Chapter VI
Knitting Broken Friendship
But the best of us do not always rise to the opportunity which temptation presents. A gust comes for which we are not prepared, and we are swept off our feet. And the earliest penalty of sin visits the transgressor simultaneously with its committal—that depressing sense of loneliness and separation from God that has been the bitter experience of every one, and that is so graphically represented in the story of the first act of disobedience. Every one who does wrong, by the deed of wrong itself, hides himself from God just as Adam and Eve did. Sin is acting apart from God, a withdrawing of our allegiance from Him, an ignoring of His voice, a snapping of the bonds of friendship.
When this unhappy experience occurs what are we to do to have the breach between ourselves and God filled up and fellowship with Him re-established? It would seem natural to answer that as soon as we perceive that we have fallen we should pick ourselves up and go on our way without further thought about the dead past. It is out of our reach; it cannot be recalled, and to dwell upon it is disastrous.
A man who has exercised a wide influence over English thought declared sin to be "not a monster to be mused on, but an impotence to be got rid of. All thinking about it, beyond what is indispensable for the firm effort to get rid of it, is waste of energy and waste of time. We then enter that element of morbid and subjective brooding in which so many have perished. This sense of sin, however, it is also possible to have not strongly enough to beget the firm effort to get rid of it."[12]
Probably of the two dangers mentioned by Matthew Arnold, the latter is the greater in these days in which an "amiable opposition" to sin as merely a pardonable flaw in human nature is so widely taught.
Whatever risk there may be in looking sin squarely in the face, and however difficult we find it to strike the mean between morbid brooding and a total disregard for the past, there never yet was a man who achieved the royal dignity of Christian character without a painful and thoroughgoing grappling with his former self. Men may strive to forget the past by weaving about themselves a web of absorbing interests. But a day of reckoning must come, as it came to Adam and Eve in "the cool of the day," as it came to Jacob as he wrestled for better things that night by the plunging stream, as it came to S. Peter when he went out and sowed the seed of a chastened character in scalding tears.
Were relief from the haunting memory of badness the only thing to be considered, a calm, fearless scrutinizing of sins committed is the one cure. The way to forget sin is to remember it before God—yes, even to the deliberate raking over the ashes of the days that are gone lest some fault should escape observation. A sense of sinfulness is the earliest indication of awakening holiness. It seems as though the common idea concerning the repentance of the Publican in the story of the Publican and Pharisee, as told by the Master, were short of the truth. Surely there is no ground for thinking that Christ commends the penitence of the Publican, who expressed his sorrow by saying "God be merciful to me, a sinner," as being ideal. Far from it. Poor and weak and young as was this appeal, it was infinitely more valuable in the sight of God and efficacious than the finely phrased self-laudation of the Pharisee. Penitence rises from a sense of sinfulness to a recognition of sins.
It is not hard to perceive why this must be. The past strikes its roots into the present, and until in some true sense the past has been undone it is bound to poison the motives and deeds of to-day. Of course when a thing is done it is done. No amount of effort can undo it in the sense of obliterating it from history. But it is not only possible but necessary that in intention it should be undone and that so far as can be its evil consequences checked. With the aid of the imagination and the will the life that has been lived apart from God may be lived over again with Him. This in His sight is to undo it, for the motive is the deed, and intention is the most powerful of realities.
But this is not all. It is a law of life governing all fellowship that transparent frankness is the only atmosphere in which friendship can exist. A wrong committed ought to be followed by full admission of the deed. And it is further noticeable that this admission is not dependent upon whether or not the person wronged is conscious of the wrong. Prudence demands, though not nearly so widely as is commonly supposed, that under certain conditions a sin against society should not be publicly confessed or even made known to the person chiefly concerned. But where this happens the penitent should feel silence as a weighty penance, and long for a day when he can throw open his life so that he will be seen to be just what he is. We are only what we are in the sight of God. It is a grief to many a holy man that because of his secret sins he is better thought of than he deserves; and he will hail the day when all that is hidden will be uncovered and made known, so that with the last veil torn from his character he will be able to join unreservedly in free and humble fellowship with all men.
