JOB-PS. XXX. — II
i62 HEARSAY AND EXPERIENCE
written on the walls opposite him, " The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit ; a broken and contrite heart, 0 God, thou wilt not despise." It is the sweet, seraphic, and holy Saint Bernard who chants the same verse as his swan song as he passes on to the calm seas of God's eternal love. It is Lady Jane Grey who repeats the cry for mercy of the penitential Psalms, as she ascends the scaffold. And Sir Thomas More solaces his spirit with the same strains as he lays his head upon the block to receive the fatal blow of the headsman's axe. It is William Carey, breathing out his life in one steadfast flame of missionary enthusiasm, who sings at life's close the self-depreciatory and Christ-trusting words :
A guilty, weak, and helpless worm
On Thy kind arms I fall; Be Thou my Strength and Eighteousness,
My Saviour, and my all.
It is the bi^oad-minded Christian scholar and teacher, the creatoi of the " Broad Church " of our country, and the " Master " to a large and increasing host of disciples, who asks that the Fifty-first Psalm may be read to him as he enters upon the fuller life beyond : — that same song which John Eogers recited as he went to the stake, and Jeremy Taylor fashioned into a prayer. It is clear thinking and pure-minded Thomas Erskine, of Linlathen, said by his friends, and those most competent to judge, to be one of " the best and holiest " of men, " with least of the stains of earth, and most of the spirit of heaven," who repeats again and again at the close of his immensely fertile life, the words, " The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth from all sin ; for He made Him sin for us who knew no sin, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him." So that the righteous Job in his penitence anticipates the Church of the first-born in heaven, and ascends to the rank of pioneer of the spirits of the just made perfect, as he goes through the seven-times heated furnace of sorrow for sin to his larger wisdom and sunnier prosperity. Even Don Silva feels :
Men may well seek For purifying rites: even pious deeds Need washing.^
^ Yes, all that part of Dr. Pusey's Life is wonderfully moving and sacred. I do not wonder that it has moved you so deeply :
^ J. Clifford, Daily Strength for Daily Living, 332.
JOB xLii. 5, 6 163
it certainly did me. But now let me try to set down the bearings of it all with regard to what you say about yourself ; for I want you to think them over.
Sometimes a thing like this, which burns deeply into one's own conscience, makes all one's past professions seem almost unreal, and one's righteousness (as it is) filthy rags. Seen by such a standard, all one's confessions have been mere lip con- fessions, all one's communions seem almost mockeries, and all life hitherto a hideous sham. Thank God that He does send us such revelations. But then there is a danger lest we, in the excitement of the moment, forget how far the Lord hath helped us hitherto — how He is the surety that our life hitherto has not been in vain — a danger, in fact, lest we should deny the grace that we have already received. I have known devout penitent souls pull down their Christian life in the desire to undergo such a self- emptying, as they think it. You have no desire to do that, of course : but all the same it is very necessary to learn one's lessons of humiliation and penance without doing despite to what God has done in us already.^
4. The way of penitence is the way of redemption. — Christ cannot become Eedeemer for those who feel no need to be redeemed, nor can they feel the need to be redeemed who have no serious estimate of sin. Nor can they have a serious estimate of sin who have no special consciousness of the holiness of God. It is all terribly logical and self-consistent. Kedemption cannot appeal in the absence of the necessary presuppositions. Your idea of redemption must correspond with your idea of God. They who can enter into the spirit of the Be Frofundis and the Miserere are they to whom redemption will appeal. There it is, that ancient cry : " My sin is ever before me " ; " Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight " ; " If thou. Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, 0 Lord, who shall stand ? " " Create in me a clean heart, 0 God ; and renew a right spirit within me." Depend upon it, that the conscience which finds reality in these words possesses the data which redemption must always presuppose. They to whom such language is Oriental exaggeration will always tend to a Christianity with redemption left out. And yet it is the most sensitive consciences on earth who have identified themselves with that self-abasing estimate. One * Bishop W. E. Collins, in Life by A. J. Mason, 58.
i64 HEARSAY AND EXPERIENCE
can only believe that they are right, and that they have arrived at this conclusion not because they strayed the farthest from God's presence, but because they saw the clearest into what God is. When the passions of the world are hushed, and the tumult of the flesh is calmed, when a man is more real, more himself, than at other times, then it is that he is disposed to say: "I had 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." The man who says that is the man who will cry aloud for redemption.