The Mystery of Man

“For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man that is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.” — I CORINTHIANS ii. n.

THIS has always seemed to me to be one of the greatest and most powerful of arguments. It shows the greatness of the man who made it and whose mind it satisfied. For the quality of men is shown not so much by the opinions which they hold as by the grounds upon which they hold them, by the arguments upon which those opinions rest in their minds. Men may hold the greatest of truths in a feeble way and upon the most unsubstantial evidence. Men may believe, for instance, in the Being of God because they have been told that it is true, or because they want to believe it. On the other hand, men may believe the simplest and commonest of truths on the most solemn and majestic grounds. Men may believe in the duty of neatness, or of charity, on considerations drawn from the nature of God and of the universe. So it seems that men’s greatness is decided not by the opinions which they hold, but by the kind of evidence on which, and by the kind of spirit in which, they hold them.

The subject of which St. Paul is speaking is an old one. The belief which he is asserting is one which many men have held, — nay, really one which all men hold who think of it at all. It is the mystery of God, the incomprehensibleness by man of the Almighty. That is no new thought. Every man who has thought of God has had it, but men have held it in a multitude of little ways. It has seemed to many of them to be God wilfully hiding Himself from His children, eluding them and mocking them, a bewildering, exasperating truth. But to St. Paul it seems to rest upon the strongest and deepest necessities of the very nature of God and man, and evidently it brings him not trouble, but peace and strength.

What is St. Paul’s argument? None but God can know God, he declares. It is only by His revelations of Himself to us, only by His entrance into us in one way or another, only by His Spirit imparted to us, that we can come to any understanding of what He is and how He works. “Yes,” he says, “this is true of every nature. It must be true. All beings in their essential life are mysteries. Only by sharing their nature can any one know them. Beings of another kind can watch them, can see how they work, can catch from their character some inferences about their nature, but no one can know them but themselves. The things of any being only the spirit of that being knows.” His words suggest how such a truth runs through the whole creation, how every order of brute life must have some mutual sympathy and understanding among its members, which no brute outside that order can possibly share.

But where the eye of St. Paul’s argument specially fastens itself is upon man. “Look,” he says, “what man knoweth the things of a man, but the spirit of man which is in him? Look,” he says, “man is a mystery. Humanity stands alone, and it is only by being man that any one can know what manhood is. Other orders of being may stand by and gaze, — may see what man does, and from his doings guess at what man is, but in himself is still locked up his mystery. No brute, no angel can unravel it. It is man’s own, locked up in his own human consciousness. And then,” so runs the argument, “if this be so, if other beings cannot read us, what wonder if we cannot read that Being which is over us! ‘No man knoweth the things of a man but the spirit of man which is in him. Even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.’ The mystery of man justifying and illustrating to him the mystery of God — that is St. Paul’s argument.

Let us look at this illustration of St. Paul and see if it will not throw some light for us upon the thought of God, — see if it will not help us to understand something of the necessary mysteriousness of His life, and also of how we may gradually enter into that mystery and come to know more and more of Him. The mystery of man as it illustrates the mystery of God — that is our subject.

By the mystery of man, then, in the first place, we may mean either a Race Mystery or a Personal Mystery. We may be thinking either of that gulf which separates human life from every other kind of life, and binds all men together into a sympathy which no being who is not man can enter; or our thoughts may be upon the way in which each individual man carries about a secret life which no other man can comprehend. Of this last there is the most to say, but let us turn first to the other.

Think of the race mystery of humanity. Side by side with all the lower races, all the brutes, through many generations, there has lived this humanity, having to do with them, but, as we often must have felt, knowing almost nothing about them, not under standing in the least their lower and imperfect lives. Emerson says in his essay on History: “I hold our actual knowledge very cheap. Hear the rats in the wall, see the lizard on the fence, the fungus under foot, the lichen on the log. What do I know sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of life? As long as the Caucasian man, perhaps longer, these creatures have kept their counsel beside him, and there is no record of any word or sign that has passed from one to the other.”

