true, useful, and generous. We wish to do in small measure such
things as He did,--in His name to give the cup of water, and the
healing of the sick. He grants all that we desire, then speaks out
of His own heart, and His desire, "The works that I do shall ye do,
and greater works than these"; for the miracles which attract us or
baffle us, which draw us to His love, or possibly turn us from His
word, which are only miracles because they are strange to us, are to
be exceeded in the things which we do, when by our teaching we open
the eyes of men that they may see God, and lift them up to the ways
of holy living, and raise them from being into life. Our visions of
heaven in our reverent imagination, even in the exultant words of
the Revelation, are not equal to the simple truths which He taught,
and men learned to repeat after Him. For what are golden streets
and jeweled walls beside that which He meant, "In my Father's house
are many mansions." "I go to prepare a place for you." "Ye shall
behold my glory." "Ye shall be loved as I am loved." The thought of
Christ far outruns the aspiration of the world, as it comes to us
from the lips of that disciple whom Jesus loved, "We shall be like
him, for we shall see him even as he is."
What do we need, then? To enlarge our desires! Yes, but to consent
to God's desires. To wish for more, but to consent to be blest as
Christ longs to bless us. We must know the methods of God, whose
will to give is greater and more constant than our will to receive.
We must adjust our life to God's desire. Faith is the compact of the
soul with God, rather than with itself. "Open thy mouth wide, and I
will fill it," is a promise ever old and ever new. We must be firm
enough and aspiring enough to hold the cup after it has begun to
overflow, and to let God's hand pour the water of life as long as He
will, for this world and all the worlds that are to be. If we could
desire more, if we could ascend to God's desire for us, life would
be transfigured.
"The balsam, the wine, of predestinate wills
Is a jubilant longing and pining for God."
"God loves to be longed for, He loves to be sought,
For He sought us Himself, with such longing and love."
We wish now to take this method for our own in all our dealing
with God. Our sense of what is right, the voice of conscience, the
commands of Scripture, call us to our duty. Let us do what they
require till conscience is satisfied; but let us add to this more
than a rigid obedience asks for, all that a loving heart, grateful
and generous, wishes to bestow. The little questions of life, small
matters of casuistry, minute affairs of conduct, would be quite
readily determined if we would live by this rule, wherewith God
blesses us. That question which with unusual urgency now presses
upon us, how we shall regard the Sabbath day, would not be difficult
if it were our delight to remember it, and to keep it holy because
it is our delight to please Him who has given to us its sacredness
and blessedness. It is pitiful when we find ourselves questioning
how much of the day should be holy; how much of it should be given
to the thought of God and the divine life; how much of it we should
yield to the holy spirit of truth; how many of the hours we should
keep in the remembrance of Him whose resurrection gives to the
Sabbath its greater meaning. We should keep the Sabbath holy as if
we desired to keep it holy. All its hours should be sacred. They
need not be less joyous, less friendly, for being holy; and we can
not be gratified with the spirit in which we find ourselves trying
to divide the time. Keep twenty-four hours for God, and if by any
means you can make the time overflow add a twenty-fifth hour.
We question again about money. What proportion of our property
should we devote to God? The Jews said one-tenth. Can we do no
better, after so long a time? Let us give the whole, and if by any
means we can compass it, let us add another tenth, simply to show
what a delight it is to give all things to Him, and to let Him make
the allotment in His care for us, and for our household, and for the
Church, and for the wide world that we are living in. There are many
who do this, and they learn how true is that word of Christ that is
called to mind among the Acts of the Apostles, "It is more blessed
to give than to receive."
