^ God in His infinite mercy has placed us in those deeps of wonder at life and death, of why and whither, deeps of intense agony : " Wherefore hidest thou thy face ? " " Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself." Deeps of intense joy : " Thou art about my bed, and spiest out all my ways, there is not a thought in my heart but thou knowest it altogether " ; and deeps of satisfaction and quiet inward peace, which Wordsworth spoke of when he said —
Enough, if something from our hands have power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour;
And if, as toward the silent tomb we go,
Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower.
We feel that we are greater than we know.^
4. There is a deeper mystery still — the mystery of sin. The great religions of the world expressed in sacrifices and rituals of atonement, often grotesque and horrible, their sense of moral failure and guilt. The sense is rooted in the conscience, and it has deepened as the life of the conscience has deepened. It finds expression in the meditations of Marcus Aurelius. It sends out a long, agonizing cry from the pages of St. Paul. The religion whose elemental facts and implications he, more than any other man, threw into architectonic form, disclosed the subtlety and virulence of the taint which had fastened on human nature. In giving to men a new sense of God, it gave them a new sense of sin. All along its history, those who have climbed farthest up its spiritual heights, its saints and heroes, have glanced with the most shuddering fear down the spiritual chasms on whose verge they trod.
^ The German naturalist, Blichner, in his book, Man in the Past, the Present, and the Future, writes these profound words: " It is only in man that the world becomes conscious to such a degree that it rises out of its previous dream-like natural existence.
* H. D. Rawnsley.
iiS DE PROFUNDIS
Struggle therefore rages on the domain of morals as violently as it formerly did on the physical field." And another German scholar, Frauenstadt, in his Religion of Nature, writes : " In the self-assertion of the flesh against the spirit I recognize sin ; and since man is by nature subject to this tyranny of the flesh, it follows that he is by nature sinful; and the sinful nature propagating itself, there arises an original sinfulness." ^
^ The word sin implies the existence of something which ought not to be where it is ; in using it, we set up an external standard and condemn what fails to conform to it. The most decisive argument against identifying sin with imperfection is the verdict of the human consciousness itself. The consciousness of sin as a positive malignant fact is most intense in the highest natures. It is the saint, not the sinner, who says, " 0 wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death ? " It was the Son of God Himself who, as Christians believe, gave His life a ransom for sin, because no smaller price could destroy its power.*
11.
The Cry Out of the Depths.
1. The cry for God is the natural utterance of the awakened soul of man in every land and age — the cry of man whenever and wherever he freely speaks out of the depths of his nature, an aspiration which all history confesses. It may not always be an intelligent or conscious cry, but a seeker after God man has always been and must ever be, because from God he comes, begotten, not made, and with a nature so constituted that only in God can he find his full and final satisfaction and rest. The surface of his life may often appear to say one thing, and its depths quite another thing, but it is the cry from the depths that reveals what he truly is and what he most needs. It is his inmost wants and desires, not his hard, cold sense and keen understanding, that read most rightly the secret of his life. It is not his real spiritual needs that belong to the surface of his life, but only those poor selfish cravings which are often mistaken for them by ill- instructed minds. Outwardly he may seem to long and cry for other things more than for the presence of God, and to find his 1 W. W. Battershall. ' W. R. Inge, Truth and Falsehood in Beligion.
PSALM cxxx. I 119
peace and joy in them ; but when his soul is moved and searched, and the fountains of the great deep are broken up, in all those crises which throw light on the inner condition and movement of his being, the cry for God is seen to be fundamental, and his longing to connect his life in some way with the life of the invisible and eternal world is felt to be an irrepressible longing, which tends ever to rise into a strong and intense passion.
^ It was once said by a celebrated English lawyer of our time that the man who could not get on without religion, who could not occupy his mind with love, friendship, business, politics, science, art, literature, and travel, must be a poor kind of creature. It is, on the contrary, the man who can be wholly satisfied with out- ward and earthly things apart from God who is the poor kind of creature living upon the surface of his nature, with the energies of his spirit still dormant, or so suppressed and overborne that they are in danger of dying out. To be truly a man is to have infinite capacity for God, to have desires, affections, and needs which the things of civilization and culture cannot satisfy, which can be satisfied only in communion with the Divine. Man, be he what he may, is made to be a seeker after God ; and, because he cannot escape from himself, he cannot escape from God.^