As it is with the departed saints sleeping in Christ,--"put to death, indeed, in the flesh, but living in the spirit,"--so by a terrible inversion with the wicked in this life. They are put to death, indeed, in the spirit, while they live in the flesh. They may be and often are powerfully alive and active in their relations to the world of sense, while on the unseen and Godward side utterly paralyzed. Ask such a man about his business or family concerns; touch on affairs of politics or trade,--and you deal with a living mind, its powers and susceptibilities awake and alert. But let the conversation pass to other themes; sound him on questions of the inner life; ask him what he thinks of Christ, how he stands towards God, how he fares in the spiritual conflict,--and you strike a note to which there is no response. You have taken him out of his element. He is a practical man, he tells you; he does not live in the clouds, or hunt after shadows; he believes in hard facts, in things that he can grasp and handle. "The natural man perceiveth not the things of the Spirit of God. They are foolishness to him." They are pictures to the eye of the blind, heavenly music to the stone-deaf.
And yet that hardened man of the world--starve and ignore his own spirit and shut up its mystic chambers as he will--cannot easily destroy himself. He has not extirpated his religious nature, nor crushed out, though he has suppressed, the craving for God in his breast. And when the callous surface of his life is broken through, under some unusual stress, some heavy loss or the shock of a great bereavement, one may catch a glimpse of the deeper world within of which the man himself was so little conscious. And what is to be seen there? Haunting memories of past sin, fears of a conscience fretted already by the undying worm, forms of weird and ghostly dread flitting amid the gloom and dust of death through that closed house of the spirit,--
"The bat and owl inhabit here: The snake nests on the altar stone: The sacred vessels moulder near: The image of the God is gone!"
In this condition of death the word of life comes to men. It is the state not of heathendom alone; but of those also, favoured with the light of revelation, who have not opened to it the eyes of the heart, of all who are "doing the desires of the flesh and the thoughts"--who are governed by their own impulses and ideas and serve no will above the world of sense.[75] Without distinction of birth or formal religious standing, "all" who thus live and walk are dead while they live. Their _trespasses and sins_ have killed them. From first to last Scripture testifies: "Your sins have separated between you and your God." We find a hundred excuses for our irreligion: there is the cause. There is nothing in the universe to separate any one of us from the love and fellowship of his Maker but his own unforsaken sin.
It is true, there are other hindrances to faith, intellectual difficulties of great weight and seriousness, that press upon many minds. For such men Christ has all possible sympathy and patience. There is a real, though hidden faith that "lives in honest doubt." Some men have more faith than they suppose, while others certainly have much less. One has a name to live, and yet is dead; another, perchance, has a name to die, and yet is alive to God through Jesus Christ. There are endless complications, self-contradictions, and misunderstandings in human nature. "Many are first" in the ranks of religious profession and notoriety, "which shall be last, and the last first." We make the largest allowance for this element of uncertainty in the line that bounds faith from unfaith; "The Lord knoweth them that are His." No intellectual difficulty, no mere misunderstanding, will ultimately or for long separate between God and the soul that He has made.