Natural and Spiritual Forces

“Truth shall flourish out of the earth, and righteousness shall look down from heaven.” — PSALMS lxxxv. n.

ON the i /th of September, 1656, two hundred and twenty-nine years ago, Oliver Cromwell delivered a remarkable speech at the opening of the second protectorate Parliament of England. The whole speech is remarkable, but the close especially is most unlike to anything which before or since has been addressed to any national political assembly. After speaking on many things of public interest, he suddenly turns and tells the representatives of England that he “did read a psalm yesterday, which truly may not unbecome both me to tell of and you to observe.” The rest of his speech is a strange sort of commentary and meditation on this 85th Psalm, from which I take my text. When he approaches the end of it, we seem to hear his rough voice glow and tremble and grow deep as he rehearses the great prophecy: “Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other. Truth shall spring out of the earth, and righteousness shall look down from heaven. Yea, the Lord shall give that which is good, and our land shall yield her increase.” Before how many other eyes that vista has been opened, and the vision of these words has glowed! What hope it has awakened and kept undyingly alive — this great, glowing prophecy which falls in words of matchless music at the end of the 85th Psalm of David!

Let us study that prophecy a while, and study it in the only way in which a prophecy ever ought to be studied, as an illumination of present life and a guide to present conduct. It may be the worst thing possible for us to have the curtain drawn aside, and be allowed to revel in the prospect of the glorious days that are to be, unless we turn back, with our eyes full of that prospect, and understand more deeply by its light the poor, blurred, struggling Present in the midst of which we are still living. The almost fatal fault of a great deal of personal religion has been that it has gloried in the hope of heaven, but has not let that hope play freely on the ordinary life of earth, to illuminate its problems, to rebuke its baseness, and to inspire its duties. Let us not deal so with this prophecy. Let us try to understand what sort of a life that will be in which truth springs out of the earth and righteousness looks down from heaven, so that we may see how far our life is from being that to-day, and perhaps may discover how we can bring it now a little nearer to the realization of that picture.

The point of the prophecy seems then to lie in this, that earth and heaven, the lower and the higher world, are represented as co-operating to produce the high condition which is promised. There are two natural meanings, it seems to me, of such a representation.

First and most literally, I take the earth to mean that world of forces which have their origin in the nature of this familiar planet where we live. It is the visible and tangible world, a world which we think that we understand because it is presenting itself to our senses all the time. Heaven, on the other hand, is the mysterious world that is invisible, the world in the existence of which some men are always trying to convince themselves that they do not believe, but which the race of men is never able to let go, — the great mysterious world which we in general call the supernatural.

How these two words, earth and heaven, represent the two great divisions of the thought of man! When you look abroad over a wide, open country, there are two parts of what you see; one, the green earth with its bright fields and sombre forests, and rivers and lakes, with its trees and houses, fences and barns, and all the clear signs of man’s activity; and the other, the blue sky, the birthplace of the winds, the home of sunlight and of stars, as mysterious and far-away as the first one is close by and familiar. And as the horizon at once separates these two and joins them to each other, and he who watches stands between the two, between the heavens and the earth, and feels his one world made of the two together; so all man’s thinking goes on between the natural and supernatural, between the simple, definite, familiar operations of practical life, the buying and the selling, the building and delving and contriving, the social relationships and govern mental operations, which make the movement of the earth; and, on the other hand, the vague, unaccountable, transcendental influences which come out of the realm of unseen things, the regions where supernal beings live, the home to which the dead have gone, and where the yet unborn are waiting for their day to live, the heavens and hells, the House where God is as He is not here, the whole great universe which comes not to the knowledge of the eye or ear, but in which man believes by the subtler witness which it bears of itself directly to the soul.

I assume the existence of these two regions. The first, no man denies. We see and feel it every day. The second, man believes in, however men have now and then denied it.

And now the promise is that these two worlds are some day to come to perfect harmony and co-operation, and to conspire to influence the life of man. The truth which springs out of the one shall also drop out of the other. The great perfection is to come by the moral unity of heaven and earth, — not as something worked out by the machinery of the lower world, its government and society and trade and study gradually accomplishing for itself man’s highest good; nor, on the other hand, dropped out of heaven ready-made, a blessing in whose accomplishment the earth has had no share; not in either of these ways, but as the result of their mutual effort, the fruit of lower and higher forces both working together for the highest moral ends, — so will the “far-off divine event, to which the whole creation moves,” at last be reached.

