3. It is a mathematical sum. " I reckon," he says. And it must be admitted that no man that ever lived was more capable of working out this sum than this Apostle. On the one hand, he has given us, in the eleventh chapter of his Second Epistle to the Corinthians, a sketch of his own sufferings, such as, perhaps, the experience of no other mortal man could match. On the other hand, he had held personal converse with the Lord Jesus Christ ; he is able to tell of " the abundance of his revelations " ; already he had been " caught up into Paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter." Who, then, was so fit as St. Paul — in the wonderful contrast of his un- paralleled life — to put the two together, and to decide the contrast ?
^ In sufferings, who has come up to the Apostle ? In revela- tions of the things which God has prepared for them that love Him, who has been equally honoured ? When he wrote of the sufferings of this present time, he was not reclining on the couch of luxury and imagining the lot of the afflicted. He was in and surrounded by those very sufferings. In perils from his own
^ r. Ferguson.
ROMANS VIII. i8 5
countrymen, and in perils from false brethren, he was working with his own hands for his daily bread in the wealthy and dis- solute Corinth. He bore about with him that thorn in the flesh, which, however difficult it may be for us to assign its nature, we know was the messenger of Satan to buffet him : which, with all his zeal, all the wonders and signs of an Apostle wrought by him, rendered his bodily presence weak, and his speech con- temptible. Day by day he entered deeper than other men into that inward conflict between the good which he would do but could not, and the evil which he would not do but did. Of a character wonderfully susceptible and habitually introspective, he had, besides, his spiritual faculties penetrated and intensified by the abiding and indwelling Spirit of God, given him for his apostolic work. Mighty was He that wrought in him — weak and frail the earthen vessel by which that energy must be sus- tained. We hear him speak of bearing about death, of daily dying ; we hear him crying out, " 0 wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death ? " Truly, in sufferings, without and within, but One ever surpassed him — that Divine Master whom he followed, and of whom he says in his fervour that he fills up that which is lacking of His sufferings ^
for the sake of the Church which is His body.^
I think man's great capacity for pain
Proves his immortal birthright. I am sure No merely human mind could bear the strain
Of some tremendous sorrows we endure.
Art's most ingenious breastworks fail at length,
Beat by the mighty billows of the sea; Only the God-formed shores possess the strength
To stand before their onslaughts, and not flee.
The structure that we build with careful toil.
The tempest lays in ruins in an hour; While some grand tree that springs forth from the soil
Is bended but not broken by its power.
Unless our souls had root in soil divine
We could not bear earth's overwhelming strife.
The fiercest pain that racks this heart of mine Convinces me of everlasting life
* Henry Alford.
6 ANOTHER GOOD RECKONING
L
The Sufferings of this Present Timk
There is perhaps no argument so frequently used against Christianity at the present day, or with such force, as the argu- ment that the pain and misery of the world are irreconcilable with a God who is both good and powerful. Never was there an age BO sensitive to pain as our own, and never an age therefore that found it so hard to reconcile the existence of pain with the love of God. Professor Huxley used to declare that his reason for rejecting the Christian creed was simply that he could not find in Nature the God of infinite love of which the New Testament speaks. The difficulties of miracles and the science of Genesis were nothing in comparison with " the impassable gulf between the anthropomorphism, however refined, of theology and the passionless impersonality of the Unknown and Unknowable which science shows in nature." If other difficulties have slain the faith of thousands, the fact of pain has slain the faith of tens of thousands.
i. The Fact of Pain.
St. Paul admits, he insists on, the pain, the waste, the imperfection, the bondage to vanity and corruption, to be found both in Nature and in Man. He depicts them in even darker colours than the materialist or the sceptic. And yet he aids us to bear the burden which seems intolerable. For he does not charge the evil that is in the world to any defect either in the power or in the goodness of the Maker of the world. He charges it, rather to the self-will, the depravity, of man; as indeed we ourselves do when in our common talk we say, " The world would be a very good world if only men were good enough to live in it." Like Schopenhauer, he says, " The world is what men have made it," and hence " the world is itself the judgment of the world."