The Eye of the Soul

“The light of the body is the eye: if, therefore, thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” — MATT. vL 22.

IT sometimes seems to me as if, in our Christian earnestness and eagerness to establish the authority of the words of Jesus, and to enforce their application, we were in danger of neglecting to seek their deepest meaning and full interpretation. These three questions every thoughtful and conscientious disciple must ask about his Master: first, Why should I believe His teachings? third, What ought my belief in His teachings to make me do? but certainly also, second, What do His teachings mean? Without the serious asking and careful answering of this second question, the answering of the first question must be well-nigh useless, and the correct and full answering of the third question must be, in great degree, impossible.

All this is true of every word of Jesus; but it is specially true with regard to certain great words of His, in which it seems as if He summed up the principles of His teaching, and gave a comprehensive statement of His work. Such words there are; words which rise like mountains in the midst of His discourse, and seem to draw up, into conclusive points, the whole expanse of His great teaching. They are not deliberate and formal.

He does not turn aside from His work of saving the world, to deliver lectures on theology. These comprehensive words of His grow naturally out of the ordinary circumstances and conversations into which He fell; but in them there meet the currents of His thought, and the great final truths of man and God lie open to the mind that reverently tries to understand them. Surely such words tempt and deserve our most reverent and loving study.

It is one of these words of Jesus that I have chosen for my text this morning. I choose it because it seems to me to have something to say very directly to some of the questions about the possibility of knowing about God, and the way of knowing about God, which one hears asked with most astonishing frequency and most impressive earnestness in these days and places. In this utterance Jesus, I think, makes it wonderfully clear how man must hope to know those spiritual things, without some knowledge of which the heart of man is not and cannot be content; after which man is forever struggling; and the despair of which makes the great gloom which in these days seems, to some prophets, to be settling down upon the human soul.

Jesus builds all His teaching upon an illustrative figure which every one could then, and can always, understand. “The light of the body is the eye,” He said. Try to get the picture back before your mind. These words are part of the Sermon on the Mount. On a bright, fresh morning, Jesus is sitting half-way up a hillside in Galilee, with a group of attentive hearers clustered at his side. All around Him is the radiant landscape. Almost at the mountain’s foot the lake of

Galilee is flashing in the morning sun. The soft rounded hills roll away like waves on every side, the quiet valleys nestling in between them. Here and there the little white villages give life and movement to the scene. The birds fly through the air; the cattle are plodding at their tasks; all the earth seems bright and fresh and clear, full of vitality and beauty. And then here, close around Him, are these men with all their sensitiveness, all their human power to enjoy and understand this world, — these men whose understanding and enjoyment of it seem to give worthiness and dignity to all this outward nature. They are the other half of the picture in the mind of Jesus. Nature and man, these two, make up the world for Him. The hills and rocks and trees and beasts and villages, and the sun shining on them all, — that on one side; and f on the other, — man, with his power of knowing what all these things mean, of loving them, of thinking about them, of using them. The world of nature radiant with light; the soul of man rich in intelligence, — these two facing and claiming each other on that bright morning in Syria, as they have faced and claimed each other every day since God said, “Let us make man,” and Adam began to live in Eden. And now, as Jesus looks at all this, He begins to praise the human eye. “The light of the body is the eye,” He says. What does He mean by that? Is it not that He is rejoicing in the one appointed channel through which these two halves of the world may come into connection? Nature and man must stand apart, not two halves of one world, but two separate worlds, were it not for that marvellous and precious avenue of sight which brings the two together, and lets the man, with his inner power of knowledge, know the outer world. Through it, the Lake of Galilee and beautiful Mount Tabor in the distance, — aye, and the dear, sweet face of the Lord himself, — flow in upon the soul of John, and become a part of him. Without the eye the world might still be real; but it must be forever unknowable to this man, able to know it, but sitting in the prison of his sightlessness where all the glory cannot reach him. He opens the window of his eye and it all comes pouring in; runs through his frame and finds out his intelligence; says to his brain: “Here I am, know me!” Says to his heart: “Here I am, love me!” To the man sitting in darkness, the whole bright world has sprung to life; and the window of the prison, the gateway of the entering glory, the light of the body is the eye.

