The Blending of Contrasts in the Kingdom of Christ

Revelation iv. 3

beautiful thing. It imparts some of the finest

touches to poetry. When Longfellow describes

the old clock on the stairs ticking monotonously

amid all family changes, the charm lies in the

conjunction of the constant and the mutable.

When St. Luke describes old Simeon holding

in his arms the infant Christ, the charm lies

in the meeting of the evening and the morning.

When St. John speaks in his Gospel of the

tomb in the midst of the garden, the poetic

interest centres round the fact that in the

immediate presence of death there are the

seeds of luxuriant life.

In the passage before us we have three

pairs of the most striking contrasts. “He io8 THE BLENDING OF CONTRASTS

that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardius stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald.” The first of these antitheses is the rainbow round the throne. It had been hitherto depicted as spread over the flood; it was God’s mercy in the midst of anarchy. In the new regime it is to have a new significance. The flood of anarchy is there no longer existent; everything reveals God’s power. But the rainbow, which for the old world meant the mercy of God amid His judgment, means for the new the bending of God amid His power. Nay, the figure is more pronounced than even this. The idea of the rainbow round the throne is not really that of God bending from His power. It is rather the idea that the power of God is itself reached by bending, that the empire of Christ has been established on the basis of service, or the stretching of the arms downward. It is no new thought to Christianity. It is the allegorising of a very old thought, common to all the evangelists, specially native to

St. John. It is but the enshrining in poetry of what was originally uttered in sober prose — that the power of Christ was to be the power of His cross: “I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me.”

Is it a new thought to human experienced No. There is a region in which the allegory of the rainbow and the throne is a perfect allegory — in which power is the direct result of bending; it is the region of the heart. When I say the heart, I do not mean the heart of a man or the heart of an angel. I mean the constitution of love itself, always, everywhere — in man and woman, in angel and archangel, in God the source of all. In the region of love man always witnesses a miracle. In all other regions power means the freedom from a chain. The power of the body is its untrammelledness, its liberation from every weight. The power of the intellect is its unencumberedness, its emancipation from every cloud. But the power of the heart, the power of love, is the opposite of these. It demands a weight, it needs a chain, no THE BLENDING OF CONTRASTS

it involves an encumbrance. Its throne must ever be encircled by a rainbow bending to the flood.

We speak of the heart sometimes as a free and a fetterless thing. At such times we are really describing its absence — certainly the absence of its power. The freedom and the fetterlessness of a heart are its weakness; to make it strong you must weight it. The experience of the heart is the opposite of the bird’s experience. The bird is free when it is liberated from its cage; but the heart’s power of action only comes when you cage it. If you want to bring out its life you must environ it. The way to take care of it is to give it care — to put care within it. We read of the bush that burned and was not consumed. It may be said of the heart that it avoids being consumed by reason of its burning. It is kept alive by its own altar fires. It is never capable of such great strength as when it is bound with the cords of sacrifice. The greatest compliment which could be paid to any man in the region of morality would

IN THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST m

be these memorable words: “He saved others; Himself He cannot save.” The powerlessness is itself the moral power. The inability to be selfish, the incapacity to take your own good at the expense of another, is the very omnipotence of love. The strength of love must be estimated by its failure to break the sacrificial cord that binds it, by the necessity imposed upon it to hold fast to the place of its cross.

There can be no exception in the case of the Divine. Infinite love is the power to love infinitely. To love infinitely is to be capable of infinite limits, to be under the necessity of bending to the farthest depths. St. Paul says, “The love of God constraineth us.” But it is equally true that the love of God con¬ strains Himself. Those who talk of the im¬ possibility of setting limits to the Infinite, should remember that an infinite love involves more limits than a finite love. It impels its possessor to stoop deeper, to stretch his arms farther down, to incorporate himself with the path of human tears. It creates a barrier, not to the will, but in the will — a barrier which makes it imperative to follow the steps of sorrow, and pause not until it has reached the nethermost world. The power of Divine love is the power of sacrifice; it is the rainbow round the throne.

