The Spiritual Struggle

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” — EPHESIANS vi.

12.

IN this world wherever there is life there is struggle. We grow so used to it as a perpetual accompaniment of life that we do not always give it its true name. We give the name only to some forms of wrestling with difficulty, and think that other lives are easy and struggleless. But always when we come to know these other lives and to examine them with any kind of care, we find that they too are engaged in strife, that the difference is merely one of form. Sometimes one strong man’s struggle shakes the world and makes the nations look. Sometimes it wears the man’s soul out in silence, and cannot be told, however the struggler longs and tries to tell it to his dearest friend. Sometimes it wiites itself in haggard lines upon the forehead and the cheek; sometimes the darker the strife that rages behind, so much the brighter is the smile upon the face. Sometimes the struggle is the joy of the life, making it like a perpetual field of trumpets and banners and marching hosts; sometimes it is all the blackness of darkness, as if a man wrestled day and night for years in a dark dungeon underground with an enemy whom he never saw and only came to know by the untiring persistency of his strength and cunning. Sometimes it is the saint struggling with the last temptation that seems to keep him from perfect peace; sometimes it is the poor wretch struggling with what seems to be the last effort of the Spirit of Goodness to rescue him from perfect satisfaction and content in sin; — whatever, however, it may be, in this world there is struggle wherever there is life. The only way in which some souls seem to escape from struggle is by lowering the tone of life, by making themselves half-dead.

No man in this world need ever seek after struggle. Let him seek after life, and the struggle will come, healthily and naturally, by the law of the world we live in. When a young man or young woman, with a Byronic impulse, seeks directly for struggle, tries to reproduce in one life those signs which have told of the deep movement which has stirred some other life, the result is only an artificial and unpleasant affectation; the contortions do not move our sympathy, but our disgust. No, do not try to struggle, but try to live, and the struggle will open before you surely. Do not seek it, and do not shun it, but let the increase of life deepen as it will the seriousness and solemnity of your contact with those things which your growing life will have to touch. It is one of those things which puts heaven past, outside of, our comprehension that there there “s to be the fulness of life, without struggle, in unhindered ease and peace. We cannot understand that now, for in this world wherever there is life there is struggle.

And then, another thought which follows immediately upon this, and which is also abundantly confirmed by the experience of men, is that with every change in the character of life there will come also a change in the character of the struggle that goes with it. As men come to a new and higher life, so will they find themselves in the midst of a new and higher struggle. It is as when a soldier storms a citadel: with each new chamber into which he presses as he comes nearer to the central room which is the key and core of all, where the choicest treasures are guarded, he meets always a more and more watchful and formidable enemy. Only beside the very treasure, only when his hand is laid upon the prize which he has come through all the perils thus far to seek, does he meet the strongest enemy of all, the stoutest heart and strongest arm that the whole citadel can furnish.

The illustrations of this are endless. A man has been trying to be rich, and he has met the enemies and hindrances that beset that search, — the fickleness of the market, the competition of his brethren, his own temptations to indolence or to extravagance. But by and by, perhaps, the man is rich, and then he presses forward into an inner chamber of ambition. He aspires to be wise. He wants to learn. With that wish opens a new life, and with the new life opens a new struggle. In his newly built study he fights a fight which his store could never give him, — no longer now against the chances of the market and the opposition of the street, but against prejudice, against bigotry, against intellectual selfishness, against pride, against all in himself and other men that dislikes and dreads the truth; against all this he fights the moment that he be comes a scholar. A man who has been selfish learns to love. Instantly he is struggling not merely for his own self-respect which it was so easy to conciliate, but for the respect and confidence of his beloved, which can be won only by magnanimous devotion. A man mounts to the thought of charity, and he is wrestling with other men’s woes and sorrows, no longer only with his own.

Or take St. Paul. Think over his life. Think how, as he opened one door after another into the successive chambers of his long career, he always met a new fight in each of them, and his growing life was marked and recognized by his growing struggles. His life began with that mere struggle for a place among the physical things of the physical earth, which all human lives must encounter first — the struggle for existence, — by success in which he made himself a standing-ground for all his other fightings. Then, as a scholar of Gamaliel, came his fight with ignorance and with all the enemies of the ideas that ruled in that master’s school. Then, to the fiery young Pharisee, riding to Damascus, persecuting the upstart Christians, there came the new life of national enthusiasm, and with it the new struggle against what he thought his nation’s enemies. Each of these lives, with its new struggle, was nobler than the one before it.

