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I have in my portfolio an
engraving, cut from some illustrated newspaper, representing Mr Redgrave's
noble picture of the "Awakened Conscience;" a coarse scrap of print bought
for a penny at an old book-stall. Absurd to keep such a thing so
carefully, is it not? I don't know that. I have walked in great galleries,
and seen many a broad canvas filled by the cunning hand of the painter
with lines of loveliness and hues of various light, but I do not remember
having ever met any-thing in the form of art that so smote upon the inmost
chords of my soul. It is true I have shewn it to others, and they saw
nothing in it at all; but is that any reason why I, who have found so much
in it and got so much from it, should not preserve and cherish it?
A man's own history is the
greatest of all histories to him. Mizraim may cure wounds, and Pharoah be
sold for balsams, but these ''mutations of the world" do not affect us.
Each of us has his own history and life to fulfil—we shall never have
another; and all circumstances, however mean in themselves, which affect
this history of ours, take on thence an importance which nothing else
could give them. The habit which many men have got of going through the
world apologetically, as if conniving at their own existence, and ready to
give up their distinctive feelings and ideas at the call of any person or
of every person, is quite distinct from New Testament humility, and may
sometimes lead to a baseness of spirit very dangerous to all New Testament
graces and virtues. It is a thing to be opposed, were there no other
reason, because of the vast amount of enjoyment which men lose who are
thus liable to be pooh-poohed by others. Two-thirds of a man's pleasures
are peculiar to himself—they are "intimate delights," with which a
stranger may not intermeddle; and if you attempt to force them upon
others, the whole flavour and aroma evaporates and is gone. Most men who
have attained middle age will be found regretting nothing so much as the
way in which they have sacrificed true and pure delights, day after day,
to the opinions of a world which yet they too much despise. Better for
them to have kept the child's heart, that enjoys its own things while it
admires those of others, than thus to feel the stony heart closing round
it in gradual petrifaction and. accretion.
But we lose better things
than enjoyment by a foolish conformity to things around us, and a careless
neglect of God's dealings with us and our own inner history. All moral
life is continuous; consciously or unconsciously, it progresses on a plan,
and our future is built upon our past. On our past it is built, not on
another man's, nor on that of all other men, however rich and affluent
their experience may be, and how poor soever our own. It is all we
have—our one poor talent—so let us lay it quickly out to usury. There is
no more important rule than this in that process of self-education which
is every man's business. We find many people who continue with patient
assiduity for years together at studies and pursuits from which they get
no good in the world, and for which they have neither enthusiasm nor
liking; and when you ask the reason, they say that these studies are
universally approved, or that they were recommended to them by their
parents, or perhaps, if you have to do with the more perverse and
eccentric kind of stupidity, that such and such an eminent man had risen
to fame by devoting himself to this particular study, and no other; and
since that fig-tree bore figs, why should not our thistles do the same?
Now, the most grievous thing about this is that these very people have in
them than which, if they were not afraid or ashamed to bring it out, would
give them, too, a place and a name in God's world—a place now, and a name
at the revelation of the sons of God. There is an unfulfilled work waiting
for every man to do, which no other man in the world can do but himself.
If he succeeds in doing it, his work shall abide, and he shall receive a
reward; but if he fails, it must remain undone for ever, and there results
what Buskin calls the saddest spectacle in all this burden-bearing and
sin-groaning world, ''the city that is not set on an hill, the lamp that
giveth light to none that are in the house." If every lamp were content
honestly to illuminate its own circle of immediately surrounding darkness,
what a bright world would this become ! If every man would do the duties
and enjoy the pleasures that lie to his hand, how would the load of life
be lightened and the dull pain of conscience appeased! But if men are not
faithful in that which is least and nearest them, how shall they enter
into the distant joy of their Lord?
Yet, if this failure is
often from mere want of honesty and conscientiousness, it is sometimes
also, I am persuaded, from want of wisdom in restricting and limiting
oneself to that which has value for oneself. Take the case of reading.
