Gloria Crucis Part 2

Just as a scientific man can watch his facts under his microscope or in his test tubes, so such comparison as has been suggested, between Genesis and the cuneiform tablets, enables us to watch the very fact, to detect the Divine Spirit at work, not superseding, but illuminating and uplifting the natural faculties of the sacred writers. But we now turn to the spiritual teaching enshrined in this particular story.

(i) First, we have the fundamental truth that man is made capable of hearing the Divine Voice. Not once in the distant past, but to-day, and day by day, the Voice of G.o.d is heard speaking within the depths of consciousness as clearly and as decisively as of old it sounded among the trees of the garden.

(ii) But, secondly, other voices make themselves heard by us, and woe to us if we listen to them.

There is the voice which bids us gratify our animal appet.i.te. The woman "saw that the tree was good for food." I am conscious of the strength of bodily desires. Let me seek nothing, from moment to moment, but the satisfaction of my inclinations. There is the voice which bids us gratify the desire of the eyes. She "saw that the tree was pleasant to the eyes." The world is full of beauty. Let me make that my end, the satisfaction of the aesthetic sense; let me rest in the contemplation of that beauty, which was made for me, and I for it, precisely in order that I might not find repose there, but might be led thereby to Him Who made this scene so fair that His dear children might be drawn to Himself, Who is the eternal and uncreated loveliness.

There is, lastly, the voice which bids us gratify the desire of the mind.

Eve "saw that the tree was to be desired to make one wise." I desire to know. Let me indulge this desire at any cost, even if it mean the filling of my mind with all manner of foul and loathsome images. It is all "knowing the world." We forget, poor fools, that mere knowledge is not wisdom, and that there is a knowledge which brings death.

The desires of the body, the eyes, the mind, are good and healthful and holy in their proper place and sphere. Through these we reach out to the life and love and knowledge of G.o.d. And yet, if gratified against the dictates of that clear-sounding, inner, Divine Voice, they are precisely the materials of sin and death. To gratify them against the dictates of the moral and spiritual nature is to exclude oneself from the garden of G.o.d's delight, from the health and joy of the Divine Presence. We know it. We have learnt it by saddest experience of our own. To sin against the voice within is to find oneself separated from G.o.d; the ears of the soul have become deaf to the warnings of conscience, the eyes of the soul blind to the vision of the glory and holiness of G.o.d.

Is it wrong to say that such teaching as this can never be outgrown?

That, as time goes on, as the spiritual experience of the race and of the individual grows and broadens, still new lessons may be found to be contained in it?

The Bible adds to the teaching of science that without which that teaching is incomplete. It bids us know and feel and recognise the Divine Presence within us and, in the light of that ultimate truth of ourselves, realise something of the appalling grandeur of the issues of common life. But, different as are the forms in which their respective lessons are conveyed, science and the Bible unite their testimony to that of experience and conscience, that the Christian estimate of sin, and not the world's estimate of it, is the right one.

And the teaching of experience, conscience, science, and the Bible receives its final confirmation in the Cross of Jesus Christ. Henceforth sin, all sins, our sins, are to be estimated and measured in the light of the fact that sin brought about the death of the sinless Son of Man. Sin is the real enemy of ourselves and of the race. It is the destruction of the true self, the Divine Man in every son of man.

We need, for ourselves, to strive to attain to the genuinely Christian estimate of sin. "Had they known, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory." But we have the Cross lifted up before our eyes and when, in the light of that, we begin to hate and dread sin worse than pain, then we shall have begun to make some real advance towards becoming that which we long to be, and all the time mean and aspire to be--Christians, disciples of the Crucified.

IV THE MEANING OF SIN, AND THE REVELATION OF THE TRUE SELF

"In this we have come to know what love is, because He laid down His life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren."--1 JOHN III. 16.

It is important that we should arrive at some clearer understanding of the nature of sin. Let us approach the question from the side of the Divine Indwelling. The doctrine of the Divine Immanence, in things and in persons, that doctrine which we are to-day slowly recovering, is rescued from pantheism by holding fast at the same time to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. G.o.d the Transcendent dwells in "all thinking things, all objects of all thoughts" by His Word and Spirit. The Word, the Logos, of which St. John speaks, is the Eternal Self-Expression of G.o.d, standing as it were face to face with Him in the depths of His eternal life. "In the beginning the Word was with G.o.d." He is the Eternal Thought of G.o.d, Who includes within Himself this and all possible universes. And the Spirit, One with the Father and the Word, gives to the Thought of G.o.d its realisation and embodiment in what we call things.

And that realisation of the Thought of G.o.d by the Spirit of G.o.d is a progressive realisation--

1. In inorganic nature, as power and wisdom and beauty.

2. In organic beings, as vegetable and animal life.

3. In men, as the higher reason, including our moral and spiritual nature.

The long process of evolution is thus the progressive realisation of the Thought of G.o.d now becoming the Word, the expressed Thought of G.o.d. And this realisation is from within, a growing manifestation of G.o.d _in_ created things. And its climax was reached in the Incarnation when

4. The Word became flesh; the Thought of G.o.d perfectly embodied in our humanity. And now this same progressive revelation of G.o.d is continuing on the higher plane into which it was uplifted at the Incarnation. The work of the Spirit is to form within the members of Christ's Body, that Body which is const.i.tuted by His indwelling, the Mind and the Life of G.o.d Incarnate. "He shall take of Mine and shall show it unto you." So we get

5. The work of the Spirit of Christ within the Church, extending the Incarnation.

"He," writes St. Paul, "gave Him [Christ] as Head over all to the Church, which is His Body, the fulness of Him Who at all points in all men is being fulfilled."

