The Symbol and the Reality

“The sun shall he no more thy light by day: neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee: but the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory.” — ISAIAH Ix. 19.

IN the midst of the glowing picture of Messiah’s kingdom, which Isaiah draws, occur these words. He is tell ing of the wonderful changes which are to come when mankind shall have reached perfection under the government of its perfect master. Especially he is speaking to the Jewish church and nation. The pages are bright with promises. “For brass I will bring gold, and for iron I will bring silver, and for wood brass, and for stones iron: I will also make thy officers peace, and thine exactors righteousness. Violence shall no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor destruction within thy borders; but thou shalt call thy walls Salvation, and thy gates Praise.” And then there comes this other promise, which I quoted for my text. The prophet bids his people look forward to a time when even the sun and moon shall become needless to them; when in some new and more direct experience of God they shall need nothing to reflect His light to them, but drink immediately from Himself His strength and inspiration. That seems to be the meaning of the words; and so it points us to one feature which belongs to every progress, the power to do without one thing after another which has before been essential, the way in which, as we advance to higher and higher supplies, we are able to gather out of them what we used to get from lower sources. It is like that verse in St. John’s description of the New Jerusalem: “I saw no temple therein, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it.” Or like these soberer words of St. Paul’s autobiography: “When I became a man I put away childish things.” This life that rises to the highest helps and companies is able easily to do without the lower.

There is no better test of men’s progress than this advancing power to do without the things which used to be essential to their lives. As we climb a high mountain we must keep our footing strong upon one ledge until we have fastened ourselves strongly on the next. Then we may let the lower foothold go. The lives of men who have been always growing are strewed along their whole course with the things which they have learned to do without. As the track of an army inarching deep into an enemy’s country is scattered all along with the equipage which the men seemed to find necessary when they started, but which they have learned to do without as the exigencies of their march grew greater, and they found that these provisions and equipments were partly such as they did not need at all, and partly such as they could gather out of the land through which they marched; so from the time when the child casts his leading strings aside because his legs are strong enough to carry him alone, the growing man goes on forever leaving each help for a higher, until at last, in that great change to which Isaiah’s words seem to apply, he can do without sun and moon as he enters into the immediate presence and essential life of God.

For everything is valuable only in relation to the powers and tastes to which it is of use. Nothing has any value which does not meet and satisfy the hunger of some organ of our life, and everything has value only for that organ, and that condition of any organ, which it satisfies. Books have no value, directly, for the taste, nor bread for the mind. Now every power that is in us, it it is healthy, hungers after food, and it will seize like any hungry thing on what food it can find. But every power is capable of culture, capable of being brought up to appreciate higher and higher foods. And as each power comes to a higher condition, and finds its higher food and learns to love it, it is able to let go the food in which it has delighted simply because it must delight in something, and to rest in its new-found higher satisfaction. And what is true of every single power is true about the aggregate of powers, — our total self considered as one whole. We must have what will give us pleasure and occupy our lives. But as we grow we come to the capacity of higher pleasures and higher occupations, and so let go the lower ones; not by compulsion, because we cannot hold them any longer, but from the satisfaction of our newer lives; because we have got something else better than they are, and can do without them now. This is the way in which a true man puts away childish things. This is the meaning of that pleasing sort of regret with which we sometimes go back to the occupations of our childhood, to the books we used to read, the tasks we used to study, the friends with whom we trifled, the fields where we idly wandered. We think we want all these things back again. We think we should be happy if they were all restored to us once more, but when w« touch them we find their charm is gone; and with a strange and pathetic mixture of discontent and pride, of pain and joy, we learn that he who has grown to any higher life not only may, but must, do without his old satisfactions. Sometimes you see a young man who has not grown. No higher work, no higher life has opened to him; and what marks him as different from his growing comrades, what shows how they have outstripped him, is just this: that they can do without what he must have. They have put away childish things for their manly occupations, while he must still be busy with his little vanities and conceits and plays and emulations, because he has grown up to nothing else, as the idiot of forty will play still with the toys of babyhood.

