Not Under the Law

by Grace Livingston Hill

The Powers family entered, to her surprise, a bit noisily, with their guests, and made quite a flutter getting certain seats. They seemed to be important personages, for whom the ushers hurried to find the place in four hymn books, and present calendars of the day, with smiles and obsequious bows. The men were fresh from a round on the golf course, and had that air of bored patronage and indifference that so many men wear on Sunday morning, as if virtue fairly exuded from their rosy faces because they had come in from the velvety green to this sombre stuffy dullness for a little while to patronize God. The women were attired in spring array and filled the air about them with the faint, sweet perfume of the well-groomed. The eyes of their envious sisters were fixed upon their hats and coats in earnest study from the minute of their entrance, and many a woman forsook her mild attention to the service and tortured her mind with such problems as how she could get together a becoming hat like that without paying the price of an imported one, or whether there was enough in the breadths of grandmother’s old silk gown to cut a silk coat like the one Anne Powers was wearing.

Joyce, in her back seat, was surprised that her employer of yesterday should be in church. She had unconsciously labeled her as a non-churchgoer. In Meadow Brook the people who gave dinner parties on Sunday did not pay much attention to churchgoing, and as she watched from her shadowed seat under the gallery and saw Mrs. Powers’ delicate airs, and the way she held her book and sang, she marvelled that this pretty woman, with the rapt expression, could be the same one who spoke so contemptuously to her the day before.

But when the minister ascended the pulpit for the sermon she tried to put such thoughts away from her mind and to listen to what was being said. It was not for her to judge the people in God’s house, and God himself might be able to see something acceptable in the worship of these people that was not apparent to her.

The minister had read the story of the man born blind, and it had given her a warm feeling about her heart to remember the dear old story, so linked with thoughts of her Aunt Mary, and especially of that wonderful day in the woods, so she settled herself to enjoy the story once more, and to thrill over the miracle of the healing as she had always been able to thrill over this particular story even after she had grown up.

As the sermon opened up with an eloquent passage descriptive of the oriental day and setting of the story her mind was back in the aisles of the grove with the boy and Aunt Mary, and the birds singing far overhead. Her own sweet thoughts leaped ahead in the story, till suddenly, she became aware of words that were being spoken, words that did not seem to fit the thread of the story at all. What was this? No miracle? Common sense? Jesus used clay to give the man something to do himself, possibly it might have had some medicinal qualities as some clays known to the medical profession of the day are known to have healing qualities. But more likely the clay was a mere agent to bestir the man, to awaken him to a sense of himself, and stimulate his nerves to action—a mere psychological effect on the man’s spirit, something that Jesus, with his unusually keen insight into men’s natures, saw was needed. Such cures were often performed today, by shock of fire or fright, by inducing the subject to in some way believe that he was healed. There was a great deal in will power and in the state of mind, and Jesus used common sense and set men right with themselves. Perhaps the man had not been really blind at all from his birth, but had merely got in the habit of keeping his eyes shut and thinking he was blind, until he and his friends had come to believe that it was true. There was much proof for this theory in the way that his cure was accepted by his friends and neighbors and even by his parents. If there had been a real need of cure it was not at all likely that the parents of the invalid would have taken the cure so lightly and even professed that they knew nothing at all about it. The matter was evidently held lightly among them. The work of Jesus on this earth was really to bring men to themselves, to awaken them to a sense of what they could do for themselves, in even rising above weakness and physical infirmity. They called Jesus divine because they could find no better word to call Him, but we were all divine, all the children of God as was Jesus, and all able to do what Jesus did. Perhaps not in the same degree, for he was the greatest man that ever lived, but still, in a sense, we could do for suffering humanity just what Jesus did. If we were not actual physicians, able to heal disease, we could yet persuade men to common sense, awake them to open their eyes to things about them.

Joyce sat straighter in her seat and her cheeks grew hot with excitement. She felt as if some exquisite, sacred fabric, that was beyond price, and had always been most dear to her had been torn in tatters and scattered to the four winds. She felt as if she must arise and cry out to the man that what he was saying was false—that he was blaspheming!

She looked around startled on the indifferent audience composed in a dreamy silence of peace, eyes intent upon the preacher, lips placid, no look of protest in their faces! How strange! How awful! Was there no one, not one, to stand up for the Bible, for the miracle of healing, for the matchless God-nature of Christ?

But other words suddenly arrested her, standing out from the drab background of the sermon sharply:

“The time has come when the world no longer needs a bloody atonement to appease an angry God. The world has grown beyond that ghastly idea. The death of Christ was to show the world how much He loved it, not to wash away its evil deeds in some mysterious way. People must undo their own evil deeds. No one could do that for them. We must work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, for it was the God in us that works. We all have God in us, only we are not letting Him work, just as that blind man had sight, but he was not using it—”

Joyce almost started to her feet. She seemed to be crying out in her throat so that it hurt: “That is not true, oh, that is not true! Will no one tell him what an awful thing he is saying?” But not a sound came from her lips, of course. She found that her limbs were trembling and she felt as though she scarcely dared look up. To think that she was here in God’s house listening to this and no one making any protest! She looked around again, aghast at the smug, satisfied faces of the congregation. It was almost as if they were not listening.