[26] St. Luke.
Heaven, I take it, is creation as its Creator sees it. "G.o.d saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good."[27] And from this creation, with the rapidity of the quickest thing we know anything about, a flash of lightning, our Lord saw the personification of evil blotted out. What thought had formed thought could destroy. The spectre which misunderstanding of G.o.d had raised in a life in which everything was _very good_ became nothing at the instant when G.o.d was understood.
[27] The Book of Genesis.
The occasion of His speaking the words I have quoted is worth noting as bearing on the subject.
A little earlier He had sent out seventy of His disciples to be the heralds of the Kingdom. "Cure the sick in that town, and tell them the Kingdom of G.o.d is now at your door."[28] By this time the seventy had returned, exclaiming joyfully, "Master, even the demons submit to us when we utter your name."[29] It was apparently the use of this word _demons_ which called forth from Him that explanation, "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." In other words, Satan is the creation of wrong thought; the demons are the creations of wrong thought. Where the Universal Good is all there can be no place for evil or evil spirits.
Banish the concept and you banish the thing. The action is as quick as thought, and thought is as quick as lightning. "I have given you power,"
He goes on to add, "to tread serpents and scorpions underfoot, and to trample on all the power of the Enemy; and in no case shall anything do you harm."[30]
[28] St. Luke.
[29] St. Luke.
[30] St. Luke.
This was no special gift bestowed on them and only on them. G.o.d has never, as far as we can see, dealt in special and temporary gifts. He helps us to see those we possess already. What our Lord seems anxious to make clear is the power over evil with which the human being is always endowed. It is probably to be one of our great future discoveries that in no case shall anything do us harm. As yet we scarcely believe it.
Only an individual here and there sees that freedom and domination must belong to us. But, if I read the signs of the times aright, the rest of us are slowly coming to the same conclusion. We are less scornful of spiritual power than we were even a few years ago. The c.o.c.ksure scientific which in its time was not a whit less arrogant than the c.o.c.ksure ecclesiastical is giving place to a consciousness that man is the master of many things of which he was once supposed to be the slave.
In proportion as the wiser among us are able to corroborate that which we simpler ones feel by a sixth or seventh sense, a long step will be taken toward the immunity from suffering which our Lord knew to be ideally our inheritance.
XVII
Sickness, age, decay, with all the horrors with which we invest our exit from this phase of existence, I take to be a misreading of G.o.d"s intentions. We shall learn to read better by and by, and have already begun to do so. To this beginning I attribute the improvement which in one way or another has taken place in our general health--an improvement in which science and religion have worked together, often without perceiving the a.s.sociation--and in the prolonging of youth which in countries like the British Empire and the United States is, within thirty or forty years, to be noted easily.
Misreading of G.o.d"s intentions I might compare to that misreading of his parent"s intentions which goes on in the mind of every child of six or seven. He sees the happenings in the household, but sees them in a light of his own. Years afterwards, when their real significance comes to him, he smiles at his childish distortions of the obvious.
In comparison with what St. Paul calls "mature manhood, the stature of full-grown men in Christ," our present rating might be that of a child of this age. It is no higher. Misreading is all that we are equal to, but it is something to be able to misread. It is a step on the way to reading correctly. Though our impulse to learn works feebly it works restlessly; and a day will surely come when we shall be able to interpret G.o.d aright.
XVIII
Next to sickness I should place poverty as the second of the two great trials we bring upon ourselves.
Under poverty I cla.s.s all sense of restriction, limitation, and material helplessness. As the subject will be taken up more in detail elsewhere I wish for the minute to say no more than this: that, in an existence of which Growth seems to be the purpose, G.o.d could not intend that any of us should be without full power of expansion.
What we are worth to him we must be worth as individuals; and what we are worth as individuals must depend on the peculiar combination of qualities which goes to make up each one of us. _I_, poor creature that I sometimes seem to others and always to myself, am so composed that G.o.d never before had anything exactly like me in the whole round of His creation. My value lies in a special blend of potentialities. Of the billions and trillions of human beings who have pa.s.sed across this planet not one could ever have done what I can do, or have filled my place toward G.o.d and His designs.
Among the billions and trillions I may seem trivial--to men. I may even seem trivial to myself. To such numbers as these I can add so little when I come, and take away so little from them when I go, that I am not worth counting. Quite so--to all human reckoning. But my value is not my value to men; it is not even my value to myself; it is my value to G.o.d.
He alone knows my use, and the peculiar beauty I bring to the ages in making my contribution. It is no presumptuous thing to say that He could no more spare me than any other father of a normal and loving family could spare one of the children of his flesh and blood.
Now, my value to G.o.d is my first reckoning. We commonly make it the last, if we ever make it at all; but it is the first and the ruling one.
What I am to my family, my country, myself, is all secondary. They determine only the secondary results. The first results come from my first relationship, and my first relationship is to G.o.d. As the child of my parents, as a citizen of my country, as a denizen of this planet, my place is a temporary one. As the son of G.o.d I am from everlasting to everlasting, a splendid being with the universe as my home.
Now this, it seems to me, is my point of departure for the estimate of my possible resources. I cannot expect less of the good things of the universe than G.o.d would naturally bestow on His son. To expect less is to get less, since it is to dwarf my own power of receiving. If I close the opening through which abundance flows it cannot be strange if I shut abundance out.
