The Bible and Life

by Edwin Holt Hughes

There are those who say that one of the crying evils of our own day is that the people are appetite-mad and pleasure-mad. Probably some men in every age have brought this charge against their time; and the charge is true as applied to some persons in each period. For such the Bible has its repeated warning. They who are lovers of pleasure more than of God fall under condemnation. Mankind has never long admired the eaters and players of history. If it remembers Beau Brummel and Beau Nash at all, it enrolls them in its lists of ridicule. An epitaph which recorded that “He ate much of the time and played the rest of the time,” would not serve to enroll a man among the earth’s heroes! The Bible and humanity are against the unbalanced devotees of the table and the parlor and the field of sports.

But the Bible and humanity unite again in their estimate of the other extreme. The mere ascetic secures curiosity rather than admiration. He has not learned how to follow Him who often went to feasts and who sat down with his friends at the supper which they gave him at Bethany. It is said of him that “he was anointed with the oil of joy above his fellows.” Jesus entered into the normal joys of life. He came eating and drinking, until his enemies seized upon his conduct and exaggerated it into a charge against him. He was present at weddings where joy reigned supreme. In all his teaching and by all his example he never proved himself an enemy to the normal pleasures of life. This particular emphasis is occasionally needed. It may not have as large a mission as has the warning against overdone appetite and play; but it has its message to that smaller circle of the deceived who would drive joy from the world in the name of Christ. One of the hymns declares:

The brightest things below the sky
Yield but a flattering light;
We should suspect some danger nigh
Where we possess delight.

There is something morbid in this conception. The invitation to the religious life becomes gruesome. The sister of Pascal cared for him through a long and serious illness. Pascal came to love her so much that he feared that his affection was wicked. In a gloomy hour he wrote in his diary these words, “Lord, forgive me for loving my dear sister so much!” Afterward his abnormal conscience worked again, and Pascal actually erased the word “dear.” For such moods the Bible has a lesson. God “giveth us richly all things to enjoy.” We would think it small glory for ourselves if our children should push our gifts away from their little hands with the idea that those selected gifts were perilous. God fills the world with possibilities of pleasure. Food and drink are not negative and tasteless. The paths of earth are not flowerless. Voices are not without music. Companionship is not lifeless. The Bible is the foe of wicked pleasure. The Bible is the foe of excessive pleasure. The Bible is the friend of legitimate and proportionate pleasure.

But while pleasure needs to be guarded and curbed, it is not either a burden to be lifted or a pain to be endured. Sorrow is both. Therefore sorrow demands some positive services from the Bible. We may be impatient with those doleful folks who speak of this world as a vale of tears or as a wilderness of woe! We may be inclined to quote the lines:

I think we are too ready with complaint
In this fair world of God’s.

On the other hand, it is well to remember that the young, especially, see life almost exclusively from the standpoint of hope and courage. The minister of the gospel begins to feel, when he reaches the age of forty, that he has not given enough comfort to his people. As he identifies himself closely with their lives he finds that most homes carry some secret sorrow and that most men and women have their own personal tragedies. You will recall the myth about the boatman whose duty it was to carry over the Styx the souls who departed from earth. He noticed that these souls mourned much and took the voyage unwillingly. He thought that it must be a very beautiful and joyful land that laid such hold on their hearts. So he secured leave of absence from his post of duty and made an excursion into the world. He discovered that for every birth there must eventually be a death; that every home that was made must in due season be broken; that men and women were troubled and maimed and sick. On all sides he saw the evidences of sorrow. He went back to his ferry greatly wondering why people should be sad because they left a sad world. This mythical picture is overdrawn, but it has its suggestion of truth. Earth does have its manifold sorrows. If all the burdens and pains and problems and anguishes of a single day could focus their influence upon any single life, the result would be either a broken heart or an insane mind.

The Bible does not make light of sorrows. Its heroes have their troubles. Call the roll of its sons and daughters and you will find that at some time each one of them was a child of grief. The Book does not assign burden and pain and sorrow to the class of unrealities. Neither does it assign them to the class of negations. In the Bible sorrow is real and sorrow is positive. When Rachel weeps for her children, the scene is real. When David goes into the room in the tower over the gate and utters his pitiful lament over Absalom, the Book does not describe his anguish as an illusion. Paul’s hunger and thirst, and stripes and shipwrecks, and perils and imprisonments were not the vain froth of a mortal mind. Jesus’s cross, and the thorns and the nails and the spear, and the tauntings of the passers-by, and the thirst, and the darkened face of the Father were not swept into the void by reciting a formula about the All. Jesus gave a promise to his disciples, “In the world ye shall have tribulation.” He kept that promise. They walked the ways of martyrdom. Their spirits won victories over their flesh. Yet there is no hint that their persecutions and deaths were the fictions of error or the dreams of a night that did not exist. The Bible, being real, ministers to sorrow that is real.

The Book, too, touches on all the phases of comfort that we may gather from the surface of life, only it does not make them either a full gospel of consolation or a large part of that gospel. Sometimes a word of Scripture will suggest the method of comparison implied in the statement, “It might be worse.” Paul does this with one quick word. “Our light affliction,” he puts it. We have lost one hand; we might have lost two! We have lost one eye; we might have lost both! We have been sick one week; it might have been a year! Sometimes this method carries us off into rather graceless comparisons of ourselves with other people as if, indeed, we were divine favorites. Can a man prove more divine providence for himself by assuming that there is less for another person? This road of comparison leads to phariseeism unless we watch carefully against a despicable by-path. Tennyson in his “In Memoriam,” which is a poem of comfort, shows much impatience with this false form of consolation:

One writes, “that other friends remain,”
That loss is common to the race;
And common is the commonplace,
And vacant chaff well meant for grain.

That loss is common would not make
My own less bitter, rather more;
Too common! Never morning wore
To evening but some heart did break.