The Divine Law of Survival
Revelation xxi. 27
The Divine law of survival is expressed in these words: “There shall in no wise enter into it anything that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination or a lie, but they which are written in the Lamb’s book of life.” It is the earliest historic statement of that great principle which has since become scientific — the principle by which the fittest live; and I wish to consider, step by step, that process of thought which probably directed the mind of the writer.
To live in a book is one of the deepest desires of men. There are few who have not wished to have an influence on earth extending beyond the range of their earthly life. To have some¬ thing that will survive me, something that will speak of me when I have gone, something that will give me a power in the world after I have passed away, is an ambition which, in some form or other, has been felt by all. Various have been the forms it has taken. Some have sought it by winning love, some by leaving a mass of money, some by rearing a monument of art, some by bequeathing the creations of music. But even those who would live by art, by sculpture, by music, expect to have their name preserved through the medium of a book. It is in no case by our own book that we mainly hope to live. Our ambition is to have our names written in some other book, to be quoted as an authority, to be referred to as an illustration. Even to write one’s name in a visitors’ book has a kind of symbolic pleasure; it suggests the transmission of fame. Even to appear in the fleeting columns of the newspaper gives a glow of satisfaction; it conveys the impression of publicity. But, to have the name written in a real book, a living book, a book that will live, to appear in pages that are destined to last for centuries, to obtain honour¬ able mention in a record that will endure as long as the language of your country — this is a goal of aspiration which any man might be proud to win.
Our ambition, then, is to get our names in a living book, a book that will live, or, as it is here called, a “book of life.” But where is such a book to be found? How many books are there of living writers which one would venture to pronounce immortal? I have often asked myself, if all the authors of the present day were to stop writing from this moment, how many would be remembered, even by name, in the year 1920? It would be invidious to say. Meantime, we cannot but observe that there is nothing in which the calculations of men have been so falsified as the fate of books. Works which were confidently promised an immortality by their contemporaries have, in a few years, been buried in oblivion; and works which, by their contemporaries were unnoticed and unknown, have filled the world with their fame. Sydney Dobell was pronounced a great dramatist; Alexander Smith was called one of the greatest of poets; yet Sydney Dobell is altogether, and Alexander Smith almost, for¬ gotten. Thomas a Kempis issued his book in the darkness, and its coming woke no echoes in its time; but the world found it after many days, and posterity gave it a place next to the Bible.
And yet, it would be a great mistake to imagine that there is really anything arbitrary in the survival of one book over another. On the contrary, assuming in each an equal amount of genius, it could be exactly calculated which would be the longest liver. Other things being equal, it may be laid down as a rule, that the surviving book is the sacrificial book. Every book that lasts through a series of centuries is in a sense a “Lamb’s book.” It has achieved success by sacrifice. It has postponed a temporal to an eternal interest. It has refused to follow the fashions of the hour. It has declined to purchase popularity by pandering to the spirit of a special age. It selects universal types of men, and is content to wait till that which is special has passed away. If Shakespeare had written for his age, he would have been famous in his age. But he preferred to disregard the accidents of humanity, to ignore that which was peculiar to the sixteenth century; and therefore he has found his atmosphere only in a later day. The universal book is a “Lamb’s book.”
Let us rise now from the metaphor to that which, to St. John, is the great reality. He sees the Son of Man writing a book in the heavens. It is not, however, a book about the heavens. There is nothing mystical about it. It is the book of human history. It is the same book with which the historians of earth have been engaged since the world began. It is not a different book from that which Macaulay, and Gibbon, and Hume, and Burton tried; but it is being written from a different standpoint. It is history seen from the Divine side — seen as it looks to larger eyes than ours. As we compare the two records — those written from the human side and that inscribed from the Divine, we find that there is an opposite estimate of the value of things; many of the last are first, and many of the first are last.
Above all, we are called to note the fact that the record of the Son of Man is a Lamb s book. It is a survival of sacrificial lives — of lives that in their own day were content to be buried. We are made aware from time to time that the men whom this Divine record pronounces the leaders of our age aie piecisely those who, by their day and generation, w ei e despised and rejected. These rejected lives take the place of the present visible forces. You ask the schoolboy who were the leaders of the German rising of 1813. He will probably answer “Schwarzenberg, Bagration, Moreau.” You open the note-book of the Son of Man, and you do not find one of these names. But in their room there stands the figure of an old monk, a prisoner in the Wartburg, reviled and execrated by his age — Martin Luthei. You ask, “Who were the originators of the Georgian era of literature?” The human record answers “Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron.’ The note¬ book of the Son of Man has only one figure, and it is none of these. It is a humble parish minister at Lutterworth, spending houis in his obscure study on a work with which his time had no sympathy — John Wyckliffe, the translator of the English Bible. You ask who liberated the British slave. “The House of Commons,” says the human record. The Divine book gives another reading. In the front of the emancipation movement stands the form of a half-blind tent maker of Tarsus, the object of obloquy, and contempt, and scorn, preaching the gospel of the essential equality of all men, and proclaiming in the heart of the Roman world that there is neither bond nor free.
