Incapable of Feeling

‘** Past feeling.”’ — Epu. iv. 19.

TuarT is a condition of most deadly impoverishment. To be incapable of noble emotion! I do not limit the impoverishment to incapacity of sorrow, -and still less to the inability to shed tears. There is often very deep feeling where tears are never seen.

There is a dry type of emotion, and it is often most poignant and profound. Bishop Westcott once said that God had denied him the helpful enduement of tears. And yet everybody knows that he was gifted with most sensitive sympathies, and he bore the griefs and carried the sorrows of all the countryside. Tears are not always the symbols of fine emotion, and their absence does not mean that there are no tidal movements of feeling in the depths of the heart. Indeed, the feeling may be all the more fervent because it is denied the expression of tears.

But at present I am thinking of the moral condition, when the capital of noble feeling begins to shrink, and the man is brought into a state of emotional bankruptcy. For instance, there is the fine feeling which registers the distinction between right and wrong. It is not so much a mental discernment as a moral sense. It is a kind of spiritual palate which tests and discriminates the moral qualities of moods and actions. Indeed, the patriarch Job used this very figure of speech when he asked, ‘“‘ Cannot my palate discern perverse things?’ He knew the perversity by its taste. He detected and loathed it, as the physical palate detects and rejects tainted food. But this fine palate can lose its power of discernment. We can abuse it. We can drug it. We can stupefy it until it becomes numb. Let an expert tea-taster defile his mouth with some strong alcoholic stimulant and his power of discrimination is lost. All teas taste alike, the good, the bad, and the indifferent, and he is incompetent to appreciate the delicate flavours of the excellent. And let a man drench his moral palate with strong doses of disobedience, and it will speedily lose its refinement, first of all becoming incapable of relishing the superlative things, and then mingling good and bad together in a common insensitiveness. The soul becomes past feeling.

It is even so with every kind of noble emotion which is purposed to be a safe director amid all the mixed and perplexing values of life. Our power of common sympathy is intended to be an extra sense by which we are to perceive the joys and griefs of our fellows. We are to taste the waters of their life, and according as they are sweet or bitter we are to weep with them that weep and rejoice with them that rejoice. But we can neglect our sympathies. We can pay them no attention. We can refuse to give them expression, and expression is the very oxygen by which alone they can survive. Deny the oxygen and they are smothered. They first become drowsy, and then they become numb. The soul is past feeling.

And pre-eminently is all this true of the noblest sense of the soul, our feeling for God. We cannot define this sense. We - cannot describe it. It is ‘a sense sublime of Something far more deeply interfused.” It is the feeling of a Presence. In the Christian life it is the fellowship of the Holy Ghost. And this holy sense can be drugged. Sin does it. Prayerlessness does it. Carelessness does it. Who is there among Christian believers who has not known how some unforgiven sin has clouded his sense of God the whole day long?

But it is the glory of our great Saviour that He can vitalise benumbed senses. He can restore withered limbs. He can raise the dead. He can break the bonds of sealed springs. ‘ For in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert.”