So Jesus spoke; and we can well imagine that His words awoke some new grateful delight in their own blessed power of vision among those thoughtful men who heard Him. But it was not for that purpose that he had spoken. He was not lecturing on optics. The visible world, and its entrance to the human intelligence through the eye, was but an illustration. His thought was aimed through the illustration at that which it was the purpose of His life to teach mankind. He was thinking of the world of unseen, invisible, spiritual life; and what He meant to say by His suggestive picture must have been that that world, too, must and could testify itself, report itself to the human intelligence through its appropriate channel of communication, just exactly as the world of visible nature manifests and reports itself through the organ of the eye. Now it is just the existence of that spiritual world, and the possibility of man’s being in communication with it, intelligently knowing it, intelligently loving it, — that it is about which man’s profoundest hopes and fears have always clustered, about which they are clustering to-day, perhaps more anxiously than ever yet. It is a world certainly that is conceivable. The invisible may at least be imagined, whether it can be believed or not. All man’s mental history bears witness that he can picture to himself a world in which the true existences are souls instead of bodies; where the forces are not those which any physics can measure, but the temptations and aspirations which only the spiritual life can feel; where the issues are not those of physical growth or catastrophe, but of the culture or decay of character; and whose central sun, the source and fountain of whose life, is not a burning globe hung in the heavens, but a personal God who feeds all the souls of His children with His love, and guides them by His wisdom, and blesses or punishes them by His judgment. Those are the components of that spirit ual world, the human soul and GocL No man has ever seen either of them. They cannot report themselves through the eye. But Jesus says that the world of which they are the constituents is a real world; and that though the eye cannot give them admission to the intelligence to which all worlds must report themselves before they can become part of the life of man, there is an organ which is to this world of spiritual life what the eye of the body is to a world of trees and lakes.

And what then is that organ? The name b)’ which it is best known is Conscience; and, though we may have to remind ourselves before we finish that some of the ordinary uses of that word make it too small and meagre, yet we may freely use the name of Conscience to represent that organ which stands between the intelligence of man and the spiritual world, just as the eye stands between the intelligence of man and the world of physical nature, and brings the two together. This is Christ’s doctrine in many places. He that uses his conscience, he that means to do what is right out of obedience to God, shall come to the knowledge of God and of his own soul. That is the plain, unfigurative statement of the doctrine which He is constantly reiterating.

And we can see how His doctrine has its root in the nature of things. Conscience is the faculty by which we judge of acts as right or wrong. It follows then, of necessity, that all knowledge of the deeper natures of things by which they become possibly the instruments of righteousness or wickedness, and all knowledge of those deeper and higher parts of the universe which are capable of being known only in their moral characters, must of necessity come in through some such organ or faculty as this, which each man knows that he possesses, and by which he says of characters, “This is good or bad,” just as by his eye he says of the branch of a tree, “This is straight or crooked.” Is not that clear? A tree is growing outside your window. You, who inside the window are sitting with your face toward the tree, are blind. Some miracle touches you and you get your sight. Instantly that tree leaps into being for you, and by the channel of your opened eye sight pours the recognition of itself through all your intelligence. Just so God, — a Being whose essence is morality, a Being who is good and who loves or hates all things in the world according as they are good or bad, — God is here before you; and you have no open conscience. You do not care whether things are right or wrong. You have no perception of the essential difference between right and wrong. You do not feel the dreadfulness of being bad, the beauty of being good. You are not trying to do right. You are not trying to keep from doing wrong. By and by, suddenly or gradually, all that changes. Your shut conscience opens. I will not ask now what makes it open. I will not speak now of the power which the world of God beyond the conscience may have to tempt the conscience into activity. Let us simply watch the fact. You do begin to feel the difference of right and wrong. You begin to try to do right. And then it is, in the pursuance of that effort, that there become gradually impressed upon your intelligence certain things which had found no recognition there before. The spiritual nature of the world; that all this mass of things and events is fitted for and naturally struggles towards the education of character; — the spiritual nature of man; the truth that man is fully satisfied only with what satisfies his soul, only with character, and with an endless chance for that character to grow; — and God; the existence, behind all standards and laws, of righteousness, of a perfectly righteous One, from Whom they all proceed and by Whom those who try to follow them are both judged and helped; — these are the before unseen realities which come pressing into your intelligence, tempting, demanding your recognition when your conscience is once open, when you have once begun to live in the desire and struggle to do right.

