(2) Not work. I will join any man, says Jowett, in singing a psean of blessedness on work; but if hard work will lead to spiritual contentment, the great majority of my congregation will be in the enjoyment of spiritual rest. And yet after the hardest day's work, often in the midst of it, there is a sigh, a weariness, a state of staleness, a certain out-of-jointness, which is abundant proof that the old craving is still there like a smoking volcano, and that its inner fires are not yet quenched. Thank God foi work, but work can never take the place of God.
^ The opponents of legislation on the question of limiting the hours of labour induced the Lord Mayor to call a general meeting of London shopkeepers, expecting to carry a resolution
1 C. Kingsley, The Water of Life, 1.
* A. Moody Stuart, Becollections of the late John Duncan, 109.
REVELATION xxii. 17 421
against any such measure as he had proposed. Sir John attended and asked for a hearing. Having explained how matters stood, he moved an amendment in favour of his [Shop Hours Eegulation] Bill and quoted, as illustrating the hard lives of shop assistants, ,and especially of women, the Norfolk epitaph :
Here lies a poor woman, who always was tired.
For she lived in a world where too much was required.
Weep not for me, friends, she said, for I'm going
Where there'll neither be cooking nor washing nor sewing.
I go where the loud Hallelujahs are ringing. But I shall not take any part in the singing. Then weep not for me, friends, if death do us sever, For I'm going to do nothing for ever and ever.
" This quotation," he observes, " carried the meeting and the amendment." Variant readings of this epitaph are extant, but the gist of it is the same in all.^
(3) Not money. The most awful weariness in the world to- day will be found where money abounds. The fact of the matter is, spiritual satisfaction is to be obtained at a counter where money is not accepted as a means of exchange. " Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money."
^ We have seen what money can do. Every moment we feel its power. But the things it cannot do ! You can get out of it all life's bottom things, but you can get none of life's top things. It can feed all the flesh appetites. It will supply you with luxury, with ease. It can buy bows, and reverences, and saluta- tions in the market-place. It is a purveyor to all the devilries — to avarice, to covetousness, to selfishness, to envy, to hatred, to lust, to murder. Not, certainly, that it always produces these things. But it can produce them ; it is the soil where they grow ; where they have grown in every age and every country of the world. But from all the gold bags in the Bank of England you could not distil one drop of mother love. You can extract from them nothing of the world's highest thought or best feeling. You cannot write a spiritual book on money; no, nor a spiritual chapter. We are trying here, but are failing egregiously. The real soul of humanity gets no rise from this source. Under its power the heart chills ; it never expands. Ask whence has come
^ H. G. Hutchinson, Life of Sir John Lulhock, Lord Avebury (1914), i. 223.
422 COME
the great literature, the noble music, the fine heroisms ? They do not hail from Mammon. Gold is a separator, never a uniter.^
(4) Not culture. Satisfaction cannot be found even in the higher and finer cultures of the mind — in music and art and literature. These ministries can soothe, they can excite, they can gratify, but they cannot satisfy ; and when the volume is closed, when the harmonious strains have died away, when the creations of art have been laid aside, the secret yearning asserts itself, and the unsatisfied soul cries out, " I thirst ! "
\ Man, individually, cannot be satisfied with the material, the intellectual, the aesthetic. There is still a part of his nature which rises above these, and demands more. It shows itself in his religions, his philosophies, and in the inordinate graspings of lower natures after the material. This is one answer to the Goethe view of man's chief end — present enjoyment, wisely moderated, and long drawn out. It never has satisfied, and cannot; it is the resource of moral defect or of despair. It is the positivism of Comte gilded, which sometimes affects a high Stoicism and worship of humanity, — as if that could be in the mass which is not in the man, — sometimes falls back by a natural reaction to Epicureanism, and sometimes hovers round the scepticism depicted by the " Preacher." ^
2. " If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink." The Lord Jesus claims to satisfy the soul ; yes, to satisfy the soul as a babe is satisfied to find its mother's breast. " The water that I shall give shall be in him a well." The Lord creates a new well of peace and fruitful satisfaction. For, look you, solid satisfaction lies in the possession of a certain quality of spirit. What is that spirit ? What sort of gift would send this congregation away in radiant triumph ? If God were now to give me the choice as to what every member of this congregation should receive before we leave the building, what would I choose ? I think I would choose three things. First of all, pardon: forgiveness for all our ill doings and all our wasted treasure. Secondly, purity: the washing away of all stains, the searching out of hidden germs and defilement. And thirdly, peace : the sense of the glorious at-one- ness with the glorious God. And if we obtained those three gifts,..