But then this Paul became a Christian. To the spiritual truth of a spiritual Master he gave up his soul. The life hid in an unseen Christ opened before him. He was drawn into it as if by a great, unseen arm put out around him. And once in there, once living not for himself but for his Lord, the new life thoroughly begun, behold the struggle was all new! No longer now with disease and physical dangers, no longer now with the scholars of other schools who fought wordy battles with the young Gamalielites, no longer now with seditious followers of One who seemed a traitor to his nation and his church, but now with all the spiritual enemies of his Spiritual Lord, — with sin, with his own selfishness, with lust, with falseness, with unspirituality. The whole battle is drawn inward. On another field, with other weapons, inspired by other hopes, led by another watchword, now it rages. Hear him tell of it himself. ‘We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

This was the way in which St. Paul came up to this great utterance of my text. The spiritual life, had brought the spiritual battle. We cannot read the words carefully, indeed, without remembering how much there was in Paul’s mind which has grown unfamiliar to these modern minds of ours. Paul was a Jew. To the Jews the whole idea of beings outside of our race, who were in continual contact with and influence upon our race, was one in which they had been bred and in which the whole history of their nation had been lived. They believed in angels, and almost looked for their daily presence and help. They believed in spirits of evil, and traced the evil works which they saw in the world to unseen spiritual hands. Man’s sin consisted not simply in yielding to the persuasions of his own worse self, but in giving way to the temptations of those external powers of wickedness of which the air was full. When St. Paul, then, describes his battle, it is of these powers that he is thinking. The “principalities and powers,” the “rulers of the darkness of this world,” the “spiritual wickedness in high places,” that is, in the upper regions of the sky, — all these are not figures of speech with him; they are real beings, true objective enemies of the human soul.

It is hard for us to realize how far we have departed from that whole conception. Man’s look then was turned outward, and all the universe was conceived as fighting for the possession of his soul. Man’s look now is turned inward, and his soul is fighting with itself, tossing in the fermentation of its own internal passions, its own enemy or its own saviour. They are different views of human life, the objective and the subjective view. Both views are true, but they give us different sides of truth. Probably no century has been so one-sided as ours in its intense acceptance of one aspect of life and its almost complete rejection of the other. No century has had its eye so earnestly fixed upon man’s struggle with himself. No century has made so little of the thought of any evil spirits outside of us, trying to harm our souls. And we are all men of our century, and must look on truth from the side from which our time regards it, but yet we never ought to entirely forget its other sides, from which it has most powerfully appealed to other times. I am willing enough to talk after our modern way, to represent the struggle of man as a struggle with himself; but all the time I want to remember with St. Paul and all the great objective thinkers and believers, that the universe is large, that it is full of beings who must send forth influence upon each other, and so that, while the spiritual enemy with which I fight to-day meets me immediately as a lust of my own soul, it has its sources and connections farther back in the world of spiritual being which stretches far, far away past my sight, but not too far away to send forth forces from its farthest depths which shall touch and tell upon my life.

We want to bear this in mind, and see that Paul’s way of feeling and our modern way are really one. The underlying idea is the same, — that he who tries to live a holy life is beset by a new kind of enemy and lives in the midst of fears that he never felt before. Paul sees those enemies gathering out of the realms of space. Range beyond range, world beyond world, back into the most mysterious distance of the universe, he sees their hostile faces bent upon him, he feels their far-sent breath upon his cheek. We know our enemies, as they gather from the depths of our own nature, as they attack us from the newly stirred regions of our own tumultuous selves; but in both cases the meaning is the same; we have begun to live a new life and we have found it beset by new enemies and fears.

Indeed, this was what Jesus said to His disciples when He invited them to a higher life. He described and characterized the new life by its new fear: “Fear not them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do, but fear Him who hath power to destroy the soul in hell. Yea, I say unto you, fear Him.” These words really agree with and fulfil the words of Paul. Paul says that as a man grows nobler he will wrestle not with men, but with devils; Jesus says that as a man grows nobler he will fear not men, but God. They really amount to the same thing, which is, that as a man grows nobler he will fight and fear not for the body, but for the soul, will fight the soul’s enemies and fear the soul’s Lord, — just as when a soldier is raised to the command of a great army, he is filled at once with a new fear of the enemy that is set against him, and a new fear of the king who has raised him to such responsibility.

