VII

THE WEAPON OF PURITY1

"As the heart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee."-PSALM 42: I.

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OTHING can hinder us from believing that the Eternal Spirit, Who sent Jesus into the world, sent also, securing it by an unfathomable play of events and circumstances, that hunger and dissatisfaction and moral tenderness which prepared a welcome for Him in the human heart. God's truth for an age never comes as a stranger to that age. On the contrary, God is so ready to hide Himself, that, when the truth comes, the wise men of the world at the time are permitted to suppose that it was they who discovered it, and that they were always sure that the thing was as now they perceive it to be.

It is not very common nowadays, except at street corners and in open spaces where one may still have the spectacle of a man plunging about in the backwash of an old controversial method-it is not very common nowadays to have it quoted against Christian truth, or against the force of a moral idea, that there is already a hunger and

From The Weapons of our Warfare and with permission of Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton.

thirst for it in human hearts. On the contrary, the most lively school of thought in our day is apt to err on the other side, declaring that the one mark of truth is that it works, that it fits the facts and suits our very case. If the allegation is put forward that Christianity made its way in the world simply because it accommodated itself to the need of the time and offered people anything they wanted, it is a false accusation and can be repelled by some quite obvious facts. For example it is quite apparent from even a casual reading of the New Testament that the early Church is already aware that she is engaged in a warfare against the world. She sees clearly that it is her doom and calling to protest against the general mood of the time. The later books of the New Testament are concerned with almost nothing else than to warn Christians, both as individuals and as communities, that they have committed themselves in Christ to a Cause and a Spirit which will range the world against them, which will encounter the spiritual habit and inertia of long ages, which will provoke unsuspected antagonisms; in short, that Christianity is a declaration of war, an unsheathing of the sword; "Ours is not a conflict with mere flesh and blood, but with the despotisms, the empires, the forces that control and govern this dark world." I detect no trace of accommodation in such a saying, and it is but one of a thousand. The fact is, Christianity did fall in with the profound neces

sities of the human heart in those days. But the necessities in the human heart which laid hold on Christianity were the last necessities of our common human nature, the invincible cries which will always break from man, because he is what he is. And in order to help man at the depths Christianity did not hesitate to offend and rebuke man in his superficial and temporary requirements.

It is true, I think, of every high thing which assails us and appeals to us in the name of God, that there is something in us which holds out hands to it and there is something in us which at the same moment hesitates or shrinks back. It is a sure sign that we are face to face with something from God, something with which we had better come to terms, that at the same moment we want it and we do not want it, we like it and we do not like it.

When Jehoshaphat and Ahab were in a difficulty as to whether they should go to war against Syria, some officials had assured them that it was God's will that they should go. Jehoshaphat, who was a good man, was not easy in his mind. It seemed to him that those officials had been suborned to say what they had said. “Is there not some man of God," said he to Ahab, "by whom we might enquire of the Lord?" "There is," said Ahab, with some heat; "there is one man by whom we might enquire of the Lord, Micaiah, the son of Imlah; but I hate him, for he doth not prophesy

good concerning me but evil."

"That is the very

man for us to hear," said Jehoshaphat.

There is always something in truth which we like, and something which we do not like. It is always proof that the matter is one with which we ought to come to terms-that we like it and do not like it at the same moment. Christianity had those simultaneous marks of truth: there was something in it which the world resented and hated, and tried to put away; and all the time there was that in it for which the world in the last solitudes and realities of its own self-consciousness pathetically cried out. Looking back over those days, and observing with what fidelity to its own ethical genius the Church dealt with the world without indulging that mood, how it refused to follow the easy way to power, how it was able at once to condemn the world and to attract it-looking back, I say, it is not possible to doubt that wherever the two or three were met together Christ was in the midst, guiding.

There were three lines, we were saying, along which Christianity moved and overcame the world; and first by the attractiveness of its faith.

Let me pass now to the second element of power-the new and haunting quality of Christian goodness. By the wonderful pressure, as we believe, of the Spirit of God upon the hearts of men, there was already abroad in the world in the first days of Christianity a real and widely experienced

desire for moral purity and cleanness. It was one of those times which come when, it may be, men do not see their way clearly, when they do not see for the time being how things on a wide scale are to be improved, when the mind in consequence is driven in upon itself, and we perceive that although there may be no open vision, nevertheless we need not be idle in the work of God; that there is a work to be done within ourselves. However, it may be explained historically, there had come over the human heart in those days a great yearning to be made clean, to be free from moral guilt, to be done with all interior disorder and entanglement. In those days, and in pursuit of this personal rightness and integrity, the most popular ceremony was a sacrament called the "taurobolium." Let me say what it was, leaving it to yourselves to perceive what a place for Christ life had evidently laid open in the souls of men. In the mystery of the “taurobolium" the suppliant stood or knelt beneath a scaffolding of wood. On the wooden platform above his head a bull was slain, and its blood poured through the grating, drenching the suppliant beneath.

It was man's profound insight into his moral necessities. It was man, urged by the Spirit of God, trying to find his way home. It was his discovery, guided by delicate organs of moral perception, that death was the only way to newness of life; and that it was not his own death merely