The Little Sanctuaries of Life

“Thus saith the Lord, Though I have cast them far away among the heathen, and although I have scattered them among the countries, yet will I be to them a little sanctuary in the countries where they shall come.” — Ezekiel xi. 16.

The prophet stood, as it were, upon the heights of Hebrew history and pointed to the disastrous exile. Yet into the cloud of the exile he sent the sunbeam of a promise. We may try to realize and understand that promise, not as it issued from the prophet’s lips, but as the exiled Jew laid claim to it in his necessity and distress in Babylon. The child of Israel has left Jerusalem behind. He has travelled far away from the holy city. As he took his departure he paused and lingered on the Mount of Olives, and looked back on the great temple which he was to see no more. There it stood in all its sacred splendor. It was the holiest spot of all the earth to him. It was the seat of his Jehovah’s presence. By rite and symbol, by decoration and image, the sign was given everywhere in it that God was there. We see the exile as he gazes with strained eyes and breaking heart, and then turns wearily away, and day after day, week after week, plods eastward across the desert. Every heavy step takes him farther from the shining sanctuary. And at last the sum of all his heavy steps brings him to Babylon. He enters into the heathen city and his whole heart sinks, for there is no sanctuary of Jehovah here. There are fantastic temples which bewilder him. He hears strange hymns upon the foreign air. He sees faces kindling with ideas which he cannot understand. Gods with mysterious names bewilder him, but no one knows his God. His soul sinks within him. Has he then been carried into a region where Jehovah’s power does not reach? Has he left his God behind him as he has lost sight of the great sanctuary on the sacred hill. And then comes to him Ezekiel’s promise: “Thus saith the Lord, I will be to them a little sanctuary in the countries where they shall come.” Before he has comprehended its exact meaning, he has caught its spirit. It brings him comfort. It makes the air less foreign. He is not totally in exile. And so he gathers courage in his heart.

As we stand off and look at the exile and his acceptance of God’s promise, two facts are very distinct, and they must go together. One of them is the centralness and undisturbed supremacy of Jerusalem. It still remains the great sanctuary. This which is given in Babylon, whatever it may be, is the “little sanctuary.” The sacredness which the Jew had always felt in the city of his fathers is not abolished. It is not declared that places are indifferent, and that this Babylon is just as truly the seat of the life of God as is the town of David. Sacredness is not spread in simple indiscriminateness over the earth. And yet — this is the second fact — it is declared that God’s presence cannot be confined in one small place. The sacredness is too mysterious, too subtle, too personal, to be shut up. It must go forth wherever those who needed it and could receive it went. However it might hold fast to its fountain, it must flow abroad, the same water of refreshment, and make itself reservoirs wherever there were thirsty lips.

These were the two truths — the unchanged separateness and centralness of the sacred city, and also the power of extension and expansion by which, wherever there was a child of Israel, there was a true presence of the God of Israel, wherever there was a devout Jew there was a little sanctuary of Jehovah.

Something which lets us understand this is familiar to our modern thought. Wherever there is an American, there is America, we say. In foreign lands, in despotisms, and in deserts, stands the citizen of our free land with its protection over him, and, more than that, with its genius in him, and he is still American. Still back across the ocean is the country which he loves; still he remembers how its shores sank down into the west as he sailed out into the sea. He knows it is still there — the great America without which these little Americas in which the exile and the travellers live could have no reality. But they are real, and he who lives in them lives in the double fact that his country is definitely set here in the world’s map, and also that her power and her spirit reach wherever her children go. So where the civilized man goes, there is civilization; where the artistic man goes, there is art; where the free man goes, there is freedom burning in the depths of his free soul. Still each of these great interests has its own central home and shrine. Still there are parts of the earth where if one of these interests should perish, the flame would sink and tremble if it did not quite go out through all the world. But of them all the two facts are both true. They have their fixed homes and their power of expansion. They are supremely here, and yet they cannot be exclusively and solely here; wherever humanity in its wanderings builds them a channel, they will go, still feeding themselves to their remotest reaches from the fountain and the source at home.