And then, when we turn the question the other way, when we ask not what we know of them, but what they know of us, we feel still more the break that lies between us. We have certain reasoning powers by which we may at least guess at something of what is going on in the dull lives of the lower animals; we may see something in them which we call “instinct,” and try to define it, but the brute that looks at man — what can he see? Only certain habits and very dimly certain dispositions. He knows how you will act in certain circumstances, and he has a dim sense that you care for him or that you hate him. He treats you as he treats fire, which he has learned will burn him if he walks into it, and for which he has an affection because it keeps him warm. There is no understanding in him of your life. He does not know you. He cannot know you unless he be man.

Now fancy that a brute should be endowed with intelligence enough to think about his relations to this higher race. Then suppose that he entirely ignores an incapacity upon his part to comprehend humanity. He thinks that he is fully equal to the task. He will allow no mystery of human life. Starting from himself he claims to understand it all. What is the result? Is it not merely that his man becomes to him only a more perfect brute? He pictures to himself no qualities outside of the little range of his own life. He leaves no margin for undiscovered qualities. He thinks he is entirely a fit judge and critic of this order of beings above his own. What shall we say? Has not the dog or the horse gone all wrong when he has lost sight of the mystery that separates another kind of life from his? Has he not made man a mere creature of his own crude fancy? Is he not robbing his life of that which it ought to look up to and respect and obey? And may not man, turning to rebuke the brute’s rash and crude thinking, claim the dignity of his own separate, peculiar life? “Be still, and know that I am Man. You cannot judge me. You cannot understand me. My will and my kindliness you can discover from my action; it is your place to take the one with obedience and the other with gratitude, but never to forget the vast gulf that separates your life from mine. You cannot tell what plan directs the will, what wisdom governs the kindliness. Let there be a reverent acknowledgment of a larger life that must be past the comprehension of every brute, unless some day that comes which never has come yet, and some brute crosses the line that separates the races and becomes a man.”

Thus upon his distinctive manhood man stands and claims his mystery. “No other race can understand me. No other being can judge me. ‘Who knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? ‘And is there, then, any figure, any analogy here, that throws light upon something that is higher? St. Paul follows it on instantly: “Even so the things of God knoweth no man but the Spirit of God.” Shall we think of St. Paul speaking these words as if he were the loyal champion of God indicating his Master’s rights against the captious criticism of the men about him? or shall we think of it as part of the word of God, and so seem to hear God Himself rebuking the ignorance that presumes to judge Him?

From whatever lips they come, the words are an assertion that there is in God the same mystery of nature that there is in man; that for any being of another order than the highest there is the limitation which belongs to every lower being watching and studying a higher. Just as the brute learned of man how he would act under certain circumstances and that he was subject to certain emotions; just as he learned man’s habits and his friendliness, but went all wrong the moment that he thought he had comprehended all his nature; so man may learn much of what God will do, and may gather a rich and certain knowledge of God’s love. But the instant that he claims to understand God, so that he can judge of Him and criticise His actions, he is all wrong. He is not understanding the Eternal God; he is merely imagining a God. He is not rising to the conception of the Almighty, he is dragging the Almighty down to his conception. “Be still, and know that I am God ’ ‘; — that is the rebuke that comes pealing down upon him in some disappointment and confusion of his presumptuous plans. And by and by, if he is wise and teachable, if he hears the rebuke, if he learns to follow God’s will and rest upon His love, reverently knowing that he cannot comprehend His nature, he is saved from the captious folly of criticising God, and enters on a higher life of peace.

But I hasten now to say that while all this is true, it does not fully or satisfactorily represent the relation between God and Man. We are not brutes before Him; we are His children. While we are not Divine, and so are of a different nature from Him, yet we are capable of Divinity, and so are really one with Him in nature. Here, then, there is some thing needed to complete our truth; and that, I think, we shall find if we turn from the Race Mystery to what I called the Personal Mystery of Human Life.