Now this change from childhood into manhood is only the picture of all the spiritual and moral advances which men make through all their lives. Every imperfect condition is to the perfect condition what the child’s life is to the man’s life; and the advance from one to the other, if we examine it, is always a change into greater and more complete reality. The things which childhood values are the symbols or types of the things which the man will value by and by, and the reason why the man is able to let the child’s treasures drop and do without them is that he has reached the reality which those precious things of childhood only represented. The man does not want the boy’s sports, because he has found in the serious work of life the true field for those emulations and activities which were only practising and trying themselves in the play-ground. The man can do with out the boy’s perpetual physical activity, because he haa

286 THE SYMBOL ANI/ THE REALITY.

come to the pleasures of an active mind which the restlessness of the child’s body, his pleasure in mere movement, anticipated and prophesied. It seems as if the change from boyhood into a true manhood could not be more justly described than as an advance from dealing with symbols to dealing with realities. And if, then, every progress in life is a change from some new boyhood to some yet riper manhood; if every man is a child to his own possible maturer self; may it not be truly stated that all the spiritual advances of life are advances from some symbol to its reality, and that the abandoned interests and occupations which strew the path which we have travelled are the symbols which we have cast away easily because we had grasped the realities for which they stood?

Such an idea, if it were true, would seem to help and enlighten us in various ways. It would make us look with complacency, without regret, upon the things which we have left behind us. It would help us to understand our neighbors who make nothing of, or make very light of, what we prize very much. On the other hand, it would give us a charitable understanding of and hope for our other neighbors who are still caring very much about things which we have ceased to value; and it would allow us to find great pleasure in many things, while all the time we know that we cannot rest in them forever, that sometime we must pass beyond them to the higher and complete things of which they are only the symbols.

Let us take two or three instances of those things which are valuable as symbols, but which he is able to do without who has got beyond the symbol and gained the reality which it represents. Take the instance ct£ wealth.

There are some men who can do without being rich, — plenty of men who have to, but some men who can, can easily, can without discontent or trouble. They have the universal human passions. They are not monsters in the shape of men, much as it may appear as if they were, in the midst of the crowd of money seekers. They love comfort and respectability as much as these their neighbors. What is the difference? Simply this, that they have found that comfort and respectability, while money is their natural symbol, are not dependent upon money, and that one may reach past the symbol and take the reality, and let the symbol go. Is it not true, and is it not striking, that while we all feel that comfort and respectability are naturally symbolized by wealth, yet the most comfortable and respectable men in town are not always, perhaps are very rarely, the wealthiest men? The symbol is good, but there will always be some mea who have seized the reality so completely that they can do without the symbol. How it shows when two men fail. One of them keeps his honor, his good repute, his self-respect, and he can do without money. He has the reality, and can let the symbol go. The other man has nothing: no respect of other men, no respect of himself. He has nothing but the money. When that is gone he has nothing. He cannot do without it, and so he flees to the pistol, or the poison, or the river. There is this lamentable lack of the power to do without money, which makes these men the slave of their money. The fact is that every symbol ought to be always fitting us to do without itself. Money ought to be making us indifferent to money; to be preparing us to be cheerfully poor; to be building tastes and powers within itself, like a house within a scaffolding, so that the scaffolding may come down and the house still stand. For how many of our rich men is their wealth doing that; but certainly, if his wealth is not doing that for a man, he is the slave of his wealth and not its master.

Or take another symbol. Praise is good. To be applauded by our fellow-men, to hear our ambitions about ourselves caught up by their testifying cheers, to have our own best hopes for our own lives confirmed by their appreciation of us, that is a true delight for any man. To be able to do without men’s praise because we do not feel its value, because morosely and selfishly we do not care what men think, that is bad; that is a sign of feebleness and conceit. To feel it is wretched, and to affect to feel it is detestable. But to be able to do without men’s praise because that which their praise stands for is dearer to us than the praise is, and it so happens that we cannot have both of them, that is a wholly different thing. The first man has sunk below the necessity of men’s applause, the second man has risen above it. The poor, demoralized beggar and the calm, philosophic ser vant of God, standing together in the street, neither of them may care much whether men praise or blame him, — both of them can do without applause. But how different they are. Both can do without the sunlight; but one is the mole crawling out of sight of the sun under ground, the other is the angel who lives beyond the sun with God. For men’s praise stands for goodness. Every man feels that if it does not mean that, if it is given to iniquity just as freely as to goodness, praise loses all its value. Praise is the symbol; goodness is the reality. But if we cannot let the praise go in order to be good, if we dare not do right though every tongue of man broke out in wild abuse of us together, then once more the symbol has us in its tyranny. We are not its masters, able to do without it, able to say to it any day, “You may go now; I have used you long enough. You have done all that you can for me. Now you are beginning not to help me, but to harm me.” We are its servants, only daring to ask of it humbly, “What would you have me do that I may more completely win your favor, O praise of men?”