The lives that survive in this book are there¬ fore sacrificial lives; it is on this account that it is called a Lamb’s book. In this view there is nothing fanciful. It is not an allegorical interpretation of the passage; it is the discovery of that allegory which the passage actually involves. Even so early as the 139th Psalm the book of life is spoken of in terms which I take to be sacrificial: “Thine eyes did see my substance while it was yet imperfect, and in thy book all my members were written, when as yet there was none of them.” The idea seems to be that the book of life selects its objects from the most obscure circumstances, and puts on record what the world has not even seen. When Paul speaks of humble labourers whose “names are in the book of life,” does he not mean to imply the same thing — that the saints shall judge the world, that the sacrificial lives shall rule? “If we suffer with Him, we shall also reign with Him” are the words in which, with greatest brevity and with greatest clearness, is enunciated the principle of Divine selection. It is only another form of the old saying, “In the volume of the book it is written of me, ‘ I delight to do Thy will,”
From the positive statement of the principle the seer next passes to consider it negatively. He has told us that the sacrificial soul shall have the permanent power in history. He goes on to tell us what shall not survive. There are two things which are said to be incapable of survival — impurity and untruth. In the first instance it is declared that nothing which is impure shall be allowed to have a permanent influence on the progress of history: “There shall in no wise enter into it anything that defileth nor which worketh abomination.” You will observe, the seer is not speaking of persons, but of things. One might wonder at first sight why he does not from the outset use the masculine form. Why does he not say, “There shall in no wise enter into it any man that worketh abomination”? In the case of the second clause, the Revised Version has inserted the personal element, “he that worketh a lie.” Yet, I have no hesitation in saying that in so doing it has weakened, and not strengthened, the original sense. The writer is speaking primarily and mainly, not of actors, but of the influence of their acts. Indeed, it is a great blessing for the human race that it should be so. Personal salvation would be impossible except on the supposition that a man shall be enrolled in the membership of the kingdom while yet he is in a state of uncleanness. This has always been regarded as the pith and marrow of the evangelical doctrine. It is as philosophical as it is orthodox, and it is as comforting as it is philosophical. The man who would enter the kingdom of Christ must, according to St Paul, enter by faith alone. He must not wait until he is pure. He must be content to come with the intention of purity, with the desire to be what he is not. He must be allowed to put his foot on the sacred threshold “just as he is, without one plea.” He must be accepted for an aspiration. If he would have his name written in the book of life, it must be written there in advance of his life. He must be justified before he is sanctified — pronounced fit for the kingdom in the light of days to come. The only hope for him is his permission to survive, his permission to enter within the gates of gold, while yet his own life has not transcended the brass.
The idea of the passage, then, is, not that a man must be spotless before he is made a member of Christ’s body, but that within the membership of Christ’s body his stains shall die. The passage is not a threat, as we are often apt to consider it. It is a promise, a message of comfort to the weary. For, to the soul oppressed with the struggles of time there is nothing really more comforting than the announcement that evil shall die. To be told that the scars of the world will not last for ever, that the influence of badness will be counter¬ acted, that the stream of history will not permanently be polluted by the stains of humanity — it is tidings of the best news. It is a message over which every earnest heart must be glad. It is a gospel fitted to cheer the drooping soul, to raise up those that are bowed down. No sincere well-wisher of the race would desire these words to be expunged.
