The Extension of the Ring

I have said that the course of human sympathy is from within outwards. The first step of the league of pity has been on the lines of this development. Jesus has begun His co-operative ministry within the circle of the smallest ring. He has allowed the little band to receive the earliest benefit from the work it has inaugurated. We are now to witness a wider movement. Let us ask, as a preliminary question, what we should expect to witness. Before we take our stand in the great gallery to survey the Portrait of Jesus let us consider the picture of human life furnished by our own experience. I do not wish to create any theory; I propose to take my impressions from the Portrait alone. But

surely it is legitimate to ask whether the aspect of this Countenance is or is not familiar to us, whether there be anything in it to which our experience says ‘Amen’! We are quite able to mark the next step in the sympathetic march of Jesus; the evangelic narratives are agreed about it. But is it also the step of our hearts? Do we recognise its truth to nature — to our nature? Do we feel that the experience which it expresses is a universal experience — an experience natural to man? If so, our study of the Portrait of Jesus will be immensely increased in interest and enormously quickened in penetration.

Let us go back, then, to our own home circle — to the days of our youth. Our first sympathies, as I have said, are family sympathies; the league of pity is a home league. How is it to pass into foreign relations?) How is it to get outside the family circle to enclose other circles? That is a question which each may answer by an appeal to his own experience, and which cannot be answered in any other way. Let me appeal to my experience — my personal memory; I feel sure it will not be found abnormal. My recollection, then, is that my outside sympathies were first excited by the things which I did not understand — the forms of darkness which had something mysterious about them. I remember distinctly my earliest sensations in looking at a funeral. They were those of deep sympathy; but the sympathy was all for the dead. The sorrow for the bereaved did not enter into it at all. My compassion was for the still form which was being mysteriously whirled away into some underground quarter, and which I

believed would experience in that quarter a sense of imprisonment and loneliness, Looking back at this early form of compassion, I feel that the mystery was the main source of its existence, and that the removal of the mystery would have taken the compassion away. —

I have said I do not believe this experience to be abnormal. I think the forms of sorrow which impress not only the child but the youth are generally those which throw a mist over the imagination. I have seen a boy manifest his earliest trace of feeling by shedding tears over the fate of those who, he was told, had gone to the place prepared fcr the wicked. In this case the power of the calamity lay in the fact that it was not a calamity of the common street. Martin Luther was first awakened to the serious aspect of life through seeing a man struck by lightning. Now, measured by anything that is merely physical, death by lightning is by no means the saddest form of dissolution. It is rapid, painless, unheralded by any bodily decay; from the purely physical side many would choose it in preference to other forms. But then, to Martin Luther the physical side of such a death was precisely that which had least importance. It seemed to be separated from other deaths by a special act of Divine Will. The man appeared to have been marked out to die, individually aimed at from out the mass of humanity. It looked as if he could not be waited for in the ordinary course of Adam’s race, as if an extra thunderbolt had to be improvised to accelerate his doom. The experience of Martin Luther is the characteristic experience of every mind which is still in the stage of unscientific simplicity.

Now, throw yourself into the position of this initial league of pity. It has begun by the exercise of a merely family sympathy; it is about to cross the line. Where shall it cross? At the point where human sympathy in general makes a transition from the home into the world — the point where the cloud takes the form of the mystery. Is there such a point in its present view? Yes. As the league of pity emerges from the house of Simon a whole world of sufferers is before it; but its eye rests pre-eminently on one band. A single individual of the company had been healed by Jesus before entering the house of Simon. But he had been healed out of his line and, as it were, by accident; he had interrupted the service of the synagogue. But now this man’s class is systematically sought for, selected from other classes. It is a mysterious band. It is a company of men grievously afflicted, yet with no visible sign of the source of their affliction. Like Jacob at Peniel they cannot give a name to the presence which has made them halt and maimed. Unlike Jacob, they are sure it is not an angel. They call their complaint demoniacal possession, to indicate their inability to assign to it a human cause. Their prevailing impression is a feeling that there are two lives within them, that their soul has become the servant of another soul. They have a sense of double consciousness — the experience of an inward dialogue in which their natural life is talked down by the vehemence of another speaker. Each man feels himself divided into two men — the lower a conqueror, the higher a slave — the lower ruling the house of the spirit, the higher trembling beneath his rod.

Of course they were what in modern times would be called the victims of insanity. Yet I am not sure that they had not discovered something which sane people do not discover. A great writer has said of the mind that there are colours which the cloudy day alone reveals. It may be that the abnormal mind has glimpses of what the normal mind cannot see. It is no new doctrine that there are two natures in every developed man — a higher and a lower. Does not Paul speak of a law in his members warring against the law of his mind and bringing the latter into captivity? What is that but a philosophic statement of the same experience which we call a mental aberration in these men of Galilee! Very striking to my view is a study of these eccentric victims of suffering. We think of them as poor creatures; yet they seem to me to have been originally the most intellectual men of their community Indeed, their intellectual power appears to have gone in advance of their moral character, In their state of aberration they were the first who recognised without suggestion. the Messianic dignity of Jesus. One part of their nature cried out, ‘Thou art the Holy One of God’; if they had felt themselves free they would have come to the new Light. But the other life, the lower life, held them back. It said, ‘Do not go; this Holy One of God is come to torment you, to curtail you, to deprive you of your freedom.’ And the product of the two voices was unrest — fierce, tumultuous, maddening unrest. Intellectually these men were the legitimate children of their century, and therefore they were the children of storm.

