Part 2 (1/2)
Love's ears and eyes are proverbially acute.
One may be so wholly absorbed in something that he absolutely does not see the thing on which his eyes are turned. He does not hear the sounds that are plainly coming to his ear because his thought, back of that his heart, is elsewhere. Hearing, seeing is with the heart back of ears and eyes. G.o.d is spoken of as silent. Yet His silence may be simply our deafness. The truth is He is speaking all the time, but we are so absorbed that we do not hear. He is ever looking into our faces with His great, tender, deep eyes, but we are so wrapped up in something else that the gaze out of our eyes is vacant to that Face, and with keenest disappointment, so often repeated, He gets no answering glance.
Let anybody in doubt about the strict accuracy of this do some experimenting on himself, either with outer things or regarding G.o.d. Let him obey the inner voice in some particular that may perhaps cut straight across some fixed habit, and then watch very quietly for the result. It will come with surprising sureness and quickness. And the reason why is simple. The man is simply moving back into his native air, and of course all the powers work better.
This truth about the nerves of the ears and eyes running down into the heart is constantly being sounded out in the old Book. A famous bit in Isaiah puts it very clearly, and becomes a sort of pivot pa.s.sage of all others of this sort. That fine-grained, intense-spirited young Hebrew was caught in the temple one day by a sight of G.o.d. That wondrous sight held him with unyielding grip through all the after years. With the sight came the voice, and the message for the nation: ”Tell these people--you are continually hearing, but you do not listen, nor take in what you hear.
Your eyes are open, they look, but they do not see.” Then the voice said, ”Make their heart _fat_, and their ears _heavy_, and their eyes _shut_.”
That is to say, by continually telling them what they will continually refuse to hear because it does not suit the habit of their lives, he would be setting in motion the action that would bring these results. The ears that won't hear by and by _can't_ hear. The heart that will not love and obey gets into a state of fatty degeneration. The valves that refuse to move in loving obedience will get too heavy with fat to move at all. The fat clogs the hinges. There is the touch of a soft irony in the _form_ of the message. As though Isaiah's talking would affect their ears, whereas it is their refusal to hear that stupefies the hearing organ. In faithfulness G.o.d insists on telling them the truth even though He knows that their refusal to do will make things worse. But then G.o.d is never held back from good by the possible bad that may work out of it.
When Jesus came, the Jews, to whom His messages to the world were directly spoken, were in almost the last stages of that sort of thing. So Jesus, with the fine faithfulness of love blending with the keenest tact, spoke in language veiled by parable to overcome the intense prejudice against plainly spoken truth. They were so set against what He had to tell that the only way to get anything into them at all was so to veil its _form_ as to befool them into _thinking it truer_. Toward the close, His keenness, for which they were no match, joining with the growing keenness of their hate, made them see at once that the sharp edge of some of those last parables was turned toward themselves.
In explaining to His puzzled disciples about this form of teaching, with a sad irony that reveals both His heart's yearning and His mental keenness, He uses more than once with variations this famous bit from Isaiah. He makes the truth stand out more sharply by stating the opposite of what He desires, making the contrast between His words and His known desires so strong as not only to make plain the meaning intended, but to give it a sharper emphasis.
The result that began with ears and eyes quickly affected the _tongue_.
That is nature's path. The inner road from ear and eye is straight to the tongue. The tongue is the index of man's whole being. While through ear and eye he receives all that ever gets in, through the tongue his whole being is revealed. Of course his personality reveals itself very much otherwise. In the carriage of the body. Strikingly so in the look of the eye. The body itself, especially the face, becomes in time the mould of the spirit within. Yet the tongue--what is said, how it is said, what is _not_ said, the tone of voice--the tongue is the index of the spirit.
There is no stronger indication of mastery over one's powers than in control of the tongue. When G.o.d would break up man's first great ambitious scheme of a self-centred monopoly on the s.h.i.+nar plains, He simply touched his tongue. The first evidence of G.o.d's touch in the re-making of man on that memorable Pentecost day was upon his tongue.
The effect upon his tongue of the break with G.o.d has been radical and strange. Dumbness, and slowness or thickness of speech alternate with an unnatural sharpness. Sometimes the spittle has a peculiar oiliness that results in a certain slipperiness of statement. Sometimes it has a bitter, poisonous, acid quality that eats its way into the words. There is a queer backward movement in biting sometimes. Withal a strange looseness of speech regarding the holiest things, and the most awesome truths, and the Holy One Himself.
The moment a man gets a vision of G.o.d he is instantly conscious of something the matter with his tongue. The sight that comes to his eyes, the sound to his ears makes him painfully self-conscious regarding the defect in his tongue. Moses found himself slow-tongued. Isaiah felt the need of the cleansing coal for his tongue.
But man's whole inner mental process was affected. A peculiar sense of fear, of dread, is woven inextricably into the very fibre of man's being.
