Mysteries in Life
Turnes are all settled for us, if we had only the sense to penetrate the meaning of the arrangement. Phinehas’ wife named her child “I-chabod.” No other name could the poor dying woman give to her child. If she had given any other name, she would have mocked herself. The birth took place under distressing circumstances. Phinehas, the child’s father, was dead; Eli, the child’s grandfather, and her father-in-law, had fallen back from his seat and was killed by the bad news which the messenger brought him; the Philistines prevailed against Israel, and made havoc of the elect.
Under such circumstances the ark of God was taken away; this child was born; his birth was his mother’s death. The women tried to cheer the. mother, saying, “Fear not; for thou hast born a son.” But she had no speech for them; she thought of greater things; her sky was full of calamity; the gathered thunders were gathered judgments. The child must be named; she said, “Call the child ‘J-chabod,’ for the glory is departed from Israel.”
Poor child! Some children are born apparently under cloudy heavens. When they open their young eyes, they see nothing but night. Who can account for this? Is there only one little world in which all this happens ? — or in the Father’s house are there many schools, many mansions, many fields upon which things will be set in new proportions and in new relations ? — and shall we require the whole universe of stars to explain this little spark of fire which we call the earth? It may be so; we shall want all things to explain one thing. ‘The tiniest flower that grows needs the whole solar system for its nurture — not directly, but indirectly, as constituting one ereat system of light and motion and protection and warmth. You could have no daisy in the hedgerow if you had not the whole solar system just as you find it.
We need the solar system in a higher sense; that is, in a sense purely spiritual, to explain our griefs, our destinies, to tell us how it is that some men are born at midday and some men are born at midnight, and never see the sun in all his glory. Some of us came into the world under dark skies; the day before, all was light; the day of our birth was sudden night. You must estimate us accordingly. We must not be judged as if we were born on the lap of summer. When some of you first took note of your father’s walls, there was not one little picture upon them; how can we blame you for not being lovers of art? When you went into the world to find it all sunshine, you found it all dead winter; you thought you were going to walk upon velvet, and you found yourself slipping upon ice. Are we the men to judge your bruises harshly, and say, Why did you not stand upright? Why did you not take care of yourselves? Poor young feet! you had no experience of the snow. You bought your education dearly. Some men have had no schoolmaster but experience. Others have been schoolmastered to death. They wanted Latin grammars, and had a dozen of them; they asked for French grammars, and the publishers were puzzled to find another, and another, and another. And some have had to graduate in sorrow. They are not, therefore, unlearned men. No man need now be unlearned. Business is a teacher; the strife, the competition, the war of life is a great pedagogue. If you take things gloomily and resentfully, you will get nothing out of them; but if you say, “Mine was a rugged school; we breakfasted late, and had little to eat; we never dined at all fairly and roundly in a jocund way; it was all battle and strife, all cuffing and smiting, all birching and lynching; we got nothing that we did not take by sheer strength of arm,”
you need not complain; you have graduated in the; L greatest university of all. Let those mock who please; they are not great men who mock. What would they have been in your circumstances? Possibly they might have gone down, they might have been crumpled up, they might have been extinguished. Why, then, do you go over all their advantages and grumble? If you had eaten half their confectionery, you would have died of biliousness ten years ago. Things are not really so bad if you come to look at them, though they are bad in one sense, that they excite the kind of wonder which may easily degenerate into resentment, or fretfulness, or discontent, that takes the pith out of a man’s muscle. It ought not to do so. After all, the emptiest world is not wholly vacant. Take a short scroll of paper, and write down your advantages, you whose name is I-chabod, you who came after the glory went, and you will need to sharpen your pencil before you finish your list; if you put down all your mercies, all your blessings, and comforts, and inspirations, and delights, they will grow by being numbered. Take a census of your soul; put down everything under an oath to the spirit of truth. It may be that you will surprise yourself into hymns and psalms and hallelujahs of delight and thankfulness.
