114 "THE WAY, THE TRUTH, THE LIFE
moving in diametrically opposite planes. The Father mourns the alienated trust, love, and service of His rebellious child. The child no longer feels the rest, strength, rapturous awe once realized in the manifested presence of the Father. All the restlessness of ambition and all the disappointment that lurks in achieved success, all the fever that burns in the gold-hunt, and all the sickness of heart that leads man, after he has exhausted the last ambition on his programme, to lie down and long to die, are the inarticulate cries of this bitter orphanhood. Sin hides the Father's face.
^ In the innermost part of the tabernacle — the Holy of Holies — the visible symbol of God's presence rested between the cherubim, and over the mercy-seat. This part of the tabernacle was divided from all the other parts by a thick and curiously- wrought veil. Through that veil, none might pass, but the high priest, and he, only once a year, and with blood. The Holy Ghost this signifying, that sinful man may not approach a holy God.
2. Christ is the way from man to the Father. — The great difficulty is— How is sin to be put away ? Many attempts have been made to remove it, but there is no way of escaping from the guilt of sin except by Jesus Christ. Some have hoped for pardon from future good conduct, but the payment of a future debt can by no means discharge a past debt, so that even the perfect future obedience of man could not touch his past sins. Self-righteousness, therefore, even if it could reach perfection, would not be " the way." Some hope much from the mercy of God, but the law knows nothing of clearing the sinner of guilt by a sovereign act of mercy — that cannot be done ; for then God's justice would be impugned, His law would be virtually annulled. He will by no means clear the guilty. Every transgression must have its just recompense of reward, so that the absolute mercy of God as such is not the way out of the guilt of sin, for that mercy is blocked up by avenging justice, and over the face of that star of hope called absolute mercy there passes an eclipsing shadow, because God is righteous as well as gracious. There is no way by which a sinner can escape from the guilt of sin but that which is revealed in Jesus Christ.
^ In proclaiming Himself " the way," Christ pronounced Him- self able to effect the most real union between parties and condi-
ST. JOHN XIV. 6 115
tions as separate as heaven and earth, sin and holiness, the poor creature I know myself to be and the infinite and eternal God who is so high I cannot know Him.^
Thou art the way. Hadst Thou been nothing but the goal,
I cannot say If Thou hadst ever met my soul.
I cannot see — I, child of process — if there lies
An end for me, Full of repose, full of replies.
I'll not reproach The way that goes, my feet that stir.
Access, approach, Art Thou, time, way and wayfarer.*
(1) Christ is the way for all. — Unless there be a road which the many can travel, unless Christianity can in a very real sense be made easy and popular, it fails of its purpose. If the treasures of its truth are at the disposal of only the wise and the clever, they need hardly have been revealed at all : there must be a way into the heart of them open to all, so that even the wayfaring man need not err therein, so that even the simplest need not despair of attainment.
^ A road is an essentially democratic thing : all ranks and kinds meet and jostle there; there are few explorers, few ex- cavators, few mountaineers, few aeronauts, but there are many wayfarers, and the road is for them all.^
^ Astronomers tell us that, inconceivably vast as is the distance of some of the fixed stars, there is no point in the universe to which the influence and attraction of our sun does not extend. Christ's mediating and restoring influence overflows every circle of conscious life, and touches the last extreme of degradation.*
(2) Christ is the way now and for all time. — The mind of man always seeks in the distance what the word of God presents close at hand. Thus Martha relegated to the far future the hope of her
^ Marcus Dods. ' Alice Meynell, in The Mount of Vision, 31.
» J. M. E. Ross, The Self- Portraiture <rf Jesus, 189. * T. G. Selby, The Imperfect Angel, 249.
ii6 THE WAY, THE TRUTH, THE LIFE
brother's resurrection, and Jesus said to her, " I am the resurrec* tion and the life." So here, Thomas claims that he does not know the way although it is there before his eyes, and Jesus has to explain to him : " I am the way." But Christ was not the way only to Thomas and the other disciples. As is often the case with the words of Christ, we can hear beneath them a more general truth than the disciples recognized. Jesus was the present way for the disciples, and He is the way for us for all time. All that Christ said to the Apostles on the eve of His Passion He has said and still says to men in every great crisis of history. The trial to which the first disciples were exposed was peculiar in its form rather than in its essential character. It was the trial which belongs to every period of transition. It was the trial which presses and will press most heavily upon our generation. And if we in our turn would face it, and come out victors from the contest, it can only be by listening with absolute devotion to the revelation of Christ which makes clear to us that there is a purpose running through all the ages and broadening upwards to the threshold of a Father's home ; that there is an abiding reality underneath the shifting phenomena of the world which cannot be lost : that there is a law of coherence, of progress, of growth uniting in a harmonious whole movements, efforts, energies which appear to us to be broken, discordant, conflicting : it can only be by claiming for our own direct instruction, as charged with a new meaning and reaching to new realms, the words with which Christ answered the appeal of St. Thomas : " / am the way."