His first reported word after that break was, ”I was afraid.” That sense of fear--a horrid, haunting, nightmare thing--has affected all his thinking and planning and every-day speech. No phrase is oftener on man's tongue than ”I'm afraid.” Isaiah's cla.s.sic utterance about ears and eyes has a counterpart equally cla.s.sic from Paul's pen, about the effect of sin upon man's mental processes. A few lines in the letter to the Ephesian circle of churches give a sort of bill of details of the mental steps down that slope from the Eden gate.
Paul is urging these friends to live _no longer_ as they, in common with all the races, had been living, in ”the vanity of their mind, being darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of G.o.d, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardening of their hearts; who, being past feeling, gave themselves up to lasciviousness to make a greedy trade of all uncleanness.” Here are seven steps down. The first five are put in reverse order. Beginning where they have been, he traces the five steps back to the starting point, and then adds the two likely to follow with any who persist past this point.
The start of all sin is in the setting of one's self against G.o.d. Choosing some other way than His. It is called here ”hardening of the heart.” The native juices of the heart are drawn away from G.o.d and dry up. In this Book the heart is the seat of both affection and will. It is the pivotal organ of life. Any trouble there quickly and surely affects the whole being. Then follows ”ignorance.” Of course. The heart controls both ear and eye, the two great channels inward of knowledge. The hardening of the heart locks both doors. And hard on the heels of that comes ”_Alienated_ from the life of G.o.d.” That is, _cut off,_ shut out of fellows.h.i.+p and intimacy. Life is _union with G.o.d_. Through union G.o.d's life flows into us. Union is rooted in knowledge _and_ in sympathy, fellow-feeling, a common desire and purpose. The man snapping that tying cord cuts himself off.
The next step is peculiarly pathetic--”darkened in their understanding.”
The man has shut the shutters close, and pulled the shades down tight. Of course it's dark inside. He is unable to see. First unwilling, now unable.
If the only thing that can be gotten for use as light be _darkness_, how intense is that darkness! Then comes the pitiable result of acting as if darkness were man's native air--”the vanity of the mind.” That word vanity means aimlessness. The mind is still keen, even brilliant, but the guiding star is shut out, and that keen mind goes whirring aimlessly around.
Sometimes a very earnest aimlessness. The man's on a foggy sea without sun or star. The compa.s.s on board is useless.
But more pitiable and pathetic yet; indeed utterly laughable if it were not so terribly serious and pathetic:--this man in the dark proceeds gravely to decide that this darkness of his own making is a superior sort of light, and bows low in wors.h.i.+p of its maker. He has even been known to write brilliant essays on the light-giving power of blinding darkness, with earnest protests at the evil of this thing commonly called light.
Sometimes having carefully cottoned up the shutters that no sc.r.a.p of sun light or sun warmth may get in, he strikes a friction match, and sits warming himself, and eloquently sets forth his own greatness as shown by the match, _friction_ match. Most of this sort of light and heat is of the friction sort.
Then with reluctant hand, one who knows Paul's tender heart can well believe, the curtain is drawn aside for the last two stages; the grosser, gutter, animal stages, which, not always by any means, but all too commonly follow. ”Past feeling!” The delicate sense of feeling about right and purity dulls and goes. The fine inner judgment blunts and leaves. The shrinking sensitiveness toward the dishonorable and impure loses its edge and departs. _Then_--pell mell, like a pack of dogs down a steep hill, follows the last--”lasciviousness,” the purest, holiest things in the gutter-slime, and then, cold-blooded, greedy trading in these things.
That's the picture painted in shadows of Rembrandt blackness, newly blackened, of the effect in man himself of turning away from G.o.d.
Now Jesus is the music of G.o.d's heart sounding in man's ears anew, that he may be wooed back the old road to the Eden life. Jesus is the face of G.o.d, close up, looking tenderly, yearningly, into man's face, that his eye may be caught and held, and his heart be enchained.
<u>Sin's Brood.</u>
The second great result of that Eden break has been in _the growth of sin_. In the seventeenth century after that it was said that man's heart was a breeding place of thoughts whose pictured forms were bad, only bad, with no spots of good, nor spurts of good. A thousand years later, Moses giving the Hebrew tribes the ten commandments, adds a crowd of particulars, some of them very grewsome, which serve as mirrors to reveal the common practice of his age. The slant down of those first centuries has evidently been increasing in its downward pitch.
More than a thousand years later yet, there is a summary made by Paul that reveals the stage reached by sin in his day. Probably no one knew the world of his time, which has proved to be the world's crisis time, as did Paul the scholar and philosopher of Tarsus. Himself a city man, well bred and well schooled, a world traveller, with acute, disciplined powers of observation, and a calm scholarly judgment, he had studied every phase of life cultured and lowly.