So it runs everywhere. The symbols of the deeper pleasures are the mere animal indulgences, — eating and drinking, the lusts of the flesh. They stand for intellectual and spiritual joys. How natural their symbolism is. The Bible talks of “hungering and thirsting after righteousness.” David says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” Jesus tells His disciples about “eating His flesh and drinking His blood.” The superficial emotions of the senses stand for and represent the profound emotions of the soul. In the harmonious life the two will live in harmony. The symbol and reality, the body’s and the soul’s enjoyment, will be complete together. But when in this unharmonious life in which we live the symbol and reality come into unnatural conflict, when either the soul must be sacrificed to the body or the body to the soul, he who really knows what the soul’s happiness is does not hesitate. He is able to do without the sensual, delight. He can be hungry and thirsty, and deny every lust its indulgence, that he may be pure and true and godly. He can be starved and famished in the symbol, that he may eat and drink deep of the reality. You say, “I cannot do it. These passions at least must have their way. I was made so. I cannot do without this gratification.” No, certainly not, unless you can come to what that gratification stands for. If you can do that; if you can really see the beauty of goodness and purity, and love that; and then if this gratification coming in con flict with them means sin, then you can easily lose it for it will have lost its charm for you. Not that it will seem better to you to be good than to be happy, as me» sometimes say, but the only possible happiness for you will be in being good.

You see that I am speaking not only of things that are wrong in themselves. Nay; I am speaking mainly of things which are not wrong in themselves, but which the time comes for a man to do without because he cannot have them and the better things which they represent together. A tree’s leaves are symbols; they mean growth; they stand for health and life as they rustle and sparkle in the summer wind and sunshine. But the day comes when the tree, to keep its healthy life, must cast its leaves aside and stand bare and naked through the long winter, losing the symbol to keep the reality. A man’s limbs mean manhood. They stand for the fact of his manly strength to himself and to the world. But the time comes in battle, at his sentry post, when the man must either lose his limbs or lose his honor; and then, rather than be a coward, he lets a part of himself go; for now to be maimed and not to be complete means strength and the perfectness of manhood. And here is the power of true self-sacrifice; here is the secret which takes out of it all the bitterness and brutality. Always it is the giving up of a symbol that you may have the reality. In the great sacrifice of all, Christ lays down His life, but it is that He may take it again. Do you think that Christ did not care for life and all that makes life beautiful to us? Surely He did, but He cared more for that which they represent, — the living purely, the doing of His Father’s will, and the serving of His brethren. That was why He was able to do without the things which seem to be absolutely essential to our lives; because He was so much more full than we are of the beauty arid glory of the life with God. That was the power by which He was able to speak harsh words when He would gladly have indulged Himself in speaking kind and soft words. And when we control our weak good-nature, and will not do some mere indulgent action to a friend or child, in order that we may help that child or friend to some manly work or vigorous self-control, we are doing in our way what Jesus did when He surrendered the mere pleasure of pleasing the world for the higher and more perfect joy of saving the world.

I am very much impressed by the truth of all this as concerns the Christian Church. She has her symbols and her ordinances, and she has her true and inner life. Her outward ways of living really belong with her inward power. In a perfectly harmonious world there never could be any conflict. In Heaven the outward and the inward church shall absolutely correspond; but here and now the church may be so set upon her symbols and her regularities that she shall fail of doing her most perfect work and living her most perfect life. The Christian may be so bound to rites and ceremonies that he loses the God to whom they ought to bring him near. The congregation may be so jealous for its liturgy that it loses the power of prayer. The church at large may make so much of its apostolic ministry that it loses the present ministry of Christ Himself. Here it certainly is true that no symbol is doing its true work unless it is educating those who use it to do without itself, if need be. The Christian is misusing his rites and ceremonies, unless they are bringing him more personally and immediately near to God. The congregation is not using its liturgy aright if it is getting more and more unable to worship except in just that form and order; and the church is suffering and not thriving by her ancient ministry if she is making it exclusive and mechanical, and calling none the ministers of Christ who have not that ordination. Everywhere the letter stands for the spirit, and to give up the letter, that the spirit may live more fully, becomes from time to time the absolute necessity of the living church.

