Victory out of Ruin

by Norman Maclean

I

Every advance of humanity in its upward struggle has sprung from some divine dissatisfaction. It was the fulness of the time in that the world, disillusioned and dissatisfied, realised its need. The Greek found no answer for their moral needs in the pantheon of gods that filled the heart with the passion for beauty alone. Socrates before drinking the hemlock advised his disciples to search for another teacher; but that other could not be found. The only remedy for the ills of man that they discovered was that he should cut himself loose from the world—a gospel of suicide. The Roman made a god of power. But when he had conquered the world, invested it with roads and bridges and by force had imposed peace on it, then he confronted the awful mystery of his own personality, and his questioning was baffled by a silence in which there was no voice nor any that answered. His gods became objects of derision. In the gratification of his bodily cravings he sought to lull the hunger of his soul. At last Rome presented the dread spectacle of a Nero who was at once 'a priest, an atheist, and a god.' There is preserved a record which visualises the awful depths to which that pagan world descended. Nero had murdered his mother, and he comes back to Rome nervous as to how the people will receive him. But the citizens poured out to meet him in their thousands, and rent the welkin with their shouts of welcome—'Hail, Nero, the god!' If that world was to be saved, it had to be saved then. If God was ever to intervene in the affairs of men, He had to intervene then. The extremity of man was God's opportunity. The Unseen Ruler must either come and deliver a world such as that or abdicate. The coming of the Child was a necessity.

II

It is very hard to understand how things do happen; and our only comfort is that we really understand nothing. We have in these last years been mesmerised into thinking that we understand a great deal when in reality we understand nothing at all. We camouflage our ignorance by speaking of law—but what is it? Why do like causes produce a like result always? No answer. We used to explain the heavens by gravitation. What is it? No answer. We ushered in the new age of electricity. What is it! Silence! There is no reason, then, for rebelling against the fact that we cannot understand the greatest of all mysteries—the coming of God more fully into the lives of men. All we can hope to do is to realise how natural it is that God should so come to men. As the years pass that thought becomes more and more natural. In other days God was thought of as dwelling far removed from the world. That is not now the great thought regarding God. 'Whatever sort of being God may be,' writes William James, 'He is nevermore that mere external inventor of contrivances intended to manifest His glory in which our great-grandfathers took such satisfaction.' (The conception of our great-grandfathers may have been limited; but it is more important that we should try to be as good men as they were.) This conception of 'an absentee God outside the world watching it go,' has given place to another. The world is now realised as spiritual through and through; the shrine of an indwelling life. God is in the world, has always been in the world, and man's reasoning and loving is but a reflection of his Maker's reason and love. Through all the weary centuries God has been with men, in men, striving with their spirits, never absent from them, the source of all their aspirations, visions, and dreams. If that be so, it is the most natural thing in all history that in the fulness of the time, when the need was greatest, God should come in fuller measure into the lives that He had made. Surely natural that the glows and flashes preceding the dawn should at last break forth into the glory of the sunrise. God, who has been with man from the dawn, guiding and leading, at last in the noontide speaks with the articulate Word, making His purpose clear. If once we realise that there has never been an impassable chasm between God and man, then the incredible becomes credible. For this is not an isolated event; it is rather the beginning of another great stage in man's spiritual evolution by which God comes and dwells more and more in the hearts of men, becoming incarnate in lives risen from the dead; in souls renewed after His image.

III

With us, too, it is the fulness of the time. If God intervenes when the need is sorest, and when man realises the need—then we can well cherish the expectation that another manifestation of God is at hand. Nineteen centuries ago He came to a world whose religion was dead. With us it is not dead; it is sore stricken. The glow has vanished, and those who bow down in the house of God in our day do so largely from force of habit, and not because they believe. Religion to-day curbs few evils, and is powerless against the selfishness that sacrifices the well-being of nations on the altars of self-interest. And, just as in Rome the unrest of soul made the degenerate a prey to every charlatan and soothsayer that came out of the East, so the spiritual hunger of our day brings men and women to crystal-gazers and table-rappers, bowing down before every superstition, however gross. And if the Rome of the Cæsars sought to allay its soul hunger at the banquets of pleasure, so also with us. Low forms of pleasure have led the multitudes captive. The London of Charles II. could not hold a candle to the London or Glasgow of to-day in the way of refinements of material sensation. The old cry of 'bread and circuses' has given place to the cry of dancing-halls and doles! In that old world at last there was no room for the cradle in the family life—the babe was shut out. And so to-day. There is every sign that God must again intervene and save, or the civilisation we know will be buried with the civilisations of all the past. The fountain of inspiration, of cleansing, of righteousness must be opened afresh, and its reviving waters sent flowing over all the land. Unless God does so come there is no hope. But all history is the proof that He will so come. We can hear the rumble of His chariot wheels as He comes. Here and there the Spirit is moving on the face of the waters. Of old it was shepherds and fishermen who first received the glad tidings. That fishermen should be the first to feel the coming outrush of spiritual power in our day is wholly natural. The glad tidings of Christmas is that God is ever coming to His own. The duty laid upon us is that we prepare His way, and make room for Him. It will be a new Edinburgh and a new Glasgow when the renewing Spirit shall have swept through them. It is the one hope. In Melrose Abbey there is an old inscription, 'When Jesus comes the shadows depart.' Some monk who felt the shadows gathering round him realised Christ as a living presence—and the shadows were wafted away. And he carved the words. And our shadows will vanish when He who lay in the manger will come again, in the fulness of His reviving and quickening Spirit. Then God will again work marvels in transfigured lives and in nations reborn.

IV

There are some good people to whom the word Revival is anathema. There have always been such people. 'Their doctrines are most repulsive, and strongly tinctured with impertinence and disrespect to their superiors,' wrote the Duchess of Buckingham to Lady Huntingdon, regarding the early Methodists. 'It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl the earth. This is highly insulting, and I wonder that your Ladyship should relish any sentiment so much at variance with high rank and good breeding.' Yet it was that same Revival of religion in the days of Wesley and Whitefield that saved England when the evil days befell in the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. There is no nobler figure in all history than that of John Wesley riding over the whole country, reading as he rode, contesting all England for God, everywhere wakening the dead. To duchesses and highly refined folk that Revival seemed to be 'repulsive' and 'monstrous.' Religion was good enough in its own place, but it must not interfere with their amusements. They wanted their religion well iced. To-day when only another such outrush of spiritual energy can save a poor sick world, there is no need to trouble about the mocker. There is only reason to rejoice that there are manifest stirrings in the depths of human life which no earthly theory can explain. Often and often on wearied men there comes the breath of a new life, and armies, long worn out, arise and snatch redemption out of ruin. The prelude to these triumphs of the Spirit has always been a sense of expectation springing up mysteriously out of the depths. That expectation is wholly natural. We have come through the most awful carnival of blood and tears in the world's history, and so far there has been no result commensurate with the sacrifice. The old world is dead and the new tarries while men are left

'Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,'

If man's extremity be God's opportunity, then, once more, it is the fulness of the time.