The application of this to our present subject is as follows. The animal life in us, and the Divine life in us, are both alike due to the indwelling G.o.d, both alike are manifestations of His Presence. But they are manifestations at two different levels of being. What follows?

The animal nature is good; the moral and spiritual nature is good. What do we mean in this connexion by "good"? We mean, they are the results of the action of Him Whose Will is essential goodness.

The peculiarity of human life is, however, the conflict between these two elements of man's nature--the lower and the higher. Neither as yet, _from the human standpoint_, is good or bad. Moral attributes belong only to the will, which we may provisionally call the centre of man's personality. For man is a personal being, and as such stands apart from G.o.d.

G.o.d, Whose power brought man into being, Stands as it were a handsbreadth off, to give Room for the newly made to live, And look at Him from a place apart, And use His gifts of mind and heart.

Man alone can bring into existence the morally good or the morally bad.

And the materials of his choice are presented by the co-existence within him of the lower and the higher. Sin is the choice by the will of the lower, when that is felt to be in conflict with the higher. It is the resolution, previous to any action, to satisfy the desires of the animal, when these are known to contradict the dictates of the moral and spiritual nature.

Here we pause to notice a point of great importance for clear thinking on this subject. The conflict we have spoken of is that described by St.

Paul as between the flesh and the spirit. Now the flesh is not equivalent to the body. The works of the flesh are by no means necessarily sensual sins; they include strife and envy. The flesh, the animal within us, is not to be identified with our physical organisation.

Now we are drawing near to the very heart of the matter. What is it which distinguishes the lower nature from the higher, the animal from the Divine in us, the flesh from the spirit? The distinction lies in the objects to which the desires of each of these natures are directed.

The animal, predominantly, desires the good of self: the Divine, the good of others.

This we must now expand. There is nothing morally wrong in the self-seeking of the animal. Moral evil--sin--only arises when two conditions are fulfilled.

The self-seeking desire must be felt to be in contradiction to the unselfish dictates of the higher nature.

The will, having this knowledge more or less clearly before it, chooses to give effect to the lower rather than to subordinate it to the higher.

We may express the same truth somewhat more accurately.

The material of human sin is the co-existence of the animal nature and the Divine Nature within us.

The occasion of sin is the conflict between the two.

The conditions of sin are two--knowledge and freedom; knowledge of the antagonism between the desires of the two natures, and freedom to give effect either to the one or to the other.

The actual fact of sin is the movement of the will, making its choice in favour of the lower in opposition to the higher.

These two corollaries follow:--(i) Sin belongs only to the will, not to the nature. "There is nothing good in the world save a good will." And the converse is true: there is nothing sinful in the world save a sinful will.

(ii) Sin does not lie in the act, but in the movement of the will, of which the act is but the outward symbol. We must carefully distinguish between sin and temptation. No temptation is sinful, however strong and however vividly presented to the mind. Sin only comes in when the will makes the choice of the worse alternative. A sin in thought is an act of inward choice, the deliberate indulgence of, the dwelling with pleasure upon, the temptation presented to us. But if I am only prevented by circ.u.mstances or by fear from embodying the wrong choice of my will in action, I have, in the sight of G.o.d, committed that sin. If I have made the wrong choice, and am deterred by the faintest of moral scruples, as well as, perhaps, by other considerations, from carrying it out, I am really, although in a less degree, guilty.

Now we can fall back upon our main thought. The animal matter is essentially self-regarding. This is not (_a_) the same thing as to say that all actions of all animals are self-regarding. I see no difficulty in believing that there may be adumbrations of the moral and spiritual in animals below man, if the animal life is the manifestation, on a lower plane, of the same Word Who is the Life of nature and the Light (the higher reason and spiritual life) of man. Nor (_b_) is it the same thing as to say that the desires of the animal nature are selfish. For selfishness is a moral term and, as we have seen, moral attributes are inapplicable except to a wrong choice of the will.

These self-regarding impulses of the animal nature are due to the fact, that that nature is the result of the age-long struggle for existence.

These impulses have secured the survival and the predominance of man.

But man is more than a successful animal. He is made in the image of G.o.d. In him, the Word is revealed, not as life only, but as light. In an altogether higher sense than can be predicated of any part of creation below man, he is a sharer in the Divine life.

Now that Divine life is the very life of Him Whose very essence and being is Love. G.o.d is Love. What does this mean? It has never been better expressed than in the following words: "G.o.d is a Being, not one of Whose thoughts is for Himself. . . . Creation is one great unselfish thought of G.o.d, the bringing into existence of beings who can know the happiness which G.o.d Himself knows" (Dr. Askwith). What happiness is that? It is explained, by the same writer, as the happiness which is found in the promotion of the happiness, that is, in the largest sense, the well-being of others.

We can now see the reason of the antagonism between the animal and the Divine in ourselves, the real meaning of the Pauline ant.i.thesis between the flesh and the Spirit, the old man and the new.

We are to "put off the old man." He is old, indeed, beyond our imaginations of antiquity, for he is the product of the h.o.a.ry animal ancestry of our race. Our progress as successful compet.i.tors in the struggle for animal existence, has been the waxing stronger of the old man day by day.

To put on the new man, is to continue our evolution, now a conscious and deliberate evolution, on an entirely different plane. It is to subdue the self-regarding impulses, in obedience to the movements of the Divine life within us, which bids us deny ourselves--not some particular desire, but our own selves--and to seek the good of others; to seek and, seeking, surely to find, "the happiness which G.o.d Himself knows."

To put on the new man is synonymous, in St. Paul, with putting on Christ.

For He is the perfect revelation of the Divine in our humanity.