By Henry Drummond
Come unto Me all ye that are weary and heavy-laden and I will give you rest.
Take My Yoke upon you and learn of Me, for I am Meek and Lowly in heart, and ye shall find Rest unto your souls. For My Yoke is easy and My Burden Light.
HEARD the other morning a sermon
by a distinguished preacher upon "Rest." It was full of delightful
thoughts; but when I came to ask myself," How does he say I can yet
Rest?" there was no answer. The sermon was sincerely meant to be practical,
yet it contained no experience that seemed to me to be tangible, nor any
advice which could help me to find the thing itself as I went about the
world that afternoon. Yet this omission of the only important problem was
not the fault of the preacher. The whole popular religion is in the twilight
here. And when pressed for really working specifics for the experiences
with which it deals, it falters, and seems to lose itself in mist.
This want of connection between the great
words of religion and every-day life has bewildered and discouraged all
of us. Christianity possesses the noblest words in the language; its literature
overflows with terms expressive of the greatest and happiest moods which
can fill the soul of man. Rest, Joy, Peace, Faith, Love, Light--these words
occur with such persistency in hymns and prayers that an observer might
think they formed the staple of Christian experience. But on coming to
close quarters with the actual life of most of us, how surely would he
be disenchanted. I do not think we ourselves are aware how much our Religious
life is made up of phrases; how much of what we call Christian experience
is only a dialect of the Churches, a mere religious phraseology with almost
nothing behind it in what we really feel and know.
For some of us, indeed, the Christian experiences
seem further away than when we took the first steps in the Christian life.
That life has not opened out as we had hoped; we do not regret our religion,
but we are disappointed with it. There are times, perhaps, when wandering
notes from diviner music stray into our spirits; but these experiences
come at few and fitful moments. We have no sense of possession in
them. When they visit us, it is a surprise. When they leave us, it is without
explanation. When we wish their return, we do not know how to secure it
All which points to a religion without solid
base, and a poor and flickering life. It means a great bankruptcy in those
experiences which give Christianity its personal solace and make it attractive
to the world, and a great uncertainty as to any remedy. It is as if we
knew everything about health-- except the way to get it.
I am quite sure that the difficulty does
not lie in the fact that men are not in earnest. This is simply not the
fact. All around us Christians are wearing themselves out in trying to
be better. The amount of spiritual longing in the world--in the hearts
of unnumbered thousands of men and women in whom we should never suspect
it; among the wise and thoughtful; among the young and gay, who seldom
assuage and never betray their thirst--this is one of the most wonderful
and touching facts of life. It is not more heat that is needed, but more
light; not more force, but a wiser direction to be given to very real energies
already there.
What Christian experience wants is thread,
a vertebral column, method. It is impossible to believe that there
is no remedy for its unevenness and dishevelment, or that the remedy is
a secret. The idea, also, that some few men, by happy chance or happier
temperament, have acquired the secret--as if there were some sort of knack
or trick of it--is wholly incredible. Religion must ripen its fruit for
men of every temperament; and the way even into its highest heights must
be by a gateway through which the peoples of the world may pass.
I shall try to lead up to this gateway by
a very familiar path. But as that path is strangely unfrequented, and even
unknown where it passes into the religious sphere, I must dwell for a moment
on the commonest of commonplaces
NOTHING that happens in the
world happens by chance. God is a God of order. Everything is arranged
upon definite principles, and never at random. The world, even the religious
world, is governed by law. Character is governed by law. Happiness is governed
by law. The Christian experiences are governed by law. Men, forgetting
this, expect Rest, Joy, Peace, Faith, to drop into their souls from the
air like snow or rain. But in point of fact they do not do so; and if they
did they would no less have their origin in previous activities and be
controlled by natural laws. Rain and snow do drop from the air, but not
without a long previous history. They are the mature effects of former
causes. Equally so are Rest, and Peace, and Joy. They, too, have each a
previous history Storms and winds and calms are not accidents, but are
brought about by antecedent circumstances. Rest and Peace are but calms
in man's inward nature, and arise through causes as definite and as inevitable.