Besides that gulf which separates the human life from every other order of existence, there is an envelope of mystery and separateness about every single life. This is a fact of which we think much oftener than of the other. It is continually forced upon us. The very fact that we have so much in common with the person by our side, reminds us constantly how much there is in each of us that there is not in the other; how, while we both belong to the same race, each has his own personal distinctness which the other cannot invade. You stand with some friend of yours before a mighty picture or before Niagara. Each of you is drinking in the sight, and these two natures are both being filled with it. Both are susceptible to it, for both are human natures, and humanity is made to drink in and appropriate sublimity and beauty. You both stand in silence till, by and by, you both speak. Each says his own word, which utters his own emotion, his own thought; and then you see how, while each has drunk in the same majesty, each has taken it into a nature distinct and unintelligible to the other.

Or how is it when you read the stories of the brightest or the blackest of mankind? We read of the martyrs, of men and women who would suffer anything rather than deny their faith, of missionaries who would go half round the globe to save a soul; and then we turn and read the story of the wretched suicide who was ready to blow up a shipful of unsuspecting passengers for a few miserable dollars: are they not both of them of our race? In the brightness of the one and in the blackness of the other, is there not something that makes us say at once, “Both these are human”?

But, personally, can we know either of them? Can we understand them? In our moderate, comfortable life, moving along in the middle range of feeling, never exalted into any great enthusiastic goodness and never sinking into any hideous vice, we cannot picture to ourselves how a man can put everything aside and walk up to the stake for a principle, and calmly see the fire lighted; nor how another man, off at the very opposite pole of humanity, can contemplate with perfect coolness the horrible destruction of hundreds of his fellow-creatures for a little money. Both of these beings are wrapped in their own personal mystery. Around the one burns the fire of his glorious self-devotion. Around the other rolls the black stream of his hideous selfishness. You must be the martyr or the monster your self, before you can know what it is to be either of them.

So it is always. When an unselfish man tries to tell another what the joy is which he finds in charity; when the religious man wants to describe the blessedness of Christ to some indifferent friend; what is it that stops the tongues that are ready to speak out to this other life? Or even where we cannot put our finger upon any single interest which is strong in one and not in the other, and which accounts for the imperfect sympathy, still there is this ultimate fact of personality. Around every human being, as around every atom, there is a wrapping of separateness; so that however closely they touch each other they never really mingle. It is a strange, impressive idea that, closely as men have crowded each other all these ages, no man ever knew perfectly any manhood but his own. No man ever knew his nearest friend so well but that it would be an utter amazement to him if he were turned into that friend for an hour. Come as close to your friend as you will, learn as much as you will of how your natures are alike, you will surely come at last to some locked door, the very citadel of his personality, which you cannot enter, simply because you are not he. Damon and Pythias divide at last. David has some things which not even Jonathan can know. “What man knoweth the things of a man save the spirit of man that is in him?”

About this personal mystery, the reserve of every man’s life, — we notice that it is not deliberate or wilful. As soon as it becomes that, it is churlish and conceited. It is not something which a man determines on. To attempt to set up a line within which no one shall come, the nearest limit by which any man shall approach our life, — that is folly and excites only derision and dislike. Men soon look over our fence and see that there is nothing in that barren pasture which we have fenced with so much care to make believe that we have a fine estate.

But the true nature needs no fences. It is anxious to admit its brethren just as far as they can come. It shuts no man out by any wilfulness. Only at last there comes a door which no other man’s feet can possibly pass. There are thoughts which you can think and feelings which you, and you alone, can feel, shapes of the universal human thoughts and feelings which are as truly your own as your presentation of the universal human face belongs to you and no other man in all the world, simply because you are you, and no other man is you anywhere. “If I were you, I would do so and so,” we lightly say to one another; but no man can know what he would do if he were his brother. He cannot tell what new forms of motive and impulse he would find in that sacred, secret room of his brother’s personality, where his feet have never trodden, and can never tread.

But just because this personal mystery is not wilful but necessary, depending on the relations which exist between two characters, therefore its limit is not fixed. A nature does not set itself one limit for all comers. Different people can come to different depths in this life of yours, which still keeps its in most secret to itself. One man stops at the outermost gate, and knows nothing about you but your most superficial habits, — the way you walk, the street you walk in, and the shops at which you trade. Another man, with the key of mutual sympathy and understanding, opens door after door, explores the spiritual meaning of the things that you do, enters your heart and reads your motives. Now this key of mutual sympathy and understanding is what we call your “spirit.” He who has the spirit as well as the form of your actions, he who understands your spirit as well as your habits, he may enter in to the depths of your life. It is conceivable that two human beings should have so perfectly each other’s spirit that they should perfectly comprehend each other’s nature, and be like one heart, one being. That is conceivable, but it is not realized. Always there is some stoppage short of the complete penetration of one nature by another; and so personality keeps its last, inmost mystery unexplored.