Have I then made clear our law? Among the tests of men there stands very high this power to do without. A man says, “You need not talk to me about this luxury, this habit. The time may come when I shall have to sacrifice my principle to keep it, but I cannot live with out it.” Another man says, “I like this, but I despise the thought that it should become essential to me, that I should not be able to do without it.” Are not those two men ranked? Do you not know which is the greater and the stronger, which is the smaller and the weaker man? But then this power of doing without some things is, we have seen, at its bottom a power of not doing without other things. We are rescued from the abject slavery of the lower by entering into the absolute servantship of the higher. He to whom honor is necessary can dD without money. He who must have goodness can get along without praise. He who must have God’s communion can do without the sweet companionships of fellow-men. He who cannot lose his eternity can easily cast aside time and the body which belongs to it, and by the martyr’s slow or sudden death exchange the visible for the invisible, the symbol for the reality. Nay, he who values most intensely his friend’s or his child’s eternal life can, not easily but still not grudgingly, let go the joy and daily comfort of his friend’s or his child’s hourly presence, and see him die that he may enter into life. On these two ladders, as it were, by these two scales, the order of human character mounts up, — the power to do without and the power not to do without. As you grow better there are some things which are always growing looser in their grasp upon you; there are other things which are always taking tighter hold upon your life. You sweep up out of the grasp of money, praise, ease, distinction. You sweep up into the necessity of truth, courage, virtue, love, and God. The gravitation of the earth grows weaker, the gravitation of the stars takes stronger and stronger hold upon you. And on the other hand, as you grow worse, as you go down, the terrible opposite of all this comes to pass. The highest necessities let you go, and the lowest necessities take lighter hold of you. Still, as you go down, you are judged by what you can do without and what you can not do without. You come down at last where you can not do without a comfortable dinner and an easy bed, but you can do without an act of charity or a thought of God. The poor sot finds his misery sealed with this double seal, that he cannot miss his glass of liquor, and he can miss without a sigh every good company and virtuous wish.

Oh, test your lives by this. Judge where you stand by what are your necessities. Oh, stretch yourselves and see where you touch your chains, and thank God if you are really, by His culture, growing more and more able to spare the temporary symbols, less and less able to do without the eternal realities of life.

But now, before I close, let me try to answer one or two questions which I most earnestly hope have arisen in some of your minds while I have spoken. I think that I have spoken in vain unless some such questions have sprung up. First you will ask, How can I tell the symbol from the reality, and so know what things it is good to hold less and less, what things it is good to hold more and more indispensable? It is not easy to give the an swer in a rule. But the answer no doubt lies in a certain feeling of spirituality and infiniteness and eternity, which belongs to those things which it is good for a man not to be able to do without. Those things which serve the soul rather than the body, those which serve the whole of us and not one special part, and those which can serve us longest, — those are the things which we want to make more and more indispensable. Those things whose usefulness belongs mainly to the body, those things which help some part of us and not the whole, and those things whose use is temporary, — it is not good for any of us to have to say, “I cannot do without these things.” This is, perhaps, the nearest that we can come to rules; but he who lives in the spirit of these rules acquires a certain sort of feeling of the infiniteness of some things and the finiteness of others, so that renown, wealth, dignity, sympathy, comfort, friendship, amusement, life, stand on one side; and honor, truth, bravery, purity, love, eternity, God, stand on the other. These last he must have. Those others he can do without. The moment that he touches any new gift he can tell to which order it belongs.

