And in so doing we maintain that the religion of Jesus Christ alone meets the deep-felt want of our souls.
After all the cherished pride of independence, after all the praises sung to “our godlike manhood,” after all the strugglings for self-development, the soul feels a consciousness of its weakness, and is burdened with a sense of its own impotency. There are occasions, not a few, when it gives the lie to all the shallow pratings of philosophy, and looks around it for help. It feels its own infirmities. It wants to escape from its loneliness and isolation. It reaches after a power which it does not possess. It cries for a “Rock which is higher” than it.
The religion of Christ meets this condition of our nature. It tells me I must look beyond myself. It shows me where to look. It reveals to me a Rock, firm, enduring, safe, where I may rest—not in me, but above me, “higher than I”—to which, if I would reach it, I must consent to be led, and to receive aid.
In this school of religion are we taught the lessons of the deepest humility, and the most absolute dependence—lessons such as were never taught in the porch or the grove of refined philosophy. They are opposed to the strongest instincts of our carnal hearts. They extort from the soul the confession of its own helplessness: “Save, Lord, or I perish.”
Yet conflicting as true religion is with the pride and self-confidence of carnal man, its provisions and conditions meet precisely the wants of a humble believer. This abnegation of self, and looking away from and above self, is the highest comfort of a Christian’s life. This Rock, higher than he, is what he wants to get hold of and lean upon. Lead me to it, is his prayer, uttered from every department of his soul.
1. The understanding utters it, when it seeks for knowledge. It asks for a wisdom above its own, to instruct us in the great truths of our being, our relations to God, our duties, and our destiny. It feels that divine wisdom alone is competent to declare what the divine will is.
Men may bid me hear it through the voice of reason; but that cannot satisfy the soul. Like the spider which spins its web from its own bowels and hangs it in the air, have men been long busy in deducing from their own reason their profoundest systems of truth and virtue, and in laying down the rule of duty which would guide them to life eternal. But the result of all such labors has been poor indeed. All the systems which reason has ever framed could never rise above the finite; and multitudes of them have proved but metaphysical cobwebs, entangling the soul which seeks to walk upon them in their perplexing meshes, till, in its strugglings, it breaks through them all, and drops down into the abyss of hopeless scepticism.
I cannot trust my eternal welfare to such deceptive oracles. I want to hear a voice outside of myself to teach me life and duty. I want to hear what God speaks to me, and to believe it because He speaks it. And though in his divine revelation he says many things which are not articulate to my reason, still reason forbids me not to trust in them. Faith lays hold of them, and climbs upward to rest upon “the Rock.” Here the Christian soul takes refuge. To the infallible word of God it flies, from all the Babel utterances of rationalistic errors, as its only security, its fortress, and high tower.
2. The human will also needs to look above and beyond itself for the Rock of its support.
“There is,” says a profound writer, “a sentiment to be found in divers forms among all men, the sentiment of the need of some external succor, of a support to the human will, of a force which can lend its aid and strength to our necessity.”