Man is of dust: ethereal hopes are his.
Which, when they should sustain themselves aloft,
Want due consistence; like a pillar of smoke,
That with majestic energy from earth
llises; but, having reached the thinner air.
Melts, and dissolves, and is no longer seen.
Who will assure us, in face of " the thinner air " that is the breath of death, that these hopes and speculations are the sure
ST. JOHN XIV. I 51
" pillar of cloud " leading us truly to a promised land, and are not but a " pillar of smoke " from the fires of human fancy ? A faith thus founded will always be cherishable by certain temperaments — and it is largely a matter of temperament — but it will never really grip the mass of men, simply because it is a mere edifice of conceptions insecurely founded on the bed-rock of fact. But it is just this that Christian faith possesses. Its basis is not the ideas of Jesus but the fact. It brings, not a new doctrine merely, but new data. It comes not with the theory of a fatherly God, but with a phenomenon, in history and experience, which means that. Now all this is precisely what faith needs. Faith — as indeed may be said of all truth — is like Antaeus in Greek legend, who was invincible when touching mother-earth ; and the mother-earth of faith is fact — the fact of Christ.
^ It was as if God had a revelation to make to the world, a word to teach it. His own name ; and He taught it as we teach a little child, letter by letter. To one nation came a message by Buddha, to another by Zoroaster, to another by Confucius, to another by Moses, until at last the full Word was revealed, the Word that was made flesh and dwelt with us. . . . No truth can be taught until the world is prepared for it. . . . To me it seems I can read my Bible with a greater reverence and interest now I see in it a continuous record of a continuous revelation, wherein God appears ever growingly more tender, more merciful, where the false human ideas of Him as held by Abraham, Joshua and Saul are softened down in the tenderness of Isaiah, and finally in the life of our Lord Jesus.^
4. Without faith in Christ, faith in God is incomplete. — Without faith in Christ such faith in God as is possible is feeble, incomplete, and will not last long. Historically a pure Theism is all but impotent. There is only one example of it on a large scale in the world, and that is a kind of bastard Christianity — Moham- medanism ; and we all know what value that has as a religion. There are many among us who claim to be very advanced thinkers, and who call themselves Theists, and not Christians. That is a phase that will not leist. There is little substance in it. The God whom men know outside of Jesus Christ is a poor, nebulous thing; an idea, not a reality. He, or rather It, is a
* Quinim Hogg, 307.
52 SECRET OF THE UNTROUBLED HEART
film of cloud shaped into a vague form, through which you can see the stars. It has little power to restrain. It has less to inspire and impel. It has still less to comfort; it has least of all to satisfy the heart. You will have to get something more substantial than the far-off God of an unchristian Theism if you mean to sway the world and to satisfy men's hearts.
^ Mr. Fujimoto was led to tell us some of his early difficulties in the Doshisha University at Kyoto. He had been baptized, but had adopted extreme views on Higher Criticism. He could acknowledge the one God and Father, but beyond that he could not see. Various " holiness " and other meetings were held, but he found no comfort in them. Mr. Barclay Buxton tried hard to help him, but still he had no real light. One day having been pressed hard to attend one of these meetings, he said to himself, " No, I am going instead into the country alone to fight it out with myself and God ! " He went and spent four hours in agonizing prayer to the God and Father for further light, if such light was really to be had. It was about 1.30 p.m. (half- way through the four hours) that a moment came which he says he shall always distinctly remember. He seemed to hear a voice saying in the concluding words of St. John xiv, 1, "Believe also in me." He instantly took out his Testament and read straight through the chapter and on to the end of chapter xvi., and he returned from that four hours a believer in our Lord Jesus Christ.^
III.
The Secret of a Quiet Heart.
" Let not your heart be troubled."
The word used here by our Saviour and translated "be troubled" does not signify any kind of sadness or sorrow; nor are we to understand that it is either desirable or possible to banish all sadness and sorrow from the mind of any son of man under the conditions that prevail upon this earth. The word used by Jesus signifies to be agitated, perplexed, and thrown into confusion. It is the description of a life thrown as it were off its centre, and tossed hither and thither by the force of perplexing and adverse circumstances.