And that is precisely what we find throughout the human race, millions upon millions of lives tightly shut against His generosity. The most generous treatment for which the majority of us look is man"s. The only standard by which the majority of us appraise our work is man"s. You have a job; you get your twenty or thirty or fifty or a hundred dollars a week for it; and by those dollars you judge your earning capacity and allow it to be judged. You hardly ever pause to remember that there is an estimate of earning capacity which measures industry and good will and integrity and devotion, and puts them above all tricks of trade _and rewards them_--rewards them, I mean, not merely in mystical blessings in eons far off, possibly the highest blessings we shall ever know, but rewards them in a way that will satisfy you now.
"He satisfieth the empty soul," writes the psalmist, in one of the sublimest lyrics ever penned, "and filleth the hungry soul with goodness."
"Yes, of course," says the Caucasian. "When you have crushed out all your present cravings and forgotten them, He will give you joys of which now you have no conception."
But are not my present cravings those which count for me? and do they not make up precisely that character which renders me unique? True, my longings now may have to the longings I shall one day entertain only the relation of your little boy"s craving for an alphabetic picture-book to the course in philosophy he will take when he is twenty-five; but so long as the picture-book is the thing he can appreciate you give it to him. Is not this common sense? And can we expect the Father of us all to act in other than common-sense ways?
It is because we do so expect--because we do so almost universally--that we have blocked the channels of His blessings. The world is crowded with men and women working their fingers to the bone, and even so just squeaking along betwixt life and death and dragging their children after them. They are the great problem of mankind; they rend the heart with pity. They rend the heart with pity all the more for the reason that there is no sense in their poverty. There is no need of it. G.o.d never willed it, and what G.o.d never willed can go out of life with the speed of Satan out of Heaven. We have only to fulfil certain conditions, certain conditions quite _easy_ to fulfil, to find the stores of the Universal laid as a matter of course at the feet of the sons of G.o.d.
"Prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of Hosts," are the striking words of the prophet Malachi, "if I will not open you the windows of heaven and pour you out a blessing that there shall not be room enough to receive it.... And all nations shall call you blessed, for ye shall be a delightsome land,"
XIX
But it is the old story: we do not believe it. It is too good to be true, so we put it away from us. In a world where the material is so pressing we use only material measures, and bow only to material force.
So be it! That is apparently as far as our race-development takes us. It takes us into suffering, but not out of it. Individuals have come into it and worked their way out again; but most of us can go no faster than the crowd. In that case we must suffer. In a terrible crisis in his history, and after many sins, David was able to write these words: "I sought the Lord ... and He delivered me out of all my fears." It is the royal avenue, and it is open to anyone. And yet if we do not take it, it still does not follow that all is lost.
Of the world as it is the outstanding fact is the necessity for struggle. Struggle may conceivably enter into every other world. There is something in us which requires it, which craves for it. A static heaven in which all is won and there is nothing forevermore but to enjoy has never made much appeal to us. If eternal life means eternal growth we shall always have something with which to strive, since growth means overcoming.
While sorry, then, that we have not released ourselves to a greater degree than we have, we may take heart of grace from what we have achieved. We must simply struggle on. Struggle will continue to make and shape us. Whether our problems spring from a world of matter, from a world of men, or from ourselves, their solving brings us a fuller grasp of truth. The progress may be slow but it is progress. Hardship by hardship, task by task, failure by failure, conquest by conquest, we pull ourselves up a little higher in the scale. Some day we shall see in the Universal all that we have been looking for, and be delivered out of all our fears.
CHAPTER VI
THE WORLD AS IT IS AND THE FALSE G.o.d OF FEAR
I
Of all fears the most d.o.g.g.i.ng and haunting are those connected with money. Everyone knows them, even the rich. For many years I was their victim, and will now try to tell how I got rid of them so effectively that I may call it entirely.
Having a good many responsibilities I lived in terror of not being able to keep pace with their demands. The dread was like a malign invisible presence, never leaving me. With much in the way of travel, friendship, and variety of experience, which I could have enjoyed, the evil thing was forever at my side. "This is all very well," it would whisper in moments of pleasure, "but it will be over in an hour or two, and then you"ll be alone with me as before."
I can recall minutes when the delight in landscape, or art, or social intercourse, became alien to me, something to be thrust away. Once in driving through rich, lush, storied Warwickshire on the way to Stratford-on-Avon--once in a great Parisian restaurant where the refinement, brilliancy, and luxury of the world seemed crushed into epitome--once at a stupendous performance of _Gotterdammerung_ at Munich--once while standing on the sh.o.r.es of a lovely New Hampshire lake looking up at a mountain round which, as Emerson says, the Spirit of Mystery hovers and broods--but these are only remembered high points of a constant dread of not being able to meet my needs and undertakings.
There used to be an hour in the very early morning--"the coward hour before the dawn," it is called by a poet-friend of my own--when I was in the habit of waking, only to hear the sleepless thing saying, as my senses struggled back into play, "My G.o.d, can you be sleeping peacefully, with possible ruin just ahead of you?" After that further sleep would become impossible for an hour or two, such wakings occurring, in periods of stress, as often as two and three times a week.