George Matheson:
George Matheson: The Eyes of Faith and Imagination George Matheson should surely stand alongside
Thomas Chalmers and Lord George Macleod as one of the intellectual and spiritual giants in the post-Reformation Scottish Church. The breadth and volume of his published work is considerable, encompassing academic theology, popular poetry, devotional meditations on Biblical texts and prayers. As well as being a formidable scholar and brilliant writer, he was also an outstanding preacher and exemplary pastor. He spent his entire working life in the parish ministry of the Church of Scotland, unstintingly caring for the spiritual needs of his congregation and painstakingly preparing public worship Sunday after Sunday. All this despite the fact that he was blind throughout his adult life.
Matheson's blindness was almost certainly the single most powerful influence on his personality and his writings. It determined his choice of career and powerfully stimulated his powers of imagination. Blindness was a particularly cruel handicap for one who had a passionate love of books and reading, a great desire for human company and a deep attachment to the beauties of nature.
Although he uncomplainingly accepted his disability, it caused him much
private anguish and brought him periods of intense loneliness.
It also led him to ask questions about the suffering of the innocent and at times severely tried his faith in a loving
God. Yet that faith was never destroyed and ultimately perhaps it was even deepened.
Matheson's blindness strengthened the power of his imagination and highlighted the element of sacrifice which he saw as standing at the heart of the Christian mystery.
George Matheson was born in Glasgow on 27 March 1842, just five years after the accession of Queen Victoria. His father, also called George, hailed from Dornoch in Sutherland and was proud of his Highland blood. He had originally intended to become a minister and went to Glasgow University where he was a proficient classical scholar but on the advice of friends he
~ took up a career in business and became a leading merchant and wholesale warehouseman in Glasgow. He married a second cousin and they had eight children of whom George junior was the second.
Young George was only eighteen months old when his mother realized that there was something wrong with his eyesight. The cause was found to be inflammation at the back of the eyes, a condition which at that time was incurable. Throughout his childhood he suffered from gradually fading vision. For most of his schooldays, which were spent in a succession of small private schools and then at Glasgow
Academy, he could see well enough to read and write provided he wore powerful spectacles and sat by a window to get full advantage of the
sunlight. But by the time he went up to Glasgow University in 1857 he was dependent on others reading to him and by the age of eighteen he was effectively blind. Just occasionally in later life he would have periods of partial vision: sometimes when he was in his manse at Innellan if the light was particularly good he could dimly make out the shapes of the steamers plying up and down the Clyde. But apart from these few brief moments, he spent his entire adult life in a world of darkness and isolation.
Despite this terrible handicap, Matheson had a brilliant academic career. He was a lively and perhaps even a slightly precocious child. At the age of seven he was preaching a sermon to the rest of the family, standing on a chair with a couple of strips of paper pinned to his chest in imitation of the Geneva bands worn by Church of Scotland ministers. In fact, his original desire was to become a lawyer but his fading sight
_ruled out that career and he decided instead to opt for the ministry.
He entered Glasgow University at the early age of 15 and spent a total of nine years there, studying first Arts and then
Divinity.
As astudent, despite his rapidly fading sight, he was neither introverted nor shy.
A contemporary recalled that ''his laughter was the biggest and heartiest in the College quadrangle, being equalled, however, by his tenderness and sensibility''. He had a particular fondness for singing, with ''D'ye ken John
Peel'', ''The harp that once through Tara's halls'' and ''Believe me if all those endearing young charms'' being favourites in his
~ repertoire. He also showed his budding talents as a poet, completing two long epic poems in his early student days, one on the Flood and the other about a blind girl in classical Greece.
In 1866 he was licensed by the Glasgow ~ ' Presbytery and he served his assistantship in Trinity Parish Church in the Sandyford district of the city. The minister there, John Ross
MacDuff, was also to achieve some fame as a hymn writer — his ''Christ is coming! Let creation from her groans and travails cease'' is still to be found in several hymnbooks. But it is unlikely that the young assistant learned much from his senior about the art of hymn writing as MacDuff was away in the Holy Land for a good deal of the time that Matheson was attached to his church.
In 1868 George Matheson was ordained into the charge of Innellan in Argyllshire. This small coastal town which stands further down the Cowal Peninsula from Dunoon and across the Firth of Clyde from Wemyss Bay was a popular
Victorian tourist resort and the Matheson family had long taken their summer holidays there. His ministry there, which lasted for eighteen years, centred on preaching and he devoted a good deal of time to preparing his Sunday morning sermons. He began on the previous Sunday afternoon when he selected his text which he
then pondered over during the early part of the week. On Wednesday he would begin dictating his sermon, usually to his sister who lived with him, and by Saturday morning he would have it finished. The sermons generally ran to about twenty minutes. Until 1878 he committed them
entirely to memory but thereafter he simply prepared an outhne sketch from which he preached.