Realize it thoroughly: it is a methodical
not an accidental world. If a housewife turns out a good cake, it is the
result of a sound receipt, carefully applied. She cannot mix the assigned
ingredients and fire them for the appropriate time without producing the
result. It is not she who has made the cake; it is nature. She brings related
things together; sets causes at work; these causes bring about the result.
She is not a creator, but an intermediary. She does not expect random causes
to produce specific effects--random ingredients would only produce random
cakes. So it is in the making of Christian experiences. Certain lines are
followed; certain effects are the result. These effects cannot but be the
result. But the result can never take place without the previous cause.
To expect results without antecedents is to expect cakes without ingredients.
That impossibility is precisely the almost universal expectation.
Now what I mainly wish to do is to
help you to firmly grasp this simple principle of Cause and Effect in the
spiritual world. And instead of applying the principle generally to each
of the Christian experiences in turn, I shall examine its application to
one in some little detail. The one I shall select is Rest. And I think
any one who follows the application in this single instance will be able
to apply it for himself to all the others.
Take such a sentence as this: African explorers
are subject to fevers which cause restlessness and delirium. Note the expression,
"cause restlessness." Restlessness has a cause. Clearly,
then, any one who wished to get rid of restlessness would proceed at once
to deal with the cause. If that were not removed, a doctor might prescribe
a hundred things, and all might be taken in turn, without producing
the least effect. Things are so arranged in the original planning of the
world that certain effects must follow certain causes, and certain causes
must be abolished before certain effects can be removed. Certain parts
of Africa are inseparably linked with the physical experience called fever;
this fever is in turn infallibly linked with a mental experience called
restlessness and delirium. To abolish the mental experience the radical
method would be to abolish the physical experience, and the way of abolishing
the physical experience would be to abolish Africa, or to cease to go there.
Now this holds good for all other forms of Restlessness. Every other form
and kind of Restlessness in the world has a definite cause, and the particular
kind of Restlessness can only be removed by removing the allotted cause.
All this is also true of Rest. Restlessness
has a cause: Must not Rest have a cause? Necessarily. If it were
a chance world we would not expect this; but, being a methodical world,
it cannot be otherwise. Rest, physical rest, moral rest, spiritual rest,
every kind of rest has a cause, as certainly as restlessness. Now causes
are discriminating. There is one kind of cause for every particular effect,
and no other; and if one particular effect is desired, the corresponding
cause must be set in motion. It is no use proposing finely devised schemes,
or going through general pious exercises in the hope that somehow Rest
will come. The Christian life is not casual but causal. All nature is a
standing protest against the absurdity of expecting to secure spiritual
effects, or any effects, without the employment of appropriate causes.
The Great Teacher dealt what ought to have been the final blow to this
infinite irrelevancy by a single question, "Do men gather grapes of
thorns or figs of thistles?"
Why, then, did the Great Teacher not educate
His followers fully? Why did He not tell us, for example, how such a thing
as Rest might be obtained? The answer is, that He did. But plainly,
explicitly, in so many words? Yes, plainly, explicitly, in so many words.
He assigned Rest to its cause, in words with which each of us has been
familiar from our earliest childhood.
He begins, you remember--for you at once
know the passage I refer to--almost as if Rest could be had without any
cause: "Come unto Me" He says, "and I will give you
Rest."
Rest, apparently, was a favour to be bestowed;
men had but to come to Him; He would give it to every applicant. But the
next sentence takes that all back. The qualification, indeed, is added
instantaneously. For what the first sentence seemed to give was next thing
to an impossibility. For how, in a literal sense, can Rest be given?
One could no more give away Rest than he could give away Laughter.