"Beware the man of one book," is an old advice, which means, in so far as
the saying is true at all, "Beware of the man who concentrates himself,
who makes what he reads his own." Some men are "general lovers" in
literature—they have no preferences. Ear be such men from our loved and
cherished shelves! The true reader is he whose history may be gathered
from his books, whose life lies folded in that dingy duodecimo or more
modern octavo. But in this matter of reading it is emphatically true that
each man has his own history, if he would only confess it. One of my
friends, who in his tastes rather affects the learned and the antique, and
loves Augustine and Thomas a Kempis above almost all hooks, acknowledged
to me lately that one of the most powerful impulses his inner life ever
received was from the reading of a novel—a religious novel—a popular
religious novel—a novel by a modern American authoress. Now, such cases
are exceedingly common. And what are people to do with them ? Are they to
suppress the fact, and praise only the stupid standard works, from which
they, at least, have never got any good—have, in fact, never got anything
at all? Or are they, on the other hand, like some great authors in this
unbashful age, to insist loudly that the world has been mistaken in its
standard works, and that they and their new friends are the men, and
wisdom shall die with them? There is surely a medium to be found
somewhere. But let us, at all events, not forget that a man's own history
is of the first importance to him, and whatever hook (or man or thing) has
been the minister of God to him for good has a special claim upon him and
an eternal connexion with his existence.
Let us try how these not
very novel remarks bear upon the question of personal religion. One of the
most eminent preachers I know—a man of strange and wayward sublimity, who
dwells in the pulpit as in a region of intellectual mist and darkness,
illuminated at intervals by a startling conflagration of light—is in the
habit of telling his hearers that every one of them, whether converted or
not, has a religious history. I am inclined to believe that this is true
of even the most godless man who has come to adult years, however much his
soul be trodden into worldliness by respectable sin, or trampled into mire
by the rush of swinish sensualities. There is a soft spot in every heart:
would that we could find it! But the man guards it jealously and fiercely,
with an instinctive feeling that this is the very citadel and sacred part
of the soul, which no rude theological hands may touch, and no human eye
must look upon. Pastors have many strange stories to tell of those who
have worn, month after month and year by year, an aspect of utter
composure or restless defiance, while all the while the inner spirit was
trembling on the verge of convictions that came at last with a rush like a
pent-up sea. Our theology recognises these admonitory feelings in the
breast of the unconverted as dealings of God with man—as the strivings of
His Divine Spirit, binding upon us a new responsibility, and conveying a
special encouragement and call. We do not, therefore, feel it necessary to
make any distinction among those whom we address, when we suggest to all
who have had religious feelings or convictions of any sort, to give most
earnest heed to these particular convictions and feelings, and to follow
them forth. The danger of spiritual desultoriness is very great. In an age
when the curse of itching ears is so common, when there are such endless
opportunities for gratifying the prurient vagabondism of idle professors
of the gospel, and innumerable utterances ready to drown, in excellent but
irrelevant music, the still, small voice that has spoken to the heart, it
comes to be really one of the most important practical advices that can be
given to men, especially young men— When God puts a thread into your hand,
follow it. Remember, the voice of conscience is an authoritative voice;
and, among many truths, all equally revealed in the written "Word, that
claims a rightful precedence in your regard which has come to you, not in
word only, but with power. Do not be led away by every new form or phase
in which truth is presented; do not alter your point of view with every
change of ideas that others may bring before you. Especially, do not seek
for such new ways ; above all, do not neglect the old. God has been
dealing with you already from your childhood. All those old providences
and experiences were the operation of His hand; it is His finger that has
been laid upon your conscience, His light that has flashed upon your eye.