But then you say, What then? When I have felt this difference, when I know what things I must not allow to become indispensable to me, what shall I do then? Shall I throw all those things away? Shall I strip my life instantly of all that is not indispensable, and live only in those things which I cannot live without? No; certainly not. That effort to cast away the symbol as soon as it was seen to be a symbol has been the source of much religious unhappiness and failure, and of much of the wrong kind of separation between religious and irreligious life. Not to give up the symbol, but to hold it as a symbol, with that looser grasp which lets its inner reality escape into us, and at the same time makes us always ready to let it go when the reality shall have wholly opened from it, that is the true duty of the Christian as concerns the innocent things of the world. That was the way in which Jesus always seemed to be holding friendship, home, nature, and His own human life; never grasping them so tightly that their spiritual meanings might not come forth from them freely, nor that He could not give them up when a higher vocation summoned Him. The Christian is a man in the world. The difference between him and the man of the world must not be in sharp separation of all their occupations. It must be in the different ways in which they hold their worldly things. How easily, with what a sense of mastery, you hold what all the time you know that you can do without. The beggar, the ruined man, the poor woman, with just one piece of money left, with no chance to get another if that is lost, clutches that piece of money tight, and, casting suspicious looks on every side, hurries along the street. The rich man, with his balance in the banks, holds his one coin lightly, and without anxiety parts with it with an easy grace for luxury or charity. That is the difference between the religious and the irreligious use of the world. The Christian works by your side in business or society, but do not think that business is to him the absorbing anxiety, or society the feverish race, that it is to you. He has not staked his everything upon their game. He can afford to lose, and yet go away calm and with the infiniteness of his life untouched. He is like Jesus, whom His disciples could not understand. They said unto Him, Master, eat. But He said unto them, I have meat to eat that ye know not of. Therefore said the disciples one to another, Hath any man brought Him aught to eat? Jesus saith unto them, My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me, and to finish His work. So the Christian, with larger, looser grasp, holds the things of earth and gathers out of them all the more richness and strength because he is not their slave, but their master, and can do without them if his higher duties or interests shall need it.

There is nothing that impresses us all so much as to see another man easily do without what is the very life of our life. “This man has not my money,” you say; “but he would have it if he could. He goes without it only because he cannot get it.” But by and by you see another man put money which he might have under his feet, and for the sake of learning or religion quietly take up the life of poverty. That startles you. You cannot understand it. But is it not true that all of us have had our best revelations of the value of things out of just such sights as that; have had our false despotic standards thrown off their pedestals when we saw a nobler man easily neglect them, as the idol fell down on his face when the ark of Jehovah was brought into the house of Dagon, the Philistine’s god?

And that brings us to the last question. How shall I come to count nothing indispensable but what I really ought to, what I really cannot do without? The answer to that question is in Christ, who holds the answers of all our questions for us. As I read the Gospels I can see how, little by little, Jesus lifted those disciples past one conception of necessity after another, until at last they knew nothing that was absolutely necessary except God. They began as fishermen who could not do without their nets and boats and houses and fishing friends and sports and gains and gossipings. He carried them up till they were crying, “Lord, show us the Father, and it sufficeth us.” That wonderful change — how wonderful it was we forget, because the story is so familiar — He brought about by showing them His salvation. When, living with Him, “hey saw the glory of forgiveness and regeneration, saw the new life that opened before those who really knew His grace, everything changed to them. It was not so important how they fared, what food they ate, what they wore, how many fish they caught. “All these things do the nations of the earth seek after.” To them the questions shifted. The tests of life swept higher up. Were they indeed His? Had they caught His spirit? Were they living His life? Had they part in His eternity? And so when you and I really desire the salvation of

Christ, He will do for us all that He did for them. Our tests of life, too, shall sweep up. Not, Is my body well? but, Is the soul strong? Not, Is my friend sure to live here by my side? but, Is he living with God? Not, Am I myself sure of the life here? but, Am I already living the life that is forever? Health, companionship, life itself, these are no longer indispensable when Christ has shown us God. A resignation that is not despair, but aspiration; a looser grasp on time, that means how strongly we are holding to eternity; this must come to us when, after all our doing of little temporary things, we have at last begun in Christ the life and work that is to go on forever and forever. Then even the most essential things of this world we can do without, if need be. We have passed from the lower to the higher necessities. We walk by faith, and not by sight. Already, even while we are yet in the flesh, before we cross the river, the promise finds its fulfilment. We live in the world, but we do not live by the world. Already the sun is no more our light by day; neither for brightness does the moon give light unto us; but the Lord is unto us an everlasting light, and our God our glory.