We speak of "causing" laughter, which we can do; but we cannot
give it away. When we speak of giving pain, we know perfectly well we cannot
give pain away. And when we aim at giving pleasure, all that we do is to
arrange a set of circumstances in such a way as that these shall cause
pleasure. Of course there is a sense, and a very wonderful sense, in which
a Great Personality breathes upon all who come within its influence an
abiding peace and trust. Men can be to other men as the shadow of a great
rock in a thirsty land. Much more Christ; much more Christ as Perfect Man;
much more still as Saviour of the world. But it is not this of which I
speak. When Christ said He would give men Rest, He meant simply that He
would put them in the way of it. By no act of conveyance would, or could,
He make over His own Rest to them. He could give them His receipt for it.
That was all. But He would not make it for them; for one thing, it was
not in His plan to make it for them; for another thing, men were not so
planned that it could be made for them; and for yet another thing, it was
a thousand times better that they should make it for themselves.
That this is the meaning becomes obvious
from the wording of the second sentence: "Learn of Me and ye shall
find Rest." Rest, that is to say, is not a thing that can be
given, but a thing to be acquired. It comes not by an act, but by
a process. It is not to be found in a happy hour, as one finds a treasure;
but slowly, as one finds knowledge. It could indeed be no more found in
a moment than could knowledge. A soil has to be prepared for it. Like a
fine fruit, it will grow in one climate and not in another; at one altitude
and not at another. Like all growths it will have an orderly development
and mature by slow degrees.
The nature of this slow process Christ clearly
defines when He says we are to achieve Rest by learning. "Learn
of Me," He says, "and ye shall find rest to your souls."
Now consider the extraordinary originality of this utterance. How novel
the connection between these two words, "Learn" and "Rest"?
How few of us have ever associated them--ever thought that Rest was a thing
to be learned; ever laid ourselves out for it as we would to learn a language;
ever practised it as we would practise the violin. Does it not show how
entirely new Christ's teaching still is to the world, that so old and threadbare
an aphorism should still be so little applied? The last thing most of us
would have thought of would have been to associate Rest with Work.
What must one work at? What is that which
if duly learned will find the soul of man in Rest? Christ answers without
the least hesitation. He specifies two things-- Meekness and Lowliness.
"Learn of Me," He says, "for I am meek and lowly
in heart." Now these two things are not chosen at random. To these
accomplishments, in a special way, Rest is attached. Learn these, in short,
and you have already found Rest. These as they stand are direct causes
of Rest; will produce it at once; cannot but produce it at once. And if
you think for a single moment, you will see how this is necessarily so,
for causes are never arbitrary, and the connection between antecedent and
consequent here and everywhere lies deep in the nature of things.
What is the connection, then? I answer by
a further question. What are the chief causes of Unrest? If you
know yourself, you will answer Pride, Selfishness, Ambition. As you look
back upon the past years of your life, is it not true that its unhappiness
has chiefly come from the succession of personal mortifications and almost
trivial disappointments which the intercourse of life has brought you?
Great trials come at lengthened intervals, and we rise to breast them;
but it is the petty friction of our every-day life with one another, the
jar of business or of work, the discord of the domestic circle, the collapse
of our ambition, the crossing of our will, the taking down of our conceit,
which make inward peace impossible. Wounded vanity, then, disappointed
hopes, unsatisfied selfishness--these are the old, vulgar, universal sources
of man's unrest.
Now it is obvious why Christ pointed out
as the two chief objects for attainment the exact opposites of these. To
Meekness and Lowliness these things simply do not exist. They cure unrest
by making it impossible. These remedies do not trifle with surface symptoms;
they strike at once at removing causes. The ceaseless chagrin of a self-centered
life can be removed at once by learning Meekness and Lowliness of heart.
