Heavenly Wisdom

“I said I will be wise: but it was far from me.” — ECCLESIASTES »ii. 23.

The writer of the book of Ecclesiastes calls himself in our English version “The Preacher.” It would be a more accurate translation if he were called the Ponderer or the Debater. His book is a discussion of the deepest things of life, all grouped around and centering upon his personal experience. In this verse he looks back and remembers. He is perhaps an old man as he writes and the days of his long-past youth come back to him. He remembers how bravely he set out in the search after wisdom. “I said I will be wise “; and then how sadly comes in the brief and summary record of the disappointment, “but it was far from me.”

How easy the struggle, which afterward ended in failure, had evidently seemed to the young soul when it was undertaken. “I said I will be wise.” There is an almost jaunty air about the words. It is as if he were talking of a holiday excursion, something that could be carried through with flying flags and untorn clothes, as if the eye saw the prize hanging close by it there upon the goal and started out to win it with a few quick steps. “I will be wise.” We almost see the hand grasping the garland of wisdom as he speaks. And then behold! all changes. The prize draws away. It becomes distant and more distant the longer that he reaches for it. “It was far from me.” Until at last he hardly can believe that he is the same man who once set out so bravely.

And yet how good he must have felt it to be for all his life that there had once been a time in his life when he had felt it easy to be wise. Will you take your youth, all afire with some great wish, all keen to run the race of life, and bid him sit down by your side while you tell him in full just what he will have to meet before he comes to the goal. That were the cruellest and most foolish wisdom. It is a blessed thing that at the start the world looks easy. If it were not so who would dare to begin. The parable indeed bids the man who is about to build to count the cost. It is warning against one kind of danger, but the man who is in business and the man who is in life knows that there is another kind of danger which is no less fatal to success. He who begins without counting the cost comes to sorrow, but he who insists on having every dollar in his hand before he starts never begins. The real counting of the cost which the young man makes is in the feeling of power, in the leap of blood within his veins. That tells him life is easy. If he could keep that, elevating it and toughening it with the accumulations of experience, life would be easy to the end. As it is, a very great deal of life gets done before the man finds out that life is hard. A good start in the race is run before the man begins to faint because he sees the course is long. Alas for any of us if behind the weary, anxious, half-discouraged struggles after wisdom which have filled our life there did not lie the memory of a bright time when we easily said to ourselves, “I will be wise,” as if we were going to do it before night.

Another thing which strikes us about this wish of Ecclesiastes is, what an old wish it is. There are some desires of mankind which are like the old countries of the world. No man can step ashore in Greece or Egypt or India without feeling how old is the atmosphere he breathes and the soil on which he treads. It has seen so much of human history. It has felt the beating of such generations of human hearts, this ancient land, this venerable home of men. Sometimes it weighs oppressively upon us and it seems as if we could not breathe the heavy muchbreathed air. Sometimes the whole land is mellowed by its long antiquity and life seems a richer and a deeper thing there than in our newer lands. So it is with the old desires of mankind; for instance this desire of wisdom. When we think how many men, how many centuries of men have desired that desire, sometimes it makes our hearts sink with the sense of how hopeless it all is. Sometimes it makes our hearts glow with the delight of sharing in the wish which all the noblest of our race have felt. In either way it deepens the act of wishing and makes it a more solemn and pathetic thing. It would be a great thing for a man to find himself wishing for something which he was perfectly sure that no man had ever wished before. It would have all the exhilaration of pressing forward into a new discovered and untrodden country. Columbus-like he would feel the whole new world before him. But to know that our wish must have been wished in his own way, in his own degree, by every man that ever lived, that no man ever grew to man’s estate who did not seek somehow this thing which we are seeking; that, if we are truly human, makes our search far more rich and attractive. It surrounds us with the accumulated enthusiasm of mankind. It knits us into human sympathy. It makes us love the very dangers of the way. It lets us feel that we are seeking not a mere selfish triumph, but that we are making our little contribution to what when it is gained will be the triumph of mankind. Something of this sort we can feel in all the best seekers after wisdom.

There is another thought which rises in our minds when we see a new man stand up and hear him say,

I will be wise!” and think how many men have wished the same before, and how every one of them in large degree has failed of what he wished.

