The Goal of Individual Development

Revelation xv. 2

“And, I saw a sea of glass mingled with fire; and them that had gotten the victory over the beast, and over his image, and over the number of his name, stand upon the shore of the sea of glass, having the harps of God.” Perhaps the question that occurs to one at the outset, in reading this striking passage, is, What is the relation of the harpers to this glassy sea? The attitude of St. John towards the sea had been an adverse one. The sea had been the instrument of his exile. It had separated him from all that he loved, and specially from the cause that he loved. It had been associated in his mind with everything that was disagreeable; the wild beast, to his vision, rose out of the sea. It THE GOAL OF

had been numbered, not among the beauties, but among the privations, of nature; it had been linked with hunger, with thirst, with pain, with sorrow, with weariness, with death; and amongst the gains of heaven he had recorded this: “There shall be no more sea.” Yet here the sea is painted in other colours — more endearing colours. The object of aversion has become an object of interest Along its shores stands the conquering host of God; it is here that they come to celebrate their triumph; while over the scene of former misery there float the strains of unbroken praise — the music of the harps of God.

Yet, I think we have mistaken the meaning of the allegorical symbol. I do not believe the praise of the harpers is over the sea, but over the abolition of the sea. We sometimes say, “The sea is as calm as a sheet of glass to-day.” In these cases what we admire is not the glass, but the sea. We are contemplating, not the smoothness, but the fact that beneath the smooth surface there is sleeping a power which in a moment could burst its frail environment, dould lash with fury every opposing barrier, could sweep into oblivion the fleets of nations, and fill many lands with wailing. We are admiring the restraint of an element which, if it would, could speak in vociferous tones; and behind our admiration lies the consciousness that some day it may do so. But St. John’s picture, as I take it, is quite a different one. He is contemplating, not a calm day on the sea, but a removal of the sea altogether. He means to indicate that in his vision all the water of the ocean was poured out and the cavity filled up with glass. The harpers are praising God because they are henceforth to be shut in — not shut in Patmos, but shut on the opposite shore from Patmos, the shore of the exile’s return. These harpers are really saying, “We shall go no more out.” Their song is the song of the emigrant who has come home and who has got a guarantee that he will travel no more. That guarantee is the fact that he is locked in from all future unrest; the sea has become glass.

The idea, then, is that of a permanent as

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distinguished from a transitory calm — a calm produced by underlying stability. This is represented as the goal of individual development. Man, after his tossings and his troubles, stands upon the shore of a new character, and thanks God for the result. The question now arises, What is the nature of this Christian peace described in such peculiar allegorical language? I say “peculiar”; I had almost said “contradictory.” The association of the sea and glass is not uncommon, but it is always an association of opposites. The mingling of glass and fire is a still more antagonistic meeting. Whence these strange combinations? Poetic licence will not account for them; they are not such as poetry would suggest. They must have been suggested by something moral, something in the spiritual nature of the facts. There must, in short, have been present to the eye of St. John a view of Christian peace which represented it as different from other kinds of peace, an element which in some sense united it to its contrary and made it, from the human side, a paradox. What is this peculiarity? If it is there, we can find it as easily as John could. It is not a matter of local colouring, which might have vanished with the years. It is within, and therefore it can be identified. Let us look within, and see if we can explain the origin of this symbolism. Let us seek light from the human heart itself on these two things — the sea made of glass, and the glass mingled with fire.

And first. It seems a strange thing that when St. John wishes to portray the peace of the spirit he should have made use of the sea at all. Why speak of a sea of glass? Why not simply tell us that men, after their storm, were permitted to walk on land? Because he wants to preserve the cavity. He wants the deep place to be retained out of which the old waters have been emptied. None knew better than he that peace may be bought too dear. We cannot forget the words of his own gospel: “Not as the world gives, give I unto you.” He, of all men, saw that there is a peace which the world does

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give, and that the peace of Christ is just marked by its distinction from this. The promise of peace was not a promise peculiar to Christ It had been offered by nearly every teacher who had ever professed to guide the steps of man. It had been promised to the devotee on the banks of the Ganges; it had been presented as a goal to the followers of the Stoic philosophy. The originality which Christ claimed was not in the thing bestowed, but in the mode of its bestowal, “Not as the world gives? All had offered glass in exchange for storm; but they offered it by a shallowing process. They proposed to purchase calm by narrowing human nature — by diminishing the capacity to feel. Christ proposed to bring calm without diminishing the capacity. He offered to breathe peace over the heart with¬ out obliterating the characters inscribed upon its depths. He declared that His purpose was not to curtail, but to expand, man’s natural powers — to give life more abundantly The waters of trouble would be lifted from the hollow place in which they lay; but the hollow itself would still remain. The capacity to hold the troubles would not pass away. That was the power of feeling, the power of the heart, the power of love; and no peace would be valuable if it were bought with that.