Thus, in all things let us make the way of God our own, become His
children entirely, receive the love of Christ in its fulness, make
up our own life in His name, according to the largeness of His
thought. If we will consent to it, we can be great and rich and
strong. It seems strange to say that we are not ready to be blest,
but of many it is true. They are not willing to be greatly blest, to
have the cup run over. They are willing to be useful, but not very
useful. They ask to be set in His service, but when He takes their
word and breathes His own desire into it, they shrink back. It is a
very serious thing, if we are able to perceive it, to consent that
God should bless us as He pleases, should have His own estimate of
our character, His own measure of our powers, His own vision of our
accomplishment, and should call us to greater service, to diviner
employment, than we have ever dreamed of. It was a wise woman who
said, "I have had to face my own prayers." We face our prayers when
God gives His own wish to our words, and makes them large enough
to hold His thoughts. It is one of the hardest things to believe,
but one to which, in humbleness of mind and in a faith which will
not falter, we should consent,--that high word of calling and
consecration which Christ gave more than once,--"As the Father hath
sent me into the world, even so send I you." Not our thought but His
thought makes our calling, and the thought of God is the summons and
the guidance of our life. Even so, even according to Thy greatness,
and Thy gentleness which makes men great; Thine infinite purposes,
and Thine eternal grace; even so, O Lord of mercy and of truth, send
us into the world!
As we close these thoughts, let us remember that promise which comes
at the close of the Old Testament, which almost seems to reverse
the promise at the beginning of the Old Testament, "I will never
open the windows of heaven and pour out a flood again"; for the last
of the prophets brings to us the word of God, that He will open
the windows of heaven, and pour out a flood again. It shall not
come to destroy, but to preserve; it shall create life; it shall
enlarge life, but it shall be after the measure of His will, not
ours. "Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, and prove me now
herewith, if I will not open the windows of heaven, and pour out a
blessing that there shall not be room enough to receive it." Not
drops here and there, but showers of blessing. Not running brooks,
but broad rivers. Not pools of water, but a shoreless sea; deep,
deep waters, when, looking up into the infinite Love, and consenting
to be blest of God as God would bless us, we bring all the tithes
into the storehouse and the remainder of the tithes, if any have
been left. "I will pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be
room enough to receive it." Not room enough to receive it; that is
the royal bounty.
FARRAR
WORK IN THE GROANING CREATION
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
FREDERICK WILLIAM FARRAR was born in Bombay, India, in 1831. He
was educated at King's College, London, and at Trinity College,
Cambridge. He became dean of Canterbury in 1895, and died in 1903.
His Life of Christ, the most widely read of his many religious
works, has been translated into many languages--even into Japanese.
The following illustrates his power of emphasis.
"There, amid those voluptuous splendors, Pilate, already interested,
already feeling in this prisoner before him some nobleness which
touched his Roman nature, asking Him in pitying wonder, 'Art thou
the King of the Jews?'--Thou poor, worn, tear-stained outcast, in
this hour of Thy bitter need--O pale, lonely, friendless, wasted
man, in Thy poor peasant garments, with Thy tied hands and the
foul traces of the insults of Thine enemies on Thy face and on
Thy robes--Thou, so unlike the fierce, magnificent Herod, whom
this multitude which thirsts for Thy blood acknowledged as their
sovereign--art Thou the King of the Jews?"
FARRAR
1831-1903
WORK IN THE GROANING CREATION[9]
[9] Reprinted by permission of Messrs. E. P. Dutton & Co.
_And God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very
good._--Gen. i., 31.
_For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain
together until now._--Rom. viii., 22.
_And there shall be no more curse._--Rev. xxii., 3.
In those three texts you have the past, the present, the future of
our earth; what was, what is, what shall be; the perfectness which
man has marred, the punishment which he is enduring, the hope to
which he looks. What share we may have in the marring or the mending
of this our transitory dwelling, that is our main subject to-day.
We see some glimpses at least of the truth that actively by
sympathy, by thoughtfulness, by charity, by unselfishness, by loving
one another;--that even passively by abstaining from the fashionable
and universal vice of biting and devouring one another;--we see
that by honesty, by self-reverence, by reverence for others, by
obeying the golden rule of "doing unto others as we would they
should do unto us," we may do very much to limit the realm of
sorrow, and to substitute a golden for an iron scepter in its sway
over human hearts. We see, too, that our own inevitable trials and
humiliations,--all the neglect, all the insult, all the weariness,
all the disappointment, all the ingratitude, which may befall
us,--can be better borne if we be cheerful and active in doing good.
