The Place Of The Cross In The World
THE PLACE OF THE CROSS
that it is not good for the man to be alone.
It is therefore an effect, and not a cause.
It it not a source of progress; it is the result of a progress springing from another source.
What that source is, it leaves us still to inquire.
And if we do inquire, I think we shall find that St. John has put his hand upon the one thing in the world which is progressive.
It is not intellect.
It is not imagination.
It is not even invention; that is the result of altruism.
It is altruism itself—the inability of the individual to live for his own interest.
St. John says creation is moving toward a type—a lamb slain; and it is moving toward that type in a straight line—the line of sacrifice.
It is climbing to its goal by successive steps which might be called steps downward— increasing limitations of the self-life.
"The Lamb slain from the foundation" means "the Lamb slain zz the foundation."
It is really an assertion of the fact that sacrifice is bound up in the constitution of nature, that the law of sacrifice is the law of nature, and
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that progress in the power to sacrifice is progress in the life of nature.
To what extent did St. John see this?
He had much less evidence for it than a man has now; that is just what proves his inspiration.
He anticipated a truth before it was demonstrated.
He was too young for the eye of science; but just by reason of his youth he had the eye of poetry.
He looked into the face of nature as the child looks into the fire—to see forms there.
He saw in visible nature a series of gospel pictures ; everything seemed to live only by losing itself.
He saw the waves of the sea of Patmos passing into waves of light; he beheld the waves of light passing into eddies of the sea.
It seemed to him that even in that lonely spot God had inscribed upon the walls of nature the image of a cross.
By-and-by, before the eyes of the seer there flashed a higher order of creation, and it was clothed in the same garb—the robe of sacrifice.
He passed from the pictorial representation of sacrifice in nature to its actual, though in-
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voluntary, representation in animal life.
The very reference to a slain lamb is a reference to an animal sacrifice.
The shedding at the altar of the lower creatures' blood must, to the gentle mind of St. John, have presented the same problem of pain which presses on the modern mind as what is called the survival of the fittest How did St. John reconcile himself to that spectacle of an involuntary sacrifice of the animal life prescribed by the Old Testament?
He said it was a type of Christ.
We in modern times smile at the naive answer.
Yet it may be questioned if, from any theistic point of view, a better can be found.
If sacrifice be the law of the highest being, it is desirable to reach it.
You can only reach anything by a repeated experience of it.
The first experience of everything must be unconscious.
Life itself is unconscious at the beginning; so, in general, is love.
What is Mr.
Herbert Spencer's account of the origin of conscience?
He says it began with compulsion; one generation did good deeds from fear, and the next did
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them from habit.
Is it not as reasonable to hold that sacrifice became voluntary from first being experienced zzvoluntarily?
The lower forms have been made to yield to lives more fit for the universe, and by their yielding they have made these lives fitter still.
They have propagated something—something which to them was a painful necessity, but which to the generation to come was to bea stimulus and a joy.
They have transmitted to posterity the battlefield on which they themselves have died, and, in the act of transmitting it, they have transformed the field of battle into a garden of roses.
In man that garden bursts into bloom.
How, we need not here inquire.
Some say it grew out of the animal; others, with whom I agree, that it required an added force.
Be this as it may, all are willing to admit that one side of our nature is allied to the life below.
That which has burst into flower is the thing which originally dropped blood.
What is it that has produced the change?
It is the advent of a power called love.
St John in this very
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book has the image of a woman rushing with her child into the wilderness to protect it from a dragon.
This shows there passed before him the natural sacrifices of the human heart.
There is, in my opinion, as much sacrifice of life in man as there is in the animal creation.
I believe that the cares of the heart prevent every man from living the full amount of his natural years.
What is the difference, then, between the sacrifice of the animal and the sacrifice of the man?
It is an inward difference ; the obligatory has become the voluntary.
What has made it voluntary?
It is love, a force to which in the animal world nothing exactly corresponds—a force which adds to the sacrifice, and at the same time helps to bear it.
It has increased at once the burden and the lever, the weight and the wing, the suffering and the power of sustenance ; it has, for the first time, made the cross a crown.
And yet, merely natural love is far from having reached the goal.
It is noble; it is beautiful ; but it is not the topmost triumph.
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For, what after all is that which it seeks?
Simply the survival of that which it deems the fittest—the nearest to itself.
In all its natural forms love seeks its own.
The mother's love, the brother's love, the husband's love, the son and daughter's love, are each and all the search for something kindred to ourselves.
St. John looks out for a vaster type—a love that can come where there is no kindred, no sympathy.
He seeks a love that shall strive for the survival of the wzfittest—the blood of a spotless soul that can wash the sins of the absolutely impure.
He seeks such a love as Paul sought in 1 Corinthians xiii, whose every step was a step downwards, a step into hearts foreign to its own—believing against present facts, hoping against existing clouds, bearing against daily disappointments, enduring against labour seemingly thrown away.
This is to John the perfect type of altruism— the Lamb that was slain.
It is the progress towards this type that constitutes, to St.
John, the philosophy of history.
The world, he would say, is made
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for Christ, and therefore it is not a perfect world.
It is not suited to the satisfaction of man—either his physical or his mental satisfaction.
It cribs and narrows his individual life at every corner, because it is made for another life than the individual.
It breaks the unity of the family, because it wants man to look farther than the family.
It interrupts the peace of the tribe, because it desires man to see beyond the tribe.
It destroys the boundaries of the nation, because it would stimulate man to a wider altruism than even the life of the patriot—an altruism which shall seek elements foreign to itself, and find a place in its heart for every country and kindred and people and tongue.
"Behold he cometh with clouds" is John's summary of the purpose of creation.
The clouds are made to rest upon everything with a local colouring, just that man may gaze upon that which is not local—that every eye may see Him.