or thought to mark its
movement. There cannot be an end.
They err, not measuring the import of their own arguments, who
tell us, in that pride of not-knowing which is so high uplifted
beyond any pride of knowledge, that the very form of the word
infinite marks it as the sign of a thing inconceivable, being a mere
negation. Nay, verily, it is the word end, limit, cessation, that
is the negative word, having no meaning except as the negation of
continuance; and infinite is the negation of this negation--a thing
positive, affirmative, real.
So, then, it is not the idea of infinity to which the human mind is
unfitted. The mind is so made that it cannot help receiving that.
The incredible, inconceivable idea is the idea of absolute end. So
far is the idea of infinity from being inconceivable, that it is
just impossible to thrust the conception out of the mind. And with
the conception of eternity, there rushes into the thoughtful spirit
at once, the awful and lovely conception of "that high and lofty
One who inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy." By such a wonder
of creation is it, that He who made the little ball of the human
eye so that it can take in the heavens and the earth, has made the
petty intellect of man so that it can take in the knowledge of the
infinite God.
II. But, secondly, it is even a greater wonder than this, that the
infinite God, whom the intellect has conceived, draws near for a
more intimate society with His creature, and enters the heart
of man through the gateway of his affections. I say a greater
wonder; for it must be confest that this ideal of the intellect,
this center in which all infinite attributes inhere, does by
His very majesty so overawe the heart that we shrink away from
Him. By every new perfection of His nature, that grows upon our
apprehension; by His awful power as the Almighty; by His perfect
knowledge as the All-wise; by His unswerving steadfastness as the
Faithful and True--the Immutable; by the very infinitude of His
nature, He is withdrawn farther and farther from the possibility
of being counted among those humble objects on which the tendrils
of a human heart are able to lay hold. How, for instance, shall
this Inhabitant of eternity, whose name is Holy, be well-pleased
with His petty creature who has dared withstand His perfect law,
and looks shrinking toward the throne of infinite Majesty, fearing
and crying, "Unclean! unclean!" How shall any prayer that we can
frame bring arguments to bear upon the Mind that knows the end
from the beginning, and to whom there is not a word upon our lips,
but lo! He knoweth it altogether? How can any pitiful plight into
which we may fall move the compassion of Him who is immutable, and
under whose benign government even the pains and severities that
befall His creatures are wrought into a plan of common beneficence
to the whole? These are questions which the awe-struck intellect,
gazing upward at the infinite attributes that adorn the name which
is holy, puts to the yearning heart, which, with all the craving
of its love, with all the outstretching of its need, gropes after
a God to worship, to love, to pray to, if haply it may find Him.
And the heart cannot answer back the intellect with arguments of
language. But love contains more reason than many arguments; and the
strong instincts of affection and devotion with which the humble and
contrite heart reaches out after the love and personal friendship
of an infinite Creator are themselves an argument that God will not
refuse Himself to the affections which He has Himself implanted. The
hunger and thirst of our hearts for God are a promise from Him that
they shall be filled. He cannot deny Himself.
The very arguments by which we climb to the knowledge of the
infinite Spirit are like mountains that separate us from any
relation with him of childlike prayer and mutual love. But a
trustful confidence can say to these mountains, "Be ye removed and
be ye cast into the sea," and it shall be done.
Have you ever pondered that dark mystery of human nature, the origin
of the frightful idolatries of India? It seems to be proved that
they had their beginning, not (as the prepossessions of modern
science would suggest) through development from some form of
fetishism baser and coarser still, but by degradation from the most
refined and abstract speculations on the infinity, the spirituality,
and the immutability of God. No subtler metaphysics is taught to-day
in the lecture-rooms of Yale and Princeton than was taught long
centuries ago by Hindoo sages, enthroning their supreme divinity in
the everlasting, impassive repose of the unconditioned, far beyond
the reach of affection, sympathy or prayer, until the needy millions
cried out, stifling, famishing, "Give us a God to love, to worship,
to pray to!" and, for lack of answer, betook them to the forest or
the quarry or the mine, to the carver and the smith, and made them
gods that were no gods. So little can argument and reason hold us
back in times when the stress of life comes down upon us, and the
cravings of the soul grow strong!
I am bringing to the altar of God my offering--my poor little
offering of thankfulness and prayer. Here have I my little bundle
of anxieties, cares, troubles,--it may be the concerns of a nation
in fear and perplexity; it may be the distress and terror of
some sorely afflicted little household; it may be the secret of
bitterness of some humble and contrite spirit; in any case, a matter
how infinitely small when measured by the scale of immensity and
eternity; but oh, how great a thing to me! And there meets me, in
the way, a philosopher. "And what, forsooth, have you there? Show
it me, now." And I unroll before Him my little bundle of griefs,
of cares, of pains, of sickness, of fears, of forebodings,--here
a handful of myrrh from a troubled heart, and there a sprig of
frankincense from a grateful spirit. "And this, then, is what you
would bring to lay before the infinite, the eternal, the omniscient,
the unchangeable God!" And each great title smites upon my heart
with discouragement and dismay. "This is what you would bring to
Him in prayer and deprecation! But do you not know that all this
is a part of a perfect system?--that it is all fixt by the laws of
nature, which no prayer can change or suspend without upsetting the
constitution of the universe. You would lay before God your wretched
plight to move His pity? Tush! Did He not know it all a hundred
thousand ages ago, or ever the earth was?" And I cannot gainsay Him,
and I cannot cease to pray. But by and by the philosopher himself
comes face to face with some of the overwhelming things in human
life and human death. He hangs with tears and wringing of hands over
some cradleful of childish anguish, and shrinks from what the laws
of nature, the system of the universe, are doing there--so pitiless,
so deaf to prayer, so blind to agony; and he looks away, and looks
up, and cries, "My God, my God!" And his reason is not one whit
the less true, because now, at last, his love and faith are also
true and strong. The awful wonder of God's unchangeable infinity
abides; but out of cloud and darkness breaks forth, oh, what light
of fatherly love! And the bewildered soul sings:--
And can this mighty King
Of glory condescend?