But it remains to ask, Is it so? Do we find as a matter of fact that impurity does not live on the stream of history? We must answer, “Yes.” It must often have occurred to us to marvel that heredity has not by this time succeeded in doing more harm to the world. When we consider the large amount of corruption which actually exists on earth, when we look at the channels which earth has provided for its transmission, when we contemplate the accumulated sources through which this transmission is effected, the wonder is, not that impurity prevails, but that anything else should prevail. We should expect that by this time there would not be a vestige left of humanity, not a rag of that robe of royalty which clothes the ideal of the soul of man. But is it so? On the contrary, we find that the stream of degradation is constantly arrested. We see specimens of humanity mutilated, both physically and morally. We see this mutilation for a time carried forward from father to son; but only for a time. By-and-bye a voice seems to say, “Thus far and no farther.” A stop is put to the downward course. Humanity makes a bound backward toward its original type, and the retarding element is either expunged altogether or transmuted into something new. Drunkenness is hereditary, and drunkenness is rampant; but the human i’ace have never become drunkards. How are we to explain this? The principle is no recent discovery. So far back as the Book of Exodus the sins of the fathers were said to be visited upon the children “unto the third and fourth generation.” There is clearly a limit in these words, a boundary imposed, beyond which the visitation cannot pass; and it is confirmed by the history of facts. Can we find any better explanation than the Divine will? Is it not only the fore¬ shadowing and the fulfilment of that gieat law of Divine survival which is proclaimed in the words of the seer of Patmos: “There shall in no wise enter into it anything that is unclean?
We come now to the second of those qualities which are to be excluded from the final development of history — untruth: “there shall in no wise enter into it anything which worketh a lie.” Why does he not say “telleth a lie?” Why does he keep the impersonal form, as if he were speaking of the working of a machine? It is because he is not thinking of a spoken lie. He is thinking of what we call the principle of make-believe. He is contemplating the efforts of men to make the appearance pass for the reality, to give a gloss to circumstances, to cause things to seem what they aie not, and not to seem what they are. And he declares that the result of these attempts is ever the same — evanescence. He maintains that nothing which is unreal can be permanent, that no sham can live, that everything false is, by its very nature, doomed to perish. And here again he has prophesied truly. I do not know of any sphere where the principle of Divine survival is so clearly manifest as in the region of illusions. Even the destruction of impurity is not so rapid. It is often left for a future generation to behold the dissolution of what was base and defiled. But every man, within his own lifetime, within a very small corner of his own lifetime, has been privileged to witness the death of make-believe. We have seen the showy preacher, by the aid of a few stolen experiences, mount into the air for a moment, and then explode in the presence of the angels. We have seen veneer of manner lose its charm and leave but weariness behind. We have seen the semblance of wealth take wings quicker than the reality. We have seen the book, which by puffing and advertisement had caught the public ear, consigned to its native oblivion within a twelvemonth. All this is no accident j it is a law, God’s law, that law of
Divine survival by which nothing lives on the stream of history which has won its pieeminence by “working a lie.
There is a curious passage in the Gospels which seems to suggest that our Lord had the alternative between the reality and the appeal - ance of success: “Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and He shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?” It is indicated that there stretches before Him the possibility of achieving a more rapid triumph than by the course which He had actually set Himself to follow. He saw that His kingdom might have been reared on another basis than sacrifice. His aims were at no time hostile to the physical dominion of Rome; nor, if rightly understood, would the physical dominion of Rome have been hostile to His aims. He had all along rejected the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. Why should He not seek the co-operation of the Roman legions to establish an empire within the empire — an empire which should have for its watchword the cultivation of peace and order? Such an arrangement might have consolidated the power of Caesar; and, if Caesar approved, who could have resisted? But the resistance to such a scheme lay in the breast of Jesus Himself. It was not an empire of peace and order that He wished to establish. It was more than that; it was a kingdom of sacrifice, a reign of love. To raise a structure on the former basis would only have been to deceive. It would have been to persuade men that that had come which had not come. It would have been to prop up the work by advertisement, to give it a success through something outside of its merits, to bind it to the hearts of men by a garb which was not its own. Jesus knew that such an attachment must perish. He knew that it would be veneered, make-believe, illusive — a product of the time, and therefore temporal. He did not want a temporal possession; He wished to be able to say, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My word shall not pass away.” And therefore He chose the sacrificial road — the road to the heart. Desiring an empire of love — the only unfailing sceptre — He stooped to conquer; for the joy that was set before Him He endured the cross and despised the shame.
For, let us never forget that, in the eye of St. John, Christ is Himself the greatest example of the Divine law of survival. The climax of his poem is reached in that majestic vision in which a lamb that has been slain sits on the throne of the universe. It is not a lamb transformed into a lion. The form is still sacrificial. The thought is that, around the sacrificial image once despised, there have gathered the insignia of royalty. “Thou art worthy to open the book because Thou hast redeemed us by Thy blood” are the words in which the secret of His empire is declared; and the secret of His empire is the secret of all ultimate survival. The Son of Man has been crowned through His cross; the sons of men shall be brought to glory by the same road as their Captain; they shall obtain an immortality through immolation; they shall have their names written in the Lamb’s book of life.