Unspoken Sermons

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But, lest it should be possible that any unchildlike soul might, in
arrogance and ignorance, think to stand upon his rights _against_ God,
and demand of him this or that after the will of the flesh, I will lay
before such a possible one some of the things to which he has a right,
yea, perhaps has first of all a right to, from the God of his life,
because of the beginning he has given him--because of the divine germ
that is in him. He has a claim on God, then, a divine claim, for any
pain, want, disappointment, or misery, that would help to show him to
himself as the fool he is; he has a claim to be punished to the last
scorpion of the whip, to be spared not one pang that may urge him
towards repentance; yea, he has a claim to be sent out into the outer
darkness, whether what we call hell, or something speechlessly worse,
if nothing less will do. He has a claim to be compelled to repent; to
be hedged in on every side; to have one after another of the strong,
sharp-toothed sheep-dogs of the great shepherd sent after him, to
thwart him in any desire, foil him in any plan, frustrate him of any
hope, until he come to see at length that nothing will ease his pain,
nothing make life a thing worth having, but the presence of the living
God within him; that nothing is good but the will of God; nothing noble
enough for the desire of the heart of man but oneness with the eternal.
For this God must make him yield his very being, that He may enter in
and dwell with him.

That the man would enforce none of these claims, is nothing; for it is
not a man who owes them to him, but the eternal God, who by his own
will of right towards the creature he has made, is bound to discharge
them. God has to answer to himself for his idea; he has to do with the
need of the nature he made, not with the self-born choice of the self-
ruined man. His candle yet burns dim in the man's soul; that candle
must shine as the sun. For what is the all-pervading dissatisfaction of
his wretched being but an unrecognized hunger after the righteousness
of his father. The soul God made is thus hungering, though the selfish,
usurping self, which is its consciousness, is hungering only after low
and selfish things, ever trying, but in vain, to fill its mean, narrow
content, with husks too poor for its poverty-stricken desires. For even
that most degraded chamber of the soul which is the temple of the
deified Self, cannot be filled with less than God; even the usurping
Self must be miserable until it cease to look at itself in the mirror
of Satan, and open the door of its innermost closet to the God who
means to dwell there, and make peace.

He that has looked on the face of God in Jesus Christ, whose heart
overflows, if ever so little, with answering love, sees God standing
with full hands to give the abundance for which he created his
children, and those children hanging back, refusing to take, doubting
the God-heart which knows itself absolute in truth and love.

It is not at first easy to see wherein God gives Job any answer; I
cannot find that he offers him the least explanation of why he has so
afflicted him. He justifies him in his words; he says Job has spoken
what is right concerning him, and his friends have not; and he calls up
before him, one after another, the works of his hands. The answer, like
some of our Lord's answers if not all of them, seems addressed to Job
himself, not to his intellect; to the revealing, God-like imagination
in the man, and to no logical faculty whatever. It consists in a
setting forth of the power of God, as seen in his handywork, and
wondered at by the men of the time; and all that is said concerning
them has to do with their show of themselves to the eyes of men. In
what belongs to the deeper meanings of nature and her mediation between
us and God, the appearances of nature are the truths of nature, far
deeper than any scientific discoveries in and concerning them. The show
of things is that for which God cares _most_, for their show is the
face of far deeper things than they; we see in them, in a distant way,
as in a glass darkly, the face of the unseen. It is through their show,
not through their analysis, that we enter into their deepest truths.
What they say to the childlike soul is the truest thing to be gathered
of them. To know a primrose is a higher thing than to know all the
botany of it--just as to know Christ is an infinitely higher thing than
to know all theology, all that is said about his person, or babbled
about his work. The body of man does not exist for the sake of its
hidden secrets; its hidden secrets exist for the sake of its
outside--for the face and the form in which dwells revelation: its
outside is the deepest of it. So Nature as well exists primarily for
her face, her look, her appeals to the heart and the imagination, her
simple service to human need, and not for the secrets to be discovered
in her and turned to man's farther use. What in the name of God is our
knowledge of the elements of the atmosphere to our knowledge of the
elements of Nature? What are its oxygen, its hydrogen, its nitrogen,
its carbonic acid, its ozone, and all the possible rest, to the blowing
of the wind on our faces? What is the analysis of water to the babble
of a running stream? What is any knowledge of things to the heart,
beside its child-play with the Eternal! And by an infinite
decomposition we should know nothing more of what a thing really is,
for, the moment we decompose it, it ceases to be, and all its meaning
is vanished. Infinitely more than astronomy even, which destroys
nothing, can do for us, is done by the mere aspect and changes of the
vault over our heads. Think for a moment what would be our idea of
greatness, of God, of infinitude, of aspiration, if, instead of a blue,
far withdrawn, light-spangled firmament, we were born and reared under
a flat white ceiling! I would not be supposed to depreciate the labours
of science, but I say its discoveries are unspeakably less precious
than the merest gifts of Nature, those which, from morning to night, we
take unthinking from her hands. One day, I trust, we shall be able to
enter into their secrets from within them--by natural contact between
our heart and theirs. When we are one with God we may well understand
in an hour things that no man of science, prosecuting his
investigations from the surface with all the aids that keenest human
intellect can supply, would reach in the longest lifetime. Whether such
power will ever come to any man in this world, or can come only in some
state of existence beyond it, matters nothing to me: the question does
not interest me; life is one, and things will be then what they are
now; for God is one and the same there and here; and I shall be the
same there I am here, however larger the life with which it may please
the Father of my being to endow me.

