BROUGHT AGAIN FROM THE DEPTHS.
AN EASTERTIDE ADDRESS.
By the Very Rev. W. Lefroy, D.D., Dean of Norwich.
"Thou, which hast showed me great and sore troubles, shalt quicken me again, and shalt bring me up again from the depths of the earth."—Psalm lxxi. 20.
Human history had seen but its infancy when the announcement was made that man was "born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward." And ever since the home of the Arab chief was devastated; ever since the day that Job's heart was broken by the intelligence of the Sabean slaughter of his sons and daughters, followed by a conflagration which stripped him of property, and made a pauper of a prince; ever since, the dreary wail of woe rends the air, and the requiem of life sobs and sighs like Eliphaz the Temanite, "Man is born unto trouble."
Nor can we allow ourselves to question the dictum. The infant's wail precedes the infant's weal. The cry of helplessness is heard in the cradle. The child's deep sigh anticipates the child's sweet smile. And although sunny childhood sometimes passes as if the pitiless law of hereditary trouble were suspended, yet no serious thinker can hesitate to accept the proposition, that trouble is in the ratio in which life's meaning and purpose are experienced, or divine love accepted and enjoyed. If a man has no trouble, it is because he has not yet practically realised the significance of existence. He is still free from those social, domestic, and personal influences, the derangement of any of which brings agony by day and sleeplessness by night. Or, again, it may be because he has learnt the loftiest and yet the lowliest lesson from his Lord, by accepting the Gospel of Gethsemane, "Thy will be done." But excepting the persons so classified by social isolation or spiritual resignation, there is not on earth an exception to the law of the human race being "born unto trouble." Yea, more. Constituted as we are, we live in the presence of the grim enigma, that the object which gave us the highest joy can give us the most excruciating sorrow. Nor can that existence be anything else than mournful whose happiness or misery depends upon any earthly object.
This statement may be illustrated by every condition in life—domestic, physical, intellectual. The genius across whose mental firmament the lights and shadows of history travelled, and by whom they were arrested, analysed, and grouped in their course; the great brain of the great worker whose intrepid excursions into the realms of the past and the present, with a view to tabulating the rise of civilisation—the patient and profound Mr. Buckle, is absorbed by mental enjoyment. He lives, and moves, and has his being in men and manners, among maps and manuscripts. He makes a grand discovery. He keeps the secret for twenty years. He repairs to Damascus to recruit for literary service. He is stricken with fever, and dies with the words of his intellectuality on his parched lips, "My book, my book! I shall never finish my book!" Here his highest joy was his keenest sorrow. So in physical life. There have been men who seemed at one time as if they were created without nerves. Their arms were brawny, muscular, and mighty. Their limbs were firm and fine. They seemed God's highest type of organic life. They rejoiced in their strength and in their youth. But disease assailed, or dissipation punished, and retribution appeared in feebleness, exhaustion, and debility. Youthful feats were forbidden. The sports of the past recalled a youth of virtue and purity; and then came the sigh which told that, even physically, the source of our joy becomes the spring of our sorrow. And need I elaborate details to establish the place of this doctrine in domestic life? Do we not know this from the gloomy history of the orphan child, the widowed mother, the bereaved sister, brother, friend? You know that to love dearly means to have a skeleton in your house. The object of your love causes a thousand smiles to play in your eye, and to break on your countenance; but the shade of that object is mocking your mirth, and is only waiting a few rounds of the clock to compensate mirth with misery.