By all accounts Matheson's performance in the pulpit was masterly. His use of language was strikingly fresh and original and he had that sense of timing and of the dramatic gesture and pause which is so essential to the preacher as well as the actor. He memorized not just his sermons but also his prayers and the Bible readings for the day. These last he appeared to read out of the pulpit Bible which was always left open in front of him. When preaching, he gave the impression of looking the congregation full in the face and many visitors to his church came away from the service with no idea of his blindness.
In an age when preachers were viewed rather as pop stars and footballers are in our own time, Matheson drew visitors from far and wide to Innellan and was regarded as one of the town's main tourist attractions. Several people took their holidays there largely to hear him preach and stopped coming when he left.
Matheson gripped his congregation through his prayers as well as in his sermons. One of those who regularly worshipped at his church and who himself went on to become a minister has left this vivid account of the start of his services:
Dr Matheson's first prayer was often the finest part of the service. And what a prayer it was!
A lifting up of the heart and upraising of the spirit, a reaching out after God, an outpouring of the soul, like the rapturous song of the lark, mounting higher and higher into the blue, to
find in the limitless skies the satisfaction of its whole nature. I confess that it was this first prayer that often lifted us up into the Mystic
Presence more than any other part of the service. How difficult it was to keep the eyes closed! There, upon the high pulpit, was the blind poet, with uplifted hand, always reaching out and up into his own illumined darkness, as if trying to catch something of the mystery of God and draw it down to man. He carried us all up into the heights along with him; and he drew down, for the most commonplace of us, something of the transfiguring blessing; so that, often before the rapture of aspiration was over, the eyes that watched the , blind, praying man in the pulpit had to view him through a mist of unconscious tears.
Although the ministry of the word was at the heart of his work in Innellan, George Matheson did not neglect the pastoral side of his calling.
He was a tireless visitor of the sick and housebound. A local doctor wrote after he left
''seldom have I seen a clergyman so near the heart of his parishioners, not merely in prosperity and success — that is easy and hardly wanted — but in sorrow and distress, in health
'and disease, in work and worship''.
In 1885 Mattheson was summoned to preach before Queen Victoria at Crathie Church next to Balmoral Castle. He took as his theme the prophet Job's endurance of repeated and overwhelming calamities. His portrayal of Job as standing before the mysteries of life in a spirit of patient trust and hope deeply affected the
queen and she requested that the sermon be printed for distribution around the Royal Household.
Perhaps because of his own sufferings, he often found inspiration from the Book of Job for his prayers and meditations, as in the opening prayer in this collection (I. 1).
The year after his visit to Balmoral, the congregation of St Bernard's Church in the fashionable New Town area of Edinburgh called Matheson to be their next minister. Although he was sad to leave Innellan, he could not resist this invitation from one of the largest and most prestigious churches in the capital. For the next thirteen years he preached to packed congregations which included university professors and students, eminent lawyers, fellow clergymen and other notables of the city.
As at Innellan, he was not just content with being a preacher and devoted much effort to pastoral matters. In the first six months of his ministry he personally visited the home of every member of the church — a total of over 1500 people. Throughout his time at St Bernard's he ran Bible classes and took an active interest in the numerous organizations attached to the church. In accordance with the general practice of the time, he generally carried out baptisms and marriages at his own house in the New Town at eight o'clock in the evening.
During his Edinburgh ministry and for several years after he had retired Matheson was in constant demand to preach all over Britain. He made a habit of visiting another church one
Sunday each month and often his travels took him south of the border or into Wales. He was
always careful to have several practices at climbing up into the pulpit of a strange church and making sure that there were no protruding gas lamps or other objects which he might hit with one of the hand gestures which invariably
. accompanied his sermons.
Four years after becoming minister at St Bernard's Matheson finally got round to learning
Braille, or at least devising his own version of it. He also learned how to use a typewriter. This meant that he could write out his sermons, articles and books himself and did not have to dictate them to others. However, he was still dependent on his long-suffering sisters for reading books and papers. He also employed a series of secretaries to help in this task. William
Smith, who took on this job for the last ten years of Matheson's life, when he had retired from the parish ministry, has left a record of a typical day.
He would rise shortly before nine and take his breakfast while his letters and extracts from the morning papers were read out to him. He was particularly interested in book reviews, political stories and reports of criminal trials and also liked to be kept informed of new scientific and mechanical inventions. The rest of the morning was taken up by studying French and German, reading works of theology, philosophy, science, history and literature and then an hour or so of: writing before lunch. There was more reading in the afternoon and a lighter diet of fiction in the evening. Often it was not until nearly midnight that the weary reader was allowed to put the last book down.