All God's truth is venerable and sacred—manet in eternum; but the word
that has been more specially spoken to you, is shall judge you at the last
day. And as it is your duty to obey it, it is your wisdom. Many men can
look back with the bitterest regret on wasted years, spent in a vain and
idle running about from truth to truth, knocking first at one door of
happiness and then at another, while no one opened unto us because we did
not wait, and watch, and kneel at any one of them. And so that ancient
doom has, in our modern days, become rather the rule than the exception,
that men are '' ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of
the truth." It is not that men have too little light— they have too much,
more than they know what to do with, or have honesty enough to meet. And
when the light that is in us is darkness, how great is that darkness ! If
men had grace given them wisely to discern what God requires of them—not
of other men—and prayerfully and humbly to follow out and do that, their
light would shine and broaden unto the perfect day. But when light outruns
conscience, conscience becomes blind to light.
There are two directions in
which danger may lie. First, there is the very great risk which men run by
suppressing their own scruples of conscience, because they are not
endorsed by Christians in general. It is in the inner world as in earthly
battle-fields; the real contest is at a few points, and if these are lost
or neglected, no matter how much else is gained. And what these points
are, none knows but the man himself. How much would the world be
astonished if it knew the trifles, as it might justly enough hold them,
upon which the moral life of a human being may turn and hinge ; the
strange personal scruples which have become to him the Hugoumont of his
fate! But woe to him if he flinch from his post because he must maintain
it alone! And ill for those through whose overbearing knowledge this weak
brother perishes, for whom Christ died!
Then, secondly, there is
the negative danger of not suppressing the voice of conscience, but
neglecting or overlaying it; as when we let the afternoon sermon drive out
the impression made by that of the forenoon, because the afternoon,
equally with the forenoon discourse, is the truth of God; or go to a
missionary meeting, and, in the abundance of intelligence and variety of
motives presented, lose the too slight but genuine view that we already
had of the nobility of the work. This danger of evaporation of religious
feeling by spreading it over too broad a surface, is one well known in the
experience of all ages. The complaint of Thomas a Kempis that the heart
tends constantly to waste and dissipate itself on all around, [Defluere in
omnia.] may recall to us the older prayer of a greater saint, ''Unite my
heart to fear Thy name;" and both together suggest the desirableness for
us weaker men of drawing our religious life into a comparatively narrow
compass, and cultivating with care our own little vineyard in the great
garden of the soul.
There is, of course, a
danger of pushing this principle of individuality in religion too far, or,
rather, of taking it up in a spurious and unworthy form. We may so
entrench ourselves in ourselves as to lose all the rich blessings of
Christian converse and communion. We may fall into a weak habit of
undervaluing the most magnificent and glorious of all studies—the science
of Christian theology. We may cut ourselves off, by our own folly, from
many a help and comfort provided by the Lord of the way for the
refreshment of pilgrims. We may stand alone, until we fall. Nor is this
the only danger. There is much risk, in these days, of men hearkening to
their own wayward fancies instead of to the revealed truth of God—of
following a light within, distorted and refracted in the medium of their
own minds, instead of that one light from heaven, "borrowed thence to
light us thither." A well-known American preacher says finely, but not
quite wisely, "A man has a right to picture God according to his need,
whatever it be." True, provided the picturing be within that great and
wondrous Name by the which He hath made Himself known, and not otherwise ;
but within that Name, revealed in Christ, there are all riches and
treasures of overflowing compassion and multitudinous grace, and help for
every time of need. A better saying, and one more directly falling in with
our too rambling suggestions, is that other, also from Ward Beecher's
"Thoughts" — "Wherever you have seen God pass, mark it, and go and sit in
that window again." Do not abuse other windows; do not undervalue any
lattice from which the light of the Eternal Countenance may be discerned.
But here you have met with God, and here you will often return, and look,
and linger, and look again. It may be dim and dingy to others; to you it
will be like the chamber where they laid Christian in the world-famous
tale—it looked toward the sun-rising, "and the name of that chamber was
Peace, and there he awoke and sang." |
