Part 18 (1/2)
Some hope arises when we observe that this experience which so perplexes us is fully acknowledged in the Bible. The popular supposition is that when one opens the Scripture he finds himself in a world of constant and triumphant faith. No low moods and doubts can here obscure the trust of men; here G.o.d is always real, saints sing in prison or dying see their Lord enthroned in heaven. When one, however, really knows the Bible, it obviously is no serene record of untroubled faith. It is turbulent with moods and doubt.
Here, to be sure, is the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians, on Immortality, but here too is another cry, burdened with all the doubt man ever felt about eternal life, ”That which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; and man hath no preeminence above the beasts” (Eccl. 3:19). The Scripture has many exultant pa.s.sages on divine faithfulness, but Jeremiah's bitter prayer is not excluded: ”Why is my pain perpetual, and my wound incurable, which refuseth to be healed? Wilt thou indeed be unto me as a deceitful brook, as waters that fail?” (Jer. 15:18). The confident texts on prayer are often quoted, but there are cries of another sort: Job's complaint, ”Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him” (Job 23:8); Habakkuk's bitterness, ”O Jehovah, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear?
I cry unto thee of violence and thou wilt not save” (Hab. 1:2). The Bible is no book of tranquil faith. From the time when Gideon, in a mood like that of mult.i.tudes today, cried, ”Oh, my Lord, if Jehovah is with us, why then is all this befallen us?” (Judges 6:13) to the complaint of the slain saints in the Apocalypse, ”How long, O Master, the holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood” (Rev.
6:10), the Bible is acquainted with doubt. It knows the searching, perplexing, terrifying questions that in all ages vex men's souls. If the Psalmist, in an exultant mood, sang, ”Jehovah is my shepherd,” he also cried, ”Jehovah, why casteth thou off my soul? Why hidest thou thy face from me?” (Psalm 88:14).
No aspect of the Scripture could bring it more warmly into touch with man's experience than this confession of fluctuating moods. At least in this the Bible is our book. Great heights are there, that we know something of. Psalmists sing in adoration, prophets are sure of G.o.d and of his coming victory; apostles pledge in sacrifice the certainty of their belief, and the Master on Transfiguration Mountain prays until his countenance is radiant. And depths are there, that modern men know well. Saints cry out against unanswered prayer and cannot understand how such an evil, wretched world is ruled by a good G.o.d; in their bitter griefs they complain that G.o.d has cast them off, and utterly forgotten and, dismayed, doubt even that a man's death differs from a dog's. This is our book. For the faith of many of us, however we insist that we are Christians, is not tranquil, steady, and serene.
It is moody, occasional, spasmodic, with hours of great a.s.surance, and other hours when confidence sags and trust is insecure.
II
Faith so generally is discussed as though it were a creed, accepted once for all and thereafter statically held, that the influence of our moods on faith is not often reckoned with. But the moods of faith are the very pith and marrow of our actual experience. When a Christian congregation recite together their creedal affirmation, ”I believe in G.o.d,” it _sounds_ as though they all maintained a solid, constant faith. But when in imagination, one breaks up the congregation and interprets from his knowledge of men's lives what the faith of the individuals actually means, he sees that they believe in G.o.d not evenly and constantly, but more or less, sometimes very much, sometimes not confidently at all. Our faith in G.o.d is not a static matter such as the recitation of a creed suggests. Some things we do believe in steadily. That two plus two make four, that the summed angles of a triangle make two right angles--of such things we are unwaveringly sure. No moods can shake our confidence; no griefs confuse us, no moral failures quench our certainty. Though the heavens fall, two and two make four! But our faith in G.o.d belongs in another realm. It is a vital experience. It involves the whole man, with his chameleon moods, his glowing insights, his exalted hours, and his dejected days when life flows sluggishly and no great thing seems real.
This experience of variable moods in faith does not belong especially to feeble folk, whose ups and downs in their life with G.o.d would ill.u.s.trate their whole irresolute and flimsy living. The great believers sometimes know best this tidal rise and fall of confidence.