What is the relations “we ask, “between a wish in a man’s soul and the reality of things?” That there is some such relation men have always felt. The human soul has always seemed to be such a mirror of the world, that all which men have found firmly and constantly depicted in the wishes of the human soul they have felt sure must have a fact corresponding to it in the universe of reality. The strong and almost universal craving of man for immortality has always been taken to constitute a true part of the evidence that man really is immortal. The belief of man in God has always helped to prove to men that God exists. Of course we know that “the wish is father to the thought,” and we compel ourselves to be upon our guard against the disposition to believe that a thing is true merely because we and other people wish it were. Our human desire, before it can seem to be evidence of the existence of that which it desires, must be very wide and very unprejudiced by selfishness. Because one century has believed that there must be some way of turning all metals into gold or of reading in the stars the fates of men, that does not show that both of those ideas are not delusions. But when all men, in every age, in every land, in every faith, turn with one common wish one way, not for immediate and palpable advantage, but with an instinctive movement of their natures, the conviction is irresistible that there must be something there which draws them. There must be an external fact to which this internal movement corresponds. Where all the needles turn there must be a pole.

This becomes very impressive when we apply it to the universal and eternal quest of man for wisdom. Somewhere there must be this wisdom which the human mind has always sought. Misconceived, distorted in its reflection in the mirror though it be, still there is a true wisdom somewhere which the mind of man has always sought. The final knowledge and character of man when they are reached are the resultant of the eternal wisdom which has come down from above and been accepted into this nature made to receive it. Not wisdom alone. That were too cold and hard and distant. Not the soul alone. That were too private and personal and sentimental. But the soul strong with wisdom. Wisdom warm in the soul, this is the dream that has always haunted men’s wishes and made them forever repeat, in spite of every disappointment, the old resolve,” I will be wise!”

But it is time for us to turn and ask more carefully just what is meant by wisdom for which the search is so inveterate and universal. If we can have that clear in our minds we shall be able to understand better the search and its chances of success. Wisdom, then, in general signifies all knowledge and the intelligent grasp of truth. But there is a special meaning of wisdom, and it is very common in the use of the Bible, in which the word signifies the apprehension of some great universal principle which underlies all things, governs all things, and by which all things are accounted for. We all know how deep the craving for such a great principle is. The physicist seeks for it in nature. He tries to find some one great ruling law which shall comprehend all the movements of natural forces and give them unity. The metaphysician seeks for it in man’s constitution. He tries to find some first principle which shall harmonize and explain the contradictions and inconsistencies of this mysterious being, man. The “J^ HEAVENLY WISDOM.

thoughtful observer of his own life seeks for it there, and is not satisfied unless he can discern around all the hundred little motives which decide his dailyactions some one great motive, out of which they all are fed, around all the miscellaneous force, some one great force of definite character which identifies his individuality and m.akes him the man he is.

It is the desire for the perception of some such first great principle or principles of things which really constitutes man’s search for wisdom. It has always had, and always must have, strong fascination for the human mind. All acquaintance with the details of things, however perfect, must be unsatisfactory without this larger understanding. It is the absence of this which the singer in Tennyson’s poem is lamenting when he cries that “knowledge comes but wisdom lingers,” the absence of any insight which shall explain the world and so secure its best use.

Now wisdom in this sense is what all earnest and intelligent young spirits crave, more or less consciously, at the beginning of their lives. “What does it all mean? Where is the clue to it? Where is the sacred, the mysterious word before the speaking of which the closed heart of things shall fly open and the secret of life be shown? I will not rest till I have found it. I will seek everywhere and try all manner of experiments till it is found. I will have wisdom. I will be wise!” To very many men’s recollection that resolution stands back at the beginning of what seems to have been a very long career. It was clear and enthusiastic. Was it not just exactly the resolution of Ecclesiastes? And what has come since? If in the course of years the incongruities and the complexities of life, the moral disappointments, the failures of our theories about people, the fading away of our hopes about ourselves, have altogether made us give up the search for any such grasp of life; if, gradually seeming more and more difficult to find, it has at last come to seem impossible for us to find any such governing and accounting principle for life — and so we have settled down to the details of living, to doing such particular act by itself and not as part of any long coherent plan, not inspired by any one consistent hope, if this has been our history — why it seems to me that we might search all literature and join words together in a thousand ways and we could not find or make a more complete description of our lives than that which is in these few short words of Ecclesiastes, “I said I will be wise, but it was far from me.”