Does not this let us feel how it was with the Jews at Babylon? One of them there remembered in his desolation the promise which had fallen on his ears as he was passing out of his beloved Jerusalem. As he remembered he looked up, and lo! a little sanctuary built itself about him; subtle, impalpable, invisible, so that no Babylonian’s eye could see it, so that the scornful heathen who jostled the poor stranger on the street did not feel its walls. The despot who insulted his wretched slave never dreamed of the peace in which his slave’s soul was enshrined and perfectly protected from his insolence. But it was there, this little sanctuary, built after the pattern of the great one in Jerusalem, and full of the same conscious, realized presence of God. When l80 THE LITTLE SANCTUARIES OF LIFE.

he had once found that, the bitterest bitterness of exile was gone for him.

And now let us turn from him to our own lives, and ask ourselves what there is in them which corresponds to that which Jehovah promised to his people by the mouth of Ezekiel. What I have said will indicate, I hope, my meaning when I speak of the little sanctuaries of life. There are in life, just as there were in the great East, certain regions which are definitely and absolutely sacred. In them religion and the certainty of God’s presence are at home. There all highest thoughts and motives naturally abound. And then, outside those regions, there are outlying tracts of life, what we are apt to call secular, which seem to be destitute at least of the consciousness of spiritual interests. Into them our circumstances, like Babylonian conquerors, drive us. And the discovery which changes everything is that in them, in what seem to be the heathen, hopeless countries, the soul may have its company with God, its spiritual homes and foods. Those are its little sanctuaries. Still the peculiarly distinctively religious region stands apart. The hour of prayer, the place of worship, the study of the Bible, the quiet meditation, — they make together the great sanctuary; but the home, the shop, the work, the study, the social circle, — these are the little sanctuaries, in each of which the spiritual life is real and rich. It is of them and of the spiritual life in them that I ask you to think this morning.

We must remind ourselves what it is that the word “sanctuary” means. It is a place made sacred by the realized presence of God. Everything else is accidental; that is essential. The architecture and decoration, the mysterious lights and shadows of the holy of holies in the Jewish temple, were not what made its awfulness. It was that Jehovah was there. There He shone in the Shekinah. There He told His will. There He forgave sins. There He bestowed His blessing. There He gave His commandments. We need not go into the question of how all this was related to His universal presence. We need not even stop to remind ourselves that God could not be more actually present in the Holy place than He was on any breezy height of Galilee or in the crowded streets of Babylon. It is of His manifested and felt presence that we are speaking. The Jew knew Him there as he knew Him nowhere else; and it was that supremely manifested presence of Jehovah there which made that place, as no other place on the earth could be,? sanctuary.

Is there not, in the life of every man whose life fulfils itself, something which perfectly corresponds to this central sanctuary of Jerusalem. There are hours when God is no more truly present with us than at other times, but when we claim and feel His presence we shut the door and pray; on bended knees we tell our soul’s wants directly into the ear of the all-hearing love. Up from our soul’s depths come welling into our consciousness the profoundest needs. Promises issuing from the Holy Book, or no less certainly communicated to us from our knowledge of the necessities of the divine nature.

come down to meet the need and fold themselves about it. Visions of what we are in God’s idea of us, and of what we might be in the entire fulfilment of that idea, — certainties, absolute certainties, of God’s unaltered and unalterable love, deep communion with Him, — all these lie at the centre of the spiritual life. Nothing can do away with the necessity and blessedness of these. Nothing which God can do for the soul in its less conscious hours can supersede the necessity of these times, supremely, absolutely lived with Him.

We fear sometimes that these days of the great sanctuary have grown less common with many souls than they once used to be. Let us remember that we cannot live without them. Do you ever shut the door and meditate? Are you ever humbly and filially alone with God? Do you ever pray? If not, you do not know what the richest richness of existence is. Oh, before it is too late, before the power is lost, before the hinges of the sacred door are rusted so that it will not open, appeal to your own soul, demand of your own soul that it shall know its privilege and insist that it shall claim its right and power of separating itself from everything beside and keeping company with God.