But just as soon and just as far as one man has another’s spirit, he may enter freely into that other’s life. Nothing will hinder him. It is wonderful how the most jealously guarded doors fly open the moment that a newcomer brings that key. There is wilful, proud reserve enough; but the largest reason why men keep themselves back from one another is that each does not believe that the other has his spirit; that is, that the other’s conceptions and intentions of life are the same as his. The minute he finds that the other has, he gives himself to that man ungrudgingly. Look at two new men meeting; see how they sit like two animals and watch each other. See how each takes for granted that the other is only in most superficial sympathy with him, and so they talk about most superficial things. But see, if they have really the same spirit, if the meanings of life, bright or sombre, are the same to them, how, as they find it out, each inevitably and unhesitatingly takes the other in; and, blending like two sunbeams or two clouds, they penetrate each other’s inmost nature.

This fact seems to me to give a simple and attractive idea of a man’s progress in the knowledge of men better and wiser than himself. As his spirit expands and purifies, purer and larger people are always becoming intelligible to him. As he grows a better man, he sweeps up to where higher and higher orders of his fellow-men are sitting, and he understands them there.” Now I know what he means,” he says of some one who has seemed to him to talk foolishness and nonsense, but whose spiritual key he has now found in his own growing spiritual life.

It is just as true when we sweep downward. One of the most terrible things about a sinking soul must be the way in which lower and lower beings become intelligible to it. It comes to understand vileness which was once wholly incomprehensible. As we go up or go down with every new spirit that we gain, some new nature opens its mystery and shows its meaning to us.

And now, with these thoughts of the mystery of humanity clearly before us, let us turn suddenly and try to realize that, as St. Paul suggests, all this is equally true about the mystery of God. My brother man hides his inner life from me, not because he wants to, but because he cannot help it. That same is true of God. He does not set me — His child, His servant — to seek after that which He is all the time holding off out of any chance of my finding it. He does not say, “Know me,” and then draw the clouds about His face and sit mocking me behind them as I seek and seek for Him in vain. His mystery is necessary. It is because He is God that He cannot make Himself plain to me at once. Let me know this fully, and then the mystery that envelops the Divine things no more exasperates or depresses me than does the mystery of my best friend, and I am saved from all the petty complaining which talks as if God had done me wrong by not turning out all the depths of His life to me at once.

And again, in the mystery of humanity different people come nearer to or farther from the secret of a life, according as they have more or less of that life’s spirit. That, too, is true of the mystery of Divinity. Not by any mere favoritism, not by a fond and foolish arbitrary choice, does God let a few favored children into secrets about Himself which He hides from the rest. The child who has the Father’s Spirit knows the Father.

And then again, in the mystery of humanity, however reluctant a man seems, he will — we may almost say he must — unfold himself to any one who really has his spirit. So (and when we know this, what cloud can possibly come between us and Him?) God always will give — we may almost venture to say God always must give — the knowledge of Himself to every man as fast and as far as that man, having His Spirit, is able to receive Him.

Apply these truths about God’s mystery to the two great revelations which He has given us of Him self in the Bible and in Christ. Would it not help us very much about the Bible if we could know, and never could forget, that the darkness which often meets us there is not wilful but necessary? It is not a book of puzzles where God has set Himself to bewilder us with contradictory accounts and insoluble moral problems. Everywhere, in History and Psalm and Prophecy and Gospel, He has told us all that was tellable to us about Himself. And into this

Bible one man will penetrate deeper than another, not by any other power than simply by having more of the Spirit of the God whom it reveals. And this Bible will enlarge its utterances to every soul just as that soul enters more and more perfectly into the meaning and intention of it all, — into that love for holiness and truth which is the Spirit of God from which it came. These are the golden laws, the first pregnant axioms of true and spiritual Bible reading.