Let us look then at this struggle of the higher life, the new battle of life which a man begins when he for the first time undertakes to do battle against his sins. It is a profoundly solemn moment. The man who heretofore has tried to do what the world called right, because he thought that it was decent or because it would make the world think better of him, gets a new idea. The right is right because it saves the soul. The wrong is wrong because it spoils the soul. The soul, the real spiritual self, the soul capable of a celestial whiteness, in danger of perpetual ineradicable stain, the soul whose purity is precious and delicate beyond anything on earth, — that soul becomes the touchstone and test of everything. Oh, my friends, with that new passion in the soul everything around you changes; expediency, fame, pleasure, — every other wish, — is swallowed up in the desire to keep that soul pure. Is it any wonder that Christ called it a new life to which men could come only by a new birth? Let us see what some of its characteristics are.

And, first of all, there is a certain strange and very delightful sense of dignity and exaltation which runs along with and continually blends into the fear with which the new life is beset. I think that this is always so. That which makes responsibility tolerable, that which supports a soul when any higher duty surrounds it with more pressing and dangerous dangers, is always the deep satisfaction, springing up with the fear and filling it and glorifying it, at finding that the manhood is capable of such a fear, that it has in it the power to dread that which it has now discovered to be its enemy. For natures might be graduated by the fears of which they are capable. And to come to a higher fear declares a higher nature and sends a thrill of conscious dignity all through the life. Man glories to find that he cannot play, “unconscious of his fate,” like the “little victims” who are only brutes. And in all the weight of danger which the man carries who has learned to care for his soul, there is a sober joy which makes his life the happiest in all the world. I think we can have no idea of how the inspiring sense of human dignity would fade out of the life of our race if man came to really think him self a creature of no spiritual capacity or peril, with a chance of no spiritual heaven, in danger of no spiritual hell.

This is the first quality of the struggle with sin — the struggle after goodness. I would always mention this first. It is a solemn and noble exhilaration to the soul. And the next striking thing about it is the silence with which it goes on. When a man begins to fight his sins he does not sound a trumpet to tell the world that the battle is begun. The world rightly distrusts any such parade, and, if it hears the trumpet, believes that it is no real battle which is so vociferously announced, but only a sham fight, with an understanding all the time made between the man and his sins which he pretends to wrestle with. The essence of the real spiritual fight is its silence. A man is stirred to the depths in some great revival meeting, and with an impulse which he does not try to control, he lifts up his voice and shouts his hallelujah to the Lord. He declares his new allegiance. He gives himself to Christ with “solemn noise.” But by and by he begins the fight that he must fight under his new Master. His old sins hear what he has done, and gather up their power to reclaim their servant. They meet him in the old familiar places. They find him in his shop, in his study, at his table, in his church. There he must fight with them. The other, — the meeting where he shouted, — that was not the fight, that was only the enlistment. This is the fight and there is no noise; all is silence here. Men see some sign, it may be, in the face, a new light in the eye, a pressure which speaks both of pain and power in the lips, but no word is spoken. The fight is too personal. It is for the man’s own soul. The fighters are the man’s own sins. Oh, how it sometimes transfigures the dull street as we are walking in it and suddenly remember that a very large part of these men and women whom we pass, are fighting in silence battles with temptation, with falsehood, with lust, with scorn, with doubt, with despair, with cruelty, which make their lives heroic! We cannot see their fight. They could not show it to us if they would, and would not if they could. The battle is “above the clouds.” But the clouds of men’s lives, the dull and dubious and foggy sides which they turn to us, cease to be dreary when we allow ourselves to think that behind and above the dreariest of them the real soul of the man is fighting silently with its sins, and winning certainly a better life.

It is this silence of the spiritual struggle that easily lets one who is not a sharer in it become sceptical about it. I do not doubt that there are men who honestly think that there is no such thing, that it is all a matter of nerves and dreams. That a man should fight with other men to win from them what is theirs — that they can understand. They are doing that themselves every day. But that a man should fight with himself for himself, with his own sins for his own soul, — that is incomprehensible. It never can be made credible to such a disbeliever till he himself undertakes it. When he does, when, on some great, new birthday of his life, he feels his soul claiming him, sees it beset — poor thing! — with all its enemies, and gives his life up to saving it, — when that time comes, then he will understand the spiritual fight of all these other souls. The mists will scatter from before his eyes, and that fight will seem to him to be the one real thing that is really going on in all the world. The earth will seem to rock with it. He will feel it all about him when he once carries it within him.