Elijah one day, with absolute belief in G.o.d, defied the hosts of Baal and the next, in desolate reaction, wanted to die. Luther put it with his rugged candor, ”Sometimes I believe and sometimes I doubt.” John Knox, at liberty to preach, ”dings the pulpit into blads” in his confident utterance; but the same Knox recalled that, in the galleys, his soul knew ”anger, wrath, and indignation which it conceived against G.o.d, calling all his promises in doubt.” The Master himself was not a stranger to this experience. He believed in G.o.d with unwavering a.s.surance, as one believes in the s.h.i.+ning of the sun. But the fact that the sun perpetually s.h.i.+nes did not imply that every day was a suns.h.i.+ny day for him. The clouds came pouring up out of his dark horizons and hid the sun. ”Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say?” (John 12:27). And once the fog drove in, so dense and dark that one would think there never had been any sun at all. ”My G.o.d, my G.o.d, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46).
This experience of fluctuating moods is too familiar to be denied, too influential to be neglected. There can be no use in hiding it from candid thought behind the recitation of a creedal formula. There may be great use in searching out its meaning. For there are ways in which this common experience, at first vexatious and disquieting, may supply solid ground for Christian confidence.
III
In dealing with these variant moods of faith we are not left without an instrument. We have _the sense of value_. We discern not only the _existence_ of things, but their _worth_ as well. When, therefore, a man has recognized his moods as facts, he has not said all that he can say about them. Upon no objects of experience can the sense of value be used with so much certainty as upon our moods. _We know our best hours when they come._ The lapidary, with unerring skill, learns to distinguish a real diamond from a false, but his knowledge is external and contingent, compared with the inward and authoritative certainty with which we know our best hours from our worst. Our great moods carry with them the authentic marks of their superiority.
Experience readily confirms this truth. We all have, for example, _cynical and sordid moods_. At such times, only the appet.i.tes of physical life seem much to matter; only the things that minister to common comfort greatly count. When Sydney Smith, the English cleric, writes, ”I feel an ungovernable interest in my horses, my pigs, and my plants. But I am forced and always was forced to task myself up to an interest in any higher objects,” most of us can understand his mood.
We grow obtuse at times to all that in our better moods had thrilled us most. Nature suffers in our eyes; great books seem dull; causes that once we served with zest lose interest, and personal relations.h.i.+ps grow pale and tame, From such mere dullness we easily drift down to cynicism. Music once had stirred the depths, but now our spirits tally with the scoffer's jest, ”What are you crying about with your Wagner and your Brahms? It is only horsehair sc.r.a.ping on catgut.” Man's most holy things may lose their grandeur and become a b.u.t.t of ridicule.
When the mood of Aristophanes is on, we too may hoist serious Socrates among the clouds, and set him talking moons.h.i.+ne while the cynical look on and laugh. The spirit that ”sits in the seat of the scornful” is an ancient malady.
But every man is thoroughly aware that these are not his best moods.
From such depleted att.i.tudes we come to worthier hours; _real life_ arrives again. Nature and art become imperatively beautiful; moral causes seem worth sacrifice, and before man's highest life, revealed in character, ideal, and faith, we stand in reverence. These are our great hours, when spiritual values take the throne, when all else dons livery to serve them, and we find it easy to believe in G.o.d.
Again, we have _crushed and rebellious moods_. We may have been Christians for many years; yet when disaster, long delayed, at last descends, and our dreams are wrecked, we _do_ rebel. Complaint rises hot within us. Joseph Parker, preacher at the City Temple, London, at the age of sixty-eight could write that he had never had a doubt.
