ISAIAH 309
you till, " when it is finished, it bringeth forth death." God grant that, before that awful ending is reached, the Lord Jesus Christ may come and cure you, so that you may be able to say, " With His stripes we are healed." ^
II.
Sin as an Incurable Disease.
If some part of the human body is bruised or cut or broken by an outside force, nature sets about at once to repair the injury. There is a resident power within, which at once comes to the rescue. Steadfast methods of life and growth assert themselves ; there is a busy knitting of broken ligaments and wounded tissues, mysterious processes of channelling, forcing new paths of life — all striving to get back on the road towards the specific perfection to which nature had started.
Is there a work of moral and spiritual repau' going on analogous to this ? Do men's sins heal of themselves from resident inner forces ? Is there, apart from the intervention of God and Christ, a coursing stream of health which works out fresh channels, knits together the lacerated moral tissues and steadfastly moves towards life ? Does the disposition to steal cure itself, or the sin of impurity, or slandering, or greed ? Is there not generally a going from bad to worse until Some power from the outside arrests a man ? And why ? Because sin is a wound inflicted not upon the surface or the extremities, but upon the vitals. It has reached the shrine and centre of implanted life, and the poison is flowing in the streams which should have been for its health.
The inherent life of the body may be able by a quickened effort to repair the partial loss wrought by a force external to itself; but it was no partial loss, no local injury that had maimed and deformed the spirit of man ; it was not a merely and wholly external force that still dragged and beat him down from the glory for which God had fashioned him. No, the whole head was sick, and the whole heart faint. In the individual and in the race alike the ethical basis of development
1 C. H. Spurgeon.
3IO THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
was conditioned by the perversion of past generations : as the personal and spiritual being woke to self -consciousness he found that in the very depths of his life evil was present witli him, and he by sin sore let and hindered in running the race that was set before him,
^ On the deepest thoughts and the purest minds of the heathen world there had fallen from time to time the passing gleam of a hope that there might be some power which could repair the ruin of a sinful race, and cut off the pitiless entail of guilt and misery. The faith, that, by some mysterious efficacy, a pure act of sacrifice might heal the hereditary taint of an accursed house, lay near to the most clear and constant forms under which a Greek conceived his relation to the Unseen. It was this belief that hindered his great conception of Nemesis from ever approaching to the im- morality or despair of fatalism. He believed that a single act of pride or violence provoked a doom which held its course through sin and punishment, and sin and punishment, from one generation to another : he traced the dark bequest of Tantalus, or Labdacus, or Xerxes : and he felt that the power of outraged holiness was astir, and that there would be no peace for the wicked. But he also believed that there was an act which could arrest even the blind and ruthless curse : that the taint by which strength and cunning were smitten and sank down and died, was powerless against the sacrifice of a pure obedience. Such a sacrifice he saw in the utter submission, the prostrate humiliation, of Oedipus, in the self-forgetful righteousness of Orestes' vengeance, in Antigone's allegiance to the heavenly Voice. And from such a sacrifice in every case there came forth a newness of Life which could push back the threatening death and wake the voice of joy and health in the dwellings of the righteous. So the thunderous air, the terror and agony of the Oedipus Tyranuus, passes into the solemn, tender stillness of Colonus : and
The promise of the morrow
Is glorious on that eve. Dear as the holy sorrow
When good men cease to live.
So in the Electra the same chorus which has sung of the everlast- ing doom, the ceaseless, weary violence of the sons of Pelops, breaks into a blessing when Orestes' service is fulfilled : —
O seed of Atreus, after many woes,
Thou hast come forth, thy freedom hardly won.
By this emprise made perfect.
ISAIAH 311
So does Antigone win deliverance from the black tide of the unwearied curse, and lay hold on the good hope of a love that is stronger than death. But in the cost of each such saving act, in the horror and anguish and cruelty and slaughter which gather round the sacrifice, the conscience of Greece assented to the law that without shedding of blood is no remission of sin : in the narrowness and imperfection of that which even the costliest and purest offering could achieve, it owned that the true healing of the nations must wait for the obedience of One who should be more than man, and for sorrow like unto which there was not any sorrow.^