The demands that George Matheson made on
his secretaries and on his sisters were considerable. He came to depend on the latter particularly for companionship.
He never married and as far as I can establish never came near to doing so. Certain old hymnal companions suggest that he wrote ''O love that wilt not let me go'' ina mood of acute depression after the girl that he loved had declined his proposal of marriage because of his blindness. This seems to be an entirely apocryphal story. The event that triggered the hymn seems to have been the marriage in the summer of 1881 of one of his sisters who had come with him to Innellan to be his. housekeeper, reader, amanuensis and companion. The rest of the family were in Glasgow following the wedding and he found himself alone in the large manse, with just the sound of the sea outside for company. He later wrote of the verses that he penned at that time:
It is the quickest composition I ever achieved.
It was done in three minutes. It seemed to me at the time as if someone was dictating the thought to me, and also giving-the expression.
There was so little sense of effort that I had a sensation of passiveness. I was sitting alone in my study in a state of great depression, caused by a real calamity. My hymn was the voice of my depression. It was not made for utilitarian purposes; it was wrung out spontaneously from the heart.
In fact, Matheson was not to be without a companion for long. Two other unmarried sisters took turns to look after him and both lived with
him in Edinburgh. Indeed, there does not seem to have been any substantial period of his life when he lived on his own. Nonetheless his blindness often gave him a feeling of solitude
- and his meditations on this subject, like those on the theme of getting old, are amongst the most sensitive and moving of all his writings
(sections VII & VIII in the selection that follows).
Matheson retired as full-time minister at St Benard's in 1897 but remained for another two years as the regular preacher there.
In retirement he continued to tour the country preaching and also to pour out a steady stream of books, articles and poems. Right up to the end his energy was prodigious. He spent the last days of his life in North Berwick, the East coast resort near Edinburgh where he had taken his summer holidays for many years. On the afternoon of 27
August 1906 he had a two and a half hour carriage drive and then settled down to an evening's reading which included a volume of the Cambridge Modern History and a novel. At 11.15 pm he was about to start working on his current project, a book about women in the Bible, but William Smith managed to persuade him to go to bed. At 1.30 in the morning of 28
August his sisters heard a slight moan. Shortly afterwards he died peacefully. He was buried in the family vault in the Glasgow Necropolis after a service that was attended by many of the city's leading civic and religious dignitaries.
The above brief account of Matheson's career as a minister may have suggested a man who went through life unassailed by doubts or uncertainties.
In fact, he experienced a
profound crisis of faith when he came very near to abandoning his ministry. Shortly after his ordination, he found that he had become, in his own words, ''an absolute atheist. I believed in nothing, neither God nor immortality.'' The experience of having weekly to present the faith in which he had been brought up had suddenly made him feel that there was nothing there. He tendered his resignation to the Presbytery but it was wisely rejected on the grounds that he was a young man and would change his views.
He did change and in so doing broadened his faith in a way that helped him to relate in a very direct way to those who were not Christians.
During his time at St Bernard's Matheson's sermons had a particular appeal to agnostics and to those who were themselves wresthng with doubts and uncertainties. There was nothing in ~ him of the dogmatist or the narrow take-it-orleave it Christian. Rather he was ever-open to those of other religions and of none and constantly striving to present his own faith in a way that was compatible with the principles of reason and the discoveries of science.
Matheson was helped out of his own crisis of faith by reading the works of the great German liberal theologians of the nineteenth century who had themselves been assailed with grave doubts about Christianity and had sought to reinterpret it in the light of post-Enlightenment philosophy.
He was, in particular, deeply influenced by the writings of G. W. F. Hegel, who saw a deep and mysterious Spirit underlying all history and reconciling the selfcontradictions that permeate every aspect of
human experience. For Matheson that Spirit was Christianity, something that was built into the heart of man and that had existed from all time, long before the historic Christ came on the earth.
Only in the light of its path of sacrifice and its message of love could the world and human life with all its vicissitudes and uncertainties be understood.
Matheson's interest in German philosophy and theology provided the subject of his first book,
Aids to the Study of German Theology, which appeared in 1874 and in which he presented the ideas of such figures as Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schleiermacher and David Friedrich
Strauss not, as they had so often been presented to British readers, as negative and destructive of Christianity, but rather as rescuing and restating it in a way acceptable to modern scientific and rational minds. The thought of Hegel was an even more direct inspiration for his second work, The Growth of the Spirit of Christianity (1877) which explored two themes to which he was to return again and again in his writings, the doctrine of evolution and the integration of all religious faiths. Christianity, he argued, was the driving spiritual force throughout the history of the world, subject to the law of evolution and gradually unfolding more and more of its inner purpose. The pagan religions and Judaism he saw as its precursors, stages in the progressive revelation of God's great and mysterious being.