Neither the goodness of G.o.d nor the divinity of Christ, nor anything essential to his Christian faith had he ever questioned. But within a year an experience had fallen of which he wrote: ”In that dark hour I became almost an atheist. For G.o.d had set his foot upon my prayers and treated my pet.i.tions with contempt. If I had seen a dog in such agony as mine, I would have pitied and helped the dumb beast; yet G.o.d spat upon me and cast me out as an offense--out into the waste wilderness and the night black and starless.” No new philosophy had so shaken the faith of this long unquestioning believer. But his wife had died and he was in a heartbroken mood that all his arguments, so often used on others, could not penetrate. He believed in G.o.d as one believes in the sun when he has lived six months in the polar night and has not seen it.
These heartbroken moods, however, are not our best. Out of rebellious grief we lift our eyes in time to see how other men have borne their sorrows off and built them into character. We see great lives s.h.i.+ne out from suffering, like Rembrandt's radiant faces from dark backgrounds. We see that all the virtues which we most admire--constancy, patience, fort.i.tude--are impossible without stern settings, and that in time of trouble they find their aptest opportunity, their n.o.blest chance. We rise into a new mood, grow resolute not to be crushed, but, as though there were moral purpose in man's trials, to be hallowed, deepened, purified. The meaning of Samuel Rutherford's old saying dawns upon us, ”When I am in the cellar of affliction, I reach out my hand for the king's wine.” And folk, seeing us, it may be, take heart and are a.s.sured that G.o.d is real, since he can make a man bear off his trial like that and grow the finer for it. These are our great hours too, when the rains descend, and the winds blow, and the floods come, and beat upon our house, and it is founded on a rock!
Once more, we have hours of _discouragement about the world_. The more we have cared for moral causes and invested life in their advancement, the more we are desolate when they seem to fail. Some rising tide in which we trusted turns to ebb again, injustice wins its victories, the people listen to demagogues and not to statesmen, social causes essential to human weal are balked, wars come and undo the hopes of centuries. Who does not sometimes fall into the Slough of Despond?
Cavour, disheartened about Italy, went to his room to kill himself.
John Knox, dismayed about Scotland, in a pathetic prayer ent.i.tled, ”John Knox with deliberate mind to his G.o.d,” wrote, ”Now, Lord put an end to my misery.” We generally think of Luther in that intrepid hour when he faced Charles V at Worms; but he had times as well when he was sick with disappointment. ”Old, decrepit, lazy, worn out, cold, and now one-eyed,” so runs a letter, ”I write, my Jacob, I who hoped there might at length be granted to me, already dead, a well-earned rest.”
During the Great War, this mood of discouragement has grown familiar.
Many can understand what Robert Louis Stevenson meant when he wrote, of the Franco-Prussian war, ”In that year, cannon were roaring for days together on French battlefields, and I would sit in my isle (I call it mine after the use of lovers) and think upon the war, and the pain of men's wounds, and the weariness of their marching.... It was something so distressing, so instant, that I lay in the heather on the top of the island, with my face hid, kicking my heels for agony.”
But these dismayed hours are not our best. As Bunyan put it, even Giant Despair has fainting fits on suns.h.i.+ny days. In moods of clearer insight we perceive out of how many Egypts, through how many round-about wilderness journeys, G.o.d has led his people to how many Promised Lands. The Exodus was not a failure, although the Hebrews, disheartened, thought it was and even Moses had his dubious hours; the mission of Israel did not come to an ign.o.ble end in the Exile, although mult.i.tudes gave up their faith because of it and only prophets dared believe the hopeful truth. The crucifixion did not mean the Gospel's end, as the disciples thought, nor did Paul, imprisoned, lose his ministry. _Nothing in history is more a.s.sured than this, that only men of faith have known the truth._ And in hours of vision when this fact s.h.i.+nes clear we rise to be our better selves again. What a clear ascent the race has made when wide horizons are taken into view! What endless possibilities must lie ahead! What ample reasons we possess to thrust despair aside, and to go out to play our part in the forward movement of the plan of G.o.d!
”Dreamer of dreams? we take the taunt with gladness, Knowing that G.o.d beyond the years you see, Has wrought the dreams that count with you for madness Into the texture of the world to be.”