Let us consider very carefully and clearly just what it is that is involved in such a prophecy as this. Think what the promise that it gives us is. Think also what the limitations of that promise are. It says to every man who is trying to do right, and finding the struggle very hard — to every man who, trying to do right, has summoned to his aid all the best influences which this earthly life can furnish, and who has learned by sad experience to fear that they are not sufficient, — to every such man it says that there are other influences which are trying to help him coming out of higher regions than this earth. “The heavens are helping you,” it says. “The world of spirits is your ally. The unseen universe is on your side. In ways you cannot guess, with an intimacy of approach which you can never know, righteousness is looking down from heaven on your endeavor to be a righteous man.” That is a splendid assurance. But see how very definite it is. It is all moral. It promises nothing but righteousness out of heaven.

Now, when I think how men have dealt with their belief in the unseen world, I am struck by the thought that what they have mostly asked of that world has been something else than righteousness, and therefore does not fall within the lines of this great promise. Think of it! The old astrologers questioned the stars to know their fates. They waited and listened night after night to hear some message out of the sky, to tell them where they were to seek their fortunes, how long they were to live, and when they were to die. The modern Spiritualist tries to peer through the veil which separates the living from the dead, and what he mainly promises himself is consolation, some mitigation of the awful loneliness which fills his empty house. The Christian Scientist thinks he feels the whole air thrilling with power from the depths of the unseen, and it seems to be to him almost entirely the power of physical healing; he is to have his sickness cured. The great ghost-haunted world has rung with inquiries for the satisfaction of its curiosity, but certainly not with cravings for a purer life and a more steadfast strength against temptation. Wealth, comfort, health, knowledge, — these are all good things, no doubt. If the unseen world can give them to us, it is right that we should take them. But they are not the greatest things. Not one of them is absolutely necessary. Righteousness, goodness, strength of character, those are the only things which a true man must have, things which he cannot live without. And so I cannot help believing that a large part of man’s questioning of the unseen world has been futile because he has not questioned it for the one thing which it was eager to bestow. He has asked it to make him rich, to give him consolation, to cure his sickness, and not above and before all other things to give him righteousness.

Here comes forth one of the great glories of the Christian faith. Christianity is a perpetual assertion of the moral purpose of the relations between man and the unseen world. In it the mists grow thin, the curtain falls. It is a revelation. But a revelation of what? Only and always of that regarding God and heaven whereby man may grow better, braver, stronger, purer. It is not a revelation of the essential nature of God, nor of the conditions of His everlasting life; not of what God is, but of what He does; yet not of what He does in the great universe or in the region of pure power; nor of how He made the worlds and of how He will bring the worlds to the catastrophe in which they shall perish; but of what He does to us to which our life ought to respond; of how He loves us, of how He commands us. Wherever men have tried to force Christianity beyond its appointed purpose, they have evidently been doing it violence; and it has always resented the violence they did it by losing its power, and ceasing to give them its best blessing.

Here has been the birthplace of evil dogmatism. Men have said to Christianity, “Tell us how old the world is! Tell us the composition of the Divine Being. Tell us how long and in what way God means to punish the wicked. Tell us what God required before He could forgive mankind.” And always the answers which they thought they got to those questions came to them hard and rigid, and bred in them bitter and uncharitable dispositions. But whenever men have begged of their great Religion simply the influence which should make them better men, saying, “Oh, drive out our sin, and fill us with holiness, with unselfishness, with truthfulness!” she has responded with a quickness and profusion which showed that now, at least, they had touched the key of her true purpose; now they had summoned her to the task which she most loved, and for which she recognized that she was made!

Is such a definition and limitation of its purpose a degradation of our great Faith? Is it a demand that she shall abdicate the highest offices and count her self fit only for a lower task? Surely not so! It is the crowning of her with the hardest duty that any power can undertake upon the earth. We do not know what force might be needed to remove mountains, to pluck the Himalayas from their seat and toss them into the midst of the astonished sea; we only know that it must be a force so different in kind as to be incomparable with the other kind of force by which a human nature shall be changed down to its root and a bad man be made good. But the longer we live, the more certainly we come to know that no force of any kind can be greater or more glorious than this which undertakes to regenerate a human life. Who would not rather transform badness into goodness than read the secrets of the stars or turn the ocean from its bed? So hard to do, so great a triumph when it is done, appears to us as we grow older the conquering of these wild passions and the bringing out of the possibilities of a human soul!