But when one has done that — when a soul has these hours of rich communion — then the question comes. What shall be done with all the rest of life? How is it with the hours when the church and closet must be left behind, and, in the Babylon of the world, the man must be living the common life of men? Then comes the doctrine of the little sanctuaries built by the expansive influence of the divine

and more sacred times.

Here is the home life. How many fathers and mothers, heads of households full of children, full of cares, see in their houshold life only a Babylon. The self, with its deep needs, is swallowed up in the confusion of the busy days. The countless plannings and devisings make any one great plan of life impossible; which is very much like saying that the effort to go from Albany to Buffalo makes us lose the road from Boston to Chicago. The parent’s religious life is wasted in the perpetual desire to make the children good; which is very much like saying that the tree is killed in order that the leaves may grow.

What shall we say of this? Must we not say that the trouble lies in the conception which pervades many homes, that the home-governors, the home-rulers are to be Christians and live spiritual lives, not in virtue of but in spite of their home occupations and household cares? If they can get rid of that idea — if they can expect to see God coming to them not over nor around but through the home relationships which He himself has built — then Babylon is transfigured, and in the very tumultuous heart of the overcrowding worry the little sanctuary springs to life.

The household truths are justice and love — not separate and standing off and fighting one another, but blending into one rich composite quahty which has such a chance to make beautiful manifestation of itself nowhere else on earth. Everything which goes on within the four walls must spring from and must educate that noble quality of just affection and of loving justice. What then? To father or mother, brother or sister, who lives in the spirit of that quality, must there not come times when it lifts itself from its lower to its higher exhibition, when the just love and loving justice of God become real to the soul by very reason of this machinery of the household which seem to shut them out. The divine home, the domestic peace of God, the strong, warm holding of the life in the great hands, are brought near and rescued from their awful distance by that which is going on in this lower household every day. The father, looking up and saying, “My Father,” finds a little sanctuary in the prayer.

There seems to be an even bitterer exile when the soul leaves the closet and the shrine, not for the home but for the shop. How many Christian merchants there are who are always expecting and counting on the time when they can shut the office door at night, and go home and be Christians again after the day’s necessary worldliness. How many of their lives are always anticipating the years when work will be over, and they can sit down and care for their souls in quiet. Those years perhaps will come, perhaps will not. The exile may or may not return to Jerusalem, and live wholly there; but surely there is something wrong if the active years have not their own nearness to God which they and they alone can give. The active years, the years of work, the years of used and ever-ripening powers!

Do you remember what Jesus said, “My Father worketh and I work.” Rich were the moments when He lay upon the mountain top, and the great peace of God gathered around Him in the darkness, but there was another sense of His Father’s presence which came to Him elsewhere than there. In work, in obedience, and cooperation came the rich company of each with each.

You sit and hold communion with your friend. You match your thoughts; you shars each other’s confidence; and then the clock strikes and working-time has come, and you rise up together and go out. The same tasks greet you both. You build the wall, you plough the field, you drive the engine, or you bargain in the trade together. Is there not another union between you which no depth of meditative communion could have made? Two men do not know each other till they have worked together. To have faced the same difficulties, to have rejoiced in the same success — that makes each present to the other in a new and living way.

If then the work of shop and office can be indeed, and can be felt to be, working with God, certainly in that cooperation there may be a little sanctuary. Does God want those things done which you are doing every day? Does He want the railroad built, the process of civilization maintained, the family supported, the laborer supplied with work? Does God want those qualities which the best doing of business involves, — integrity, energy, mercy, intelligence, maintained upon the earth? Are the operations of your trade as legitimate outputtings of true forces as are the movements of the planets or the blowing of the winds? If they are, then he who does these things may dare to think of himself as God’s co-worker, and down the medium of their common work the presence of the great worker may flow and surround his fellow-laborer.

