The road for his release, Oh, tell him they stretch dark and wide,
Long roads that never cease — If you should meet with one outside The walls of peace.^
ii. The Flaming Sword.
There is something else, besides the Cherubim, that bars the way: something more subtle, more inexplicable, more versatile even, and even more formidable. " The flame of a sword which turned every way." See how the words themselves irresistibly suggest an allegory. Not " a flaming sword " ; that was a poor prosaic watering down of the original; but "the flame of a sword." As though some magic sword " bathed in heaven," and wielded by some invisible angelic virtue, were leaving its scorch and radiance upon the yielding air as it played hither and thither with the velocity of lightning.
1. The "flame of a sword"; something "living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword " ; something " everywhere perceived, but nowhere dwelt upon," subtle, inscrutable, inex- plicable, but meeting one at every turn, and hopelessly barring approach from any side — not by any solid obstacle, but by the sense of dread; dread of the unknown and awfuL What does that flame of a sword turning every way stand for ? Is it not the sense of guilt ? the conscience of sin ? which is so subtle and fleeting and intangible, and yet keeps a man out of the Paradise of peace and happiness as effectually as though he were shut up within prison bars.
^ Try to get into Paradise ! try to be perfectly calm, and happy, and at rest ! try to return to the Garden where, in the cool of the day, you may hear the voice of God the Father speak- ing to you ! to that primal state of which your heart whispers to you, when you were in His sight naked and yet unashamed. Forget for a moment the unsurmountable difficulties which nature has placed in your way — its bereavements, its limitations, its illusions — and you will be instantly aware of this subtler and more formidable foe, the lambent flame which plays around you and through you, more quick and incessant than the lightning,
» Dollie Radford.
122 THE TREE OF LIFE
piercing at once and scorching, a force which you cannot seize or grapple with, a force against which the intellect and the will are alike helpless, the subtle irresistible sense of sin whereby you know and feel that you are a sinner, that you are out of harmony with God, that you can be at peace neither with Him nor without Him, that you must either dwell in an eternal unrest or become very different from what you are.
2. Are there people who have no sense of sin ? Very likely. The flame of a sword played and turned at the gate of Paradise, at the east of the garden of Eden. "Whilst you are ranging about the wilderness, whilst you are pressing west and north and south, it is only the far-off glare and glitter of the sword that you will see at times, like the reflected brilliance from the electric light- house which leaps upon the clouds from below the horizon. It is only when you set your face eastwards and homewards, towards the home of light and the birthplace of the dawn ; only when with weary heart and tired thoughts you seek for peace and satisfaction where alone it can be found ; only then that you really encounter the sternness of the brandished flame.
^ There is not anything more subtle and unsubstantial than the sense of sinfulness. If you try to set it down in black and white, if you try to fix it in the language of theology, it is bound to evade you: you have got your definition, your terminology, your religious phraseology, but your sense of sin has vanished. You prove to a man that we are all by nature children of wrath, that the Scripture hath concluded us all under sin, that all have sinned and fallen short, that there is none righteous, no, not one, that the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, that all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags. What is the use ? The man you address assents, or dissents ; but in either case he feels nothing : the flame of the sword is playing in some other direction at that moment. You cannot fix it; you cannot say, "lo, here," or "lo, there"; for even as you speak it is gone. Nothing is more clumsy, more ineffective, more useless, than arguments and statements about the sense of sin. And yet nothing is more real, more inexorable, more impossible to over- Strange powers unused like poison burn in me:
Cruel quicksilver thro' my veins they creep. What hour will bring mine infelicity
Some drowsy cup from the mild founts of sleep ?
* Rayner Winteibotbam.
GENESIS III. 24 123
Tired sieges of high castles never taken,
Desires like great king-falcons never cast, Beautiful quests all wearily forsaken,
Figure the fiery arras of the Past, The pale Dreams walk on the horizons grey:
Like stars they tread the dawn with flaming feet: Their eyes for evermore are turned away.
I heard their silver trumpets once entreat: — Low sighed the caitiff Voice: "They sound in vain.