Apply the same to Christ. He is no wilful mystery. If He who walked in the broad daylight did not shine through and through, transparent to the proud Pharisees and carnal Sadducees; and if He now eludes us when we attempt to follow Him into His deepest depths; it is not that He will not, but that He cannot, show us all. Oh, it makes a vast difference to us, in looking at Him who is so dear to us, whether we think of Him as One who is holding back what He might tell us, or as One who is struggling to utter Himself to those who are too far from Him to understand Him perfectly. Does the cloud come out from the sun or up from the earth?

Yes; Christ shows us all of God that He can show. And He is different to different men, — a hard, cold, barren study to one, the mere agent of a mechanical salvation to another, the very Lord of the Heart, the Life of Life, to another, according as each has more or less of His Spirit. And He will give Himself to men, open deeper and deeper visions of His life, just as fast as they can take Him in. What a buoyant, hopeful Christian life it makes if one believes all that! How the souls who, gathering more and more of Christ’s Spirit, are always coming nearer to Christ, seem like the long procession that David saw moving along across the valleys and the hills from the far ends of the country, and always getting nearer to the Temple at Jerusalem till at last they entered into its very gates. “They go from strength to strength; every one of them in Zion appeareth before God.”

If we should change for a moment our thought of Christ, we might consider Him not as the Revealer of God, but as the Man, struggling after the comprehension of His Father just as all his brother men are doing. He is both. He is the Revealer of God, and the struggling Son of Man. And yet not “struggling”; for, when we think of Christ’s humanity, we feel that we have reached that which we said a little while ago was conceivable, but never had been perfectly realized between two human lives — so absolute a possession by one of the spirit of the other that there is no break or hindrance in the perfect knowledge. Jesus Christ had perfectly God’s Spirit. With that key He opened doors before which men had always waited hopeless, and walked through chambers of the Divine Mystery where no human feet before had ever trodden. He knew what was the divine meaning of pain, the divine hate of sin, the divine ideal of man. He had perfectly God’s Spirit, and so He knew the things of God; and, taking us into His life, He makes us sharers of His Spirit and of His knowledge. As He said Himself, “No man knoweth the Son but the

Father, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.”

As I look back over the ground where we have walked, and then look round upon our life, I seem to see the argument of St. Paul bursting forth every where, out of every association which man has with his fellow-men. All these intimacies which we have with one another become prophetic of a higher intimacy, declare its possibility, and suggest its limitations and its laws. As we go about, knowing one another, touching each other’s life in all the satisfying and stimulating intercourses of mind and heart, there is a voice which comes out of the whole and says to us: “So you might know God. Do not be perfectly satisfied with any knowledge, any friendship, short of His.”

But out of these same associations which we have with one another come these other voices: “Be hold! your brother is a mystery to you. Do not then think or wish to find God unmysterious. Be hold! he who has most of your brother’s spirit knows him best. Do not complain, then, if one who has more of God’s Spirit than you have, who is humbler, truer, purer, manlier than you are, knows Him as you do not, sees Him as you fail to see Him. But behold! as soon as you are fit to know your brother, he cannot help showing himself to you. By that right of fitness you enter in and comprehend him. Be ambitious, then. As fast as you can contain more knowledge of God, it shall be given to you. The ‘pure in heart’ shall certainly ‘see God.’ As impossible as it is for the impure to see Him, so impossible is it for the pure not to see Him.”

Whatever gives us more of God’s Spirit makes a new knowledge of Him possible. Here is the meeting ground of goodness and knowledge. When we are in heaven and revelling in the absolute, unhindered vision of Divinity, seeing God face to face, we shall look back to some experience of this life, — perhaps paltry, perhaps painful, — some time when God broke our pride and won our hearts and gave us His Spirit, — and we shall see that in that experience was really the opening of the mystery of God for us, the beginning of the endless knowledge of eternity. Oh, if we really understood that to know God is the only true end of life, we should be looking into every experience to see if He were not trying there to give us a little more of His Spirit, and so to make possible a little deeper revelation of Himself.