It is not work, but work done ignobly, done undivinely, that separates the man who works from God. Do not desert your work, but pierce into its heart, exalt it to its loftiest conception if you would be more holy. Strike God’s iron on the anvil, see God’s goods across the counter, put God’s wealth in circulation on the street, teach God’s children in the school, — so shall the dust of your labor build itself into a little sanctuary where you and God shall dwell together.

If there is any labor which we should be apt to say would make the life of the laborer undivine and separate his soul from God, perhaps it would be politics. But, on the other hand, if there is any work which ought to make the worker feel God’s company and get the inspiration of that feeling, it is politics. Politics as a selfish rivalry of personal interests, as a race of partisanship, is as far from God as darkness is from light. It wraps the politician round with a dense robe of selfishness, through which no sacredness can penetrate. But politics as an application of great principles, as the securing of the operation of eternal laws, is God’s work, and he who works in it must work with God. If the undevout astronomer is mad, the politician who disowns the divine forces with which he deals is a blind fool. And in this country we are all politicians. To know the best that we can learn of what is good for these sixty millions of the children of God, and to do what we can by our ballot and influence to secure it, — this is to work with God; and he who does it faithfully finds his political thought and labor a little sanctuary wherein God speaks to him, and gives him richly of His spirit.

Suppose a man wants to be a minister, and to give himself directly and entirely to sacred things; and suppose that circumstances or some inexorable demand of troublous times compels him to give up that privileged career, and to devote himself to politics. I can almost see the longing with which he looks back. He is not then to live with God. There is to be no divine communion for his soul. Alas for him if at least sometimes in the midst of his perplexities and struggles there does not come a better and a nobler thought about it all, so that he says, not as the rhetoric of a campaign speech to a crowd, but as a message from on high to his own soul, that since what he is working for is what God wants, therefore he is with God and God is with him in his working, and so he may take courage and expect to be kept pure in the midst of corrupt machineries and pest, in the dust of numberless details. If that consciousness never comes to him, surely he ought to be much afraid that what he is doing is not the work of God.

Among the Babylons into which men’s lives are led it is not possible for us to forget that which is ordinarily called society, — the world of fashion and of conventionally established and arranged inter* course of people with each other. It is a hard and barren world. It is not rich in character nor in ability. It crushes individuality and makes enthusiasm seem ridiculous. Each winter in our great cities makes its silly despotism seem more terrible. Into the borders of that world there comes some fresh young nature, full of belief in good and God, eager with youthful piety, keen in the wish to grow to its own best and to help other natures to their full development. What an old story it is of how there comes first the disappointment, and then the demoralization. First the pure standards are shocked, and then they yield. First they say “This is dreadful,” and then they say, “Who can see anything dreadful about this?” Where is the salvation? Where it always is. In brave insistence that the very power which is trying to crush our life shall lift it and inspire and fulfil it. When the young man or woman in society keeps clear and strong the sense of individual existence and the craving for the opportunity to help the lives whose deeper possibilities are visible through all their tinsel, there is salvation. And that sense and craving can be kept by, and help to keep, the certainty of God’s presence.

There are in every thickest crowd of frivolity and selfishness some pure souls who walk with God. Nearer than those who touch them nearest, is He. Others may come and go, but He is constant. Through the close envelope of His invisible companionship no blow or poison can assail them. For them there is no need to run away from society. They are away from it in its very midst. Their personal life is intensified by their companionships, and the desire to be helpful feeds itself out of the very selfishness by which it is surrounded. Thus in the heart of society a soul may enshrine itself in God.

The same is true of study and scholarship. Will you lose God among your books, O scholar! In the fascination of the search for truths will you let go out of your soul the certainty that there is at the heart of everything one truth, one beating, throbbing, living soul whose name is not truth alone, but love? I feel two tendencies in the world of thought and study. One of them is to cast God out altogether, as incapable of being known, if not incapable of existing; the other is to keep God apart as if He could not live with learning, and to pay in some obscure corner of the brain a worship which can have no warrant and no meaning for the intellect, to make, as it were, hurried little journeys back to Jerusalem in order to find for a few minutes the God who has been left there, and for whom Babylon can find no place.