This is what St. John means by having the glass on the surface of the place once filled by the waters. It is only on the surface that the glass lies. Underneath there are indeed no waters; but the depth which held them remains unfilled. The beast is expelled — the sensuous nature of the soul; but the spot where it dwelt is not allowed to remain vacant; the old love is replaced by a new. The image of the beast is expelled — that ideal which survives in the memory after it has passed from the life; but in the home of the former picture there is hung up a better portrait. The number of the beast is obliterated — the influence of its name; but in its room there is implanted a new influence — a sense of the beauty of holiness. The subject is so important and so distinctively a thought of Christianity that it merits a more detailed illustration.

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Instead of speaking of goodness in the abstract, let us take a single virtue — patience. The Stoic philosophy and the Gospel of Christ have both inculcated patience — resignation in the hour of trial. But they have proposed to reach it by different methods. If a colour is trying, there are two ways by which you can relieve the eye; you may wash out the colour, or you may blend with it another colour. The former is the method of Stoicism; the latter of Christianity. The Stoic proposes to make men patient by rooting out feeling; the Christian by inspiring a counter-iotXmg. The one would get rid of repining by getting rid of pain; the other would bear the pain for the sake of a prospective or an accompanying pleasure. There is an infinite difference between the sense of dense darkness and the state of born-blindness, the one is a black space before the eye; the other is no space at all. Stoicism is an attempt to get rid of the black space — to blot out the memory of the former day, and make the man as if he had been born blind; it is an incitement to forget. It is against this that I understand Tennyson to protest in “In Memoriam”: —

“Let love clasp grief, lest both be drowned,

Let darkness keep her raven gloss,

Ah! better to be drunk with loss,

To dance with death, to beat the ground,

Than that the victor hour should scorn The long result of love, and boast,

* Behold a man that loved and lost
And all he was is overworn. ’”

Now, this is a Christian protest — a protest which could only have been made under the influence of Christian thought. The patience of Christ — that quality which St John himself so highly valued — is valued by him, not for the sake of the glass, but of the force which lies beneath it. Measured by quantity, the amount of peace reached by a Christian is not more than the amount of peace which might be reached by a Stoic or a Buddhist; it is the quality that makes the difference. Have you ever stood in a cemetery on a day of breathless calm? If so, you were at that moment in the presence of two kinds of peace:

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there was a peace below, and there was a peace above. Which was the stiller? If you ask me in terms of quantity, I cannot say; I can only answer by a new adaptation of Tennyson’s line, “I know not which is calmer, no, not I.” But if you ask me in terms of quality, the case is very different; I have no difficulty in assigning the prize. The silence below has an opposite source from the silence above. The silence below is the silence of death. Max Muller says the reason why the lower animals do not speak is that they have nothing to say. So is it with the silence of this under-world; it is the speechlessness of the deaf-mute. But the silence of the sky is the calm, not of emptiness, but of fulness. It is the calm of balanced forces, of regulated powers, of harmonised energies. It is a peace which comes from an equal division of labour, from a convergence of work, from an absence of competing interest. The surface is glass; but there is depth below.

So much, then, for the first of these poetic figures — the sea and the glass. We come now to the second — the glass and the fire. This marks, I think, a different association. The putting of glass over the place where the sea once lay indicated that the peace of Christ was the peace, not of a shallow nature, but of a deep character; it symbolised Christ’s relation to the world within. The glass mingled with fire refers, I think, not to the inner state of the mind, but to the outer circumstances of the heavenly life. If the glass over the former place of the sea means the peace of profound feeling, the glass mingled with fire means the peace that can subsist in circumstances of out¬ ward sacrifice. Fire is the symbol of sacrifice. The seer says in effect that he is unable to contemplate a time when the soul will ever enter into an environment of pure glass — into a world from which have been excluded all the elements which necessitate human effort. The abode of the Greek gods on Olympus would not satisfy him. He wants the glass to be mingled with fire. He desires that the peace shall be one in which the hands will not be folded, in which the heart will not be mute, in

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which the cares of love will not be suspended, in which the need to give will not be sup¬ pressed. He would repudiate the notion that the cross of Christ is a transitory thing, a thing which is to pass away with the present environment. The cross is to him an eternal badge of Christianity, the distinctive mark of the Lord Jesus, and as inseparable from the Lord Jesus as the mark of the beast is inseparable from the beast. The resurrection of Christ was, to him, not an ascension above the need of sacrifice, but the rising into a life where the power of sacrifice would be unimpeded — where the glass would make it more easy to pass through the fire.

