(2) Such, perhaps, would hardly be the first thought suggested to one of us by the promises of God ; and, indeed, would not be the last or the crowning thought in the mind of the Apostle of the Gentiles. Far deeper and older than these are the promises which God has written with His own finger, not on tables of stone, but on the fleshy tables of the heart of man. These promises, the earliest of all God's revelations, made to mankind before even the oldest book in the Bible was written ; these promises which the loving heart finds repeated in every page of the Bible ; these promises which the Bible often reveals to us in so strange a way, making us quite unable to tell whether the word within or the word without, whether the yearnings of conscience or the oracles of the Scripture, first pronounced them in our
' A. N. Somerville, Precious Seed, 233.
2 COR. I. 20 43
spiritual ears ; these are above all the promises which Christ came to ratify and fulfil. Deep down in the heart of man there speaks a voice which calls us to God, and promises to take us to Him. And in former days, no doubt, when it spoke to those who had no revelation to interpret or confirm its sayings, what it said must have been often strange, inarticulate, even unintelligible. In dumb instincts rather than in plain commands, in voiceless longings, in yearnings for something unearthly, in strange doubts and questions did it often speak to men who had no other teaching. And even now, to those who have the Bible in their hands, but are still unawakened, or only half awakened, the voices that call from the deep abysses of the soul are faint and strange, and hard to understand, and often seem hopelessly impossible to obey. The Bible is, as it were, the grammar and the dictionary of this spiritual language, and teaches us to interpret its accents into duties and prayers and hopes and battle and assurance of victory. But even when we have the Bible, how much study we need before we can fathom the depths of spiritual meaning contained in the everlasting promises which God's finger has written on the soul of man. Men still unawakened, or only half awakened, could not. even with the Bible in their hands, always translate the language of the spirit that speaks within them. But even the awakened, in our human sense of the word awakened, what can they do but see in a glass darkly the dim reflection of the truth of God ? Yet what they see is the never-dying truth, and that truth received its final seal in the life of Christ.
Tl This, Edwin Markham, the spiritually-minded, has put for us in his rhapsody on " The Desire of All Nations," where he sees that in Christ is the one positive figure that fulfils the highest prophecies and sublimest promises that were cherished in the hearts of the world's great nations from the most ancient days ; for in Him God had answered Yea to all the desires of the people of the whole world.
And when He comes into the world gone wrong, He will rebuild her beauty with a song. To every heart He will its own dream be: One moon has many phantoms in the sea. Out of the North the horns will cry to men: "Balder the Beautiful has come again!"
44 THE YEA AND THE AMEN
The flutes of Greece will whisper from the dead:
" Apollo has unveiled his sunbright head ! "
The stones of Thebes and Memphis will find voice:
"Osiris comes; 0 tribes of Time rejoice!"
And social architects who build the State,
Serving the dream at citadel and gate,
Will hail Him coming through the labour hum.
And glad quick cries will go from man to man :
Lo, He has come, our Christ the Artisan —
The King who loved the lilies. He has come !
^ Lord, the Apostle dissuadeth the Hebrews from covetous- ness, with this argument, because God said, I will not leave thee nor forsake thee. Yet I find not that God ever gave this promise to all the Jews, but he spake it only to Joshua when first made commander against the Canaanites ; which, without violence to the analogy of faith, the Apostle applied to all good men in general. Is it 80 that we are heirs apparent to all promises made to thy servants in Scripture ? Are the charters of grace granted to them good to me ? Then will I say with Jacob, I have enough. But because I cannot entitle myself to thy promises to them, except I imitate their piety to thee ; grant I may take as much care in following the one, as comfort in the other.^
II.
Our Amen.
"Through him is the Amen."
Therefore, through Him is the^great Amen of the Universal Church, attesting and acclaiming His fidelity by psalms and anthems, by every act of living faith, by the labours of time, by the triumphs of countless death-beds, where death has been without a sting, and by the songs of those within the veil.
1. Now there should be some kind of correspondence between the firmness with which we grasp, the tenacity with which we hold, the assurance with which we believe, these great truths, and the rocklike firmness and immovableness of the evidence upon which they rest. It is a poor compliment to God to come to His most veracious affirmations, sealed with the broad seal of His Son's 1 Thomas Fnller, Good Thoughts in Bad Timet.