% At the Interpreter's House, the fourth »c«ne is the fire at the wall. Here life is seen in a new aspect, chosen in order to bring out the spiritual forces of good and evil which are at work upon it. The scientific definition of life aa the " sum total of the functions which resist death " is strikingly applicable here. This view, which Professor Henry Drummond expounds so eloquently in his Natural Law in the Spiritual World, is exactly that of Bunyan's figure. Life is a wasting thing, a waning lamp, a dying fire. And just as, in the natural world, there are many diseases and accidents which threaten to hasten the decay and violently end the resistance to it, so there are in the spiritual world agencies such as temptation, discouragement, and many others, which tend to extinguish the inner fire. These are all summed up in the figure of Satan casting water upon the flames. Yet the wonderful fact is that the flame is not extinguished. There are lives known to us all which seem to have everything against their spiritual victory — heredity, disposition, circumstances, companions — yet in spite of fate their flame burns on. The secret is that Christ is at the back of the wall, and there is no proof so wonderful as this of the reality of Jesus Christ as an agent in human life. Besides the two main agents there are plenty of human ones at work for both these ends. Some people are for ever throwing cold water upon the fires of the soul, devil's firemen, whose trade seems to be that of discouraging. Others, and these are the blessed ones of the world, pour in upon the flagging spirit the oil of good cheer and hope.*
* John Kelman, The Road, i. 61.
454 WEARINESS IN WELL-DOING
2. Why are we weary ? There are many temptations to weariness. Let us touch upon a few of the most frequently encountered.
(1) Some of the hindrances arise from within, and are connected with the state of our own hearts. Although it should be our earnest desire and prayer that the God of peace may " sanctify us wholly," and that our whole spirit, and soul, and body, may be thoroughly and harmoniously consecrated to the service of Christ, yet every believer knows, to his loss and to his lamentation, that he is sanctified " but in part " ; that there is a law in his members warring against the law of his mind ; that the flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh, and that these are contrary the one to the other. Instead, therefore, of making any steady progress in the way of well-doing, he finds himself drawn as it were in difiFerent directions; swayed hither and thither by the conflict of opposing principles which is going on within him. He is like a kingdom divided against itself, and sometimes feels as if he had two distinct and discordant natures struggling in his bosom. It is true that —
Evil into the mind of god or man
May come and go, so unapproved, and leave
No spot or blame behind.
But even where no " spot " is left, its confusing influence is felt ; and hence his inward experience is often but a chaos of antag- onistic purposes and conflicting inclinations. There is generally such a wide difference between his aims and his actings that he always finds reason to be dissatisfied with himself. The good that he would, he does not ; the evil he would not, that he does. And of this he is always sure, that when he would do good, evil is present with him, hindering his higher resolutions, and hanging to the skirts of all his better designs, until he is often constrained to cry out, with the Apostle, " Oh wretched man that I am ! who shall deliver me from this body of death ? " Sometimes the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak ; at other times the spirit is weak while the flesh is strong ; and between the various impediments arising from these sources, the believer's progress is so grievously interrupted, that he is, at certain seasons, apt to sink into a state of utter discouragement.
GAL. VI. 9 455
I would have gone ; God bade me stay : I would have worked ; God bade me rest.
He broke my will from day to day, He read my yearnings unexpressed And said them nay.
Now I would stay ; God bids me go : Now I would rest ; God bids me work,
He breaks my heart tossed to and fro, My soul is wrung with doubts that lurk And vex it so.
I go, Lord, where Thou sendest me;
Day after day 1 plod and moil : But, Christ my God, when will it be
That I may let alone my toil And rest with Thee?i
(2) When a man grows " weary in well-doing," it may be the effect of a false modesty. As he thinks of how very much misery, sin, want there is in the world, he may say, " After all, how little I can do. What is my little when compared with the infinite need of the world ? " And so, from a genuine feeling of how much there is to be done in the world for Christ, we may actually let ourselves off with doing nothing. Yet surely one great principle of our religion is just this — to believe in the infinite power for good, in the infinite future of the Christlike behaviour of every one. And in any case, we have only our duties. We only know what Christ asks of us : it is not for us to know what will become of our deed, or how Christ will arrange for what we cannot overtake. We know the parable of the leaven in the meal. We know that the few loaves which Christ blessed and broke fed five thousand, besides women and children.