The argument implied, not expressed, in the poem, seems to be this--
that Job, seeing God so far before him in power, and his works so far
beyond his understanding that they filled him with wonder and
admiration--the vast might of the creation, the times and the seasons,
the marvels of the heavens, the springs of the sea, and the gates of
death; the animals, their generations and providing, their beauties and
instincts; the strange and awful beasts excelling the rest, behemoth on
the land, leviathan in the sea, creatures, perhaps, now vanished from
the living world;--that Job, beholding these things, ought to have
reasoned that he who could work so grandly beyond his understanding,
must certainly use wisdom in things that touched him nearer, though
they came no nearer his understanding: 'shall he that contendeth with
the Almighty instruct him? he that reproveth God, let him answer it.'
'Wilt thou also disannul my judgment? wilt thou condemn me that thou
mayest be righteous?' In this world power is no _proof_ of
righteousness; but was it likely that he who could create should be
unrighteous? Did not all he made move the delight of the beholding man?
Did such things foreshadow injustice towards the creature he had made
in his image? If Job could not search his understanding in these
things, why should he conclude his own case wrapt in the gloom of
injustice? Did he understand his own being, history, and destiny?
Should not God's ways in these also be beyond his understanding? Might
he not trust him to do him justice? In such high affairs as the rights
of a live soul, might not matters be involved too high for Job? The
maker of Job was so much greater than Job, that his ways with him might
well be beyond his comprehension! God's thoughts were higher than his
thoughts, as the heavens were higher than the earth!

The true child, the righteous man, will trust absolutely, against all
appearances, the God who has created in him the love of righteousness.

God does not, I say, tell Job why he had afflicted him: he rouses his
child-heart to trust. All the rest of Job's life on earth, I imagine,
his slowly vanishing perplexities would yield him ever fresh
meditations concerning God and his ways, new opportunities of trusting
him, light upon many things concerning which he had not as yet begun to
doubt, added means of growing in all directions into the knowledge of
God. His perplexities would thus prove of divinest gift. Everything, in
truth, which we cannot understand, is a closed book of larger knowledge
and blessedness, whose clasps the blessed perplexity urges us to open.
There is, there can be, nothing which is not in itself a righteous
intelligibility--whether an intelligibility for us, matters nothing.
The awful thing would be, that anything should be in its nature
unintelligible: that would be the same as _no God_. That God knows is
enough for me; I shall know, if I can know. It would be death to think
God did not know; it would be as much as to conclude there was no God
to know.