It has always seemed to me that the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, a writer of the same century, has their case in view in words which he applies to all Christians. He says that when a man comes into contact with the Portrait of Jesus his life is separated into two lives: ‘The Word of the Lord is living and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of the animal and the spiritual nature.’ Here is almost an exact description of the symptoms of the possessed, If that be a correct diagnosis of the incipient life of the soul, then was the state of these unfortunate individuals simply the exaggerated perception of a universal fact, the over-clear discernment of an inward struggle which belongs to the mental development of man. They were mistaken in believing that the impeding foe was a foreigner; he was one of their own household. None the less must he be expelled, lifted from the threshold, driven from the consciousness. The possession was one of thought; but it was not on that account less intense or less real. There is no grasp so iron as the grasp with which an zdea holds.

How, then, is Jesus to deal with this possession? Shall He tell the man that the hand which holds him is not a foreign hand? Shall He tell him that it is his own higher self striving against the life that is restraining it? Not so. The Son of Man knows what is zz man; He will not wreck the cure by ruffling the patient. I have heard the question asked by Christian apologists, ‘Did Jesus believe in the possession, or did He accommodate Himself to an existing belief?’ Of course He believed in the possession. So far as the fact is concerned, there was no accommodation necessary for Him, there is none necessary for you, It is beyond all question that one life within the man was impeded by another life, was restrained by the force of his lower being. It was no misconception of a primitive age. The foe to be expelled was a real antagonist, a real hindrance, all the more real because it was earth-born. But that was no reason why Jesus should contradict the patient’s cherished belief that it was born elsewhere; that was to endanger the validity of the healing. The vital point was that the hindrance should be removed, not that its human origin should be vindicated. To the physician of a mental ailment, the first thing requisite is that he should put himself in the place of the sufferer. Other maladies merely require a sympathy with pam; this needs a sympathy with limitation. If I have to deal with the mentally afflicted I must contract my own nature so as to meet theirs. I must learn to think with their thoughts, to see with their eyes, to palpitate with their delusions. I must divest myself of my experience. I must meet them on their own ground, not on mine. I must reason with them on their own assumptions, not on mine,

I must study to imagine things as I have ot felt them, to deal with things as I have xoft known them. There is no such self-abnegation as is involved in the contact with mental disease.

It is to this period of the human life of Jesus that I refer the beginning of that stage in St. Paul’s ladder which is described in the words, ‘He was made in the likeness of men.’ It is not the incarnation of Christ in humanity that is spoken of; ¢sat came when He took the ‘servant’s form.’ But this is an incarnation of the human life of Jesus itself. It was one step of humiliation to assume the likeness of Man; but it was another and a deeper step to assume the likeness of men. The plural form implies more than the singular. It says that Jesus clothed Himself not only in the attributes of the race but in the peculiarities of the individual. If ever such a process found its beginning in the soul of Jesus, it was here, To heal the possessed He had to put Himself in the place of the possessed. He had to bend in sympathy below normal humanity. No act of bodily healing could for Him have involved such a strain. Physical pain is the common heritage of man; it was the heritage of the human soul of Jesus. But mental aberration is mot the common heritage of man; least of all was it the heritage of Jesus, To put Himself in the place of the demoniac implied more to Him than it would have done to you; should I be misunderstood if I said it involved more difficulty? We meet most readily that grief in another which we ourselves can picture in experience. We can pity the blind, because we can shut our eyes; we can sympathise with the deaf, because we can close our ears; we can even compassionate the mentally deranged, because we have moments of folly. But Jesus had a perfectly balanced mind — a mind which, to the view of His earthly contemporaries, suggested the thought of ‘fulness. For Him to enter into the spirit of the demoniac was a meeting of extremes. It was wisdom trying to picture the path of folly; it was the calmness of implicit trust seeking to figure the terrors of a shattered brain.

OSSESS my soul, O Christ! I feel that something must possess me. My heart cannot be its own master; it must be ruled either from above or from below. I have no life within me strong enough to rule me from above; if Thou leavest me alone the lower life will conquer. Come into my soul, O Christ! Come, and take the place from which my higher self has fled. Come, and restrain the advance of the lower man. Come, and possess the gates of my enemies — the gates by which they issue forth on me. Come, and make me Thy captive evermore. Put Thy fetters on me — Thy golden fetters which make free. Put Thy mark on me — Thy mark of ownership which ennobles. Put Thy fear in me — that fear of meanness which makes the coward brave. Put Thy yoke upon me — that yoke of love which makes the burden light. I shall own no other master when I am possessed by Thee,