Do you not see then what I mean when I say that the conscience stands between man’s power of knowledge and the spiritual world, just as the eye stands between man’s power of knowledge and the world of visible nature? It is the opened or unopened window through which flows the glorious knowledge of God and heaven; or outside of which that knowledge waits, as the sun with its glory or the flower with its beauty waits outside the closed eye of a blind or sleeping man.

In both the cases, — in the sight through the eye and the sight through the conscience, — ‘the intelligence which waits within, and does not yet see for itself, is not, of course, shut out from testimony. If a man is thoroughly blind and never sees the sun himself, other men who do see it with their open eyes may, no doubt, come and tell him of it; and in his darkened soul, if he believes them, there grows up some dim, distorted image of the sun which he has never seen. Nay, other senses have some stray messages to tell him of the world, whose full revelation can come only through the opened eye. He feels the sun in its warmth; he smells the rose in its sweetness; he tastes the flavor of the peach. Through these chinks there steal in some tidings of the wondrous world, even while the window through which it can report itself entirely is shut and shuttered. I am impressed by seeing how exactly all this has its correspondent in man’s knowledge of the universe of spirit ual things. There too, through testimony and through sideway and accidental intimations, as it were, some knowledge comes even when conscience is shut and no struggle to do right is urging it open to its work. Some man who knows that there is a God, and that the soul is precious and immortal, comes and tells me so. The Bible speaks it with such power that I cannot disbelieve. Nay, the things that are spiritual bring their own sidelong testimonies of themselves. They touch my sense of beauty. They make me feel how good it would be for the world if they were true. I hear their movement in the depths of history. In all these ways they do not leave themselves unwitnessed. These are the ways in which, while I am most unconscientious and least anxious to do right, I may still know that God and spirit are the basis and the issue of the world. Yet still, in spite of all this, there stands the separate glory of the revelation of that day when to me, at last beginning to try to do right, the God whose faint reports have come to me pours in upon my opened soul the glorious conviction of His righteousness and love; and my soul, in which I have half believed, becomes the centre of my life; becomes my life, that for which all the other parts of me are made. Then, in the knowledge which pours through my opened conscience, then I know with an assurance which makes all the knowledge that I had before seem but a guess and dim suspicion.

And there is yet another point of resemblance in this comparison of the eye and the conscience, which is striking. When one declares thus, that through the conscience man arrives at the knowledge of unseen things, and conceptions of God and spiritual force and immortality reveal themselves to the intelligence, at once the suggestion comes from some one who is listening, “Can we be sure of the reality of what thus seems to be made known? How can we be sure that what the conscience sends in to the understanding are not mere creations of its own; things which it thinks exist because it seems to need them; mere forms in which it has been led to clothe with outward and substantial life its own emotions?” Everybody knows such questions. They are thrown up, on every side, to the man who, trying to do right, thinks that through his effort he has found God. They come to him not merely from other men; but his own heart, suspecting its own faiths and hopes, suggests them. But now think how exaptly they are the same questions which have always haunted man’s whole thought about his vision of the world of nature. How often we are told that none of us can prove that all these things which our eyes see have any real existence outside our sense of sight; that all that we are sure of is certain sensations and impressions in our own brains. Are not then the questions which haunt the conscience the same as those which haunt the eye? And as the eye deals with its questions, so will the conscience always deal with its. A conviction of the reality of what it sees, which is a part of its consciousness that no suspicion can disturb; a use of its knowledge, which brings ever a more and more complete assurance of its trustworthiness, — these are the practical issue of every such question with regard to what the brain sees through the eye; and the same will be the practical issue of every question with regard to what the soul sees through the conscience. At least we may say this, that it would be a very deep confidence indeed if the soul felt as sure of God as the mind feels of nature. This we feel very deeply in these days, when to so many minds the certainty of nature seems to stand in strong contrast with the uncertainty of God. It is much if we can see that the doubts which are suggested as to the sight of the soul, are but the same with the doubts which we easily overcome when we are dealing with the sight of the body.