Matheson's third book, Natural Elements of Revealed Theology, was published in 1881. A strong believer in the idea of natural theology,
he argued that there was something innately religious about human beings and that Christianity in many ways squared with their rational capacities. He believed that the German theologians and philosophers had successfully synthesized reason and revelation.
''God's _ revelation'', he wrote, ''is the poetic form of natural reason.'' It was only possible because there was something in common between the Divine and the human -— the fact of the Incarnation that enables communion between God and his creatures.
In 1885 Matheson published another book attempting to synthesize the worlds of religion and science, Can the Old Faith Live with the New? The new faith in question was the doctrine of evolution, with which like so many of his midVictorian contemporaries he was fascinated. For him it posed no challenge to the Christian faith, but rather deepened it. He was almost certainly influenced by the ideas of Henry Drummond, professor of Natural Science at the Free Church
College in Glasgow, who had in 1883 published an influential book entitled Natural Law in the Spiritual World, which used the language of biology to illuminate the Christian message. In similar vein, Matheson cast Christ in evolutionary terms, drawing on the Biblical image of the second Adam to portray him as the summation and completion of humanity — the point to which we are all striving. It is an argument which in a remarkable way anticipates the evolutionary theology of Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin in the middle of the twentieth century.
The same desire to reconcile the spirit of
Christian faith and the outlook of modern science underlay his next book, The Psalmist and the Scientist (1887). His essential instincts as a synthesizer and reconciler of apparently conflicting positions are also very evident in his important work on The Distinctive Messages of the Old Religions, which came out in 1892. I have included a brief extract from it in the selection that follows (IX, 2). Here he argues forcefully the point that is brought out so well in his great poem, ''Gather us in, Thou Love that fillest all'' (IX, 3), that the mission of Christianity is not to destroy or even replace the other great religions of the world, but rather to embrace and gather them in so that, as St Paul puts it in his first Epistle to the Ephesians, 1:10, all things shall be one in Christ.
George Matheson's strong sense that Christianity summed up the spirit of all religions is very much in the tradition of nineteenthcentury German liberal Protestant theology as exemplified by such figures as Ernst Troeltsch and Adolf von Harnack. It also reflects the considerable interest in comparative religion in late Victorian Britain that followed the pioneering work of Max Muller, Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, who edited fifty volumes of sacred texts from the East and believed that all the great religions of the world manifested a single principle. But by the standards of his contemporaries, Matheson was strikingly open and inclusive in his approach to other faiths and his assertion that ''Thy presence is wider than our creed'' (III, 6). In many ways, it is reminiscent of the doctrine of anonymous Christianity
developed in our own age by the Roman Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner. It is not surprising that he was criticized for his extreme catholicity of belief and readiness to leap over not just denominational differences but the barriers between rival faiths. His writings show a tendency not just towards syncretism but also towards a doctrine of universal salvation. There is certainly not a hint in them of the Calvinist doctrines of election and predestination which figure prominently in the Westminister Confession of Faith to which as a Church of Scotland minister he had to subscribe at his ordiantion. It would be interesting to know what he thought of the fate of his near-contemporary, John McLeod
Campbell, who was thrown out of the Church of Scotland in 1831 for his heretical stance in preaching a doctrine of universal atonement.
Matheson's other books were more Biblical and biographical in their themes. In 1888 he produced Landmarks of New Testament Morality, a treatise on Christian ethics, and in - 1890 a study of The Spiritual Development of St Paul. There are interesting elements of his own personality and experiences in this latter work. Significantly he identified the thorn in the flesh which St Paul mentions in 2 Corinthians
12:7 as defective eyesight and portrayed the apostle as finding Jesus not through seeing him, as his disciples had, but through faith. The whole book is permeated with a sense of perfection achieved through suffering and with the idea of affliction as a means of spiritual growth a theme which he took to be the central message of the Cross.
In 1896 Matheson published what is in many ways his most powerful and original book, The Lady Ecclesia, whichhe described as a spiritual biography. It is entirely allegorical in character and portrays the development of the Spirit of Christ in both the Church and the individual. In a vivid piece of imagery that he also used in several of his devotional meditations (for example IV, 2) he describes the kingdom which the Lady Ecclesia has inherited as an island, surrounded by the ocean and cut off from other communities and institutions.
Matheson's last years were particularly fruitful for his writing. In 1899 and 1900 he brought out two volumes of Studies of the Portrait of Christ and in 1902 four volumes on The Representative Men of the Bible, in which — he produced pen portraits of figures who pointed up particular themes and phases in the Scriptures. At the time of his death he was working on a companion volume about women in the Bible.