I hope that I make clear the difference between two lives, one of which is still inspired by, and the other of which has abandoned, the search for wisdom. Behold how different they are. One has a fire in its eye, a spring in every movement. Each special act is freed from anxious questioning, is almost unconscious, because it is absorbed in and is decided by the larger purpose of the life. Where the next footstep shall be set is settled not by the choice of softest ground or greenest grass to tread on, but by the direction in which lies the life’s recognized and beckoning goal. The least things become lofty; the worst disappointments may be revelations so long as the man is saying “I will be wise.” When that is done, when the man has begun to say “It is far from me,” then everything falls to pieces. Each bit of life has to be valued by itself, and oh, how valuable it comes to look. Yesterday’s fact, to-day’s frolic, to-morrow’s bargain — what are they worth except as mere beguilements of the hour? We give them artificial values. We fill the search for them with the spirit of rivalry to keep its interest alive. Each day has to begin all over again. Our life has no flow. It lies in ponds and is not like a river. And, worst of all, we grow distrustful and scornful about other men who still think that life has a meaning when we have once ceased to seek the meaning of our own. We are ready to say “There is no wisdom,” when we have stopped saying “I will be wise.”

And what then? Somehow or other evidently this discouragement must get new courage, and the abandoned search must be taken up again. How shall it be? I have not spoken thus far of religion. I have purposely talked as if there were no such thing as religion in the world. The search for wisdom, as I have spoken of it, is the search for abstract principles, for a plan to be discerned in the structure of the universe, in the nature of things. That is all scientific, not religious. Now when that fails us, or before that fails us, for we would not talk of religion as if it were a mere last resort, when science fails us, or before it fails us, we turn to religion. Religion means God. It can mean nothing less, nothing else than that. Reh’gion cannot be made abstract. It must be personal. Religion means God. When a man becomes religious, it is just this. He puts God before and under and around his life. How cold and weak that sounds! When a man becomes religious he feels the God who has been always before and under and around his life, and gives himself in conscious and obedient relationship to Him. Do you not see then what must come? The first principle of that man’s life comes to be God. Instead of looking for a philosophy, a statement, a law which will comprehend and harmonize his life, now he looks for a person, for God. Instead of making wisdom simply an understanding of something which can be discovered by the perceptions or reasoned out by the intellect, now he makes wisdom to be the total acceptance by his nature of that higher nature to which it gives itself in obedience and love. “I will be wise” now means “I will come near to God. I will know Him.”

The old Christian temple in Constantinople, now the central mosque of the whole Mussulman world, is called “Saint Sophia.” It is consecrated to the holy wisdom. What does its name mean? Was it to the abstract love for principles, the impersonal search for truth that these stately and glowing walls were reared in the years when Christian faith was earnest and alive? Not so! It was not a university but a church. It was to something sacred, personal, divine, that it was dedicated. It was to the wisdom which consisted in the obedient and loving service of the soul to God; the wisdom which consisted in the service which every faculty could pay to Him, the wisdom which found abundant explanation of the world in Him! It was to the wisdom by which as Solomon sang “The Lord hath founded the earth”; that wisdom which does not sit in the schools and argue, but which standeth in the top of high places, by the way in the places of the paths; the wisdom of which the fear of the Lord is the beginning and the end.

And now with this new, this deeper, this religious meaning in the words “I will be wise,” does the old search become any more hopeful than it was before? Now it is a search for God. But God cannot be pictured as just standing off there and waiting for the soul to come to Him and find Him. A theory of the universe, a comprehensive truth of the nature of things, even that I cannot picture to myself as wholly dead. I have to think of it as something in some sense alive and reaching out with some sort of desire to make itself known to the mind that is so blindly reaching towards it. But just as soon as it is not a theory of the universe but God, a person, a soul, a love, a Father, then what a different thing this life and this outreach toward man becomes. Everything that being can feel towards other being, tempting the communication of his life, is there. Personal love, the desire to communicate and repeat himself, craving to drive out sin, to fill imperfection with perfection, to produce character, to fulfil possibility, all of these unite in one great stream of effluence which comes pouring forth from

God to meet the soul’s desire to be wise. All of these make the wisdom of God which comes down to satisfy the soul whose right it is to crave that wisdom.

The wisdom of God! We cannot say those words without remembering that they are used by St. Paul of Jesus Christ. “Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God,” he writes to the Corinthians. The Incarnation was the full expression of this pouring forth of the personal life of God upon the personal life of man which I have just been trying to describe. It came, He came, with the most overwhelming revelation that God loved man, that God claimed man. After His coming no man who had caught the real spirit of that great event could let himself think for a moment that God stood off motionless and simply waited for the soul to come to Him. The whole universe, to the soul believing in the Incarnation, must quiver and palpitate with God coming for the soul of man.

Oh, what a difference, my friends! We talk sometimes as if for a man to come to believe in the Incarnation was simply for him to add another article to his creed, perhaps in sign that such addition had been made, to transfer his name from one set of church books to another, and to submit to some new Christian rite. It is much more than that. For a man to believe in the Incarnation is for the world to become to that man afire with God. God is reaching out to him everywhere. God believes in him, believes in the possibility of revealing Himself to him; nay, of taking up his abode within him.