It is a moral power, then, that the unseen world is to exert upon our human life. And then, the next question rises; whether it is possible for us to know the nature of that influence. How can the parts of the universe which we do not see make it possible for us to live better lives here in our earthly homes? It is a great question. We cannot know all its answer. But we may know something of it. We may say at least this: that the very knowledge that the unseen world is moral must bring strength and clearness to the moral life of any human being who apprehends that truth.

Do you see what I mean? Here is a man trying to do right, and finding it very hard. He hears men all about him calling him a fool because he tries. He sees men all about him acting as if there were no difference of right and wrong. His own heart is full of misgivings. He is sorely tempted. His passions rise up against his principles, and denounce them as tyrants. Tell me, will it be any thing — nay, will it not be everything — to that man if he can know that the right and wrong which make the subjects of his hourly struggles are things not only of this narrow earth of his, but of the whole wide universe? Will it not be everything to him to know that there is no world, out to the farthest bounds of space, in which it is not wrong to lie or steal, or to do impurity; no world where it is not good for any being, of whatever most exalted or degraded sort he may be, to tell the truth, to be pure, and to forget himself in serving others?

Only suppose the opposite of that. Suppose that the poor creature struggling to do right, here upon our earth, with so much here against him, came to know that all this distinction between right and wrong was a purely local thing; that all the beings of the unseen worlds knew nothing of it, that there was a whole universe in which happy and effective life went on without any dream of there being any thing disorderly in stealing, or lying, or murdering, or being selfish. Would not his feeble struggle grow far feebler still? Would not morality often seem to him like a mere provincial prejudice? Would not his fight often seem to him but a fruitless folly? Would not truth cease to spring out of the earth when righteousness had ceased to look down from heaven?

We can easily see how the same thing is true upon a smaller scale. Here is some man in a barbarian country, in Timbuctoo or Madagascar. A spark of divine fire has fallen into his heart, and has kindled there the fuel of his better nature. He has rebelled against the brutality and wickedness by which he is surrounded. He has begun to struggle for a better life. Truth has sprung out of the gross earth of his savage circumstances. The savage men around him laugh at him. They hate him. Even if their hearts admire him, they think his poor struggle the most hopeless dream. Hundreds of times, in his despondent moods, the poor fellow is ready to think so himself.

Then suppose that for a moment the curtain can be lifted which hides from him the world of civilized and Christian life. Suppose that some voice finds its way across the seas, to tell this solitary struggler that there are lands in which the struggle which in his island seems so exceptionally strange is the accepted law of life; that there are lands where the things he seeks are recognized as the only worthy prizes of a human soul, the things without the attainment of which any life is a wretched failure. A breath out of this great tempest of desire for more perfect human living, which we call civilization, strays in and blows with coolness and refreshment on his heated forehead. Is he not filled with new courage? Does not the impossible grow possible to him as he listens? These distant, unseen lands, where higher life is lived, are to him a very heaven. To see righteousness looking down out of that heaven makes the ground under his feet to blossom with new hope. Behold! the love of beauty, the culture of character, the desire for progress, the service of fellow-man — they are not dreams! They are realities! The best parts of the world are full of their realization now. He who in barbarism imagines them, and struggles for them, has only caught sight of what it really is to be a man.

Is not our illustration perfect? Must it not be that if to you and me there can be made known simply this with regard to heaven — not where it is, not what the blessed souls are doing there, but only this — that there goodness is the power of life, and that goodness there is of the same essence exactly as goodness here, — if this can be made known to us, are we not strong? Is there not in us then the power of martyrdom? Is not ridicule robbed of its sting? Is not our little, dusty struggle dignified and glorified when it is seen to be a true effort of loyalty to the same great Master who 4< preserves the stars from wrong,” and by whom the eternal heavens “are fresh and strong”? Do we not fight with new courage against our Sisera when we know, as Deborah sang in her great song, that the stars in their courses are fighting against him, too?