And this suggests another characteristic of the spiritual struggle, namely, its companionship. Silent as it is, it is not solitary. Have we not all felt sometimes that silence, with those who are in genuine sympathy with one another, brings men nearer together than any talk can do? Talk necessarily obtrudes details. Talk compels me to feel the special form of a brother’s life, and so, in the differences which there must be between the form of his life and mine, obscures the identity of spirit. But two souls side by side, doing the same essential work in different forms, but doing it in silence, feel one another’s companionship perfectly, and get the best blessing and help from one another. So it is in men’s fight with their sins. Let every man shout aloud the story of his battle, and the impression will be of infinite difference. Let every man fight on with earnestness, but with no foolish attempt to tell the details of his struggle to his brethren; and the truth of the identical spirit that pervades them all will come out clear, and each will get the inspiration of all the rest. A world full of men who fight their several battles in their several circumstances is like one of those old eastern towns where there is one single fountain, out of which all the people of the town have to draw all the water that they need. They live their different lives; they use the water which they draw for various uses, — one in one trade, another in another, — but once a day they all meet at the fountain to refill their pitchers for their several works. The fountain is the centre of the town and gives it all its unity. So the souls of all earnest men are in their different struggles, but they all meet, all rest, in Him who is the supply, the fountain of them all, the God to whom they are all dedicated. He who is the fountain of goodness is the centre in whom all men who are struggling for goodness find unity with one another. How true, how deep, that union is! You have not learned its deepest quality if you require that men should tell you what their struggles are, and tell you that they know of yours. You have not fully learnt it unless, without a word, you live in company, through God, with every soul, known or unknown, whose life in its own way is seeking Him.

Yet one more thing about the spiritual struggle which gives it a large part of its character is its/<rrpetualness, its persistency. It is to run on through all our life. We always do differently those things which we do temporarily and under some special demand, and those other things which we do continually as a part of our life. The first are spasmodic and take force out of us. The others are calm and determined, and put life into us. There is always a difference between the taking of occasional medicine and the taking of regular food. And some men fight their sins as if they expected to conquer them all and to be perfectly good by to morrow night. Other men look calmly forward and see the work they have to do stretching on solemnly to the very end; and, with complete dedication, accept struggle not as the temporary necessity, but as the perpetual element of life. Oh, what a repose comes to a man’s soul when he has once done that, — the repose not of idleness, but of accepted work. /No longer does he tire himself in trying to shirk i what he knows is as true a part of himself as the drawing of his breath. He wakes every morning to his struggle, not with weary surprise, but with glad recognition that his struggle is still there. He plans for it far ahead as a thing which, he is sure, will still be with him. And his greatest wonder about death and heaven is how he can ever leave behind that which is such a true part of himself, and what it will be to grow in goodness against no resistance, how it will seem to do right when there is no temptation to do wrong which must first be trodden under foot. The dignity of spiritual struggle, then, its silence, its companionship, and its perpetualness, — these are the positive qualities in that fight with unseen sin in which every true man is engaged, and in which his deepest life is lived. I want still to suggest to you what are some of its negative qualities, what are some of the freedoms into which a man is liberated by it, at the same time that it gives these endowments to his life. When St. Paul says that we wrestle “against principalities and powers,” he says also that “we wrestle not against flesh and blood.” The more that the battle with the unseen for the unseen takes possession of a man, the more the battle with the seen for the seen must let him go. You may put it to yourself either as a necessity or as a privilege, either “you may” or “you must.” But at any rate the two are inconsistent with one another, the eagerness for the spiritual and for the temporal victory. They cannot live together. This liberty from carnal passions and struggles will be the best test that the higher spiritual struggle has really entered into us. When the passion of our life is to conquer sin and be good, we shall let men beat us in the race of business; we shall let men overwhelm our wishes with their arrogance, or drown our good repute in their slanders, wherever the great fight of our life, the fight with sin, would suffer a moment’s hindrance by our effort to refute the slander or to right the wrong. This is a noble liberty. The true struggler with sin will no more turn out of his way to punish a man who has wronged him than the captain who is leading his army into deadly fight will stop to chase a fly that stings him on the way. The battle with “principalities and powers” puts us above the fight with “flesh and blood.”