Apart from these theological and biographical works, Matheson published eight volumes of devotional meditations and a book of poems. It is from them that the selection of his work that appears later in this book has largely been chosen. They are for me the finest products of a mind that displayed not just intellectual acuteness but also immense spiritual sensitivity and quite remarkable powers of imagination.
At acomparatively early stage of his ministry in Innellan Matheson had abandoned the traditional practice of reading two lessons from the Bible in the morning service. Instead he gave
his congregation a meditation on a verse from the Scriptures. This practice was very popular and many of his congregation urged him to publish the meditations. It was not until 1882 that the first collection appeared under the title My
Aspirations. The book was an instant success, going into numerous editions and finding its way
' into many homes not just in Scotland, but throughout Britain and on the Continent. A second volume of devotions, Moments on the Mount, was published in 1884. A third, Voices of the Spirit, appeared in 1888, followed by Searchings in the Silence (1895), Words by the Wayside (1896), Times of Retirement (1901),
Leaves for Quiet Hours (1904) and Rests by the River which was published shortly before Matheson's death in 1906. All went into several editions and several were translated into German and achieved significant sales on the Continent as well as throughout Britain.
Matheson believed very strongly that devotional writing should have intellectual weight as well as spiritual depth. He had no time for the shallow emotionalism of much popular piety. ''By devotional moments'', he wrote in the preface to Rests by the River, ''I do not mean moments of vacuity.'' Earlier, in the preface to Times of Retirement he had challenged the common view that devotion is a thing of the heart.
I do not think it is either merely or mainly so.
I hold that all devotion is based upon intellectual conviction ... The devotional writer must have a message as much as the
expositor. Devotion must be the child of reflection; it may rise on wings, but they must be the wings of thought. The meditations of this little book will appeal to the instinct of prayer just in proportion as they appeal to the teaching of experience; therefore before all things I have endeavoured to base the feeling of the heart on the conclusions of the mind.
Matheson's poems were gathered together into a volume of Sacred Songs in 1889. The two hymns for which he is known today, ''O love that wilt not let me go'' (X, 7) and ''Make me
© a captive, Lord, and then I shall be free'' (VI, 3), come from this collection. Like another great
Victorian Christian and poet whose work he much admired, John Henry Newman, Matheson
| did not intend his verses to be sung as hymns.
Indeed, they do not fulfil the criterion which he himself set for good hymns which is that they should abandon doctrine and concentrate on sounding a humanitarian note.
I don't think our hymns will ever be what they ought to be until we get them inspired by a sense of the enthusiasm of and for humanity.
| The hymnists speak of the surrender to Christ.
They forget that Christ is not simply an individual. He is Head of a body, the body of humanity; and it no longer expresses the idea correctly to join yourself to Christ only, you must give yourself to the whole brotherhood of man to fulfil the idea. Hymnology is feeble and ineffective when it ignores the humanitarian side of religion.
In stressing the importance of humanitarianism in the Christian religion.
Matheson was once again following the lead of German theologians like von Harnack and was very much in the mainstream of nineteenthcentury Liberal protestantism. He often referred to Jesus Christ as being at the head of a ''League of Pity'? and made frequent references to practical charity in his devotional meditations, as in his remark about the Celestial City being a home for hospital training (II, 2). For all his superb intellectual powers and almost mystical imagination, he had a great sense of the practical side of the Christian Gospel and of the need for followers of Jesus to ''quit the glorious mountain for the common plain'' (V, 1) and ''leave the green fields of speculation for the thorny paths of practice'' (V, 4)..I have included some of his meditations on this theme in the section entitled
''The Christian Life''.
The most striking characteristic of Matheson's meditations and poems is not their humanitarianism, however, but rather their originality. Again and again he takes a familiar passage from the Bible and gives it a wholly new interpretation, as in his use of the story of the shepherds and the wise men at the Nativity to distinguish two different kinds of Christian (V,
5). The key to the effectiveness of his devotional writings lies in his quite extraordinary powers of imagination. He had the ability to paint vivid impressionistic thought pictures to bring out the meaning of a Scriptural passage or a theological doctrine.
In the words of a friend and fellow-minister:
All his work, written or spoken, was a transcription of what he mentally saw. Truth' came to him in a vision; he did not reason it out.
. His power lay in holding up to others the same living impression of a subject which he himself had experienced. His preaching was not so much the elucidation of a text or of a theme as the re-telling of a series of graphic impressions which the subject had already made on him. Hence also his writings assumed a descriptive rather than an argumentative form, and became by preference a series of protraits or picture studies.