No Christian man has any more warrant for trying to "dissemble or cloak" his sins before his fellow-men than he has for trying to do the same thing before God. To rejoice when we see others attributing to us qualities which we do not possess, or to congratulate ourselves when we escape detection—or at least when we think we do, for as often as not men see our faults when we think they do not—upon the committal of some sin, is to deepen that line of deceit that furrows most characters. There is no social quality quite so splendid as transparency. It is said by one[13] well qualified to speak of Mr. Gladstone that "the man in him leapt forward to express itself with transparent simplicity. If he were subtle he showed at once why he wanted to be subtle. And in spite of everything that could be said about his intellectual subtlety, it remains that to the very last the dominant note of his character was simplicity—the simplicity of a child; with the child's naïve self-disclosure, the child's immediate response to a situation, without cloak or disguise."
Now it is just this simple, childlike transparency that the Christian must cultivate in every respect. When it so happens to a man that he may not tell his wrong-doing to the person immediately wronged, then let him go to some spiritual friend, or to his pastor, who stands as the representative of Christian society, as well as the ambassador of Christ, and share with him his grief.
The exception referred to above—where an open confession would result in social injury—does not at all alter the fact that perfect frankness alone makes fellowship possible. More often than not when one friend tells another of some piece of petty meanness by which friendship has been marred, the injured party already knows all about it. The confession is not made to give information, but to open up the soul that has sinned so that the process of healthy social life may be free to work again. It is not wholly explicable, but it is a law which governs human intercourse.
Precisely in the same way this law works in the life of fellowship with God. He knows more about our sins than we can tell Him. But by telling them over, their occasion, their guilt, before Him, the soul is new-born into His love, and the warmth of His compassion melts the emotions. This is a first requisite in genuine personal religion—frankness before God; and frankness among men is second only to it.
In requiring perfect openness of life from men God asks only what He gives. He is Light. There is no knowledge of His Person which man is capable of grasping which He does not offer. He tears open His bosom and reveals the most sacred depths of His being. He asks man to do likewise that fellowship may follow.
So far we have considered what man should do when, whether for a moment or for years, he has walked apart from God. He must review the past and in intention live it over again with God, turning his back upon everything that is amiss. But this alone is incomplete. The heart must receive some sort of assurance that the work of penitence is acceptable in God's sight. There is no thirst of the soul so consuming as the desire for pardon. A sense of its bestowal is the starting point of all goodness. It comes bringing with it, if not the freshness of innocence, yet a glow of inspiration that nerves feeble hands for hard tasks, a fire of hope that lights anew the old high ideal so that it stands before the eye in clear relief, beckoning us to make it our own. To be able to look into God's face and know with the knowledge of faith that there is nothing between the soul and Him is to experience the fullest peace the soul can know.
Whatever else pardon may be, it is above all things admission into full fellowship with God. It is not a release from certain penalties which the natural course of sin entails, though it brings with it power and wisdom to endure and to use penalties so that they become means by which lost virtues are restored and the whole character reinvigorated. The sense of fellowship comes out with singular force when for the first time the pardoned soul leaps out from under a weight of sin. The joy of prayer, the fearless approach to God, the contemplation of His personal love—all this testifies to what pardon is. The absolution of the dying robber on Calvary was not merely an admission into Christ's privileges, but a call to His fellowship and a speedy call at that—"To-day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise."
The first awakening of the soul to a sense of pardon makes this very vivid. But somehow as time goes on and repeated falls on the upward climb discourage the soul, the difficulty of grasping God's pardon seems to increase. Confession is made and sorrow is felt, but God's face seems hidden behind a cloud. Then is it comforting to remember that all clouds are earthborn. The trouble is that we reflect our own impatience and discouragement up into the life of God. Because we chafe under our almost imperceptible progress we imagine God does the same. His first absolutions were full and generous, but how can these later ones be so? Surely they must be grudgingly bestowed. So we argue, and the latest forgiving message of God, a message as strong and full as the first, falls upon listless ears. The absolution that comes to the penitent after the seventy-times-seven repetitions of a sin is all that the first one was. Absolution is never less than absolution. It always admits to fellowship so complete that it could not be closer.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] Matthew Arnold, St. Paul and Protestantism.
[13] H. Scott Holland.