It is the antithesis of that state which Christ described as ^ Bishop Ingham, From Japan to JervMUem, 48.
ST. JOHN XIV. I 53
peace, the rocky strength that is not exempt from sorrow, but remains unshaken by it. For we must remember that Jesus Christ Himself, though He spoke of giving His peace to His disciples, was " a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief."
^ " Troubled " is the best English equivalent we can give for the Greek ; but, as generally employed, its force is fainter. The original verb — used often of the agitation of waters, the heaving and surging of the sea — aptly represents the deeper agitations of the soul, painful to strong natures, dangerous to the weak. Thrice it is used of our Lord Himself in some access of vehement emotion. So He shared the experiences which in us He would comfort and control. Such a condition needs control, tending as it does to confusion of judgment and suspension of faith. " Let not your heart be troubled" was then not only a word of sympathetic kindness, but a needful counsel ; and it is so still, falling with composing power on many an agitated mind.^
^ I happened to read, one immediately after the other, the lives of two women written by themselves ; the one was Sarah Bernhardt's, the other Marianne Farningham's. I gathered little in the way of help from Sarah Bernhardt's. She is a woman with a kind heart. That at least can be said of her. At the siege of Paris she got all her friends safely out of the city, but remained herself, and turned her house into a hospital where she nursed the wounded soldiers. B^it in looking for any guiding principle of her life, it seemed to be chiefly this — that whatever she was thwarted in, whatever she was asked or recommended not to do, that was the very thing she would set herself to do with all the somewhat hysterical energy of her nature.
It was refreshing to turn to Marianne Farningham's. In quoting what have been the two mottoes of her life, she says, " We change our mottoes as we proceed through life. Mine is now ' Let not your heart be troubled,' but through all my working years my favourite was ' I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.' " One can understand why she changed her motto in later life, from a remark she made in reply to an Address presented to her — " The beauty of getting old is that not so much is expected of one, and one has time to sit and think." In her strenuous years she had the earlier motto. For the " doing " we need Christ's strength, for the " thinking " we need Christ's com- fort. The evening of her days had come, when the hands had to be folded from much labour, and she had to face the approaching night. We are so helpless, so ignorant, in view of the great un-
* T. D. Bernard, 2Tic Central Teaching of Jesus Christ, 125.
54 SECRET OF THE UNTROUBLED HEART
seen realities which each day's journey is bringing us nearer to, We need hope and comfort, and Christ's words are specially suited to such conditions and such times.^
1. Christ does not offer exemption from sorrow. — It has been a mistake of most of the remedies proposed for a troubled heart that they have aimed at eliminating sorrow from the earth. In this they have aimed, not only at what is impossible, but at what is, as a primary aim, undesirable also. Ancient Epicureanism, for example, sought to banish sorrow as far as possible by avoiding excess of pleasurable excitement, by making the tenor of life so even that extravagant excesses in pleasure should not occur to plunge men into consequent excess of pain. Modern Epicureanism, a more wretched fallacy still, adopts as its watchword : " A short life and a merry one ; let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." It endeavours by the constant inoculation of pleasure in its most feverish form to exclude the possibility of pain, and to drive life's pulse at its hottest pace, let the end come when it wilL Stoicism sought to remove sorrow by the destruction of feeling, to create men who should not be flesh and blood, but iron and brass. It tried to crush and destroy the emotional side of life by such tremendous acts of self-conquest, or rather of self- mutilation, as to make man a monster — a " reason " with an iron will and no heart. And Buddhism, with all its beauty, has at the very centre of it a feminine anguish to be released from sorrow, and knows no way to cure earth's heart-break except in an un- manly longing for extinction, in giving up the life, not in the Christian way so as to find it again, but in such a way that it disappears altogether into the great abyss of the Infinite.
Securely cabined in the ship below.
Through darkness and through storm I cross the sea,
A pathless wilderness of waves to me:
But yet I do not fear, because I know
That he who guides the good ship o'er that waste
Sees in the stars her shining pathway traced.