At first sight, it might seem a strange paradox that this highly pictorial and impressionistic style of writing should be found in a man who was blind. Yet it was surely the fact of Matheson's blindness that greatly increased his power to make images in his mind which he then transferred to paper. If he was to see things he had to conjure them up in his mind's eye.
Like many blind people, he developed his other senses to compensate in part for his loss of visual perception. His sense of hearing was particularly acute. A close friend commented that it was ''observing, discerning and thinking, the one perfect avenue in which things external poured into his thoughtful mind. In conversation the minutest difference of tone he at once detected. Many unknown people's peculiarities he diagnosed from their cough, their walk, their mode of blowing their noses''. There is a particularly vivid illustration of how he used his hearing to stimulate his imagination in the story
that a local doctor recounted of an evening spent with him in the manse at Innellan. A strong breeze was blowing over the Clyde outside throwing up white horses that broke on the _ shore with a muffled roar and a steamer was sounding its horn as it passed down the water.
Standing by the window, the blind minister commented to his companion:
That weird music comes up here from the ocean like the far-off music of another world, a symphony of great Nature. How varied and multiform it is! I often listen to it, when sitting here alone, or perhaps sometimes in the depth of night; it puts one in reverie. And that?
Listen! The monotone of that passing steamer, decisive and clear, how finely it blends with Nature's majestic music...
. It reminds me of the story of Goethe when he was on the Alps. On the whole, it seemed he liked best not the mountains with their snowy peaks in the sky, but a manufactory in one of the valleys.
The unceasing humming of the spinning-wheel sounded in his ears in such a place, as never before, as the Music of the Spheres. So is that symphony of Nature we are listening to, with the occasional syren-note.
Matheson's own thoughts on the need for blind people to cultivate and stimulate their powers of imagination are revealed in some remarks that he once made about deficiencies in their training: ''They have been taught any amount of cyphering and manual work, but it seems to me they have not been taught what they most
need, namely, how to conceive the thing that has been denied to them. The blind cannot conceive sight as sight but I hold that they may be able to conceive it by analogy''. He went on to suggest that by using sound and touch to convey the ideas of space, distance and even colour, it was possible to describe meaningfully to blind people even a process as apparently visual as the rising or setting of the sun.
In her book on the subject (Imagination, published in 1976), the philosopher Mary Warnock defines imagination as the power to produce images in the absence of the objects themselves imagined. If this is the case, then perhaps the blind are in a better position than the rest of us to develop this particular human faculty to the full. As she points out, seeing in the mind's eye may be more powerful than
| seeing in reality because we can concentrate on those images which are meaningful.
''The feeling engendered by the image may be more powerful in the absence than in the presence of the object.'' For a blind person this absence from objects is, of course, a permanent condition which must surely make the task of imaging, or imagining, more important than for a sighted person. There is a very strong sense of his own absence from the beauty of God's creation, and a powerfully imaginative evocation of what those beauties might be, in Matheson's poem, ''The Hidden Beauty'"' (II, 1).
He believed it was not just those who were physically blind like himself who needed to use their imaginations to appreciate the full wonder of God's creation. The vision of all mankind was
as yet clouded and partial and awaited the evolution of the human soul before it would be made full and perfect. He had a strong sense of the hidden dimension of beauty and wonder in God's creation which would be revealed as human beings progress in sensitivity and perception.
It comes over clearly in those meditations which I have grouped together in the section entitled ''Now we see through a glass darkly''. Here as in other aspects of his theology, it seems to me that Matheson is close to the Eastern Orthodox tradition. He sees human beings as set on a path of deification, gradually moving up towards God and with the eventual prospect of the wonder and splendour of the Divine plan being made manifest on this earth.
It is easy to see how the darkness and isolation brought about by Matheson's blindness could have enhanced his sense of expectancy of a coming time when God and his glory would be revealed to his children in a blaze of light and colour. But it is a measure of the sensitivity and the discipline of his Christian imagination that he did not allow it to turn into mere fantasy and wishful thinking. He had a profound sense of the darker side of God — His hiddenness in clouds and shadows, in lonely and empty places. This theme links the first group of meditations that I have selected below. Once again there are clear echoes here both of his own blindness and also of Eastern Orthodox theology. The idea that God and Christ are to be encountered primarily in the darkness is found in the writings of many of the Greek Fathers. In the early third century Origen developed a highly complex set of images around
the idea of Christ as a shadow rather than a light and in the fourth century Gregory of Nyssa portrayed the journey of the Christian soul towards God as an ascent from light to ever greater darkness on the basis of Moses' encounters with the Lord in the cloud on Mount
Sinai.