Such is the first of these pairs of contrasts which this passage brings before us — the power of stooping, the rainbow, and the throne. We come now to the second; it is the rainbow and the emerald. If the first denotes the union of power and bending, the second signifies the absorption of the fleeting in the permanent. The rainbow is the most fugitive of all things; it fades even as we gaze, and vanishes away. But there is one of its colours which has always been taken as an emblem of youth and a symbol of immortality; it is green. On this colour the great allegorist lays hold and enshrines it in a separate form. Out of all the colours, he keeps his eye for the present upon this alone, as if there were no other; he says the rain¬ bow was “like unto an emerald.” And what

I understand him to mean is that, while the accidental elements of Christianity will pass away, there is something about it which will not only never pass away, but never become an anachronism — which will keep in latest years the freshness of its morning, and reveal the burning bush even amid the shadows of Nebo.

I believe it will be admitted that this pre¬ diction of the allegorist is a very bold thing. To say that this rainbow was to be an emerald rainbow, to prophesy that this form of faith would be an evergreen when so many others had become sear and yellow, was a distinctly brave deed This in itself would be little. But the prediction has been singularly fulfilled is still fulfilling. It is not a question of survival; there are faiths which survive older than Christianity; but none of them could be called an emerald rainbow. Brahmanism is alive, Buddhism is alive, Parsism is alive; but they are all living anachronisms. They are like the survivals of last autumn in this year s summer. But at the end of nearly two millenniums Christianity is modern. In the heart of Western civilisation, in the midst of incessant changes, storms, revolutions, in an atmosphere where the mind of man is in perpetual movement, and everything dominated by the thirst for the new — the religion of Christ not only lives, but is the most vital force of all. For an inhabitant of the Chinese Empire living at the beginning of our era, it would have been no great prophecy to have predicted that the creed of Confucius would last as long as his native land. But for an inhabitant of the Roman Empire, which St John was — an empire which at that very moment was passing through a series of the most rapid vicissitudes — the prediction of Christianity’s permanence is a remarkable thing. We do not wonder at Goethe for presaging it; he had eighteen centuries of experience behind him. But this man was standing on the threshold, in the dawn. He was himself an exile for his faith, and a representative of its precarious fortunes. It was surely a bold stroke to hazard the conviction that it would be one of the world’s evergreens.

And not only has this emerald greenness of Christianity been preserved in the heart of political vicissitudes, it has been preserved in the heart of vicissitudes affecting its own form. The environment of the Christian faith has been perpetually changing. It has encountered every phase of fortune. It began in obscurity. It passed into a scene of persecution. Then came a stage of worldly recognition, resulting in worldly accommodation. By-and-by it became itself a political empire, with the nations under its feet. Then came the disintegration, the division, the splitting up of the great mountain into fragments. Next swept over it the ages of doubt. Land¬ mark after landmark was borne away by the waves of unbelief. Tongues ceased, prophecies failed, the claim to theological knowledge vanished away. One would have said that this was the end. But no. At the very moment of seeming effacement the emerald green reappeared, and on the ruins of the former structure rose with our own age the temple of humanitarian love — the temple which n6 THE BLENDING OF CONTRASTS

St. Paul views as the finished goal. The history of Christianity has been the history of the permanent in the fleeting. The emerald has often dipped beneath the flood, but it has never been washed away. It has always emerged, always reasserted its presence, always attached itself to the new. Between the nineteenth century and the first there is not a fragment of secular sympathy. The institutions of the past are gone, without hope of resurrection. But the emerald remains; and through the changed sky there floats the old music: “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.”

I come now to the third of the great contrasts involved in this passage; it is that between the rainbow and the appearance of the throne. “He that sat was like a jasper and a sardius stone” — i.e ., like a sardius reflected by a jasper. The jasper is evidently the same transparent stone spoken of in chapter xxi., and described as “clear as crystal”; its property is that of a revealer. The sardius is therefore the real feature in the comparison, and the contrast is between it and the rainbow. What is that contrast? What is the antithesis between the aspect of the throne and the aspect of the environing rainbow? I take it to be the difference between the one and the many hues. The sardius is of one colour — a flaming red; the rainbow is of seven. The idea seems to be that the throne originally presented the appearance of a single type of majesty, but that the advent of Christ has introduced many types. At first there was but one sphere for greatness — the sphere of the brilliant. But with the coming of the Son of Man there began to break upon the eye a multitude of spheres for possible heroism. There began to dawn the consciousness that man might wrestle with his angel in more places than one, and that through many unrecorded paths should be thenceforth recruited the great army of those who have struggled until the breaking of the day.

