In Quest of Light (II)

Sole Positive of night!

Antipathist of light!

Fate’s only essence! primal scorpion rod — The one permitted opposite of God! Condensed blackness and abysmal storm

Compacted to one sceptre

Arm the grasp enorm;

The Intercepter, The substance that still casts the shadow, death.

S. T. COLERIDGE

We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers of the darkness of this world.

ST. PAUL

14 N enemy hath done this.’ So Matt. L the master of the field, in our xiii’ 28 .//JL Lord’s parable, said to his servants, his people from the farm, when they came to tell him with troubled looks that the well-sown wheat-field proved to be dotted all over with tares. He was a good master, and a good agriculturist, and he had sowed exclusively good seed. But he had an enemy, and the enemy had stolen out in the night, and sowed bad seed in the furrows meant only for the good.

The parable may help us to see light not only in those problems of sin and salvation which were its first concern. It may give us one clue at least amidst the problems of world-evil, of the chaos in the cosmos.

The Holy Scriptures open with a Gen. i. majestic vision of creation. God plans an abode for His dear creature, Man, made in the Maker’s likeness. One wonderful ’ day ’ after another rolls out of darkness and into it again. And behold a cosmos of light, and order, and vastly varied life — and then at last man, made to be the happy friend of God. And all, from God’s view-point, for each thing’s purpose and end, is good.

Gen. iii. But what does the strange, deep narrative, picturing mighty realities like an Egyptian hieroglyphic inscription, go on forthwith to tell us? We see the cosmos invaded by a power which brings in chaos. An c enemy ’ appears, and approaches man, and man’s world. A will is at work, hostile to God — a subtle and deadly conscious influence, a being (not a thing, but a person) who hates God, and speaks lies about Him to man, and draws man into that dreadful discord with God which we call sin. Then mischief is seen in Nature too, for Nature is in deep connexion with man. The ground is ’ cursed.’ The world-order is disturbed. We turn a page or two, and we find Nature turning in ruin upon man, whelming him in the flood.

Thus man himself, and man’s world, are shewn to us as hurt and altered, stricken with disease and disaster, which were no more part of the Maker’s plan than fever or cancer is part of the plan of the body. In a noble little poem, * At a solemn Musick,’ Milton speaks in his own lofty way of this, using the musical imagery which he loved:

* Disproportion’*! sin

Jarr’d against Nature’s chime, and with harsh din Broke the fair music which all creatures made To their great Lord, whose love their motion sway’d In perfect diapason, while they stood In first obedience and their state of good.’

I have called this story of the Fall, in Genesis, a sort of hieroglyphic. Hieroglyphics set forth records, just as histories printed in alphabetical writing do. But hieroglyphics are not letters but pictures; and as such they seem to me to illustrate those first grand and profound pages of the Bible. There the foundation facts of man and the world are given to us under images and mysteries, in a manner different from common narrative, while true to the facts of God’s ways with creation and with man. Do they not give us an illuminating suggestion here? Do they not make it easier to think that, whatever there is of real evil in Nature, real disorder and disaster, real cruelty and ’ dreadfulness,’ it is not part of the Master’s plan at all? ‘An enemy hath done this.’ Yes, we are led up to the thought that a dread personal Power has been about ’ in the night,’ the lord of the darkness, and has tampered with the world. It is not too much to believe that he has been permitted to misguide, with subtle skill and power, the course and evolution of things. He has turned, for example, the innocent energies of animal life into strife and struggle growing into ferocity. He has somehow got leave to wield the motions of air, earth, and seas, so as to compass his evil purposes, as when he let loose the whirlwind upon the Markiv? family of Job, and when he worked the 39 Galilean waters into fury to overwhelm,

if it might be, the sleeping Christ. He crept into the course and development of humanity, and, in the earliest dawn of human things, perverted instincts of desire, innocent in themselves, into that self-will of the moral being which sets the being in antagonism to God.

Are we prepared to say, as the Sadducees

ram 8 sa so l°n& a?°> tiat ’ tnere is neither angel nor spirit ‘? That denial is as arbitrary, as unscientific, now as it was then — unless we moderns have acquired a knowledge of the unseen world which is practically omniscient. Less and less, in our day, do the wisest minds allow them selves in such sweeping denials. More and more they realize the vastness of what we do not know, and are humble about it. Now and then I am struck by words which own the probability of the very mystery I am speaking of, words from quarters far removed from * obsolete superstitions.’ Only lately I came upon the utterance of a thinker, altogether modern, forced from him by the facts of this world-war. He confesses himself convinced that its horrors, its deliberate and calculated savagery, can only be explained by the action of a mighty personal power of evil behind the scenes of the visible.