Impossibility floats off like a melted cloud. All men become sacred. Whatever else man may find or fail to find, knowledge, wealth, friendship, power, he may certainly find God, for God is seeking him. All this is real to the man who believes in the Incar. nation. What right has any such man to be discouraged or dismayed?

Evidently then the search for wisdom becomes another thing as soon as it becomes religious, as soon as the wisdom for which we seek is God, It becomes full of hope, nay, it is filled with certainty. I know I shall be wise if I can only persevere. But there is something else. Not merely the hopefulness but the whole character of the search is altered. It becomes moral. It is a search for character. And the power and method of it is obedience. That is an enormous change. To make the method of man’s growth and attainment to be not the acquisition of knowledge but the obedience to a perfect will, that was an enormous change. It was a transfer of human ambition to a new region. It was the opening of human possibility on a new side. It did not exclude thought and study and intellectual labor. It included them. Only it made them part of the obedience of the lesser to the greater soul, of the child to the father, of the man to God.

One consequence of this transfer of the field, this change of the character of man’s struggle after wisdom was in the way in which it opened the possibility of that struggle to all men. When “I will be wise” meant “I will reach the final principles of things by reasoning and meditation” it was a resolution which only a few choice privileged spirits in each generation of the world could make. When “I will be wise” had come to mean “I will obey God and come near to Him, or let Him come near to me by my obedience,” it was a resolution which was open to all men, the weakest and the humblest, as well as the strongest and highest, to make. The little child just putting a trembling foot on to the margin of the vast plain of life; the plough-boy busy at his work without a rest for thought from morning till night, from year to year, the practical man strong in affairs but with no gift for abstract speculation, the poor sick woman with no strength left but just to suffer — this new change of the Gospel threw open the gates of wisdom to them all. They all could be wise. Wisdom not as a luxury, not as an ornament, but as a transformation, a regeneration, an illumination of their lives — this was within the power of them all when the road into wisdom became obedience and obedience itself was made to be the knowledge of and likeness to the God whom the soul obeyed.

Wise unto salvation “is the Bible phrase for this. Think what a significance there is in these familiar words. Wisdom that shines as a star in the forehead, wisdom that wraps the form with dignity like a rich mantle, wisdom that burns in eloquence upon the lips, these all men cannot have. If these are the true successes of a human life, then most human lives must be failures. But wisdom that enters as salvation into the heart all men may have. Hear how St. James describes it, “The wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and eas-* CO be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy.” These are not easy things indeed, but they are things not impossible for any man. In the possibility of those things, fruits of the wisdom which is from above, for every man lies the profoundest and most trustworthy assurance of our human brotherhood.

One noble feature of this universality of the capacity of religious wisdom lies in this: that it makes men’s best and highest side to be also their side of greatest sympathy and broadest fellowship, and so ensures that the greater men grow in the truest greatness, the more and not the less they should come near to their fellow-men. Many of you will remember the quaint strong verse which is inscribed upon the tomb of Shakespeare’s daughter, Mrs. Ann Hall, as she lies hard by the tomb of her father in front of the chancel in the Stratford Church:

‘Witty beyond her sex. But that ’s not all Wise to Salvation was good Mistress Hall. Something of Shakespeare was in that: but this Wholly of Him with whom she ’s now in bliss.”

The words cling to one’s memory when he once has read them. And what a true discrimination they suggest. The wit which had in it “something of Shakespeare” is not as strong an appeal to the remembrance and sympathy of one who stands by the worn tombstone as is the wisdom and salvation which is entirely of God and in virtue of which our souls meet hers in Him.

The” wickedness of folly,” says Ecclesiastes in the verse the next but one to that from which my text is taken. There again you see we have the same idea — that wisdom is a moral thing. “Folly,” or unwisdom, is a wicked thing. Surely another consequence of this Bible idea of wisdom must be that men will learn to seek it with the intensity of their moral natures. It cannot be a mere dilettante study. It must be a thing of life and death.

As Sunday after Sunday we come up here, dear friends, to drink of the water of the fountain and then go down to another week of work and temptation, let us pray that the fruit of our coming may be that the old resolution is fastened more firmly in our hearts. Let us pray that we may go hence every week saying more surely, more enthusiastically, “I will be wise.” It is not far from us. It is close at hand. As close as duty! as close as Christ! May He, according to the great promise, be made to us ever more and more wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.