Men in the Making

by Ambrose Shepherd

Under the impact of his own emotions and sensitive to his surroundings, he was eager at the close of the service to share with others what he virtually demanded they should impart to him. But he was grievously disappointed. Not a word did he hear, not a look did he see on the face of a departing worshipper which so much as betrayed the transient emotion stirred by dream or romance. If they had listened to the discourse, they had evidently forgotten what they had been at no pains to remember. No new experience befell this man of artistic and impulsive temperament. I heard a sermon a short time ago preached in a seaside church, which deeply moved me; a sermon I was thankful to have heard, and the like of which I would walk a long way to hear again. As I stood outside the building waiting for a friend, the congregation came out, and I heard the usual interchange of verbal nothings. The only reference I did hear to the service was from a well-dressed young man to a girl by his side, and this is what he said: "A long-winded fellow, that; let us go on the parade." The remark did not unduly surprise me. "I wonder," said a man to me lately, "why some people go to a place of worship at all; they appear to be as indifferent to what is said, sung, or prayed, as the dog that barks is indifferent about the dog-star." In every congregation of fair size there is a strange mixture. But it always includes those whose attention and evident interest do something to compensate for others who show neither. There are elect souls who hear the Word and receive it. You may not trace the fact by what they say, but you know it by the holiness of helpfulness, which radiates from them like light, and is made by them as an atmosphere. God has not ordained the foolishness of preaching—which does not mean foolish preaching—to thin out in the miserable anti-climax of a remark like that of the young man I have just quoted. Fortunately, however, our artist had not sufficient experience of the conventional congregation at a place of worship to have become philosophic about it—which usually amounts to indifference. Judging others by what he himself felt, he thought they must be equally moved. But instead of having received the preached Word, there was nothing, so far as he could discern, to indicate that they had even heard it, while there was much to lead to the conclusion that they had not. Hence he resolved to repeat the sermon through the translation of his art. They should, if he could accomplish it, receive through the eyes what they would not hear with the ears.

Something like this, we are told, was the genesis of this picture, with its central Figure of the Crucified One close by an ancient altar, yet immediately outside a modern building called a Christian church. There He stands unregarded and silent, but so far as His anguish speaks the eternal Passion of God, while there stream past Him the clearly-defined types of a twentieth-century multitude—each, with one doubtful exception, as indifferent about who, and whence, and why He is, as if He were one of the stone pillars that support the vestibule of the temple dedicated to His worship. Poverty sits at His very feet and it is not even curious; fashion and vice, toil and sport, science and ruin, culture and ignorance, want and opulence pass by, and do not so much as despise and reject Him—for that at least would argue some form of interest. It is the indifference which, as Confucius says, is the "night of the mind—night without a star." I need not linger over the types. You may see them any day in a characteristic London throng; you may see them in a less emphasized form in a city like Glasgow. If I may make one reference to them, let it be where the artist attempts to represent the attitude of the Churches to the Man of Sorrows. We have, for example, a high ecclesiastic in one of the sacerdotal communions, and by his side there is some order of Nonconformist minister. The latter is evidently in earnest, not to entreat the attention of the crowd to Him whom they pass by, but to convict his companion of error out of their commonly-received Scriptures. And the great ecclesiastic, sleek, debonair, and well preserved, has a bored look on his capacious face which says: "My dear good man, why excite yourself? I readily make you a present of your contention. You take your truth and I will keep my position. As we can settle nothing but ourselves, why not settle ourselves as comfortably as we can?"

According to the artist, each in his own way is in the crowd and of it. It is anything and everything except the Crucified One, as in St. Paul's it was anything and everything except the message spoken to those who, having ears, heard not. How do we explain it, then, from his point of view, that this stream of people, representative of a widespread society, is utterly indifferent to that Figure so pathetic in its loneliness, so tragic in its appeal, and almost aggressive in its sorrow? It is possible that not a type on the canvas is to be interpreted as quite ignorant of the letter of the claims made for Him who is yet the Object of the world's indifference. There is a sense in which it is true that Christ was never better known than He is in your day and mine. We have the well-authenticated Scriptures which testify of Him. We are more sure that we possess many of His sayings than we are sure that the writings known as Shakespeare's plays were written by a man called William Shakespeare. In these Scriptures He is reported to have said:

"Before Abraham was, I am." And in another word, that falls like a beam of light on everything He did and said, He tells us that "the Son of Man is come to seek and to save the lost." We have the key-word of the Father's message to the race in the wondrous declaration that "God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

We have a mighty Christian literature which, if it be evolved out of a myth, resolves itself into a miracle. We have the fact that never before was Christ so admired, so much quoted, and so generally applauded as He is at the opening of the twentieth century. We have accredited thinkers who reject, as they think, all dogmatic theologies about Christ, and yet tell us that the spirit which Christ incarnated in His words and actions reveals a God humanity cannot improve upon. We have, moreover, an army of men who are set apart by training, and what they believe to be their "calling," to preach Christ by precept, and to teach Him by a life derived, as they declare, from Him whom they preach and teach. And amid many failures, and motives of the earth earthy, these men do not all fail, nor do they all live by bread alone. Was there no place in that canvas-crowd for one of those devoted men who, ill-paid, half-starved, and overwrought, toil night and day in that most awful work on this earth, the attempt to rescue and raise the lapsed masses of our large populations? Was there no room for the man who penalizes body and soul to straining-point for words and thoughts that shall inspire and hearten men to steer their lives by the higher stars, those eternal principles of truth and right? Was there no room for a woman of the Salvation Army who is out of some hideous slum for a moment's breathing, before returning to it with a great self-renouncing life of love and healing?

