II.
Hewing out Bkoken Cisterns.
1. If the Fountain is forsaken we must have something to make up for God. We cannot turn our cravings away from the Father, and by the very turning find these cravings appeased. The delicate tendrils which have clung to the Almighty must seek their support elsewhere. Our spiritual instincts will demand 1 Charles Kingsley : His Letters and Memories of his Life, ii. 344.
JEREMIAH ii. 13 9
attention, and they will need to be either narcotized or strenuously and constantly subdued. So it was with the people who had forsaken the Lord. The national life became a sort of restless vagrancy, and a wild quest took the place of a forsaken rest. " See thy way in the valley, know what thou hast done : thou art a swift dromedary traversing her ways; a wild ass used to the wilderness, that snuffeth up the wind at her pleasure." All of which means that this people, having forsaken the place of their rest, ran about everywhere, dipping into everything, in the attempt to satisfy the instincts which had been denied their appointed springs.
Tf Tedium has been defined as a consciousness of time, just as in a morbid state one may become conscious of the throbbing of one's pulse. Having to wait at a railway station is a perfect torment to some people. For myself I remember this restlessness, which was very strong in me from about eighteen to eight-and- twenty. There was a constant craving to get on anyhow or any whither, only there must be no pause. I wonder how I should feel now if I were cut off from books, writing materials, and com- panions for some hours and were not travelling. I should be all right if some subject were buzzing in my head, as the Eastern Question has been lately, but without some such subject on which my thoughts settled naturally, 1 suspect I should be bored. I often grumble that I have no time to think. Should I think if I were condemned to solitary confinement for a week ? What went on in men's minds when they were shut up in oubliettes ? What goes on in the minds of sailors on watch or of sentries ? Do they feel tedium, or does the mind, like the body, accommodate itself to the conditions in which it lives ? '
2. Let us touch upon two of the most common of those broken cisterns at which the thirsty soul seeks to quench its cravings.
(1) There is the cistern of 'pleasure, embroidered with fruits and flowers, and bacchanalian figures, wrought at the cost of health and rest. It is in the very nature of passion not to yield the pleasure you seek from it if you push its gratification beyond the limits assigned to it in the constitution of our moral nature. It is with the passions as it is with the appetites, with which they have a close alliance and affinity — the more moderately they are satisfied within the limits of the claims of health, the higher is the 1 Life and Remains of the Rev. R. H. Quick, 427.
io THE FOUNTAIN OF LIVING WATERS
satisfaction and the longer their susceptibilities of pleasure remain. The pampered appetite becomes the jaded appetite, and at length becomes the diseased and ruined appetite. And the man who is hewing out for himself a cistern of sensual pleasure is like the dram-drinker, who derives less stimulus and delight from the same quantity every day, and has accordingly to increase the dose to supply the same excitement ; who at length gets beyond the range of gratification but finds that the passion holds him fast in its serpent coils even when all its joys are for ever fled.
TJ The human soul cannot live as an animal, seeking only to satisfy the physical nature and following only animal instincts ; there is in it a rational faculty, which must have regard to a rational, or good, purpose in life, and control the animal nature in accordance with this purpose. In each of us the animal nature asserts itself, and every soul has to go through a struggle with the physical senses for mastery. If there be no such struggle, then the animal nature becomes dominant and the higher nature remains undeveloped. Only when the animal is thoroughly subdued can the soul attain to self-realization and union with the Supreme. Control of the appetites, in itself, will not suffice : the desire for sense-gratification must be rooted out. All the world over man is deeply sunken in sensuality, and a great part of his miseries and diseases are due to this. Most men in civilized communities are slaves to the senses. They indulge the animal nature, and in most cases never try to conquer it. With some it is not enough to live like animals ; — for animals are pure and healthy in their instincts — nothing less than a debauching excess of sensuality will suffice them. They must wallow in slime. Indulgence in intoxicating liquor — one of the grosser forms of sensuality — is alone the cause of an almost inconceivable amount of misery. Then there are other forms of indulgence which, though much less obvious, are scarcely less serious in their consequences in wastage and disease. The external aspects of this sensuality are obvious ; but the internal, or subjective, aspect, which is not the least serious, is understood only by few. Every sense-degraded soul is in misery and darkness, in degree according to the degree of its indulgence.1