Again, this assurance of the Apostle, that the true man’s battle is not with flesh and blood, has another meaning. It contains that old truth which it is so hard for all of us to learn, but which, when we have learned it, cuts for us the knots of so many difficulties, — the truth that the moral trouble of our lives does not lie in our circumstances, and that it is not our circumstances that we have got to conquer in order to be better men. Fighting with poverty, fighting with ignorance, fighting with allurement, fighting with bad health, beating ourselves against the narrow walls in which we have to live, — those may be fights that we cannot escape; but none of them is the great fight of our life. We may be defeated in them all, and yet be conquerors in the fight to which God sent us. Not with circumstances but with spiritual conditions is the struggle that makes us men; not with the things the tempter uses for his tools, but with the tempter; not against flesh and blood, but against spiritual wickedness.

But still more Paul’s view of life shows us the folly of substituting personal hostilities for the war with wickedness. It is so easy to hate a wicked man! It is so hard to hate a sin! And men have always been letting one slip into the place of the other. This is what has made those dreadful things called religious wars, and the persecutions of heretics, which have stained the pages of Christian history with such unchristian blots. Three hundred years and more ago two knights stood before the great Emperor Charles the Fifth, one asserting and the other denying the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. The Emperor bade them fight their battle out with spears upon the field. They fought; and the champion of the disputed doctrine unhorsed his adversary and compelled him to confess his error as he lay helpless on the ground. What a strange, deep twist there must have been in men’s minds before such a performance could have meant anything to them. Imagine the brave young victor standing with his foot upon his prostrate foe. He has conquered him. He hears the words of reluctant and insincere confession groaned forth between his tortured lips. And then, suppose, in all his flush of victory there start up in his own soul, as well there might unless he is merely a splendid animal with an arm that is invincible and a mind incapable of thought, — suppose there start up in his own soul doubts about the dogma in whose behalf he has fought and conquered. Suppose it seems to him, all of a sudden, to be incredible, — this for which he has risked his life. How worthless this battle which he has just fought with his brother knight must seem to him! Now the only real fight is just beginning in his own troubled soul. The shouts of the people tell him he has conquered, and the doctrine is sustained. He knows that the battle is yet to fight, that it lies between him and these unseen doubts. The victory over flesh and blood withers into worthlessness even as he takes its laurel. The true wrestling is to be with doubt and unbelief; and for that he goes to the silence of a cloister or the venerable peace of some altar in the Church.

We do not set our knights on horseback any longer for the faith, but oh! the cheaper, tawdrier way in which we set denomination over against denomination, and count the majorities of church over rival church, and think that that has anything to do with the answering of the question over which the soul of man is anxious, — What is truth? We do not any longer kill one disbeliever, but we think that in some way by hating and abusing him we substantiate our own belief. Only when in a man’s own soul the real strife comes, does it appear how worth less all that which we called fighting for the truth really was. When the “powers of the air” are up in arms against us, when our own hearts fling their doubts in our faces, when we are wrestling for belief with the devil of unbelief who has taken possession of our own souls, — then is the moment when we are least likely to revile the unbeliever. The fight with “principalities and powers” frees us from the struggle with flesh and blood. That is the human charity and patience which belong to all deep life.

And just once more, the law that the deepest struggle of life is spiritual gives us, when we have realized it, the power to separate between the special forms and the essential spirit of the wicked nesses that are around us, and always to fight against the spirit, not against the form. To denounce dishonesty not because it is dishonest, but because the cheater happens to be cheating us; to abuse impurity because of some offensive aspect which for the moment it has taken; to upbraid slavery not for the absolute wrong that it does to the slave’s manhood, but for the blood that a specially cruel master draws from the slave’s back, — all of these are fightings not against the spirit but against the form of sin. Christ set us nobly an example of the fight, not against the form, but against the spirit, when, instead of rebuking the single bad acts which He saw about Him, He laid the strong and tender hand of His Redemption on the essential badness of the human heart, and so has changed the world.

O friends, that we might know — I hope that many of you do know already — the privilege and joy of that profoundest struggle, in which a man, full of the passion of holiness and faith, wrestles with sin and doubt; and, coming by Christ who is our Brother to God who is our Father, finds eternally in Him the goodness and the faith which are well worth all the struggle through which we may have to reach them, and without which no man really lives.