“Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?” Even by ruling himself on the faith “that it is probable that God exists, and that death is not the end of life;” or again, “that this is the only world of which we have any knowledge at all.” Either of these creeds, says the philosopher of the clubs, if held distinctly as a dogma and consistently acted on, will be found “capable of producing results on an astonishing scale.” So one would think, but scarcely in the direction of personal holiness, or energy. Meantime, the answer of the Hebrew psalmist, three thousand years old, or thereabouts, has gone straight to the heart of many generations, and I take it will scarcely care to make way for any solution likely to occur to modern science or philosophy. Yes, he who has the word of the living God to rule himself by—who can fall back on the strength of Him who has had the victory over the world, the flesh and the devil—may even in this strange disjointed time of ours carry his manhood pure and unsullied through the death-grips to which he must come with “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life.” He who will take the world, the flesh, and the devil by the throat in his own strength, will find them shrewd wrestlers. Well for him if he escape with the stain of the falls which he is too sure to get, and can rise up still a man, though beaten and shamed, to meet the same foes in new shapes in his later years. New shapes, and ever more vile, as the years run on: “Three sorts of men my soul hateth,” says the son of Sirach, “a poor man that is proud, a rich man that is a liar, and an old adulterer that doateth.”
We may believe the Gospel history to be a fable, but who amongst us can deny the fact that each son of man has to go forth into the wilderness—for us “the wilderness of the wide world in an atheistic century”—and there do battle with the tempter as soon as the whisper has come in his ear: “Thou too art a man; eat freely. All these things will I give thee.”
LVIII.
“How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be in my Father’s courts, about his business?”
Full of this new question and great wonder, Christ went home to the village in Galilee with his parents, and was subject to them; and the curtain falls for us on his boyhood and youth and early manhood. But as nothing but what is most important, and necessary for understanding all of his life which we need for our own growth into his likeness, is told in these simple gospel narratives, it would seem that this vivid light is thrown on that first visit to Jerusalem because it was the crisis in our Lord’s early life which bears most directly on his work for our race. If so, we must, I think, allow that the question, once fairly presented to the boy’s mind, would never again have left it. Day by day it would have been coming back with increasing insistency, gathering power and weight. And as he submitted it day by day to the God whom prophet and Psalmist had taught every child of the nation to look upon as “about his path and about his bed, and knowing every thought of his heart,” the consciousness must have gained strength and power. As the habit of self-surrender and simple obedience to the voice within grew more perfect, and more a part of his very being, the call must have sounded more and more clearly.
And, as he was in all things tempted like as we are, again and again must his human nature have shrunk back and tried every way of escape from this task, the call to which was haunting him; while every succeeding month and year of life must have disclosed to him more and more of its peril and its hopelessness, as well as of its majesty.
We have, then, to picture to ourselves this struggle and discipline going on for eighteen years—the call sounding continually in his ears, and the boy, the youth, the strong man, each in turn solicited by the special temptations of his age, and rising clear above them through the strength of perfect obedience, the strength which comes from the daily fulfilment of daily duties—that “strength in the Lord” which St. Paul holds up to us as possible for every human being. Think over this long probation, and satisfy yourselves whether it is easy, whether it is possible to form any higher ideal of perfect manliness.