Can we know that? Can we be sure of such a pervasive morality filling the universe like a life-blood? or is this which I have been saying only a splendid theory? I am not sure that there is not something in the very moral sense itself, which, to one who is truly in its power, proclaims its universality, — some intuition which makes the struggler after goodness anywhere absolutely sure that there can be no most transcendental land wherein that same struggle is not going on. How that may be, I do not know. But the real assurance that the universe is all pervaded by morality comes to us, I believe, not from that intuition, but from the belief in God, and therefore has its full strength only when the belief in God is fully strong. This is one of the many ways in which religion and morality are bound together. God fills the universe with Himself, and is the principle of its life; and God is essentially and necessarily moral. Therefore no part of the universe which He thus fills with Himself can be unmoral. Right and wrong must be the critical distinction everywhere, because He is everywhere and everything is His. That is the argument. It rests on the identity of God and the essentialness of the moral element in His nature.

I can conceive of there being regions which God governs, to which He has not made known truths which He has shown to us. There may be realms in His dominion which know nothing of some manifestations of His power with which we are most familiar. But that God should be the God of any farthest star which carries inhabitants capable of morality, of any highest heaven or deepest hell; and yet, that those distant regions know nothing of the difference of right and wrong — that is incredible! “Thus saith the Lord, ‘The Heaven is my throne and the earth is my foostool.” Throne and footstool are full of the nature of the one same God. It cannot be that the throne is ignorant of that power of His Presence which gives to the footstool its deepest and highest glory.

Just think what meaning this truth gives to the Incarnation, to the visible coming of God into the world in Jesus Christ. Out of a heaven all full of the power of morality, a heaven where the right is supremely glorious, and the wrong is supremely horrible, the God in whom that morality of the heavens consists comes forth into our earth, where the same morality, the same distinction of right and wrong exist, but far more feebly, more cloudily and dimly. “What illumination will follow wherever He shall go!” we say. “How, as He treads the earth, goodness the most despised will lift its humble head, and wickedness, however splendid, will cower and shrivel!” It will be — to return a moment to our illustration — it will be as if the citizen of civilized Europe went with his Christian standards to Madagascar and walked among the savages. The souls that dreamed of progress and of holiness will know him and be strong. The brutal and barbarian tyrants will be ashamed through all their brutality.

And think what will be the joy of him who brings the illumination. I love to think of the self-consciousness of Christ. How radiantly full of joy it must have been! Even although the torch which He brings must be held up at last upon a cross, what then? The joy of making the universe of His Father more perfect in its harmony, the joy of making earth hear and respond to the righteousness of heaven, what is the suffering of the cross to that! Oh, if any of us could only be Christ, it would be so easy for us to die like Christ! The cross did not increase, but only manifested His Divinity.

This truth does not exhaust our subject. I do not doubt for a moment that there are more active ministries which the righteousness of heaven renders to the truth of earth than those which belong simply to its existence, those which result necessarily from the fact that the worlds of unseen life are moral. I do not doubt, though no man ever can reduce it to an exact science and tell its methods and its laws, — I do not doubt that there is ever flowing out a great active influence from all the worlds in which righteousness is established as the law of life, to help this poor world of ours, and to help every soul in it that is trying to be good. We are so slow to think that there are any ways in which soul may help soul, besides the few poor ways we know! We limit help to sight and sound and touch. Who can say, who can believe, that it is not possible for every righteous soul in heaven to help every soul striving for righteousness here on earth, with a help just as true, though unseen and unheard, as that with which a strong man lifts a weak man who has fallen in the ditch, or a wise man guides a foolish man with a whisper in his ear? It can be so. No man can say it is impossible. In highest moods we feel their presence with a sense deeper than the senses. The spirits of the universe are helping us; and most of all, the Spirit of God, in whom the universe abides and is forever righteous and forever one.

In such active ministry of the unseen worlds to the earth in which we live, I do indeed believe. But now, I would go back and fasten your remembrance on that of which I have been mostly speaking: The universe is moral. Even in their mere passive character and being, the unseen worlds are full of help for every righteous soul. Tell me, my friends, is not this a truth for you to teach your children, something for you to give them very early, so that they may live by it all their lives? They ask you, perhaps in curious words, perhaps only in the inquiry of wondering faces and of actions which are evidently feeling about for their best motives, why they should do right. You try to answer them. You point them first, no doubt, to their own natures. It is written there that right is right, and wrong is wrong, and that to do the right and not the wrong is the only possible true life for them. That is absolute. That would abide even if there were no other moral being in all the wide universe except this child of yours.

