The Secret of Moral Progress

“I will run the way of Thy commandments, when Thou shalt enlarge my heart.” — Ps. exix. 32.

‘’ The way of Thy commandments,” To many people not an attractive road! It is suggestive of fences, and trespassing boards, of curbs and restraints. It is a road which is hedged about on every side with prohibitions, and its liberties are just the guarded freedom of a school walking out under the vigilance of a stern and severe control. I stood a little while ago in a little village church, where on one side of the chancel the Ten Commandments were inscribed, and on the other side the beatitudes, and I felt in passing from one to the other that I had changed from the imprisoning restrictions of the winter into the warm expansiveness of the spring. I do not say that my feelings were healthy; I do not think they were; for a deeper sensitiveness would have probably appreciated the more vital relationship, and the two temperatures would have been felt to be more akin. But it is true that we recoil from the commandments and incline to the beatitudes. The majority of us experience no particular allurement in the contemplation of a skeleton, but, after all, the skeleton is the inevitable framework on which the more winsome figure is built. And so in passing from the commandments to the beatitudes I was but passing from the bald and essential skeleton on which these finer and softer graces can be laid. But, even with all this, the way of the commandments is not an attractive and inspiring road. To mention only one thing, our resentment stiffly rises against the very name. If the imperative came to us in the guise of a gracious counsel, a delicate suggestion, or a soft constraint, we might be subdued by the wooing note; but when it comes to us with the rigid features of a commandment we stoutly resent the stern approach. “When the commandment came,’’ says the Apostle Paul, “sin revived,’’ sin stood up in bold hostility, and plunged me into deeper shame. ‘’ When the commandment came, sin revived “; no, we do not like it; pilgrimages to Sinai are very infrequent, pilgrimages to Calvary are happening every day.

“The way of Thy commandments.” Through the Christian Scriptures the way becomes steeper and more uninviting to the natural man as the centuries move along. The gradient of the moral ideal becomes increasingly precipitous. You may get up the lower and earlier slopes, but when you get to Amos and Hosea and Isaiah the track becomes exceeding steep, until when you get to the Lord Himself the radiant ideal lifts itself sheer and clear as the Matterhorn. “1 looked then after Christian to see him go up the hill, where I perceived he fell from running to going, and from going to clambering upon his hands and his knees because of the steepness of the place,” Yes, the way becomes verysteep as we draw near the Lord! His commandments cover not only deed but purpose, not only achievement but intention; they pass from the negative to the positive, and in the transition the altitude is immeasurably heightened. Passion is now judged, not by the measure of its destructiveness, but by the intensity of its flame. The duty of a balanced retaliation is changed into a beneficent ministry. Love is no longer a benign passivity, but an active crusade. Take the teachings of our Lord, map out the way of His commandments, make a contour map of the road, and you will find that you are face to face with a shuddering ascent, an ascent so stiff and steep that some declare it to be the dream of a visionary, the moral prospectus of a fanatic, proclaiming imperatives which are unpractical and impracticable. The moral ideal of Jesus is just overwhelming; so much so, that many do with it as the Swiss did in the olden times with the Alps, build their houses with their backs to the towering heights, and they face the lowlands of human expediency and moral commonplace.

Now let me remind you that the word” heart ‘’ has a much wealthier significance than we commonly attach to it to-day. The sjmibolic significance of the word in our own day is confined almost exclusively to the emotions. If we say that a man has a big

heart we do not refer to the range of his thought, but to the quality of his sympathies. If we say that a man has no “heart “we mean that the channels of feeling are as dry as a river bed in time of drought. Nay, we even bring the brain and the heart into distinct and isolated positions. We say that a man has not very much brain, but that he has a very big heart. Now all these modern distinctions must be laid aside when we seek the interpretation of the word of God. I am not aware that the word ^’ brain” or “brains” ever occurs in the Bible. According to the primitive physiology of those times the heart was the mysterious seat of thought as well as of feeling. The heart was ‘’ the seat of man’s collective energies, the very focus of his personal life.” All the great elements in personality which psychology has discovered and named had their pre-eminent seat in the heart; the heart was the throne in the individual empire. And therefore the ‘’ heart “is inclusive of the intellectual, the emotional, the volitional, all that is now signified by thought and feeling and will. When, therefore, the Psalmist declares that he will “run the way” of God’s commandments when God shall “enlarge” his heart, he is thinking of something far more than the enrichment of sentiment, he is contemplating the heightening and deepening and broadening of his entire being, when

“Mind and soul, according well, May make one music as before. But vaster/* every part of the life being energised and strengtn^B ened by the gracious influences of the eternal God. Moral speed will come with spiritual enlargement.

^’ I will run... when Thou shalt enlarge my heart.’’ When Thou shalt enlarge my thought! Many of us go slowly because we do not see far. There is no long range of purpose in our eyes, and therefore our feet are sluggish. Our imaginations are not peopled with the glories of attainment, and therefore there is no eager haste in our steps. Napoleon got his men over the Alps by richly sharing with them the promises and purposes of the campaign. Their eyes were filled with the resplendent riches of Italian cities even while they were contending with the stupendous obstacles of the trackless wastes of snow. Their thoughts included the sunny Italian plains as well as the grimness of the immediate toil, and that forward-cast of the eyes gave strength and inspiration to their labours. “I will run the way of Thy commandments when Thou shalt enlarge my” thought, when my mind is filled with Thy blessed purposes, when even now the eyes of my imagination rove over the celestial fields, and when even now I feel something of the warmth and liberty of the coming noon. That is what we need if we are ever to run. We need enlargement of thought, range of vision we need to keep the goal in our eyes from the very first step on the difficult way. The goal has not been hid. The ultimate purpose is not obscure.