Before the parallel, which Christ’s illustration suggests, is quite completely apprehended, there is one thing more which we ought to observe; and the observation of it may perhaps touch a difficulty which, I dare say, has suggested itself to some minds while I have been speaking. We have talked as if all that was necessary, in order that the eye of man should see the world of nature, was that the eye should be open; but we know very well that something else is needed. The world of nature may be there in all its beauty, but the openest eye will not see it, if it be not turned that way. The eye, wide open, turned to the blank wall, will not see the mountain and the meadow. “Open your eyes and look here,” we say to a child into whose intelligence we want the wonder of nature to be poured. And now, is there anything that corresponds to this second necessity in the case of conscience and its perception of spiritual truth? Surely there is. There is an openness of conscience, a desire and struggle to do right, which is distinctly turned away from God and the world of spiritual things, so that, even if they were there, it would not see them. On the other hand, there is an openness of conscience, a desire and struggle to do right, which is turned towards God and the supernatural, which is expectant of spiritual revelation; and to that conscience the spiritual revelation comes. This does not amount to saying that the conscience sees what it wants to see. It is very different from that. Many things the conscience, like the eye, wants to see, and does not see them because they do not exist. But those things which do exist, — though they be the plainest of realities, — no conscience can see which, with the greatest scrupulousness and faithfulness, is turned the other way and expecting revelation from another quarter. Does this explain nothing? If we can recall a time when we did our duty just as faithfully as we knew how, and found all our duty a drudgery and toil, — a time when conscience was intensely, almost morbidly scrupulous, and would not rest; and yet, when, for a purpose of duty, we never looked, or tried to look, beyond ourselves and the world in which we lived; when we tried to be good because we were ashamed of wickedness, or because wickedness we knew would bring us pain; and if, remembering that all our struggle after goodness in those days brought us no sight of God, we ask ourselves what such a failure of the truly open conscience meant, is there no suggestion of an answer here? It was the open eye looking down and not up, looking away from God and not to Him. Of course it did not see Him. When the desire to do right began to turn itself and to look up; when it began to desire to obey and please, and depend upon, whatever highest being in the universe might have anything to do with that soul and its struggles, then the soul knew God. The man who is not trying to do right at all may stand with his blind conscience in the very blaze of God’s presence and not see Him. The man who is trying to do right in selfishness and self-dependence may toil on unenlightened and unaided. The man who is trying to do right Godward, who in all his scrupulousness is devoutly humble and hopeful of things higher than himself, to him, through the openness of his faithful conscience, the vision conies, and he sees God.

My friends, may we not pause a moment here in the midst of our definitions, and let ourselves see what a great truth this is that we have reached? Is it then true that every man carries about with him such a capacity as this? This impulse, the necessity of doing right, of struggling with temptation, which has so often seemed to make life a hard slavery, — see what it really is! It is the opening of the organ through which the whole world of unseen spiritual light and life, all the being and power and love of God, all our own untold future in the regions of immortal growth, may flow in on us and become real and influential in our life. That boy keeping himself true when other boys are tempting him to be false, keeping himself lofty when other boys are tempting him to be base, he is no toiler in a tread mill which he would be well out of if he dared but leave it. He is a climber of the delectable mountains from whose height he shall see heaven and God. And, as he climbs, the promise of the vision is already making his dull eyes strong and fine, so that when the vision comes he shall be able to look right into its deep and glorious heart. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” We praise the hand, the ear, the eye, the brain, for all the knowledge they so wonderfully bring to man. Is there among them all any organ which a man should honor and glorify and enshrine in such reverent obedience as this, the Conscience; if indeed, through it, God and the unseen world of God may come to him, and his poor humanity grow rich in knowing them?

