Zacharias, as becomes the last of the prophets, and a man whose
whole religious life was nourished upon the ancient Scriptures,
speaks almost entirely in Old Testament phraseology in this song.
And his description of 'them that sit in darkness and the shadow of
death' is taken almost verbally from the great words from the Book
of the Prophet Isaiah, who speaks, in immediate connection with his
prophecy of the coming of the Christ, of 'the people that walk in
darkness and them that dwell,' or sit, 'in the shadow of death, upon
whom the light hath shined.'
The picture that rises before us is that of a group of travellers
benighted, bewildered, huddled together in the dark, afraid to move
for fear of pitfalls, precipices, wild beasts, and enemies; and so
sighing for the day and compelled to be inactive till it comes. That
is the picture of humanity apart from Jesus Christ, a darkness so
intense, so tragic, that it is, as it were, the very shadow of the
ultimate and essential darkness which is death, and in it men are
sitting torpid, unable to find their way and afraid to move.
Now darkness, all the world over, is the emblem of three
things--ignorance, impurity, sorrow. And all men who are rent
away from Jesus Christ, or on whom His beams have not yet fallen,
this text tells us, have that triple curse lying upon them.
Ignorance. Think of what, without Jesus Christ, the world has deemed
of the unseen, and of the God, if there be a God, that may inhabit
there. He has been to them a great Peradventure, a great Terror, a
great Inscrutable, a stone-eyed Fate, a thin, nebulous Nothing, with
no emotion, no attributes, no heart, no ear to hear, the nearest
approach to nonentity, according to the despairing saying of a
master of philosophy, that 'pure Being is equal to pure Nothing.'
And if all men do not rise to such heights of melancholy abstraction
as that, still how little there is of blessed certainty, how little
clearness of conception of a Divine Person that turns to us with
love and tenderness in His heart, apart from Christ and His
teaching! If you take away from civilised men all the knowledge of
God that they owe to Jesus Christ, what have you left? The ladder by
which they climbed is kicked away by a great many people nowadays,
but it is to Him that they owe the very conceptions in the name of
which some of them turn round and deny Him.
Ignorance of God, ignorance of one's own self and of one's deepest
duties, and ignorance of that solemn future, the fact of which is
plain to most men, but the how of which is such a blank mystery but
for Jesus Christ--these things are elements of the darkness that
wraps the world. Go to heathendom if you want to see the problem
worked out, as to what men know outside of the revelation which
culminates in Jesus Christ. And take your own hearts, dear friends
who stand aside from that sweet Lord and light of our lives, and ask
yourselves, What do I know, with a certainty which is to me as
valid, as--yea! more valid than that given by sense and outward
perceptions? What do I know of God that I do not owe to Jesus
Christ? Nothing. You may guess much, you may hope a little, you may
dread a great deal, you may question more than all, but you will
_know_ nothing.
Well, then, further, this solemn emblem stands for impurity. And we
have only to consult our own hearts to feel how true it is about us
all, that we dwell in a region all darkened, if not by the coarse
transgressions which men consent to call sins, yet darkened more
subtly and oftentimes more hopelessly by the obscuration of pure
selfishness and living to myself and by myself. Wherever that comes,
it is like the mists that steal up from some poisonous marsh, and
shut out stars and sky, and drape the whole country in a melancholy
veil. It is white but it is poisonous, it is white but it is
darkness all the same. There are other kinds of sin than the sins
that break the Ten Commandments; there are other kinds of sin than
the sins that the world takes cognisance of. The worst poisons are
the tasteless ones, and colourless gases are laden with fatal power.
We may walk in a darkness that may be felt, though there be nothing
in our lives that men call sin, and little there of which our
consciences are as yet educated enough to be ashamed. Rent from God,
man lives to himself, and so is sunk in darkness.
And what shall I say about the third of the doleful triad of which
this pregnant emblem is the recognised symbol all the world over?
Surely, though earth be full of blessing, and life of possibilities
of joy, no man travels very far along the road without feeling that
the burden of sorrow is a burden that we all have to carry. There
are blessings in plenty, there is mirth more than enough. There is
'the laughter' which is 'the crackling of thorns' under a pot. There
are plenty of distractions and amusements, 'blessings more plentiful
than hope'; but yet the ground tone of every human life, when the
first flush of inexperience and novelty has worn off, apart from
God, is sadness, conscious of itself sometimes, and driven to all
manner of foolish attempts at forgetfulness, unconscious of itself
sometimes, and knowing not what is the disease of which it
languishes. There it is, like some persistent minor in a great piece
of music, wailing on through all the embroidery and lightsomeness of
the cheerfuller and loftier notes. 'Every heart knoweth its own
bitterness,' and every heart _has_ a bitterness of its own to
know.
I do not understand how it is that men who have no religion in them
can bear their own sorrows and see their neighbours' and not go mad.
Sometimes the world seems to me to be moving round its central sun
with a doleful atmosphere of sighs wherever it goes, and all the
mirth and stir and bustle are but like a thin crust of grass with
flowers upon it, cast across the sulphurous depths of some volcano
that may slumber for a while, but is there all the same.
Brother! you and I, away from Jesus Christ, have to face the
certainties of ignorance, of sin, of sorrow--ignorance unenlightened,
sin unconquered, sorrow uncomforted.
And then comes the other tragic, and yet most picturesque emblem in
the representation here: 'They _sit_ in darkness.' Yes! what
can they do, poor creatures? They know not where to go. The light
has left them, inactivity is a necessity. And so, with folded hands,
they wish for the day, or try to forget the night by lighting some
little torch of their own that only serves to make darkness visible,
and dies all too soon, leaving them to lie down in sorrow.
But, you say, 'What nonsense! Inactivity! look at the fierce energy
of life in our Western lands.' Well, grant it all, there may be
plenty of material activity attendant upon inward stagnation and
torpor. But, again, I would like to ask how much of the most
godless, commercial, artistic, intellectual activity of so-called
civilised and Christian countries is owing to the stimulus and
ferment that Jesus Christ brought. If you want to see how true it is
that men without Him _sit_ in the darkness, go to heathen
lands, and see the stagnation, the torpor, there.
Now, dear brethren, all this is true about us, in the measure in
which we do not participate by faith and love, welcoming Him into
our hearts in the illumination that Jesus Christ brings. And what I
want to do is to lay upon the hearts and consciences of each of us
here this thought, that the solemn, tragic picture of my text is the
picture of me, separate from Christ, however I may try to conceal it
from myself, and to mask it from other people by busying myself with
inferior knowledges, by avoiding to listen to the answer that
conscience gives to the question as to my moral character, and by
befooling myself with noisy joys and tumultuous pleasures, in which
there is no pleasure.