All things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you.’’ ^’ We have the mind of Christ.” Our minds may be expanded to take in the glorious purpose, and eyes that are held in that vision will most assuredly communicate buoyancy and speed to the feet. Look at the Apostle Paid. The far-off goal was always flinging its kindly ray upon the immediate task. That “far-off divine event” was ever in his eyes, and the light of its glory pierced through the murkiness and oppressiveness of the immediate day. ‘’ o chastening for the present seemeth joyous; nevertheless afterward...! “Is not that like Napoleon’s soldiers with the sunlit Italian plains in their eyes? ‘^ This light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at things that are seen but at the things which are not seen!” Ay, that is the enlarged mind, which in its inclusive range gives hospitality to the ultimate, and brings the glory of the far-away to relieve the burdensomeness of the present task. That’s the way to get over the hill, and to get over it at a run! What is the philosophy of it? It is this. Small and exclusive thinking is like a closed and tiny room, in which the inmates become asphyxiated, and reduced to lassitude and languor. Large thinking oxygenates the powers, it lets in the vitalising wind from the far-stretching moors of truth, all the faculties are toned and braced into strenuousnees, and they can move in difficult ways with ease.

There came a day in the life of John Wesley when his thought was indefinitely enlarged; far-off goals became luminous, pervading purposes became clear; and that expanded mind imparted such strenuousness to his feet that henceforth life was a glorious race, speeding here and there, in face of difficulties inconceivable, but ever in the way of the Lord’s commandments.” I will run the way of Thy commandments when Thou shalt enlarge my thought,’’ when the quickening light and fire of Thine own purpose expands and possesses my mind.

It may be, too, that further enlargements are required before the desired speed is obtained. Should we not need, perhaps, to emphasise this particular element with reference to some men’s needs? I will run the way of Thy commandments when Thou shalt enlarge my emotions/^ The mill will not work if the mill-race is empty! The weakness of many a life is explained by the poverty of its emotions; the emotional energy is only that of a reduced and languid stream, and there is no power to run the mill. There are lives that are seemingly destitute of any great capacity to be deeply stirred. Their storms are only “storms in a tea-cup “; they have nothing of the terrific movement of the disturbed sea. They cannot be moved into mighty indignation like the Apostle Paul; ‘^ who is made to stumble and I burn not? “They cannot be constrained into passionate love;” I could wish that myself were separated from Christ for my brethren/^ They cannot be upheaved by sullen sorrow, nor made to dance in ecstatic joy. Their emotional life is feeble and paltry, and there is no possible storm in the scanty stream. Now see the consequence. We must not expect much speed where there is little feeling. The insensitive are not the strenuous, rather are they the victims of sluggishness and sleep. The man who has no emotional wealth will never be found among the pioneer runners in the moral way. He requires enlargement before he can run! And this very enlargement is provided for us in the grace of God. Nay, more than enlargement is provided for, even a new creation. “I will take away the stony heart and I will give thee a heart of flesh.’’ That miracle has been perfoiTQed in innumerable lives. Love has been born where indifference reigned, self-love has been turned into neighbour-love, and neighbour-love has been enlarged and transfigured into enemy-love, and this is the full explanation of the glorious change —” We love because He first loved us.” When our selfishness is scooped out, there is amazing room for God. He Himself will do the scooping, and He will fill the liberated spaces with His own love, and most assuredly we shall” run the way of His commandments ‘’ when He has thus enlarged our hearts.

And so it is also with the third primary element in the contents of the heart, the factor of the will.

Many of us crawl and faint in the paths of the moral ideal because our wills are weak and irresolute. We can run for a while, but we fail in the “long run.” We are good for a hundred yards, but we are spent at the mile. We begin well, but the end is very near. Our wills are something like the batteries of portable electric night-lights, good for so many flashes, and good for nothing more. We have volitional spasms, succeeded by a forceless lethargy. In our running we “run down,’^ and our progress is stayed. We shall ‘’ run the way ‘^ of His commandments when God shall enlarge our wills. And — that is just one of the wonderful resources of grace. “It is God that worketh in you to will,” to enlarge your will, to fill it with all needful power, to make it adequate to the attainment of the far-off goal. We shall be “strengthened with all might by His Spirit in the inner man,’’ and ‘’ our sufficiency” shall be “of God.”

And so we who yearn to run in the way of His commandments, who yearn to obtain power and speed in the way of the moral ideal, must place ourselves in His hands, by the means of prayer and faith and consecration. And He will enlarge us! How the enlargement may be effected we cannot tell; it may be by ministries secret and imperceptible, it may be by ministries painful and obtrusive. ‘’ In my distress Thou hast enlarged me! “It may be done in the night! ^’ The joy of the Lord shall be your strength “j it may be the work of the light of the morning! However it be, the glorious change shall be begotten of God, and ‘^ His gentleness shall make ns great.” ‘’ I shall run the way of Thy commandments when Thou shalt enlarge my heart.’’