And so we are led quietly onward to that which Jesus teaches in the text which has given us our starting point for all this long discussion, — “If thine eye be single thy whole body shall be full of light;” the critical importance of a pure, true conscience, of a steady, self-sacrificing struggle to do right Godward. So only can the channel be kept open, through which the knowledge of God and of the spiritual things which belong to Him, can enter into our souls. 0, my dear friends, has there been nothing in our experience which has taught us to understand that and to believe it? Is there one of us who cannot remember how, in the hours when he tried to do what was right, the possibility of God, perhaps the certainty of God, grew clear to him, and it seemed to him as if the world opened, and spirit ual things bore direct testimony of themselves? And is there one of us who has not the other recollection also, of hours when, in the tumult of indulged passion, or in times when we let ourselves be mean, or when we cared only for ourselves, the whole world of spiritual being, God, heaven, immortality, the power of divine love, the vast, infinite hopes, aye, even the spiritual quality of our own soul itself, — all seemed to fade away from us as the landscape fades away out of the sight of the eye when blindness drops upon it? Still, out of the darkened landscape may come mysterious sounds which fill the soul with fear; and still, out of the hidden world of spiritual life may come to the sinful and unbelieving soul whispers of dread which make him tremble at the unseen presence of the awful verities which he does not believe in. But all true, healthy, inspiring faith, — all knowledge that can live by love and open into action, grows dim to the soul, dimmer and ever dimmer as it gives itself up to sin.

All this seems to me to throw so much light upon the nature and purpose of Christ’s incarnation. Men say: “He came to show us God.” Other men say, “No, but He came to save us from our sins.” Are not the two really one? It would be easy to ask whether He who showed men God must not save them from their sins. But — what is to our purpose now to ask — must not He who saved men from their sins show men God? The work of Jesus was to make men do right God ward; to make men do right not merely that the world might be more quiet and peaceable and decent, but in order that into souls thus open through their consecrated consciences, the knowledge of that God might enter in whose knowledge is eternal life.

Remember how Jesus always found, in His own obedience to His Father, the secret of His Father’s perpetual revelation of Himself to Him. “The Father hath not left me alone, for I do always those things that please Him,” He said. Those words are the key to it all. He did right Godward. He did always those things that pleased God. In Him was neither the abstract meditation and study of divine things which thinks that the knowledge of them is like the knowledge of the rocks or the stars, something quite independent of moral conditions in the knower; nor, on the other hand, was there in Him that mere slavery to duty on its lower grounds of economy and prudence, which often paralyzes the conscience and shuts it up as a channel for the higher knowledge. He did right Godward. And if in the wilderness, when the devil was tempting Him, He came for any instant near to faltering, a large part of His strength of resistance must have been in the certainty that if He yielded and sinned, the door would close through which the perpetual knowledge of His Father was forever flowing into Him and filling Him with rich joy and peace.

And what His own life was, Jesus is always trying to make the lives of His disciples be. He is always trying to lead men to do right with hopes and expectations Godward. Men debate again whether Jesus is a human example and teacher, or a divine Power and Redeemer. Surely He is both, and between the two there is no con flict. They are most congruous. Both are parts of that completeness of life by which He would draw the conscience of man upward and make it clear and pure, so that through it the knowledge of God should descend. He taught men holiness by His example and His words; and He declared, in all He was and did, the love ol God; and the result of all of it, to John and Mary and Nicodemus and the Magdalen and countless other un named disciples, was that they saw God through consciences made scrupulous and holy, and turned to God by the attraction of His manifested love.

I turn to the consummate act of His life, the act in which His life was all summed up, and I see all this in its completeness. I look at Jesus on the cross. I see Him there convicting sin by the sight of its terrific consequence. I see Him also drawing men’s souls up, away from the earth and from themselves, up to God, by that amaaing sign of how God loved them. And when I turn from looking at the sufferer and look into the faces of those men and women to whom His suffering has brought its power, I see how, in the struggle against sin under the power of the love of God, to which the cross has summoned them, they are knowing God; how, in St. Paul’s great words, “the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory, is giving unto them the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of their understanding being enlightened.” I see all that in the group around the cross on Calvary; and all that also in the host of Christian souls who have been filled with the knowledge of God, through the sacrifice of Christ, in all the ages since.

I should be more glad than I can say if I could know that I had opened up to any one of you to-day a hope that you might know the things of the spiritual life, the things of God, of which many men are telling you now that they are unknowable by man. That you must not believe. So long as man is able to do right Godward, to keep his conscience pure and true and reverent, set upon doing the best things on the highest grounds, he carries with him an eye through which the everlasting light may, and assuredly will, shine in upon his soul. Such faithfulness and consecration and hope may God give to all, that we may know Him more and more.