Part 3 (1/2)
Absent, they enrich us as those present cannot. And so the child who smiled upon us and then went away, the son and the daughter whose talents blossomed here to bear fruit above, the sweet mother's face, the father's gentle spirit--their going it was that set open the door of heaven and made on earth a new world. These all lived vicariously for us, and vicariously they died!
No deeply reflective nature, therefore, will be surprised that the vicarious principle is manifest in the Savior of the soul. Rejecting all commercial theories, all judicial exchanges, all imputations of characters, let us recognize the universality of this principle. G.o.d is not at warfare with himself. If he uses the vicarious principle in the realm of matter he will use it in the realm of mind and heart. It is given unto parents to bear not only the weakness of the child, but also his ignorance, his sins--perhaps, at last, his very crimes. But nature counts it unsafe to permit any wrong to go unpunished. Nature finds it dangerous to allow the youth to sin against brain or nerve or digestion without visiting sharp penalties upon the offender. Fire burns, acids eat, rocks crush, steam scalds--always, always.
Governments also find it unsafe to blot out all distinctions between the honest citizen and the vicious criminal. The taking no notice of sin keeps iniquity in good spirits, belittles the sanct.i.ty of law and blurs the conscience.
With G.o.d also penalties are warnings. His punishments are thorn hedges, safeguarding man from the thorns and thickets where serpents brood, and forcing his feet back into the ways of wisdom and peace.
For man's integrity and happiness, therefore, conscience smites and is smiting unceasingly. Therefore, Eugene Aram dared not trust himself out under the stars at night, for these stars were eyes that blazed and blazed and would not relent. But why did not the murderer, Eugene Aram, forgive himself? When Lady Macbeth found that the water in the basin would not wash off the red spots, but would ”the mult.i.tudinous seas incarnadine,” why did not Macbeth and his wife forgive each other?
Strange, pa.s.sing strange, that Shakespeare thought volcanic fires within and forked lightning without were but the symbols of the storm that breaks upon the eternal orb of each man's soul. If David cannot forgive himself, if Peter cannot forgive Judas, who can forgive sins?
”Perhaps the G.o.ds may,” said Plato to Socrates. ”I do not know,”
answered the philosopher. ”I do not know that it would be safe for the G.o.ds to pardon.” So the poet sends Macbeth out into the black night and the blinding storm to be thrown to the ground by forces that twist off trees and hiss among the wounded boughs and bleeding branches.
For poor Jean Valjean, weeping bitterly for his sins, while he watched the boy play with the b.u.t.tercups and prayed that G.o.d would give him, the red and h.o.r.n.y-handed criminal, to feel again as he felt when he pressed his dewy cheek against his mother's knee--for Jean Valjean is there no suffering friend, no forgiving heart? Is there no bosom where poor Magdalene can sob out her bitter confession? What if G.o.d were the soul's father! What if he too serves and suffers vicariously! What if his throne is not marble but mercy! What if nature and life do but interpret in the small this divine principle existing in the large in him who is infinite! [1] What if Calvary is G.o.d's eternal heartache, manifest in time! What if, sore-footed and heavy-hearted, bruised with many a fall, we should come back to the old home, from which once we fled away, gay and foolish prodigals! The time was when, as small boys and girls, with blinding tears, we groped toward the mother's bosom and sobbed out our bitter pain and sorrow with the full story of our sin.
What if the form on Calvary were like the king of eternity, toiling up the hill of time, his feet bare, his locks all wet with the dew of night, while he cries: ”Oh, Absalom! my son, my son, Absalom!” What if we are Absalom, and have hurt G.o.d's heart! Reason staggers. Groping, trusting, hoping, we fall blindly on the stairs that slope through darkness up to G.o.d. But, falling, we fall into the arms of Him who hath suffered vicariously for man from the foundation of the world.
[1] Eternal Atonement, p. 11.
GENIUS, AND THE DEBT OF STRENGTH.
”Paul says: 'I am a debtor.' But what had he received from the Greeks that he was bound to pay back? Was he a disciple of their philosophy?
He was not. Had he received from their bounty in the matter of art?