Matheson's meditations on this theme also have some affinity with the notion of the dark night of the soul developed by the sixteenth century Spanish mystic St John of the Cross. He actually likened the Christian faith to blindness since ''it informs us of matters we have never seen, or known, either in themselves or in their likeness'' and argued that, like the blind, those seeking for closer union with God ''must lean on dark faith, accept it as their guide and light and rest on nothing of what they understand, taste, feel or imagine''. Through his blindness
Matheson had his own dark night of the soul and knew only too well the feelings of desolation that it brought. Yet, like St John of the Cross, he could still frequently and sincerely thank God for the void places in his heart and for the sense of emptiness that he often experienced, believing that human beings were in fact nearer to the Divine presence in this state than when they were full of the joys of life (I, 6).
George Matheson's imaginative faculties were greatly enhanced by his memory. He himself had once beheld the world and its beauties, if only dimly, and the scenes which he remembered from his youth formed an important stock of imagery on which he was to draw in his theological.and devotional writings. He had,
indeed, achieved that state which William Wordsworth prayed for his sister Dorothy to attain When thy mind Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place For all sweet sounds and harmonies Like that other blind poet who had once enjoyed sight, John Milton, Matheson stored up the memories of sea, cloud and sky, flowers and stars from his youth and idealized them in his writings. I have gathered together some of his meditations on these themes in the section entitled '"'The World of Nature''. Some of them, like his thoughts on the treatment of animals, have a remarkably modern flavour. He had a great feeling for the physical as well as the spiritual — a strongly Incarnational theology which enabled him to see Christ as present in nature as well as in humanity. Undoubtedly his childhood memories of the beauties of nature played a major part in shaping the imagery from the physical world that he so often used in his writings. He himself was fascinated by the extent to which memory fashions perception, perhaps because he had to rely on it so much.
It forms the theme of his meditation ''In the Light of Eternity'' (IJ, 2) in which he looks forward as well as back and makes the point that to be properly understood the world needs to be seen in the light of its future destiny.
Matheson had a clear perception of what that destiny was — the gathering of all things
together into Christ and the creation of a new heaven and a new earth of inconceivable beauty and splendour.
He had an even clearer perception of the engine that was driving the world towards that destiny — the power of sacrifice. His thinking is summed up in his poem
''The Divine Plan of Creation'' (IV, 1):
Thou hast, O Lord, a wondrous plan, To build a tower to reach the skies; Its base is earth, its progress man, Its summit sacrifice.
The theme of sacrifice comes up again and again in Matheson's writings. I have drawn some of them together in section IV below. He was undoubtedly influenced by new thinking on this subject by mid-nineteenth-century theologians.
The old idea of propitiating or satisfying an angry Deity was giving way to a much deeper and more compassionate theology where the principle of sacrifice was seen as lying at the very heart of the Universe and God himself as the ultimate exponent of self-giving love, sacrificing his own Son to give life to mankind.
Matheson himself at one point describes God as ''the Spirit of sacrificial love'' (II, 6).
This new theology of sacrifice had been worked out most fully by the Anglican Christian
Socialist, F. D. Maurice, in a series of sermons published in 1854 under the title The Doctrine of Sacrifice. I feel sure that Matheson must have read this work and that it left a deep impression on him. Maurice argued that far from being a jealous or angry deity keen to see the punishment
of his faithless creatures, God was rather the author of life through sacrifice and Christ the demonstration of that life.
It was through sacrifice that the created world came into existence and through sacrifice that its evils were thwarted. The principle of sacrifice belonged to the very constitution of the Universe. It was not an after-thought introduced by God to deal with an unfortunate situation but a principle that "'lies at the very root of our being — our lives stand upon it; society is held together by it''.
Matheson strongly adhered to this view of the Atonement.
He was particularly fond of preaching on the text from Revelation, 13:8, "The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world'', to show how Christ's death had not been an accident but part of God's plan from the beginning. For him, as for Maurice, sacrifice was the animating principle that brought forth new life in both the natural and the supernatural worlds. As he wrote in one of his many sermons on this theme, ''All things shine by passing into the life of others: the seed into the flower, the sun into nature, the sea into the reflections of light. Each stage of human life expands by sacrifice of the self-will''.
This same theme underlies the closing lines of 'O love that wilt not let me go':
I lay in dust life's glory dead, And from the ground there blossoms red Life that shall endless be.
Explaining this somewhat puzzling imagery, Matheson wrote, ''I took red as the symbol of
that sacrificial life which blooms by shedding itself''.
It was in terms of the universal principle of sacrifice that hé found if not an explanation then at least a purpose for ali the world's suffering.
One of his parishioners in Edinburgh recalled that one of the commonest themes for his sermons was ''The perfection of man through suffering. He shed many a ray of light on the mystery of pain. He taught us that God meant us to overcome the pains of life, not by avoiding them, but by taking them to our hearts and passing them through our souls. We were to conquer all enemies by conquering all our enmity to them. Man was made by God to become perfect through sufferings, not to be made perfectly free from sufferings''.