And will He write His name
My Father, and my Friend?
I love His name! I love His word!
Join all my powers and praise the Lord!
And now behold a mystery--the mystery of godliness, without
controversy great, manifest in the flesh! That He may come over
these mountains of helpless separation, that we may be helped to
know, to love, to trust that which is far too vast for the reach
of our clinging affections to clasp, what wonders of condescending
tenderness will not our Father do! There draweth near to us One
having the likeness of man, but glorious with an unearthly glory,
as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. He
stands beside us in our daily cares, our household joys and griefs,
our business troubles and anxieties, our national fears and sorrows.
He shares our temptations. He is touched with the feeling of our
infirmities. He carries our sorrows. He bears our sickness. He dies
our death. How easy to love Him, to come near to Him, to trust Him!
Being lifted up, how doth He draw all men unto Him! And what mean
those wonderful words of His, telling of His intimacy, His sonship,
His oneness with the invisible and eternal God? Could it be,
perhaps, that such an one might bring us nearer to the inaccessible
Light--might help us to draw nigh as seeing Him who is invisible?
Oh, Master, show us the Father and it sufficeth us! And hear now
His gracious words: "He that believeth on me believeth on him that
sent me." "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father also." Thus the
high and lofty One, who hath wonderfully entered into our narrow
understanding, cometh also into our heart, and draweth us to His own
bosom "with the chords of love, with the bands of a man."
III. Finally, with a true spiritual intercourse and converse, which
no man can define, which is as the viewless wind that men know altho
they see it not, and feel its quickening and refreshment, altho they
cannot tell whence it cometh nor whither it goeth, God entereth into
our spirits, "not to sojourn, but to abide with us," and we become
the temples of the Holy Ghost.
JOSEPH PARKER
A WORD TO THE WEARY
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
JOSEPH PARKER was born at Hexham-on-Tyne, England, in 1830. He
was a prodigious worker, writer, and preacher. His "The People's
Bible," in twenty-eight large volumes, a popular commentary on
the Scriptures, is his greatest work. To a naturally energetic
personality he added great originality and resourcefulness. He
gave much time to the preparation of sermons, reading them aloud
as he wrote in order to test their effect upon the ear. A strong
personal quality pervaded all his preaching. "If I have not seen Him
myself," he said, "I cannot preach Him." In lectures to students he
gave much valuable advice gathered from the storehouse of his own
varied experience. He gave particular attention to the use of the
voice. "It is not enough," he said, "that you be heard; you must be
effective as well as audible; you must lighten and thunder with the
voice; it must rise and fall like a storm at times; now a whisper,
now a trumpet, now the sound of many waters. There is an orator's
voice, and there is a bellman's. The auctioneer talks; the orator
speaks." Dr. Parker's sermons are published in numerous volumes. He
died in 1902.
JOSEPH PARKER
1830-1902
A WORD TO THE WEARY[7]
[7] From "The People's Bible," by Joseph Parker, published by Funk &
Wagnalls Company.
_The Lord God hath given me the tongue of the learned, that I should
know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary._--Isaiah
1., 4.
The power of speaking to the weary is nothing less than a divine
gift. As we see the divinity in our gifts shall we be careful of
them, thankful for them: every gift seems to enshrine the giver,
God. But how extraordinary that this power of speaking to the weary
should not be taught in the schools. It is not within the ability
of man to teach other men how to speak to the weary-hearted, the
wounded in spirit, the sore in the innermost feelings of the being.
But can we lay down directions about this and offer suggestions?
Probably so, but we do not touch the core of the matter. There is an
infinite difference between the scholar and the genius. The scholar
is made, the genius is inspired. Information can be imparted, but
the true sense, the sense that feels and sees God, is a gift direct
from heaven.
It is a common notion that anybody can sing. Why can you sing? Why,
because I have been taught. That is your mistake. You can sing
mechanically, exactly, properly, with right time, right tune, but
really and truly you can not sing. Here is a man with his music and
with the words; he sings every note, pronounces every word, goes
through his lesson, finishes his task, and nobody wants to hear him
any more. Another man takes up the same music, the same words, and
the same hearers exclaim, "Oh, that he would go on for ever!" How
is that?--the words exactly the same, the notes identical--how?
Soul, fire, ever-burning, never consuming, making a bush like a
planet. The great difficulty in all such cases is the difficulty
of transferring to paper a proper or adequate conception of the
power of the men who thus sway the human heart. There are some men
whose biographies simply belie them, and yet every sentence in the
biography is true in the letter; but the biography is little else
than a travesty and a caricature, because the power was personal,
it was in the face, in the voice, in the presence, in the gait, in
the touch--an incommunicable power; the hem of the garment trembled
under it, but no biographer could catch it in his scholarly ink.
Very few ministers can enter a sick chamber with any probability
of doing real and lasting good. They can read the Bible, and they
can pray, and yet, when they have gone, the room seems as if they
had never been there. There is no sense of emptiness or desolation.
Other men, probably not so much gifted in some other directions,
will enter the sick room, and there will be a light upon the wall,
summer will gleam upon the windowpane, and angels will rustle in the
air, and it will be a scene of gladness and a vision of triumph. How
is that? The Lord God hath given me the tongue of the learned that
I might know how--_how_ to speak a word in season to him that is
weary. The Lord God hath not only given me a word to say, but hath
given me learning to teach me how to speak it. Place the emphasis
upon the how, and then you develop all the mystery, all the tender
music, all the infinite capacity of manner.