The Mystery

How long, LORD? Wilt Thou hide Thyself for ever? Wherefore hast Thou made all men for nought?

Tbf Book of Psalms

Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams? So careful of the type she seems,

So careless of the single life.

I falter where I firmly trod, And falling with my weight of cares Upon the great world’s altar-stairs

That slope thro’ darkness up to God,

It stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, And gather dust and chaff, and call To what I feel is Lord of all,

And faintly trust the larger hope.

In Mtmoriam

THE word ’ mystery ’ was the closing note of the last chapter. I wrote it there on purpose. Our chief thought had been the sheer agony which the war has inflicted upon poor human hearts. Here are these innumerable wrecks and deaths, these tremendous lists of c casualties.’ The pain of them, to those who love the sufferers, is made all the heavier, of course, by the recollection of the terrible means which, more in this conflict than ever before, have been used to maim and to destroy.

The heart trembles when our beloved fall asleep in the quiet bedroom, on the white pillow, fondly tended, cheered with text and prayer, whispering back a last word of perfect peace in the hush of listening love. Even where death is not in immediate question, we watch the physical distress of a racking malady, amidst every alleviating aid, with a mental sympathy which passes into physical pain in our selves. But alas for those who know that iz CHRISTUS CONSOLATOR

their dearest have suffered, have died, in the dreadful throng, the dreadful solitude, of the battle. And these black central shadows, as we have remembered, have the dark fringe all around them of troubles only less heavy, as beloved ones are thought of as maimedp or ’ missing,’ or imprisoned. How many are the wives, parents, sisters, who cannot for one waking hour get their thoughts away from the misery of it all?

But it is the mystery, rather than even the sheer misery, that I pause upon here. I must do so for myself, if I want to apply the least real consolation to these wounds. As I said before, if I would help, I must first share. And God knows that I do share, in the depth of the soul, the distressing sense of the mystery of the thing. Why is all this allowed to be? What is the matter, that this tremendous wreckage of human hearts is possible and is actually going on? Put this immense scene of pain, death, and waiting, side by side with the idea, which we try to believe to be true, of a universal order working for right and good. Put this wilderness of wrong and wretchedness beside the creed which seats almighty Love on the throne of existence. What are we to say? Is not the mystery absolute and intolerable? Can such things be, and can we yet believe, with the happy girl in Browning, that

* God’s in His heaven;
All’s right with the world*?

Can we speak so, with an unshaken
heart?

* Unshaken? ‘No; that cannot be. 6 At this also my heart trembleth, and is Job moved out of its place.’ All these wreck§ XXXV11- T and horrors, in which physical and moral dreadfulnesses go together, are just a fragment, a specimen, though a heavy and ragged one, of the whole great riddle of evil as we see it working in a world which we Christians yet say has a central and sovereign throne, on which sits neither a ruthless Despot, nor a soul-less First Cause, neither bad nor good. No, that seat is occupied, we affirm, by a Being infinitely conscious, infinitely present everywhere, living in all things while He also is sovereign over them, good beyond our highest dreams, perfectly just and perfectly kind, and whom we worship as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

It is a very ancient trouble, this riddle

of wrong and sorrow in a God-created

job ill. world. This was the torment of Job’s

l6’ 24 &c< mind in that majestic Biblical poem; it

made his soul even more miserable than

his grievously suffering body. It was this

which very nearly goaded Asaph, in the

seventy-third Psalm, to renounce his faith

PS. ixxiii. in a good God. ‘I had almost said even

(Prayer as tkey ‘Almost he had lost patience.

Book) Almost he had ’ reproached God.’

From many sides comes this temptation to troubled silence, to doubt, despair, denial. Now it is from ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw,’ from the universal war amongst animal existences, the malignant instruments with which the tiger, the cobra, and a host of other creatures, large or little, come into being. Now it is the desolating convulsions of land, sea, air,

‘When earthquakes swallow or when tempests sweep Towns to one grave, whole nations to the deep.’

Now, and oftener, and bringing a stronger and harsher challenge still, from further down in the darkness, it is the moral miseries of man’s world. We think of the silent horrors of treachery and cruelty, in dark places of the earth, uncivilized or civilized. We see in our souls, perhaps with our eyes, the helpless victims of the petty tyrant, whose lips quite possibly are specious with smooth economic maxims, and who is hard as the millstone. Then there is the world of woe created always anew, every day and night, by lust and by drink. Here and now are the evils, tempestuous, murderous, thunder ous, of war and battle, with their ghastly accompaniments, as possible to-day as when Sennacherib or Attila made a campaign — the fire, the plunder, the outrages much worse than death, let loose together on poor pretty villages and on harmless lives, while from far away comes, like a long echo of the local horrors, the sound of the wailings of the distant lovers of the fallen fighting-men. Probably my reader’s heart makes one note in that choir of sorrow.

We do our best, and rightly, to limit and reduce the vastness of the mystery of evil. We divide deeply between one sort of evil and another. On one side we set purely physical pain; this plainly, in countless cases, does not rise directly from moral wrong, and often it proves even necesgary in the cause of mercy and righteousi6 CHRISTUS CONSOL4TORness. We set in quite another column the fathomless evil of the will, the injustice, the falsehood, the hardness, the cruelty, the bestial violence, and at the back of it all the hideous selfishness, with which man can make man so miserable. Even within that dread class we can find, with solemn feelings, a mitigation of the mass of woe, as we see the grand results in moral good which can be struck out by the cruel blows of moral evil. We watch the meek but glorious victory of some patient sufferer, some Uncle Tom in the immortal slavestory, and the question is almost forced on us, whether such splendid goodness could come to being at all without such evil to give it call and cause.

But when in this direction, and in a hundred others, we have done our best to see the darkness less dark and less vast, do we not seem to listen again, and to hear a sigh, a groan, almost universal? We ask, is not finite existence, ( creation,’ the outcome of the fiat of an ultimate Author, believed to be good? Does it not, in our creed, rest for its continuance, moment by moment, on a sovereign will, thought to be perfect and acceptable? Then how comes into being this enormous mass of trouble, not

THE MTSTERr

merely in the shape of disciplinary pain, but of hideous injury and ill-will? Why this moral wrong, seething everywhere in manhood, and bursting out into all the varieties of conscious woe?

Yes, the heart is indeed shaken. Perhaps we are very near to * saying even as they.’ And part, no small part, of the answer must come for the present in that wise saying of the Rabbis of old: ‘Teach thy tongue to say, / do not know*

Friday asked Crusoe, in a memorable talk, ‘If God much stronger, why God no kill the devil? ‘And Crusoe found, so he tells us, that ’ though I was now an old man, yet I was but a young Doctor, and ill qualified for a solver of difficulties; and at first I could not tell what to say.’

‘Teach thy tongue to say, / do not know* Yet that confession, rightly made, will mean an ignorance not hopeless and sullen, but humble and reliant, at the feet of Him who knows, and whom to know is life. But we approach the fulness of that thought of peace by some further steps of recollection.