How much more than Job are we bound, who know him in his Son as Love,
to trust God in all the troubling questions that force themselves upon
us concerning the motions and results of things! With all those about
the lower animals, with all those about such souls as seem never to
wake from, or seem again to fall into the sleep of death, we will trust
him.

In the confusion of Job's thoughts--how could they be other than
confused, in the presence of the awful contradiction of two such facts
staring each other in the face, that God was just, yet _punishing_ a
righteous man as if he were wicked?--while he was not yet able to
generate, or to receive the thought, that approving love itself might
be inflicting or allowing the torture--that such suffering as his was
granted only to a righteous man, that he might be made perfect--I can
well imagine that at times, as the one moment he doubted God's
righteousness, and the next cried aloud, 'Though he slay me, yet will I
trust in him,' there must in the chaos have mingled some element of
doubt as to the existence of God. Let not such doubt be supposed a yet
further stage in unbelief. To deny the existence of God may,
paradoxical as the statement will at first seem to some, involve less
unbelief than the smallest yielding to doubt of his goodness. I say
_yielding_; for a man may be haunted with doubts, and only grow thereby
in faith. Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to rouse the
honest. They are the first knock at our door of things that are not
yet, but have to be, understood; and theirs in general is the
inhospitable reception of angels that do not come in their own
likeness. Doubt must precede every deeper assurance; for uncertainties
are what we first see when we look into a region hitherto unknown,
unexplored, unannexed. In all Job's begging and longing to see God,
then, may well be supposed to mingle the mighty desire to be assured of
God's being. To acknowledge is not to be sure of God. One great point
in the poem is--that when Job hears the voice of God, though it utters
no word of explanation, it is enough to him to hear it: he knows that
God is, and that he hears the cry of his creature. That he is there,
knowing all about him, and what had befallen him, is enough; he needs
no more to reconcile seeming contradictions, and the worst ills of
outer life become endurable. Even if Job could not at first follow his
argument of divine probability, God settled everything for him when, by
answering him out of the whirlwind, he showed him that he had not
forsaken him. It is true that nothing but a far closer divine presence
can ever make life a thing fit for a son of man--and that for the
simplest of all reasons, that he is made in the image of God, and it is
for him absolutely imperative that he should have in him the reality of
which his being is the image: while he has it not in him, his being,
his conscious self, is but a mask, a spiritual emptiness; but for the
present, Job, yielding to God, was calmed and satisfied. Perhaps he
came at length to see that, if anything God could do to him would
trouble him so as to make him doubt God--if he knew him so imperfectly
who could do nothing ill, then it was time that he should be so
troubled, that the imperfection of his knowledge of God and his lack of
faith in him should be revealed to him--that an earthquake of his being
should disclose its hollowness, and at the same time bring to the
surface the gold of God that was in him. To know that our faith is weak
is the first step towards its strengthening; to be capable of
distrusting is death; to know that we are, and cry out, is to begin to
live--to begin to be made such that we cannot distrust--such that God
may do anything with us and we shall never doubt him. Until doubt is
impossible, we are lacking in the true, the childlike knowledge of God;
for either God is such that one _may_ distrust him, or he is such that
to distrust him is the greatest injustice of which a man can be guilty.
If then we are able to distrust him, either we know God imperfect, or
we do not know him. Perhaps Job learned something like this; anyhow,
the result of what he had had to endure was a greater nearness to God.
But all that he was required to receive at the moment was the argument
from God's loving wisdom in his power, to his loving wisdom in
everything else. For power is a real and a good thing, giving an
immediate impression that it proceeds from goodness. Nor, however long
it may last after goodness is gone, was it ever born of anything but
goodness. In a very deep sense, power and goodness are one. In the
deepest fact they are one.