Let us try to open up this thought a little. There have been three ideals of perfection in this world; we might call them respectively, n8 THE BLENDING OF CONTRASTS

uncoloured perfection, one-coloured perfection, and perfection of many colours. The first is perhaps the earliest ideal, both with the man and the race. The good child is the child which is not naughty — which does no wrong. The purity of a primitive race is its law-abiding¬ ness, its purpose that it will not transgress. I have called this the ideal of uncoloured perfection. It it distinctly a negative standard of purity. It is neither the sardius nor the rainbow. It is the absence of all colour. So far as the righteousness of the law is concerned, it is blameless; but the righteousness of the law does not go further than the prohibition of wrong. It says “Thou shalt not”; it cannot say “Thou shalt.” It is the perfection of the tied hands, of the closed eyes, of the pulseless heart. It is the virtue which is harmless and undefiled, but not holy; it is without crime, but it is without colour.

By-and-by there comes a second form of perfection; it is that of a single colour. It is the time when the type of virtue consists in following the special spirit of an age. In the time of St. John the special spirit of the age was the love of a sardius. The ideal of human heroism was found in but one form of valour — that of martial prowess. The thrones that were reached were gained by physical conquest, and the sardius that glittered upon them was a commemoration of that conquest. Alike with the Roman and the Jew, the sardius was the sign of glory; and the throne of heaven itself was figured after the pattern of that which was on earth so dear

When Christ came He added to the sardius a rainbow. He did not destroy the sardius; He did not say that there was no heroism in martial valour. But He said that there were other kinds of valour as well — greater kinds. The sardius is but one hue of His rainbow; there are six besides. Will any one say that this is too poetical an exegesis? Let him remember that it is the exegesis of a poem — a poem of the most exuberant fancy and of the most florid imagery. I do not say St. John took this meaning out of his symbols; I do say that this meaning would 12o THE BLENDING OF CONTRASTS

explain his allegory. Let us, then, be poetical, as he was. A symbolism of fancy can only be interpreted by fancy. The image of the rainbow, as seen by the human eye, requires for its understanding no historical research, no profound knowledge of Greek, not even a scientific view of nature. It appeals, in its visible aspect, to the poetic sense alone. Viewed in that aspect, men may see in it different meanings. The writer of Genesis saw one; St. John beheld another; it would be no impiety to add a third. If the Bible is the inspiration of God’s Spirit, it is folly to think that its deepest meaning must be its original one; as well say that the primitive clocks are the test of clock-making. On the view that God is the inspirer, I should greatly prefer to believe that the full meaning is to be found farthest from its source.

Let us, then, provisionally impute to St John, as a thing he might have felt, the comparison of the sardius with the rainbow. The sardius, as we have said, depicts the heroism of a single sphere. The seven-coloured

rainbow indicates that all spheres may be the scene of heroism. Let us take the three primary colours — red, blue, and yellow. From the standpoint of poetry — St. John’s stand¬ point — they might represent the three voices of the verb “to live” — active, neuter, and passive. Red is the symbol of active struggle; it is the sphere of the sardius itself. Blue is the symbol of life in its calm — life in its commonplaceness and uneventfulness. Yellow is the symbol of passive endurance, of the power to support the weight of falling leaves.

It would be hard to say which of these requires most strength. Perhaps the sardius demands least of the three. The red struggle of life, the struggle which involves the putting forth of active energy, is for that very reason more endurable. All outward exercise with¬ draws the mind from its own troubles. The two others have no such advantage. The weight of falling leaves is a weight of privation; it is a state that gives no room for action; its victim can only bear. The life of commonplace monotony is, from the 122 THE BLENDING OF CONTRASTS

moral side, more arduous still; it is that

tarrying of the bridegroom in which all are apt to slumber. The sphere of the yellow and the sphere of the blue have always been equal in danger to the sphere of the red.

But Christianity alone has detected the fact; this is what St. John desires to say. Christianity alone has found for all spheres a possible wreath of heroism. Here for the first time the entire rainbow encircles the throne. The sardius has no longer a monopoly of power; it must share it with the yellow and the blue. To these hitherto neglected spheres the religion of Christ says, “I go to prepare a place for you.” It offers a crown to others besides those who labour; it remembers the heavy-laden too. It recognises those who bear and those who simply thirst — the victims of privation and the victims of mere monotony. It tells us that those who can keep alive their love while fighting under these neglected colours are worthy to encircle the throne where the sardius shines.