(1) There are the mysteries of God's Providence. How often are we completely at our wits' end what to make of them. When we begin to inquire into the meaning of this or that occurrence, we get no reply. We meet with things that baffle explanation in our everyday life. The good are taken away, and the wicked left; strong men are cut down in the midst of their days and usefulness. We see communities visited with the most appalHng
^ W. M. Taylor, The Limitatums of Life, 66.
454 THE INDIVIDUALITY OF DUTY
calamities, young and innocent lives taken away in one fell disaster. We see the rising hope of a happy home laid low by the ravages of death, and the weak and feeble spared to a lingering old age. We can scarcely open a newspaper without reading of sufferings and fatalities that make the heart bleed. These things are mysteries to us. We try to explain them, but our explanations are often as perplexing as the mysteries themselves.
That old debate which waxed so hot between Job and his friends in the far land of Uz has emerged anew in some form or other in every individual heart and in every successive generation. It has never received fuller or more exhaustive treatment than it had at the hands of these Eastern sages. Yet virtually they left it where they found it. Jehovah appeared to them at the close asserting His sovereignty, and claiming His right to veil Himself in clouds and darkness. He asked them to confide in His wisdom, and to leave the matter in His hands. And what farther can we get than that? We are not responsible for the government of the world. It is not ours to sit upon the throne. We may well leave the vindication of God's workings to God Himself. He will take care of His own honour. Meanwhile for us there is the lowlier province of working out^ our own salvation with fear and trembling, under the assurance that " it is God who worketh in us, to will and to do of his good pleasure." To us the gospel has been preached, and for the use we make of that we shall be held to account. To us the Saviour has said, " Follow me," and for the answer we give to that earnest call we shall be responsible.
^ The saintly Eobert Leighton — sometime Bishop of Dunblane (of whom, as I am his unworthy successor in the Episcopate of that See, so I would wish to be indeed his follower, even as he was of Christ) — that holy Bishop has a sermon upon this text — preached before the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, November 14, in 1669 — in which, speaking of the state of things as it existed in this country two hundred years ago, he exclaims : " Ah ! my brethren, the body of religion is torn, and the soul of it expires, while we are striving about the hem of its garment." Alas! there is too much reason still for the same complaint. We are still far too much inclined to place speculation before practice, to place knowledge before virtue ; to be curious about the future rather than to be careful for the present ; to be inquisitive about others rather than to be well acquainted with ourselves. How
ST. JOHN XXI. 22 455
few of us are there, it is to be feared, who could appeal to God in those beautiful sentiments expressed in the 131st Psalm : " Lord, I am not high-minded ; I have no proud looks ; I do not exercise myself in great matters, or in things which are too high for me. But I refrain my soul and keep it low ; like as a child that is weaned from his mother; yea, my soul is even as a weaned child." To say this, and to say it truly, would be indeed io follow Christ?-
^ All that we can safely gather from his conversation at St. Helena is that his mind turns greatly on these questions of religion. He ponders and struggles. A remark which he lets fall at St. Helena explains probably his normal state of mind. " Only a fool," he says one day, " says that he will die without a confessor. There is so much that one does not know, that one cannot explain." And as he spoke of the mysteries of religion, we may speak of his frame of mind with regard to them. " There is so much that one does not know, that one cannot explain." ^
(2) There are difficulties connected with doctrines of the faith, which rest upon unrevealed mysteries behind them. If we are perplexing ourselves with such things as the fall of man, the sin of the angels, the salvability of the heathen, the locality of heaven, and of the spirits in prison, the decrees of God that seem to destroy the free will of man, or that great problem that presses with equal force on the brain of the wisest philosopher and the heart of the little child, why God permitted the entrance of evil into the world at the first, and why He permits its dominion still ; we can not only calm ourselves by the reflection that probably these are depths that no created mind can sound ; but still more by the voice of our heavenly Lord, who does not explain any one of them, but says, " Leave mysteries to God, and do thou thine own work of following Me."