Labor for God is the best cure for sorrow, and the best occupation
of life.
Can we to-day push the inquiry yet further, and learn whether it is
in our power in any way to mend the flaw which runs for us through
the material world; or in any way to diminish for ourselves and for
mankind the pressure of that vast weight of laws which exercises
over us, undoubtedly, a sway of awful potency? The whole creation
groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now; can we--not by
any strength of ours, but because God permits and desires it, can we
do anything to hasten that blest hour for which we wait--the hour
of the new creation; of the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our
body; of the restitution of all things; of the _palingenesia_ of the
world?
I think we can. I know that the supposed helplessness of man is
a favorite topic of modern materialism, which makes of man the
irresponsible tool of forces which he can not resist, the sport
and prey of dumb powers which are alike inexorable and passionless.
This philosophy--if we may call it a philosophy--laughs to scorn the
notion of a miracle, and makes virtue and vice not the conscious
choice of free beings, but the inevitable result of material causes
and hereditary impulses, of which in all but semblance, we are the
mere automata and slaves. My brethren, into all these speculations
of a baseless atheism, I need not enter. To us, nature means nothing
but the sum total of phenomena which God has created; and since in
the idea of nature is included the idea of God, a miracle becomes as
natural and as easily conceivable as the most ordinary occurrence.
And we know that we are free, that God does not mock us, that we
can abhor that which is evil, and cleave to that which is good. The
laws of nature are nothing, then, for us but observed sequences, and
we do not admit that there is anything fearful in their uniformity.
It is true that nature drives her plowshare straight onwards, and
heeds not what may be lying in the furrow; it is true that therefore
she shows an apparent indifference to human agony; it is true that
if the fairest and sweetest child which earth ever saw be left at
play in the face of the advancing tide, the tide will still advance
and drown the little life; it is true that the fire in its ruthless
vividness will roll over the loveliest maiden whose rich dress
should catch its flame. It is a law that resistance must be equal
to force, and that if there be a certain amount of pressure of
vibration, whatever comes of it, a structure will give way, even
though, alas, it hurl nearly a hundred human beings, with one flash
of horror, into the gulf of death. But is this any reason for a
fierce arraignment of nature, as tho she were execrably ruthless,
and execrably indifferent? Not so, my brethren. Death whenever it
comes is but death. None of us has any promise of this or that
amount of life. It needs no railway accident, no sinking ship, or
breaking ice, or burning town, or flame from heaven, or arrow in the
darkness, or smiting of the sun by day, or the moon by night, to
cut short our days. An invisible sporule in the air may do it, or a
lesion no bigger than a pin's point.
"He ate, drank, laughed, loved, lived, and liked life well;
Then came--who knows?--some gust of jungle wind,
A stumble on the path; a taint i' the tank;
A snake's nip; half a span of angry steel;
A chill; a fishbone; or a falling tile,--
And life is over, and the man is dead."
But is this any reason why we should look on ourselves as victims
of dead irresponsible forces? Why so? Death is but death, and if we
live faithfully, death is our richest birthright. "Were you ready to
die that you jumped into the stormy sea to save that child's life?"
said a gentleman to an English sailor. "Should I have been better
prepared, sir," the sailor answered, "if I had shirked my duty?" A
sudden death is often, and in many respects, the most merciful form
of death; and the apparently terrible death of a few may save the
lives of many hundreds. The uniformity of nature may sometimes wear
the aspect of passionless cruelty; but as we learn more and more to
observe and to obey her laws, we find more and more that they work
for countless ends of beneficence and beauty, that out of seeming
evil she works real good, out of transient evil enduring good. The
fires which rend the earthquake and burst from the volcano, are the
quickening forces of the world; her storms lash the lazy atmosphere
which otherwise would stagnate into pestilence, and it is for man's
blessing, not for his destruction, that her waters roll and her
great winds blow.
But are we, after all, so very helpless before the aggregate of
these mighty forces, as materialism loves to represent? Not so!
"Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands," said
the Psalmist, "Thou hast put all things under his feet." "Replenish
the earth, and subdue, and have dominion," said the first utterance
of God to man. And what is this but an equivalent of the latest
utterances of science, that "the order of nature is ascertainable
by our faculties to an extent which is practically unlimited, and
that our volition counts for something in the course of events"?
Man has done much to make the world in all senses a worse place for
himself, but he has also, thank God, done much to make it better,
and he may, to an almost unspeakable extent, remedy for himself and
for his race the throes and agonies of the groaning universe. God
meant His earth to be a more blest place for us than it is, and in
every instance men have made it more blest when they have read the
open secrets, by virtue of which, for our excitement, if not for our
reward, "herbs have their healing, stones their preciousness, and
stars their times." Ancient nations have shuddered at the awfulness
of the sea. It drowns ship and sailor; but "trim your sail, and the
same wave which drowns the bark is cleft by it, and bears it along
like its own foam, a plume and a power." The lightning shatters
tower and temple; but once learn that it is nothing but the luminous
all-pervading fluid which you may evolve by rubbing a piece of
amber, and brush out of a child's fair hair, and then with no more
potent instrument than a boy's kite you may dash harmless to the
earth the all-shattering brand which was the terror of antiquity;
nay, you may seize it by its wing of fire, and bid it carry your
messages around the girdled globe. Zymotic diseases smite down the
aged and young, but, when you have learnt that they are caused by
myriads of invisible germs which float in the water or the air, you
have but to observe the commonest rules of sanitary science, to
filter and boil the dangerous water, to insure free currents of air,
to breathe as nature meant you to breathe, through the nostrils, and
not through the throat, and you rob them of half their deadliness.
Why has smallpox been stayed in its loathly ravages, and deprived
of its hideous power? Why does the Black Death rage no longer,
as it raged among the monks of this Abbey four centuries ago?
Why do we not have pestilence, like that great plague of London,
which destroyed 7,165 persons in a single week? Why has jail fever
disappeared? Why are the cities of Europe horrified no longer by the
hideousness of medieval leprosy? Because men live amid cleaner and
purer surroundings. Because rushes are no longer strewn over floors
which had been suffered to be saturated with the organic refuse of
years. Because the simplest laws of nature are better understood.
Because, in these respects, men have remedied by God's aid, some of
those miseries for which the Savior sighed.
And this amelioration of man's miseries is a great, and noble, and
Christlike work. Would that there were no other side to the picture!
Man, alas! also has done, and may do, infinite mischief to the
world he lives in. He may cut down the forests on the hills, and
so diminish the necessary rain. He may pluck up the grasses on the
shore, and so lay waste whole acres to the devastating sands. He may
poison the sweet, pure rivers of his native soil, till their crystal
freshness is corrupted into deathful and putrescent slime. He may
herd together, as we suffer our poor to do, in filthy tenements
which shall breed every species of disease and vice. He may indulge
or acquiesce in senseless fashions and pernicious vanities which
shall mean not only wasteful ugliness and grotesque extravagance,
but leave shattered health and ruined lives, to the mothers of his
race. He may in greed of competition extirpate the game of the
forest, the fishes of the sea. He may destroy the exquisite balance
of nature, by shooting down or entrapping the sweet birds of the
air, till his vines and his harvests are devastated by the insects
on which they feed. He may suffer the chimneys of his manufactories
to poison the atmosphere with black smoke and sulphurous acid, till
his proudest cities are stifled at noonday, as we all have seen in
London for these many weeks, with the unclean mirk of midnight fogs.
