Would we fain look on the present year as sacred to reconciliation and peace? let each one inquire whether he has ensured the enjoyment of those blessings in their most precious and enduring forms! It is a fact, to which the consciousness of most thoughtful men bears witness, that in connexion with the intellectual harmony of their nature, there is sad discord in their moral experience. The heart is divided against itself—its little world is full of rebellion and strife, torn in pieces by intestine war, like an empire in the anarchy of an interregnum, even as that clear-sighted Hebrew, looking at himself in the radiance of a light which fell from heaven, most plainly saw, and mournfully confessed, when he cried, to his and our true Lord and Maker, “unite my heart to fear thy name!” That inward confusion indicates the rejection of a Divine law of order, and that fact explains the secret of many a man’s misery. The material world out of which he gathers the triumphs of art, and the intellectual power by which he achieves his victories over the physical, are in a state of unvarying subjection to law, and hence the admired results of his formative genius and taste; but he himself, the innermost and moral self, is out of harmony with law. Hence the disorder and trouble which human beings carry with them everywhere, amidst the harmony and order of external nature; which, with a still small voice, reproves them for their disobedience. Some lead mournful, miserable lives; they strive to be happy, but happiness flies from them. All kinds of expedients are adopted to secure inward peace; but these all fail. The disappointed ones still try. Again cheated of the prize, they try—it is in vain. And do you not know the secret of your sorrow? You lay it perhaps on circumstances, or friends, or on the world, or on nature, or on God. You invent causes and miss the right one. Here it is lying within yourself, in your own heart and will. Your inward life is not under the rule of the great God. His laws run in one direction, and carry happiness with them. Your soul rushes in an opposite direction, and dashes against these laws. The collision is your misery and ruin. “You stretch out your hand against God, and strengthen yourself against the Almighty. You run upon him, even on his neck, upon the thick bosses of his bucklers.” Man’s heart, divided against itself, throwing off the yoke of law, is at emnity with God. Divine relations are disturbed. The bonds which alone could bind safety and peace to the human soul, by binding that soul to the omnipotent and loving Father of all, are ruptured and destroyed; and thus, giving up its Guide and Guardian, the wandering child is left to battle with storms in the dark ocean of evil over which it strives to push its bark. How can there be security to a creature who breaks away from God? How can that bosom be at peace in which there is no love to him? His law has sanctions, as all effectual and perfect law must ever have—pain and trouble therefore follow disobedience here and hereafter. “The wages of sin is death.”
Such being the facts of the case, the first desire of all should be to secure reconciliation with God, with law, with conscience. The gospel, and it only, reveals the method of this reconciliation. It teaches us that there is redemption in Jesus Christ; that God has set him forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins; that whoso believeth in him is justified; that there is no condemnation to them that are in him; that he is our peace; that to as many as receive him he gives power to become the sons of God; that being made sons they receive not the spirit of bondage again to fear, but the spirit of adoption, whereby they cry, Abba, Father; that his people are renewed and sanctified through his Spirit, that dwelleth in them; that the righteousness of the law is fulfilled in them who walk not after the flesh but after the spirit; and that having access by faith unto this grace wherein we stand, they rejoice in hope of the glory of God.
This Divine reconciliation, inward order, and holy peace are our best qualifications for seeking to promote domestic reconciliation, national order, and the world’s peace. They are the proper preparatives for all usefulness, private and public—for all works of love towards our fellow-men. For how inconsistent it is to think of binding up the wounds of a family, curing the ills of the commonwealth, or bringing a divided world together—while the very soul, dreaming of these achievements, is a spectacle of sorrow to unseen beings; inasmuch as it is engaged in an impotent warfare against its God, and is bleeding under fatal injuries inflicted on itself in a struggle so unutterably awful and insane. Fraternity! concord! union! These beautiful words come with a melancholy and mocking sound from any lips but those which have prayed for union with God, concord with law, and fraternity with a holy obedient universe. How touching also, even to tears, is it to think that any of the minds so richly gifted by the Creator should devote themselves through life to artistic and intellectual toils, for the sole purpose of bringing into fair proportion and symmetry rude heaps of matter, or confused elements of thought—while their own nature, in itself and its highest relations, is left “without form, and void,” like the primeval deep, its face covered over with darkness.
These blessings to which we have referred alone can satisfy. Other things, however fair and good—success in the formation of the beautiful, and even the production of the beneficent, leave a consciousness of want until the human spirit be reconciled to itself and God. The soul wonders why the cup in which it has mixed such sweet ingredients should yet be dashed with bitterness; but so it must be while the vessel itself retains the wormwood of its spiritual enmities. Let the cup be cleansed; let the moral nature be renewed and purified by a reconciling faith in the One Mediator; and then shall the man, however disappointed before, find himself blessed above all mortal blessedness.
These blessings too are of an enduring character. It were to tell an oft-told truth, if we described the limited existence of all works of art and genius; if we reminded the reader of the crumbling touch of time, and pointed him to the all-enveloping ruins of the last day, when “the elements shall melt with fervent heat, and the earth and all the works that are therein shall be burned up.” But these common themes are as indisputable and awful as they are common: nor should any one forget them as he looks on the palace of glass—(how forcibly symbolic is that word)—and on the manifold structures, possessions, and achievements of men. In contrast with such brittle objects, how strong in enduring strength is that spiritual good to which, in the conclusion of this volume, we direct, with intense desire and hope, the thoughts of every reader. “The world passeth away and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.” The Divine favour, so plainly promised to such, is an inheritance exempt from the condition of time, change, and mortality. It is a treasure brought down to us from another world, and will be carried back there by him who finds it. In the silent musings of eternity the soul, reconciled to God through faith in the blood of Jesus Christ, will be able to look back with unspeakable satisfaction on a course through this world, in which the only thing not doomed to perish with itself was secured and appropriated. “I could not stay in that earth,” will be the reflection of so happy a spirit. “I saw but a little while what it had within it of the beautiful and the sublime in God’s works, and in the works which God enabled man to accomplish; I left them there to perish, and on the last day I saw them perish: but in my passage I discerned, by the aid of the Divine Spirit, something better than all that they signified to me. I seized the Pearl of great price and have brought that away.” [161] On the other hand, how inexpressibly dreadful must be the recollection of the opposite class of human souls,—of all unreconciled, unregenerate, earthly, sensuous, and even merely intellectual ones,—who will be for ever tortured with the accusation of their own mortifying and fatal folly, because they will have passed through a world of perishable objects with only one thing imperishable, and in striving to enjoy them forget that, and after a life of toil, ambition, and hope, came away with nothing.
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