But take the picture as the artist's impression of the ail-but universal indifference about Him who is yet declared to be the soul and centre of our Scriptures, our creeds, and our religious life, and how do we explain it? Or if we put the artist's impression aside, and on our own account face the truth which, for the purposes of constructive art, he may have exaggerated, is there any less need that we should ask: Why is Christ despised and rejected of men? Why is it that they do not come unto Him that they may have life? The answers are legion. To my thinking, they resolve themselves into practically one. Before we can know Christ, before we can understand Christ, before we can come to Christ, we must come to ourselves. And not a face on that crowded canvas suggests a hope that he, or she, had taken an honest step in this all-determining direction. Before I can look to Christ as my Saviour I must know that I need a Saviour. Before I can realize my need of salvation from sin I must realize that I am a sinner. So much, if not all, turns there. It is not every man who feels that he is a sinner because he talks about being one. But let him feel it, and out of the knowledge will come his saving health, or the death that dies.

It is declared to be the work of the Holy Spirit to convince men of sin, and the unbelief growing out of sin. Analyse the causes of indifference about the things that belong to our peace, and you find that for the most part they resolve themselves into sin, and the unbelief that follows sin, as consequence comes out of cause. I know with what impatience the world turns from what is called the evangelical teaching about the nature and effects of sin. And we need not go outside the Church to find the same impatience, not to say contempt. We have in our pulpits men who represent sin to us as good in the making. It is in some sense a necessary means to an end. They speak of arrested development, of defect of will, of inheritances and surroundings, of a vacancy as yet unfilled by virtue. It is hard to think that people held by a half-sceptical pantheism, and the relativity of evil, have ever been face to face with the awful deeps and disobediences of their own heart, or have felt the hot breath of the devil on their own cheek. If we have any worth-discerning faculty, we know when a man is handling certain subjects whether he knows what he is talking about; whether or not, to use an expressive colloquialism, "he has been there." No man who with the eyes of the soul has looked down that awful cleft that separates between the carnal mind and the holy will of God, can use words here under the wasting impression that he knows things. If Christ only died to save us from something which, after all, is only good in the making, then the Cross of Calvary is the supreme irony of time. We shall never find a Saviour by the road that, at the most, leads but to a martyr.

Here is a man—and he is not an imaginary case—who is married, and has young people growing up in the home. He is wealthy, with a reputable position in society. But there is a sinister something in the background of his life, and he sets himself to do what he knows full well is an irreparable wrong to an inexperienced and defenceless creature. He makes no fight against the wicked prompting, and does the hurt which if another man were to do to one of his own family he would willingly shoot him dead. And say when the hurt is done, a searchlight—he knows not whence it comes—is flashed across his soul and he sees himself as he is, a base scoundrel before God and man, will it help him to think of his sin as good in the making? For whatever he may become, he has done his part to damn another. And let his conscience become, as it can become, and woe to him if it do not become, as real as the wicked thing he has done, and his first and devastating question will be, not can God forgive him, but can he ever forgive himself? Let his one hope come to be in some means of expiation, which can give him a degree of rest from the sin by paying what he can of its wages, and he will begin to realize what is meant, not by the remission of the consequences of sin, but by the remission of sin. He will know the need, where the need is agony, which God in Christ has met for us, and which, had He not met, would have left the need something greater than God Himself. It is when a man must have peace with himself or die to all that is immortal in him—it is then I will trust him never again to pass by with unconcern the anguish of Him who bore our sin in His own body on the tree.

Sometimes we look at the Lamb of God without feeling that we are sinners, and then we have a thousand difficult questions to ask. At other times the burden of sin is so heavy upon us, we see the sinfulness of sin so vividly, that we get away from the mere accident of place and time as far as it relates to sin, we see sin as God saw it, and must ever see it—then it is we look to the Crucified One. "When I feel myself in my heart of hearts a sinner," I once heard Dr. Parker say, "a trespasser against God's law and God's love; when I feel that a thought may overwhelm me in destruction, that a secret, unexpressed desire may shut me out of heaven and make me glad to go to hell to be away from the face of Him that sitteth upon the throne—then when I am told that Jesus Christ was wounded for my transgressions, that upon Him was laid the chastisement of my peace, I press my way through all the difficulties and say: If I perish I will pray and perish at the Cross; for if this be not sufficient, it hath not entered into the heart of man to solve the problem of human depravity, and the human consciousness of sin."

I am not seeking to explain or defend what I am saying. I may try to make it a little more clear before I close. For the moment I am putting before you what I believe to be the truth of very truth. To some I may be speaking in an unknown tongue, but not to all. If there is one here who, with some years behind him, has ever been in serious conference with himself, he knows that there is something radically wrong with himself, which calls for something he is powerless to supply. He knows that the springs of his being have been poisoned, and he has no detergent to make them sweet. It is the fashion in our day to speak of the old description of "hell-deserving sinner" as marred by exaggeration, if not to say morbid. I do not fall into that fashion, for it expresses just what I am—a hell-deserving sinner. When the great Puritan, John Newton, saw a man taken out to be hanged, he said: "But for the grace of God there goes John Newton." It is when the true idea of sin is realized under the convincing power of the Holy Spirit, that the "necessity of the sacrificial work of Christ will be felt, understood, and become the one foundation of human hope."