Seeing God, Job forgets all he wanted to say, all he thought he would
say if he could but see him. The close of the poem is grandly abrupt.
He had meant to order his cause before him; he had longed to see him
that he might speak and defend himself, imagining God as well as his
righteous friends wrongfully accusing him; but his speech is gone from
him; he has not a word to say. To justify himself in the presence of
Him who is Righteousness, seems to him what it is--foolishness and
worthless labour. If God do not see him righteous, he is not righteous,
and may hold his peace. If he is righteous, God knows it better than he
does himself. Nay, if God do not care to justify him, Job has lost his
interest in justifying himself. All the evils and imperfections of his
nature rise up before him in the presence of the one pure, the one who
is right, and has no selfishness in him. 'Behold,' he cries, 'I am
vile; what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.
Once have I spoken; but I will not answer: yea, twice; but I will
proceed no further.' Then again, after God has called to witness for
him behemoth and leviathan, he replies, 'I know that thou canst do
everything, and that no thought can be withholden from thee. Who is he
that hideth counsel without knowledge?' This question was the word with
which first God made his presence known to him; and in the mouth of Job
now repeating the question, it is the humble confession, '_I am that
foolish man_.'--'Therefore,' he goes on, 'have I uttered that I
understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.' He had
not knowledge enough to have a right to speak. 'Hear, I beseech thee,
and I will speak:'--In the time to come, he will yet cry--to be taught,
not to justify himself. 'I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto
me.'--The more diligently yet will he seek to know the counsel of God.
That he cannot understand will no longer distress him; it will only
urge him to fresh endeavour after the knowledge of him who in all his
doings is perfect. 'I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but
now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust
and ashes.'

Job had his desire: he saw the face of God--and abhorred himself in
dust and ashes. He sought justification; he found self-abhorrence. Was
this punishment? The farthest from it possible. It was the best
thing--to begin with--that the face of God could do for him. Blessedest
gift is self-contempt, when the giver of it is the visible glory of the
Living One. For there to see is to partake; to be able to behold that
glory is to live; to turn from and against self is to begin to be pure
of heart. Job was in the right when he said that he did not deserve to
be in such wise punished for his sins: neither did he deserve to see
the face of God, yet had he that crown of all gifts given him--and it
was to see himself vile, and abhor himself. By very means of the
sufferings against which he had cried out, the living one came near to
him, and he was silent. Oh the divine generosity that will grant us to
be abashed and self-condemned before the Holy!--to come so nigh him as
to see ourselves dark spots against his brightness! Verily we must be
of his kind, else no show of him could make us feel small and ugly and
unclean! Oh the love of the Father, that he should give us to compare
ourselves with him, and be buried in humility and shame! To be rebuked
before him is to be his. Good man as Job was, he had never yet been
right near to God; now God has come near to him, has become very real
to him; he knows now in very deed that God is he with whom he has to
do. He had laid all these troubles upon him that He might through them
draw nigh to him, and enable him to know him.

Two things are clearly contained in, and manifest from this poem:--that
not every man deserves for his sins to be punished everlastingly from
the presence of the Lord; and that the best of men, when he sees the
face of God, will know himself vile. God is just, and will never deal
with the sinner as if he were capable of sinning the pure sin; yet if
the best man be not delivered from himself, that self will sink him
into Tophet.

Any man may, like Job, plead his cause with God--though possibly it may
not be to like justification: he gives us liberty to speak, and will
hear with absolute fairness. But, blessed be God, the one result for
all who so draw nigh to him will be--to see him plainly, surely right,
the perfect Saviour, the profoundest refuge even from the wrongs of
their own being, yea, nearer to them always than any wrong they could
commit; so seeing him, they will abhor themselves, and rejoice in him.
And, as the poem indicates, when we turn from ourselves to him,
becoming true, that is, being to God and to ourselves what we are, he
will turn again our captivity; they that have sown in tears shall reap
in joy; they shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing their
sheaves with them. Then will the waters that rise from God's fountains,
run in God's channels.

For the prosperity that follows upon Job's submission, is the
embodiment of a great truth. Although a man must do right if it send
him to Hades, yea, even were it to send him for ever to hell itself,
yet, while the Lord liveth, we need not fear: _all_ good things must
grow out of and hang upon the one central good, the one law of life--
the Will, the One Good. To submit absolutely to him is the only reason:
circumstance as well as all being must then bud and blossom as the
rose. And it will!--what matter whether in this world or the next, if
one day I know my life as a perfect bliss, having neither limitation
nor hindrance nor pain nor sorrow more than it can dominate in peace
and perfect assurance?