He may suffer noxious gases to be vomited upon the breeze, till
the most glorious buildings in his cities corrode and crumble--as
the stones of this Abbey are doing--under their influence,--till
the green woods blacken into leafless wastes, and life is lived
at miserable levels of vitality under the filthy reek. There is
hardly any limit to the evil, no less than to the good, which man
may do to this his earthly environment. Nor is it less deplorable
that he may go out of his way to do endless mischief to himself by
his misuse or abuse of the properties of things. From the dried
capsules of the white poppy he extracts opium, and he grows acres of
poppies that with thousands of chests of that opium he may degrade
into decrepitude and wretchedness the most populous nations upon
earth. Nature gives him the purple grape and the golden grain,
and he mashes them and lets them rot and seethe, and assists, and
superintends, and retards their decomposition, till he has educed
from them a fermented intoxicating liquor; and not content with
this luxury, he pours it into Circean cups of degrading excess;
not content with even fermentation, he further, by distillation,
extracts a transparent, mobile, colorless fluid, which is the
distinctive element in ardent spirits, and these, whatever may
be their legitimate use in manufacture or in medicine, he has so
horribly abused that they have become to mankind, the _spiritus
ardentes_ indeed, but not of heaven--fiery spirits of the abyss,
which have decimated nations, ruined continents, shortened millions
of lives, and turned for millions of God's children, and millions
of Christ's little ones, life into an anguish, and earth into a
hell. Do not say we can do nothing to soften for man the deadly
agencies which are working in the world,--for all this mischief, and
incalculably more than this, is man's own doing.
But let me ask you to glance for a moment at one of the beneficent
secrets which nature has yielded up to man. Have you ever realized,
with heartfelt gratitude to God, the priceless boon which He has
granted to this generation in the diminution of pain? One of our
best surgeons has just told us the strange yet simple story of this
discovery, from the first dim intimation of the possibility in
1789, till in 1846 it might almost be said that in Europe we could
name the month, before which all operative surgery was agonizing,
and after which it was painless. But what an immense, what an
enormous boon is this application of anodynes! "Past all counting
is the sum of happiness enjoyed by the millions who have, in the
last thirty-three years, escaped the pain that was inevitable in
surgical operations; pain made more terrible by apprehension;
more keen by close attention; sometimes awful in a swift agony;
sometimes prolonged beyond even the most patient endurance, and then
renewed in memory, and terrible in dreams. This will never be felt
again." And besides this abolition of pain, it would take long to
tell how chloroform and ether "have enlarged the field of useful
surgery, making many things easy which were difficult, many safe
which were perilous, many practical which were nearly impossible."
But another lesson this eminent man of science draws, which bears
directly on our subject, is that while we are profanely decrying
nature, discoveries the most blest, boons the most priceless, may
lie close to us and yet God leave us to discover them; and that we
may endure many needless miseries, falsely accusing nature and even
God, only because we have neither hope enough to excite intense
desire, nor desire enough to encourage hope. We wonder that for
forty years the discovery of anesthetics was not pursued, tho, after
the pregnant hint of Sir H. Davy, it lay but half hidden under
so thin a veil. Our successors will wonder at us, as we at those
before us, that we were as blind to who can tell how many great
truths, which, they will say, were all around us, within reach of
any clear and earnest mind. They will wonder at the quietude with
which we stupidly acquiesce in, or immorally defend, the causes
which perpetuate and intensify our habitual miseries. Our fathers
needlessly put up with these miseries "as we now put up with typhoid
fever and sea-sickness; with local floods and droughts; with waste
of health and wealth in pollutions of rivers; with hideous noises,
and foul smells"; with the curse of alcoholic poisoning, and many
other miseries. Our successors, when they have remedied or prevented
these, will look back on them with horror, and on us with wonder
and contempt, for what they will call our idleness or blindness, or
indifference to suffering. Alas! in the physical as in the moral
world, we murmur at the evils which surround us, and we do not
remove them. We multiply those evils, and make life wretched, and
then curse nature because it is wretched, and neglect or fling away
the precious gifts and easy remedies which would make it blest. And
is it not so in the spiritual world? Nine-tenths of our miseries
are due to our sins. Yet the remedy of our sins is close at hand.
We have a Savior; we have been commemorating His birth, but we live
and act as tho He were dead; in our own lives and those of others we
suffer those miseries to run riot which He came to cure; we talk and
live as tho those remedies were undiscoverable, while from day to
day His Word is very nigh us, even in our mouths and in our hearts!