If we take Holy Scripture in any real sense as an authoritative guide to our thinking, can we hesitate over our answer to the question: Is a personal Adversary of God and of good thinkable? Not less but more, as the Book leads us out of the dawn of Revelation to its sunrise and its noon, that shadow falls across the scene. Beyond all question the Evil One was a tremendous reality to the Holy One Himself, and to the teachers whom He trained and inspired. Not it but he assailed Him with all subtlety of allurement in the

Lukeiv. desert, tempting Him through good to

evil, and incidentally, but seriously, claiming

a vast and mysterious permitted power over

Matt. xvi. human history. Not it but he spoke to the

22, 23 Christ a deadly suggestion through the

Luke Ps °^ Peter’ Not *’* but he was permitted

xxii. 3, 31 to put the Apostles to fiery tests, to possess

one of them fully and finally, and to drag

another into the great denial.

It is easy to spend badinage and jests upon this dark Form. Is it not worth the while to say that, supposing him to exist, it would inevitably be a part of his strategy to suggest to man that the thought is absurd, that he is not?

Why, in a book which is written to console, do I speak of this saddest of all sad mysteries? Not with the vain hope of explaining the unexplainable. Not as if I could answer Friday’s question to Crusoe. Not as if the bad thought or act, the horrible disaster, the world-ruining war, were made in themselves less evil because an invisible Enemy, an Evil One, is in the question. Not so. But then it is something to recognize at least this, that the crop of tares, the real harvest of wrong and misery, is not the unkind or careless sowing of the Master, but is done by an

Enemy. It sets the dread facts in another perspective. It lets us, in a sense, see light beyond them. It releases us from the agonizing question whether the immediate will of the true God is behind the shriek of the cyclone, the rage of the tiger, the stab of the assassin, the lust of the human fiend, the boundless desolation of a modern war. It is a less intolerable thing by far to think that the Enemy of the eternal Goodness has done it.

Then further the mind is relieved by this thought so far as it helps us to see that this awful interference of an evil personality in the Unseen resembles in kind, however incalculably greater it is in

’ / O

degree, evil facts with which we are all acquainted, and which we do not allow to destroy our faith. We read in history, we observe perhaps in our own experience, the dark phenomenon of a bad man permitted to disturb, to destroy, the peace and good of a family, of a nation, of a continent. He may be a mad Caligula, a soul-less Nero, a savage Timour, or he may be the * petty tyrant ’ who breaks his wife’s heart and turns his home into a hell. He is a mystery; every day he is permitted to have his way he is a mystery. ‘Why God no ’ stop him? We cannot tell. But every voice of reason as well as of faith tells us that over such mysteries of evil reigns and rules the infinite Mystery of good — silent, patient because eternal, waiting the time for retribution and restoration. So with the vaster fact, the cosmic evil, material and moral. It is permitted. It has not overcome the good, it has not dethroned God. He who sits on the throne is not defeated because, for a while, He permits it, seeing all things. * For a season,

Rom viii. need be,’ the cosmos suffers, * groaning

22 and travailing in pain.’ But it is under

the unsleeping eyes and the unfaltering hands of the All-Holy One, who is also, as such, for ever and of necessity, the Almighty. It is for a time. It is for a purpose, inscrutable but good. That purpose, ’ the end of the Lord,’ will be

james Disclosed above. It will be seen at length, by all conscious beings in all worlds, how eternal Goodness could overrule its dark Adversary.

Let our thought, as well as our heart,

PS. xci. abide in peace within ’ the shadow of the Almighty.’ Be patient; He will ’ subdue all things unto Himself.’ Even of the

Enemy who sows the tares the poet
truly says:

* ‘Tis Lucifer, the son of mystery;
And, since God suffers him to be,
He also is God’s minister,
And labours for some good
By us not understood.’

‘God suffers him to be.’ Our ultimate resort is sheer personal reliance on the Highest. The infinite Commander, the Kriegherr, the Lord of the spiritual War — in Him lies our final and immeasurable rest and hope. The campaign we do not understand. But we know HIM.