IT Mr, C. T. Studd once told me a cry of anguisli which he heard in China, and which has haunted him ever since. He was negoti- ating in a Chinese dwelling for the tenancy of a building for an opium refuge. While the negotiations were in progress, he and Mrs. Studd were horrified at a series of piercing shrieks which fell upon their ears. They evidently came from a little girl, and knowing how dangerous it was to interfere in anyone else's busi- ness, they at first disregarded the cries, which were agonising in their character. At last they could bear it no longer, and determined, whatever the consequences, to find out whence the cries proceeded ; they followed the sound until they found them- selves in a room, where, forcibly held on a rude bed, was a little girl, from whose feet the cruel bandages used in the process of foot-binding were being stripped. One woman held her down by her little arms ; another was tearing the bandages from the poor feet ; while a third was beating the child with a heavy stick, to divert the pain to other parts of the body, and to punish the little one for her cries. Those cries were heard by a sympathetic man, but there are thousands which are heard only by a sympathetic God. How can we, who have children of our own, be indifferent to the wail of these little ones, into whose cries we may read the agonising question, " Will the night never pass away ? "^
If " He who has seen the misery of man only," Victor Hugo tells us, " has seen nothing, he must see the misery of a woman ; he who has seen the misery of a woman only, has seen nothing, he must see the misery of childhood."
2. The fact of if. Three things are to be observed here.
(1) When night hangs heavily on the Church, it hangs still more heavily on the world. The Assyrian oppression lay like a cloud on Judah, but in lying on Judah it projected a still heavier cloud upon Edom. We take Judah (as we are bound to do) as a type of the Kingdom of God, and we take Edom (as we are also bound to do) as a type of the kingdoms of sense and sin ; and the lesson to be first noted is this, that whatsoever casts a
^ J. Gregory Mantle.
i64 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
gloom on the one casts the same gloom or a deeper gloom on the other. There never was a greater mistake than to suppose that, because Christianity is bound up with problems, the abandonment of belief is the abandonment of mystery, mystery will meet you still. Do you get rid of the mystery of human sin, or of human pain, or of human inequalities, or of human death, or of any one of those great and pressing perplexities that make existence a puzzle, our belief in the kindness and righteousness of Providence hard ? No, you do not. But you get rid of the one fund of hope that can soften these mysteries, the one source of light that can brighten them.
(2) In the midst of this common night there is the significant fact that the world does turn to the Church. It is very suggestive that in the general pressure of the general gloom the Edomite is represented as appealing to the Jew — a votary of the Jewish worship, a representative of the Jewish God. Was there none to consult nearer home ? Where were the seers of Idumaea ? No doubt there were seers in abundance, necromancers, astrologers, wizards that peeped and muttered. But it is not to these that the questioner turns. He looks away from them all to yonder lonely man on the serrated ridge, clad in camel-skin, now stand- ing still, now pacing backwards and forwards, as he swept the cloud-hung horizon with his eye. It is from him the Edomite expects the oracle. It is on him he depends for the truth. " Watchman," he says, " prophet of Israel's race, servant of Israel's God, what of the night ? " Through all ages the principle is the same. Ever, in the midst of the cloud that surrounds us all, the world puts its questions to the Church. It puts them to the Church's representatives, puts them to the Church's ministers. We have no more significant testimony to the place which God gives to the witnesses of religion than the way, friendly or unfriendly as the case may be, in which those most removed from their habits and thoughts continually ask their opinion. They are the mark of perpetual notice. They are the subjects of unceasing examination. The question, " Watchman, what of the night ? " is raised in a variety of forms, comes through a variety of channels. But there it is, and those applied to must take account of it and face it.
(3) The Church must be ready with some answer. Has the
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Church an answer to give ? It has. The Church is the watchman standing on the tower to look into and ascertain the nature of the world's night. That, when you come to examine it, gives us a very wide range, perhaps wider than we sometimes think. For what would we include in the night — the world's night ? First of all, unquestionably and fundamentally, the world's sin, the world's alienation from God, the world's wander- ing from holiness and purity and truth, the world's rejection of the Divine Spirit in its beneficent and soul-healing power. But that is the starting-point. By the world's night you must understand all its need, all its heart-breaking, all the problems that weary, harass, and perplex the brain of man, all the tears it is shedding, all the burdens it is bearing, all the sorrows it is enduring, all its chaos, all its discomfort, all its failure, all its darkness. That is the world's night ; and the Christian Church has to do with all of it. And more than that, I say this, that it is the Christian Church, as I have defined it, and that alone, that is competent to understand the meaning of it, to look into the nature of it. And if a remedy is to be found for it at all, it must be found in the name and spirit of Jesus Christ; it must be found by the watchman that has been set upon the tower to note the progress of the night, and to declare the passing away of the darkness. It is only the spirit that rules the Church, or should rule it, that can see clearly into the night.