But the child is not the only moral being. You tell him about God, that his Heavenly Father wants him to be righteous, that He will be displeased and sorry if His child is wicked. That would be true if he and God were all alone, if there were no other moral being in the universe but just those two. But there are others, and so you go on and tell him how all the best men whom he knows are struggling against temptation just as you bid him struggle. Then you enlarge the field. You give him books to read, or you take him travelling from land to land, and point out to him that this moral struggle is not a thing of his country or race alone, but is wherever man is throughout the wide world. Then, wider still, you lift the veil of History and show him that all the noble souls in all the ages were moral, too, all elder brethren of his in this desire to be good. You make yourself a prophet, and assure him that, however man may change in future ages, still, until man ceases to be man, this search for character must be the endless aspiration of his race. Then you take his hand and lead him out of the world of man into the world of lower nature; and even there you let him see how a blind craving for something which corresponds to righteousness in man is visible, a struggle to obey its law and to fulfil its purpose even in beast and weed. All this you do to make him brave and strong.

Have you done all you can? Suppose that then you can open some inner eye in himself, so that the universe of unseen worlds shall all be visibly alive with this same struggle; suppose that you can un stop some inner ear so that out of the farthest depths of space shall be heard the universal voice praising righteousness as the great, the only worthy and sufficient, end of being; — have you not filled him with a strength which never can fail, a strength which will come pouring in to aid him in many a weak moment and lift him out of many a desponding slough? It is the strength of infinite companionships. His smallest act of duty is done in company, hot only with Paul and Plato, but with natures whose names he cannot guess, who fill the depths of space and the sublimest heights of heaven. The breath of eternal sympathy will lift his dull resolution as the winds out of the farthest north or south lay themselves under the ship’s sluggish sails and urge it on its way.

Three of the greatest embarrassments which come to a man who, in public or in private life, in the great worlds of government or men or in the little world of his own soul, sets out to struggle after righteousness are these: the sense of loneliness, the sense of unnaturalness, and the sense of hopelessness. It seems to him sometimes as if he works alone, as if the whole world around him cared nothing for that on which his heart is set. It seems sometimes as if the nature of things sets the other way, and as if, in everlastingly resisting his own passions and the currents of established life, he were doing something against nature, something which is almost monstrous. And then these two impressions combine to make a dull sense of despair, in which he labors on, perhaps, but without buoyancy or hope. Do you not see how it must go far to dissipate these embarrassments if, on his struggles after goodness, righteousness shall look down from heaven? Lo!

he is not alone! The universe is with him. Lo! what he does is not unnatural. The truest nature of things is all upon his side. It is sin that is unnatural, not goodness; and success, so far from being hopeless, is absolutely sure, the surest thing in the universe of God.

This is what you are to teach your child; this is what you are to hold fast to for yourself — the sympathy and companionship of the unseen worlds. No doubt it is best for us now that they should be unseen. It cultivates in us that higher perception which we call “faith,” which is as truly perception as is the sight of the eyes. But who can say that the time will not come when, even to those who still live here upon the earth, the unseen worlds shall no longer be unseen? In all times there have been men who, at special moments, have seemed to see beyond the ordinary bounds of sense, and actually with their eyes to behold the forms of beings who belonged not to the earth but to the heavens. Who can say that some day, centuries off, when the old world shall be far older still, and shall have been purified by vastly more of pain and labor, it may not be given to men to see those beings of other worlds than ours who, even now, are round us, and who, we know, are living and seeking the same righteousness with us?

How that may be we cannot know. But certainly our thoughts on this subject ought to have thrown some light forward into the great mystery of death. It ought to let us see in death all the light we really need to see, for if all that I have said is true, then must it not also be true that the man who has striven after goodness here, and at last, after his years of striving which so often seemed to be lonely and hopeless, dies, — is it not true that he goes into a companionship and a certainty which has been preparing for him all his life? The spirit passes into other worlds, and lo! the faces which he meets upon the shore are not strange but familiar. He knows the passion in those eyes. He understands the resolution of those ardent lips. It is his own eagerness for goodness which he finds here in the heaven, out of which for years he has dimly felt it looking down. Death has brought him to his own.

The universe is large, far larger than we think, but there is no portion of it so far away, so splendid or mysterious, that it does not send us messages bidding us and helping us to be pure and brave and true and faithful in these common tasks and simple duties which God has appointed for us on the earth.