Neither of those two things will do. It is in scholarship and learning that the God of truth is to be found. It is as the sum and heart of all knowledge that He is to be known. O you young scholars who come crowding back in these autumn days to school and college, are you leaving the sanctuary behind you in the homes where you are loved, and in the fields where you have breathed the air of God? Is there no special meeting of your soul with His which is possible for you among your books, which is possible nowhere in the world beside? Believe that there is, and how good is this great autumn trooping of students through the open doors! Believe that there is not, and it is a sad, a tragical procession. Let the heavens be darkened and the sun withdraw its shining as they come. But there is. In the heart of all true study God makes Himself a little sanctuary, and enshrines the true scholar in Himself.

But it is not necessary to multiply situations, conditions of exile in which God comes to man and builds His presence round them like a sanctuary. Everything which seems at first to separate a man from God, but by and by shows that it has a power to bring God and man together in some rich way of its own, illustrates what I have tried to preach. What multitudes of sick rooms there are where God has built His little sanctuary round the sufferer, and surprised him with a new kind of peace of which he never dreamed in health! What mountains of temptation where the struggling soul which thought itself alone has found itself alone with God! What doubters who in their wilderness of doubt have felt gathering around them the walls of a peculiar and most steadfast faith! * ‘Oh, if I had time to rest and pray,” you say; “Oh, if this pain would stop a moment and let me think and worship,” “Oh, if this pressure of other people’s needs would relax and let me care one hour for myself!” Those are the cries of the exile for his lost Jerusalem. And to each, if the man has ears to hear, there comes the answer, “Thus saith the Lord God, I will be to them a little sanctuary in the countries where they shall come.” Then the business and the pain and the service of others’ needs grows more than tolerable, grows beautiful and gracious to the soul.

In the great cathedral of the world there is the high altar of perpetual, visible religion, where the worship is forever going on. There all men meet and own themselves, in conscious and deliberate devotion, the sons of God. And then there are the chapels, each with its special altar, where they who have their own peculiar work to do find that of God which in that work can give itself to man. But one great roof covers them all. He who goes from the high altar to the chapel does not go outside the church. The worship is all one, whatever be the strain in which the music sounds.

Here is the unity of life — the diffused presence of God, which no man in any exile can outgo — which makes of the whole world the universal Church.

Be sure, my friends, that both at the high altar of the distinct Christian experience and also in the chapel of your own peculiar life you find God. So only do you fulfil the particular with the universal, and make the universal strong and clear with the particular as well.

To go down from the high altar to the chapel is not to go away from God. To pass out of the great inspiring thoughts into the personal duties is not to cease to be religious. It need not be, at least. It may be the clothing of religion with reality, the grip and grasp on truth and God and light. There, in the little sanctuary, He who in the great sanctuary our careless souls have missed may make us see Him, and believe Him and love Him and take Him for our own.

So may it be with you. You need God for the very things which seem to separate you from Him. You must seek Him in the very places where the misery of life seems to be that He is not. You must question the stoniest paths for springs of water. You must stand in the midst of doubts and look for faith.

What does the miracle of Jesus mean but this? “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?” and lo! the Saviour is a Nazarene. “Can any man provide food here in the wilderness? “” And they took of the loaves and likewise of the fishes as much as they would.” “He saved others, Himself He could not save,” and “behold forth from the Cross shone the glory of the Son of God.”

Some day the exiles shall go back to Jerusalem. They shall enter into the city where everything is visibly and manifestly holy. They shall be in the unhindered sight of Him that sitteth on the throne and of the Lamb forever. While they abide in Babylon may He give them grace to see that He is with them there, and to rejoice in the “little sanctuaries” which He makes, which He is, for them in their land of exile!