No. One of the most striking things in history is the fact that Paul abode in Athens and wrote about it, without having any impression made upon his imaginative mind, apparently, by its statues, its pictures or its temples. The most gorgeous period of Grecian art poured its light on his path, and he never mentioned it. The New Testament is as dead to art-beauty as though it had been written by a hermit in an Egyptian pyramid who had never seen the light of sun. Then what did he owe the Greeks? Not philosophy, not art, and certainly not religion, which was fetichism. Not a debt of literature, nor of art, nor of civil polity; not a debt of pecuniary obligation; not an ordinary debt. He had nothing from all these outside sources. The whole barbaric world was without the true knowledge of G.o.d. He had that knowledge and he owed it to every man who had it not. All the civilized world was, in these respects, without the true inspiration; and he owed it to them simply because they did not have it; and his debt to them was founded on this law of benevolence of which I have been speaking, which is to supersede selfishness, and according to which those who have are indebted to those who have not the world over.”--_Henry Ward Beecher_.
CHAPTER V.
GENIUS, AND THE DEBT OF STRENGTH.
Booksellers rank ”Quo Vadis” as one of the most popular books of the day. In that early era persecution was rife and cruelty relentless.
It was the time of Caligula, who mourned that the Roman people had not one neck, so that he could cut it off at a single blow; of Nero, whose evening garden parties were lighted by the forms of blazing Christians; of Vespasian, who sewed good men in skins of wild beasts to be worried to death by dogs. In that day faith and death walked together.
Fulfilling such dangers, the disciples came together secretly at midnight. But the spy was abroad, and despite all precautions, from time to time brutal soldiers discovered the place of meeting, and, bursting in, dragged the wors.h.i.+pers off to prison. Then a cruel stratagem was adopted that looked to the discovery of those who secretly cherished faith. A decree went forth forbidding the jailer to furnish food, making the prisoners 'dependent' upon friends without.
To come forward as a friend of these endungeoned was to incur the risk of arrest and death, while to remain in hiding was to leave friends to die of starvation. Then men counted life not dear unto themselves.
Heroism became a contagion. Even children dared death. An old painting shows the guard awakened at midnight and gazing with wonder upon a little child thrusting food between the iron bars to its father.
In the darkness the soldiers sleeping in the corridors heard the rustling garments of some maiden or mother who loved life itself less than husband or friend. These tides of sympathy made men strong against torture; old men lifted joyful eyes toward those above them.
Loving and beloved, the disciples shared their burdens, and those in the prison and those out of it together went to fruitful martyrdom.
When the flames of persecution had swept by and, for a time, good men had respite, Apollos recalled with joy the heroism of those without the prison who remembered the bonds of those within. With leaping heart he called before his mind the vast mult.i.tudes in all ages who so fettered through life--men bound by poverty and hedged in by ignorance; men baffled and beaten in life's fierce battle, bearing burdens of want and wretchedness, and by the heroism of the past he urged all men everywhere to fulfill that law of sympathy that makes hard tasks easy and heavy burdens light. Let the broad shoulders stoop to lift the load with weakness; let the wise and refined share the sorrows of the ignorant; let those whose health and gifts make them the children of freedom be abroad daily on missions of mercy to those whose feet are fettered; so shall life be redeemed out of its woe and want and sin through the Christian sympathy of those who ”remember men in the bonds as bound with them.”
Rejoicing in all of life's good things, let us confess that in our world-school the divine teachers are not alone happiness and prosperity, but also uncertainty and suffering, defeat and death.
Inventors with steel plates may make wars.h.i.+ps proof against bombs, but no man hath invented an armor against troubles. The arrows of calamity are numberless, falling from above and also shot up from beneath. Like Achilles, each man hath one vulnerable spot. No palace door is proof against phantoms. Each prince's palace and peasant's cottage holds at least one bond-slave. Byron, with his club-foot, counted himself a prisoner pacing between the walls of his narrow dungeon. Keats, struggling against his consumption, thought his career that of the galley-slave. The mother, fastened for years to the couch of her crippled child, is bound by cords invisible, indeed, but none the less powerful. Nor is the bondage always physical. Here is the man who made his way out of poverty and loneliness toward wealth and position, yet maintained his integrity through all the fight, and stood in life's evening time possessed of wealth, but in a moment saw it crash into nothing and fell under bondage to poverty. And, here is some Henry Grady, a prince among men, the leader of the new South, his thoughts like roots drinking in the riches of the North; his speech like branches dropping bounty over all the tropic states, seeming to be the one indispensable man of his section, but who in the midst of his career is smitten and, dying, left his pilgrim band in bondage.