Christian Unworldliness
“In the day that I shall have cleansed you from all your iniquities, I will also cause you to dwell in the cities.” — Ezex. xxxvi. 33.
CAN imagine one exclaiming, “What a lame
and impotent conclusion!” We should have expected the words to be, “In the day that I shall have cleansed you from all your iniquities, I shall keep you from getting stained any more; I shall place you in a garden far from the madding crowd, far from the temptations of social influence.” But it seems an anti-climax to say, “In the day that I shall have cleansed you from all your iniquities, I shall cause you to dwell in cities.” Is it not the dwelling in cities that has done all the harm! Are we not again and again cautioned to avoid a worldly life, to love not the world nor the things of the world! Yes, but
the world is not the city. We are all in a delusion about this matter. We think of worldliness as a life in the crowd. No, it is a life in the solitude — a garden life. To love the world does not mean to love the assembling of ourselves together. It means, to love the separation from our kind, to dwell within our own spirits. Worldliness is selfishness, and selfishness is solitariness. A worldly man or woman is never really social. A worldling is always a monopolist — one who seeks to absorb all the profits. He would absorb the conversation. He would absorb the attention. He would absorb the interest. It is not the social life that makes the worldly life; it is the curtailment of sociality. It is where a woman of fashion aims to be the only fashion that the world has sway. It is where she aspires to be the sole magnet, the one attraction, the form who eclipses every other form — ‘“fair as a star when only one is shining in the sky.” This is not city life; it is solitary life, lonely life, unshared life; it is life apart from the crowd. And it is the ideal of what God would have life not to be. God is leading us towards a city — a city which hath foundations in the reciprocity of human gifts. He is leading us from the garden to the town, from the individual retreat to the common brotherhood. He is leading us from the silence of the field into the fellowship of the street, from the meditation into the market-place, from the life of the unit into the life of the universe.
Lead, kindly Light, lead on! Thy leading is not whither I expected; butI follow in faith. I thought Thou hadst come to take me out of the world. I thought I should ascend the Mount and build my tabernacle there. I did not see that this was only Thy morning hour, Thy rising hour. I did not see that Thy midday was in the streets and lanes where the traffic rolls and the people meet. I thought the mountain hour was the unworldly hour. It seemed to me more pious to fast in the wilderness than to serve the wineat Cana. It neverstruck me that Cana was more sacred than the wilderness. Yet to Cana Thou hast been leading me — to the marriage-feast of human souls. And asI tread the crowded pathway I see that Thou hast led me right. It is in the wilderness that the world and its temptations dwell. My soul’s vanity is its solitude. I speak of the giddy height, and truly; the height above the crowd is always giddy. Break my solitude,O Lord! Withdraw me from the world — which is the wilderness! Save me from keeping too much company with myself! Guard me from the vanity of admiring my own loneliness! Protect me from the pride of being pre-eminent! Hide me from the temptations of the unsocial hour! Shield me from the danger of having no boon companions! I shall not regret my expulsion from the garden if thereby I shall find a place in Thy city of human souls.