Yet it is worth while to dwell upon the difference of conditions under which men come into the world, that we may have a right standard of judgment. Here is a man all limb, strong, muscular, agile, and he has run twenty miles; here is a man lame from his mother’s womb, and by dint of sheer perseverance he has struggled ten yards: who has run the most? Let God decide; God knows; God is Judge. Oh thou who hast outrun all other men, and got thy pockets lined with millions, learn not the bad lore of mockery. ‘The first shall be last, and the last shall be first. It may be found that he who struggled but his little tether of ten yards, who reached his circumference of action so soon, has outrun creatures whose running was flying. We want a nobler judgment of one another; we cannot have that nobler judgment unless we know all that lies behind. We cannot know all that lies behind; therefore be gentle, be noble. Some men suffer much on account of others, and suffer silently. Some men have had to get all their education under public gaze and criticism; all their blunders have been seen, all their mistakes have been on the surface, and persons have therefore characterised them as rude, rampant, unmanageable, impracticable. You perhaps committed all your blunders under some measure of secrecy or concealment, and you got polished, and refined, and completed, as it were, out of the sight of men, so that when you did come within their vision they called you gentlemen.
It is easy to be hard: it is easy to crush. Know ye then that some men came into the world when the glory had gone. It was not even twilight — it was night sevenfold, the largest planet ashamed to look on such darkness. We expect great things from you who were born whilst the glory was there. You had the library, we came to its ashes; you had all the paintings, we had nothing but the scorched frames; you had all the elegance, we had all the roughness. You will treat us well, you will be gentlemen, you will show us the advantages of refinement; you will not be found among the mocking and the scorning, but among those who wonder at the providence of God, and bless the hand that has guided even weakness into strength. There is no vulgarity so ghastly, so unpardonable, as that which mocks the roughness of those who never had any chance to be refined.
This great principle of providence, by the action of which some men are born at mid-day and some at midnight, has a large and comforting application. Take it in the case of merchants. Some are born into very disastrous relations and circumstances. Some men are born into debt. Their inheritance is one of heavy responsibility; they are handicapped from the very beginning. They have no control over it. Shall we add to their distress the pain of our taunting? They came into a business that was dilapidated; the deceased leader concealed things, made a fair show before society, got credit for being more than he was. Some of you have had to work behind rotten walls, and that you have done anything at all is wonderful. Take heart! You may yet surprise those who thought there was nothing in you. You have something to do, and something to do should be a continual inspiration. See what you have to repair; see what leeway you have to make up. You are not working for one man, yourself, but you are working for generations gone, mayhap to redeem their reputation, certainly to overget the difficulties in which their career of unreasonableness or extravagance may have landed you. We must not have business men roughly judged; we cannot always tell what is behind. If they could tell us all, we would sympathise with — them, and be their true-hearted friends evermore; but they cannot tell us all. What, then, is to be our relation to them? A relation of trust, of honour, of sunshine, of encouragement. Men are not bound to tell all their circumstances; men are not bound to hold a bankruptcy-court on the thoroughfare. Let us hope that they are struggling like brave men; let us hope that it is a case of honesty against difficulty: and God save honesty! That is the Christian tone; that is the Divine temper.
Take it in the case of education. Some men can learn everything in no time. There are men with whom I would on no account compete in anything unless I had a seven years’ start. Is it a language we are going to learn? then I must begin seven years before my competitor does, because when he comes along he drinks it up, and he is talking in the language whilst I am wrestling with the declensions. He has the swift mind, I have the slow brain; we may both be honest students. Why should I envy him? The time I spend in envy I should spend in grammar; it were better providence, it were cleaner and happier economy. Yet these things must be recognised. Some boys have brought home a wheelbarrowful of prizes, and have never been heard of more. Some boys have come home, so that they could not even look at their own mother for a kind of wordless shame; but they have had stuff in them, there has been pith in them, but not of that particular kind, and in fifteen or twenty years they have risen to massive strength. Let us have no harum-scarum judgments. When we cannot understand, let us be silent; where we meet with honest, simple, modest discouragement and self-disheartening, let us speak a word of cheer; when we meet I-chabod, say to him, The name was once right, but it shall be changed, for the glory shall return. Watchman, what of the night? Hear him; he saith to the willing winds, flying to bear us the happy news, The morning cometh! the east is a flame of light!
