Oh that I had wings … then would I fly away. Here the idea of fleeing away suggests itself as a possible solution of life; and whenever it comes to a man like this it is a source of weakness. It is not a desire to find the joys of heaven; it is a desire to escape the pains of earth. There is no vista, no wistful distance, no long, alluring prospect. The soul is hemmed in by its enemies, crushed down by its burdens, beset on all sides by the frets of the earthly lot; and there comes a vague desire to be out of it all. It is not aspiration, it is evasion. It is not response to the ideal, it is recoil from the actual. It is not the spell of that which shall be that is upon the soul, but the irksomeness or the dreadfulness of that which is. This is a mood that awaits us all. No man faces life as it should be faced, but some can hardly be said to face it at all. Their face is ever turned towards a seductive vision of quietness. The solution of life for them is not in a fight, but in a retreat. Of course we know there is no going back, and no easy deliverance from the burden and the battle, but in the thick of any fight there is a great difference between the man who wants victory and the man who merely wants a cessation of hostilities.
This plea for wings does not necessarily betoken 'a desire to depart.' It rather indicates a desire to remain under more favourable and comfortable conditions. Such a mood is not the highest and the healthiest experience of the soul. It is rather something against which we must fight relentlessly. Very often the longing for wings results only in lagging footsteps. Picturing to ourselves the luxury of laying life down will not help us to face the duty of taking life up. The secret of enervation is found not in the poverty of our resources, but in the cowardliness and selfishness of our attitude towards life. The battle is half won when we have looked the enemy in the face. The burden is the better borne as we stoop under the full weight of it.
Oh that I had wings like a dove! That is a short-sighted and a selfish desire. Supposing you had wings, what would you do? Fly away from the moil of the world and find rest and shelter for yourself? Is that the best and noblest thing to desire to do? After all, we know other and loftier moods than this. We know that staying is better than going when there is so much to stay for. We know that working is better than resting when there is so much to do. We have something better to think about than a quiet lodgement in the wilderness, we who live in a world where the strength of our hands and the warmth of our hearts count for something. To give your tired brother a lift is a vastly more profitable occupation than sitting at the roadside and wishing you could fly. Man, you ought to be glad that you can walk—in a world where there are so many cripples that want help.
Oh that I had wings!… then would I fly away. That desire has never taken any one to heaven, but it has made them less useful upon earth. The breath of this desire is able to blight the flowers of social service. No one would be foolish enough to indict suburbanism as a mode of life. The day must surely come when few or none will dwell in the smoke-grimed heart of the city. But in as far as a man seeks the fairest suburb open to him in order that he may see little of, and think little of, 'the darkness of the terrible streets,' then the very life that restores health to his body shall sow seeds of disease in his soul.
There is only one way to rest, and that lies right through the heart of the world's work and pain. Rest is not for those who flee away from life's difficulties, but for those who face them. 'Take my yoke … and ye shall find rest.' It were not well for our own sakes that we had wings. It were not well for us to be able to avoid the burden-bearing and the tale of tired days, for God has hidden the secret of our rest in the heart of our toiling. They who come unto the City of God come there not by the easy flight of a dove, but by the long, slow pilgrimage of unselfishness.
Yet there is a beauty and a fitness in this longing. It is expressive of more than the weariness of a world-worn spirit, or the thinly disguised selfishness of one who fears to pay the price of life.
When the long working-day of life is wearing away its last hours and verging towards the great stillness, the voices of time fall but faintly on the ear, the adorations and ideals and fashions and enthusiasms of the world come to mean little to a man who in his day has followed them as eagerly as any, and the heart within him asks only for rest.
God, if there be none beside Thee
Dwelling in the light,
Take me out of the world and hide me
Somewhere behind the night.
When, like Simeon the seer with the Christ-Child in his arms, a man feels that for him life has said its last word and shown its last wonder and uttered its last benediction, the desire for rest is a pure and spiritually normal thing; it is just the soul's gaze turned upward where
beyond these toils
God waiteth us above,
To give to hand and heart the spoils
Of labour and of love.