But as a rule the summons has an outward semblance no more striking than that of any other communication. Much more than upon its form and manner it depends upon this: that it touch in the innermost heart of man a string still sensitive to this tone, struck from another key than one’s ordinary life and thought.
And so, if the summons shall come to you once more, then arouse yourself, but at once, where you are and as you are, in business, on the street, in society, even in the theatre or in any other place; delay for not one minute the resolution to strike every sin out of your life. Then everything will become easier and clearer; that gloomy spirit and those false conceptions, which are simply the direct consequence of sin itself, will leave you, and a day will come at last when you also can say: “Now am I become, in God’s sight, a soul that findeth peace.”
II
If you should ask men which of these two great evils, sin and sorrow, they had rather see banished from their life, the majority, we fear, would choose to see sorrow banished. But wrongly; for not only is sin very often the basal cause of sorrow, but it is also comparatively easy to bear heavy sorrow if no feeling of guilt is bound up with it. On the contrary, even in the midst of grief one often feels a closer nearness to God that beatifies the human heart in its inmost depths; one feels, too, the truth of the saying that the spirit of man can be joyous even in distress. And so, beyond all doubt, the greatest of evils is sin; and in this fact lies, what is very often overlooked, a tremendous equalizing force in human conditions, which in this respect know no distinction between rich and poor.
On the other hand, to be sure, the relation of the two evils to each other is, not rarely, an inverted one: the first impulse to sin comes sometimes from sorrow, the tormenting anxiety how to get through life, the conviction, in troubled moments almost forcing itself upon us, that one will not be able to carry through the hard struggle for existence if one is too painfully scrupulous, if one may not use a little dishonesty, deception, and force, “just as everybody else does, and as seems unfortunately to be inevitable, you know, in human affairs.” Without this conviction many men would be upright who now think they can not be. This is really a superstition which to-day almost seems to be more prevalent than ever, and to destroy it should be one of the chief concerns of the Christianity of our time. Christianity was also much concerned therewith in the days of its beginnings, when it gave not merely the counsel but the command, “not to be anxious,” giving at the same time a very positive direction as to how the command might be carried out: “Seek ye first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.”
But this counsel, of course, presupposes trust in God; without this, it is of no value. An unconquerable anxiety is, therefore, in most cases evidence of a secret atheism. Among the most remarkable of the many remarkable things of this life is this: that so many of the very wisest people voluntarily submit to this punishment, their whole life through, when they could have things so much better. For God is faithful, a rock on which one may rely; this is the one thing we most surely know of him, the one thing we can most easily ourselves experience. But faithfulness is in its nature reciprocal, and our own faithfulness consists far less in any sort of acts or confessions than in the resolute shutting out of all distrust every time it would approach us in the manifold difficulties and injustices of this life.
To be sure, complete confidence in the possibility of a release from sorrows through trust in God comes to be a certainty only through experience; but there is, in the Bible and in countless later writings and in many human lives, such a mass of assurances and experiences of trustworthy men, and on the other hand, there are, before our eyes, so many obvious examples of the impossibility of any other release from sorrow, that we may fittingly ask: Why is there so great an aversion to making this experience? Why, when men are tormented with sorrow, often to the point of despair, why do they not at least make trial of this, instead of seeking death? The reason, perhaps, is mostly this: they do not want to be dependent on God; they had much rather put dependence on pitiless men. Indeed, the assurances of the Bible may be appropriated in their literal, full meaning only by the man who has sought no alien help beside, nor any human help at all before he has first sought God’s. But how many are there to-day who do that? So long as the sun of fortune shines for them, they believe in their “lucky star” with a kind of ludicrous or sacrilegious fatalism, and therewith a secret fear often takes them unawares; for “happiness of this kind needs many supports, while the happiness of those at one with the will of God has need of but one.” But when once they have misfortune and no human aid to ward it off, they go all to pieces and fall into the manifold “nervous affections” of our time, into sleeplessness and ceaseless unrest, and these bring them to the numberless sanitariums, for the most part vainly; for “the sorrow of the world worketh death,” and against that no nerve specialist nor hydropathy avails.
It is certain that there is a way of release from continuous sorrow; it must be just as certain that single and even frequent sorrows belong to the necessary events of our life. There can be no human life without sorrows; but to live with sorrows, yes, with many sorrows, yet free from sorrow’s burden, that is the art of life toward which we are being trained. It is, therefore, an everyday experience that men who have too few sorrows buy themselves some; for riches, which in the view of most men are meant to release one from anxiety, are not fitted to do that; they are “deceitfulness,” as Christ himself calls them, and his warnings against them, which we are wont to take so lightly, are surely not there for merely “decorative effect.”
We must have sorrows, and for three substantial reasons: in the first place, in order not to become arrogant and frivolous; sorrows are the weight in the clock, to regulate its proper movement; misfortune is really in most cases the only means of salvation for those who are not on the right way. In the second place, to enable us to have fellow-feeling with others; people who are too well nourished and free from customary sorrows easily become egotists, who at last not merely have compassion for pale faces no longer, but regard them as a kind of offence, a disturbing element in their ease; they may go so far as to feel downright hatred for them. And finally, because sorrows alone effectively teach us to trust in God and seek his aid; for the granting of prayer and the consequent release from sorrow is the only convincing proof of God, and likewise the test of the truth of Christianity to which Christ himself challenges us. Therefore the evil days are good; without them, most men would never come at all to the soberer thoughts.
Furthermore, the deliverances from sorrow, the triumphal days when a man beholds a mountain-load rolled away, belong to undoubtedly the purest moments of happiness in life, moments that God must grant to his own, if he is truly merciful to them. Spurgeon, therefore, rightly says, in one of his finest sermons, that if we truly trust God, he is, in the beginning, better than our fears, then better than our hopes, and finally better than our wishes. For his people, sorrow always lasts only so long as it still has a task to fulfil on their behalf.