I care not whether the book of Job be a history or a poem. I think it
is both--I do not care how much relatively of each. It was probably, in
the childlike days of the world, a well-known story in the east, which
some man, whom God had made wise to understand his will and his ways,
took up, and told after the fashion of a poet. What its age may be, who
can certainly tell!--it must have been before Moses. I would gladly
throw out the part of Elihu as an interpolation. One in whom, of all
men I have known, I put the greatest trust, said to me once what
amounted to this: 'There is as much difference between the language of
the rest of the poem and that of Elihu, as between the language of
Chaucer and that of Shakspere.'

The poem is for many reasons difficult, and in the original to me
inaccessible; but, through all the evident inadequacy of our
translation, who can fail to hear two souls, that of the poet and that
of Job, crying aloud with an agonized hope that, let the evil shows
around them be what they may, truth and righteousness are yet the heart
of things. The faith, even the hope of Job seems at times on the point
of giving way; he struggles like a drowning man when the billow goes
over him, but with the rising of his head his courage revives.
Christians we call ourselves!--what would not our faith be, were it as
much greater than Job's as the word from the mouth of Jesus is mightier
than that he heard out of the whirlwind! Here is a book of faith
indeed, ere the law was given by Moses: Grace and Truth have visited
us--but where is our faith?

Friends, our cross may be heavy, and the _via dolorosa_ rough; but we
have claims on God, yea the right to cry to him for help. He has spent,
and is spending himself to give us our birthright, which is
righteousness. Though we shall not be condemned for our sins, we cannot
be saved but by leaving them; though we shall not be condemned for the
sins that are past, we shall be condemned if we love the darkness
rather than the light, and refuse to come to him that we may have life.
God is offering us the one thing we cannot live without--his own self:
we must make room for him; we must cleanse our hearts that he may come
in; we must do as the Master tells us, who knew all about the Father
and the way to him--_we must deny ourselves, and take up our cross
daily, and follow him_.

SELF-DENIAL.

_'And he said unto all, If any man would come after me, let him deny
himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. For whosoever
would save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life
for my sake, the same shall save it.'_--St. Luke ix. 23, 24.

Christ is the way out, and the way in; the way from slavery, conscious
or unconscious, into liberty; the way from the unhomeliness of things
to the home we desire but do not know; the way from the stormy skirts
of the Father's garments to the peace of his bosom. To picture him, we
need not only endless figures, but sometimes quite opposing figures: he
is not only the door of the sheepfold, but the shepherd of the sheep;
he is not only the way, but the leader in the way, the rock that
followed, and the captain of our salvation. We must become as little
children, and Christ must be born in us; we must learn of him, and the
one lesson he has to give is himself: he does first all he wants us to
do; he is first all he wants us to be. We must not merely do as he did;
we must see things as he saw them, regard them as he regarded them; we
must take the will of God as the very life of our being; we must
neither try to get our own way, nor trouble ourselves as to what may be
thought or said of us. The world must be to us as nothing.

I would not be misunderstood if I may avoid it: when I say _the world_,
I do not mean the world God makes and means, yet less the human hearts
that live therein; but the world man makes by choosing the perversion
of his own nature--a world apart from and opposed to God's world. By
_the world_ I mean all ways of judging, regarding, and thinking,
whether political, economical, ecclesiastical, social, or individual,
which are not divine, which are not God's ways of thinking, regarding,
or judging; which do not take God into account, do not set his will
supreme, as the one only law of life; which do not care for the truth
of things, but the customs of society, or the practice of the trade;
which heed not what is right, but the usage of the time. From
everything that is against the teaching and thinking of Jesus, from the
world in the heart of the best man in it, specially from the world in
his own heart, the disciple must turn to follow him. The first thing in
all progress is to leave something behind; to follow him is to leave
one's self behind. 'If any man would come after me, let him deny
himself.'

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