Now, this is not the common view entertained of the Apocalypse. I have heard its ideas of the heavenly state again and again stigmatised as the pictures of a sensuous life — and that, not by negative critics, but by divines otherwise pronouncedly conservative. That it does present the imagery of sensuous comfort is beyond question; but I think it is forgotten that it presents this imagery only on one side of the road. On another side of the road you will find the opposite imagery. Let us take the seventh chapter as a specimen. Looked at from one angle, it is the portraiture of a sensuous paradise. The redeemed are arrayed in shining garments. They are in front of the Divine throne. God has spread over them a protective tabernacle. They hunger no more; they thirst no more; they sink no more beneath the burden and the heat. They are shepherded like a flock; They are led to living waters; They have all tears wiped from the eyes. It seems a picture of glassy calm.

But look again, and I think you will find that there is another side to the picture. All this calm is the result of a stupendous sacrifice. It is not simply the reward of a sacrifice which was perpetrated in the earthly state. The idea of the passage is clear and explicit. It is because the sacrifice continues in the heavenly state that the heavenly state itself is so smooth. In this state the central figure is the Lamb — the symbol of sacrifice corres-THE GOAL OF

ponding to the fire. It is the Lamb that feeds them, it is the Lamb that leads them, it is the Lamb that gives life to the fountain of waters. If their robes are shining, it is because they have washed them in the Lamb’s blood. If they have a front view of the throne, it is because in God’s temple they serve day and night. If they dwell in the centre of Divine power, it is because they have surrendered themselves to a life of sacrifice. The glass has come from the fire.

And the principle which lies beneath all this is not difficult to read. It is that which Paul calls emphatically “the law of Christ” — that the personal burden can only be got rid of by taking up an /^personal one. “Bear ye one another’s burdens, for every man shall bear his own burden.” It is a declaration of the fact that it is a man’s interest to be unselfish, that the load which every spirit bears cannot fall into the sea until the sorrow of others has cast its shadow over him. If the heavenly state is a life personally burden¬ less, it is because it is a life z;;zpersonally burdened. Its individual calm is the result of individual surrender. It has conquered pain by homoeopathy. Each man has lost his own passion by taking up the Lord’s passion; he has walked through the fire and felt no hurt, by reason of a larger pain.

‘There is one passage of this book which seems to me strikingly to illustrate the sacrificial nature of the heavenly state; and none the less so because it is one of those adduced on the opposite side. I allude to Revelation vi. 10, where the souls under the altar are represented as calling with a loud voice, “How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?” It has been said that this marks a relapse in religious thought — the regress towards a sensuous and vindictive spirit. To my mind, it marks the very root of the modern conception of heaven. What is realiy the cry of these souls? It is not an emotion of vindictiveness. It is not even a desire for the redress of personal injury. The word “our” is generic. It is not their own

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blood they are thinking of; it is the blood of their kind. The voice is a voice of pity. They are contemplating the miseries which their fellow-creatures are suffering in the earthly state. They are in the attitude which modern Britain has often taken over the perpetration of Eastern atrocities. They have resumed in the heavenly life the cross of humanity — the cross of the Son of Man. They have entered into sympathy, nay, into participation, with that which they have surmounted; they live in the conflict of the past.

I think this a grand as well as a bold trait in the delineations of St. John — to have allowed the blessed dead to preserve the possibility of pain. “Enter ye into the joy of your Lord” seems a natural utterance; we expect to find the glass where the waters used to be. But St. John sees beyond this. He sees that if we would enter into Christ’s joy, we must first enter into His pain. The glass is here the product of the fire; personal care has fled, because universal care has come. The seer of Patmos has inaugurated the modern heaven. “I saw a new heaven are the words in which he himself expresses this conviction. He felt that men were on the borders of a higher conception of blessedness a conception in which sensuous happiness was no longer the goal of man. He remembeied that, according to his own narrative, the peace of Christ came in the midst of the cross. And that became to him the rule for all peace — always, everywhere. It became the law of life universal — in heaven as on earth. Why does he behold the redeemed casting their crowns at the feet of Christ? It is because to his mind the crown is not the basis of joy. It is because in all worlds the basis of joy is Christ Himself — the spirit of sacrifice, the surrender of the individual will. The altar which he builds is the altar of Jacob — the monument to the night of struggle. The stone pillow of Bethel is transformed into a couch of down; but it is because the angel life forgets its own pain by descending the ladder of ministration; the glass is reached through the fire.