In practical terms this meant not just the acceptance of pain and adversity but also a total surrender of self to God and to fellow human beings. '"There are four phases in the birth of the religious life'', he began one of his 'meditations in Moments on the Mount, ''selfawakening, self-reflection, self-help and selfabandonment''. It was only through such selfabandonment that true liberty could be found, that blessed state that comes from following Him whose service is perfect freedom and which Matheson expressed so beautifully in his poem,
''Make me a captive, Lord, and then I shall be free'' (VI, 3).
The image which Matheson returned to most often to express his ideas of sacrifice and selfabandonment is that of the sea. Perhaps it was because its sound had been the constant
accompaniment of his lonely evenings in the manse at Innellan.
There is a _ particularly interesting and highly original meditation which he based on the text of Revelation, 21:1: ''And there was no more sea'' (IV, 2). This passage is usually interpreted in terms of the Ancient
World's dread of the sea and as a promise that at the Second Coming this sign of chaos and evil in the natural world will be no more. But Matheson's rich imagination gives it a wholly new meaning.
Human life below has more sea than land. It is not a connected continent — a brotherhood of souls; it is a multitude of little islands divided by stormy waves. There is a great gulf fixed between my life and the life of my brother — the gulf of self-interest; I cannot pass over to him and he cannot pass over tome...
. But in that higher life which the seer of Patmos saw the gulfs were all dried up, and the separation of land from land appeared no more. Human nature became to his gaze a continent. Men lost their isolation and ran together in unity...
There was perfect self-forgetfulness, therefore there was no more sea.
Many religious traditions have used the image of the sea to express their beliefs about what happens at death. The idea of human souls being carried down like rivers until they merge into the infinity of the ocean is particularly a feature of Hinduism and Buddhism. Matheson paints something of the same picture in the first verse of ''O love that wilt not let me go'' when he
speaks of the individual's life being given back to God ''that in thine ocean depths its flow may richer, fuller be''. But he parts company with | the Eastern religions in wanting to stress the retention of the individual human personality after death, while believing that this is only achieved through the surrender of self-love:
Thou speakest of losing thyself in the ocean of His love, but this is only poetically true.
Love is an ocean where no man permanently loses himself; he regains himself in richer, nobler form. The only ocean in which a man loses himself is self-love; God's love gives him back his life that he may keep it unto life eternal' (X, 6).
| A conviction that the destiny of all humanity, and indeed of all creation, is to find a final and permanent resting place with God permeates all of Matheson's writings. Some meditations and poems which speak particularly eloquently of this theme will be found in the final section of extracts from his work which I have entitled
''Finding Our Rest in God''. There are many echoes there of St Augustine's great prayer:
''Thou awakest us to delight in Thy praises; for Thou madest us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee''.
Intellectual, poet, mystic, preacher and interpreter of the Word of God, Christian apologist, sensitive pastor and traveller along the way of suffering and sorrow — George Matheson was all of these. But above all, I think, he was a man of faith and imagination. Keen as he was
to show the compatibility of Christianity with reason and science, he always insisted that faith must precede knowledge (II, 5). He was not able any more than the rest of us are able to explain
or understand the mystery of suffering — why Christ died on the Cross, why he should have been stricken by blindness, why so many innocent souls lead lives of pain and misery. But he approached this mystery in a spirit of utter faith. For him St Paul's remark in 2 Corinthians
5:7, ''We walk by faith and not by sight'' was true in a spiritual as well as in a literal way.
George Matheson's faith was strengthened and deepened by his rich imaginative faculty. I can think of few people whose lives and writings better exemplify the contribution that imagination can make to a full and lively
Christian faith.
His near-contemporary and fellow Scot, George Macdonald, might have been thinking of the blind divine when he wrote in his essay on The Imagination: Its Functions and Its Culture (published in 1867):
In very truth a wise imagination, which is the presence of the spirit of God, is the best guide that man or woman can have; for it is not the things that we see the most clearly that influence us the most powerfully; undefined, yet vivid visions of something beyond, something which eye has not seen nor ear heard, have far more influence than any logical sequences whereby the same things may be demonstrated to the intellect. It is the nature of the thing, not the clearness of its outhne, that determines its operation.
For George Matheson, seeing nothing of the world as it is but filled with visions of the world as it might and will be, imagination was the form that faith took in the face of the mystery of existence. It was through the eyes of faith that he saw the world and the God whose sacrificial love through Jesus Christ gives it its very being.
And it was with the eyes of imagination that he interpreted the destiny of creation and the point and purpose of human life. ae