Take it in the case of the ministry of the Gospel. Some places are not to be worked; it were much better to close them, or to introduce into them a kind of ministry suited to the particular conditions of the locality. The great obstructives in the Christian ministry are the men who remember what the Church was fifty years ago. Would heaven they could fall asleep! Their silence would be their best eloquence. What they say about fifty years ago is perfectly right; but we are not living fifty years ago, we are living now. All things have changed: distance has changed, business has changed, ideas of home and school have changed, and we must change with them and master them by readaptations, or we shall go down in this struggle. What a pity some of us ever had, in any ecclesiastical sense, those dear old shadows and memories called “the fathers!” I am sure that these modest and venerable gentlemen never meant to project themselves a century beyond their own day, and govern the thinking of fresher minds. Let us respect the dead. Why make an amateur resurrection, and bring all the departed back again to tell us in the nineteenth century what they did in the seventeenth? Because they did in the seventeenth century what they did is a proof that if they lived in the nineteenth they would be the leading reformers of their time. We honour the reformers by doing the work of reform. There are some circumstances in which it is pleasant to work. It is impossible to keep some churches empty. The locality is suffering from congestion of population; open what you please, and put into it what you please, there will instantaneously be the most marked success. I do not call it success, — I call it failure. He would be a successful preacher who built a church on Salisbury Plain and filled it. Even these miracles can be wrought by the omnipotence of God, and by the almightiness of faith, and by the invincibleness of love.
Look how this principle applies also to psychological constitution and to physical constitution. We are not ail born under the same bodily conditions. One man carries a burning hell within him, and Niagara could not quench one little spark of that infinite conflagration. He did not choose it, he did not fix the temperature of his own blood; verily, in his case, he was ruined by the fathers! Take care what you are doing, because your children will re-live you. Never do anything mean in their presence, because that will take away some part of your manhood; be great, noble, generous, sympathetic, firm as truth, tender as love, then the boy may have some chance in the world. Nor am I anxious to blame parents for the prodigals for which they may be responsible as to birth. But prodigals may only be such for a time. The prodigal whom we know best in sacred history came home again. Think of that and be cheered. Sometimes a mother has come to me and said, What shall I do? he has had seven chances, and he seems as far off as ever; what shall I do? Give him seven more. But it is very hard. So it is, but God has had a hard time with you. Not in the same way; you never drank, you never got into debt, you were never criminally prosecuted, but you have troubled the heavens. There has been a spiritual ugliness about you that God could never commend. Think of your case, varied by incident, but perhaps not varied in the substance of its meaning. Shall I shut the door upon him, and bolt it and lock it? Yes, when God shuts the door upon you, and bolts it and locks it; not until then. That prodigal may be the brightest jewel in your crown; he may be the song of the household yet; say I will never give up; I cannot force him home again, but I can leave the door ajar.
What, then, is to be done in this rickety, crazy world, so mad, so tumultuous, so vexatious in its moral mysteries? This brings us right away to
Bethlehem, to Calvary, to the Christ. I grow in the conviction that nothing can reconcile all mysteries and contradictions, and illuminate all perplexing darkness, but the light which streams from the priesthood of Him whom I worship as God the Son. He keeps the world alive; inquire more deeply into that suggestion, and find how large and true it is. Christ is the life of the world and the light of the world, and though He be statistically reg He is influentially supreme.
We cannot all be great, but we can all be good. We may have to bear unhappy names down to the day of our death, but the blame is not ours. Our mothers were sad at heart when they bare us; the glory had gone, the sky was black, and they gave us names that have been a life-long burden to us. We may change the meaning of the name; we may make it a new name by a new service. Young man, thy mother named thee not to burden thy little life, but to mark a point in history. Let it be a turning-point; thy mother will be well content to be thus rebuked. It will take nothing from her smile in heaven to know that her I-chabod has seen the glory return. Let us all do what we can to bring the lost morning back into the melancholy heavens.