He who learns them is for ever proof against it. He lives henceforth a
charmed life. Christianity is a fine inoculation, a transfusion of healthy
blood into an anaemic or poisoned soul. No fever can attack a perfectly
sound body; no fever of unrest can disturb a soul which has breathed the
air or learned the ways of Christ. Men sigh for the wings of a dove that
they may fly away and be at Rest. But flying away will not help us. "The
Kingdom of God is within you." We aspire to the top to look
for Rest; it lies at the bottom. Water rests only when it gets to the lowest
place. So do men. Hence, be lowly. The man who has no opinion of himself
at all can never be hurt if others do not acknowledge him. Hence, be meek.
He who is without expectation cannot fret if nothing comes to him. It is
self-evident that these things are so. The lowly man and the meek man are
really above all other men, above all other things. They dominate the world
because they do not care for it. The miser does not possess gold, gold
possesses him. But the meek possess it "The meek" said Christ,
"inherit the earth." They do not buy it; they do not conquer
it; but they inherit it.
There are people who go about the world looking
out for slights, and they are necessarily miserable, for they find them
at every turn--especially the imaginary ones. One has the same pity for
such men as for the very poor. They are the morally illiterate. They have
had no real education, for they have never learned how to live. Few men
know how to live. We grow up at random, carrying into mature life the merely
animal methods and motives which we had as little children. And it does
not occur to us that all this must be changed; that much of it must be
reversed; that life is the finest of the Fine Arts; that it has to be learned
with lifelong patience, and that the years of our pilgrimage are all too
short to master it triumphantly.
Yet this is what Christianity is for--to
Teach men the Art of Life And its whole curriculum lies in one word--"Learn
of Me." Unlike most education, this is almost purely personal, it
is not to be had from books or lectures or creeds or doctrines. It is a
study from the life. Christ never said much in mere words about the Christian
graces. He lived them, He was them. Yet we do not merely copy Him. We learn
His art by living with Him, like the old apprentices with their masters.
Now we understand it all? Christ's invitation
to the weary and heavy-laden is a call to begin life over again upon a
new principle upon His own principle. "Watch My way of doing things,"
He says. "Follow Me. Take life as I take it. Be meek and lowly and
you will find Rest."
I do not say, remember, that the Christian
life to every man, or to any man, can be a bed of roses. No educational
process can be this. And perhaps if some men knew how much was involved
in the simple "learn" of Christ, they would not enter His school
with so irresponsible a heart. For there is not only much to learn, but
much to unlearn. Many men never go to this school at all till their disposition
is already half ruined and character has taken on its fatal set. To learn
arithmetic is difficult at fifty--much more to learn Christianity. To learn
simply what it is to be meek and lowly, in the case of one who has had
no lessons in that in childhood, may cost him half of what he values most
on earth. Do we realize, for instance, that the way of teaching humility
is generally by humiliation? There is probably no other school for
it. When a man enters himself as a pupil in such a school it means a very
great thing. There is much Rest there, but there is also much Work.
I should be wrong, even though my theme is
the brighter side, to ignore the cross and minimise the cost. Only it gives
to the cross a more definite meaning, and a rarer value, to connect it
thus directly and causally with the growth of the inner life. Our
platitudes on the "benefits of affliction" are usually about
as vague as our theories of Christian Experience. "Somehow,"
we believe affliction does us good. But it is not a question of "Somehow."
The result is definite, calculable, necessary. It is under the strictest
law of cause and effect. The first effect of losing one's fortune, for
instance, is humiliation; and the effect of humiliation, as we have just
seen, is to make one humble; and the effect of being humble is to produce
Rest. It is a round-about way, apparently, of producing Rest; but Nature
generally works by circular processes; and it is not certain that there
is any other way of becoming humble, or of finding Rest. If a man could
make himself humble to order, it might simplify matters, but we do not
find that this happens. Hence we must all go through the mill. Hence
death, death to the lower self, is the nearest gate, and the quickest road
to life.
Yet this is only half the truth. Christ's
life outwardly was one of the most troubled lives that was ever lived:
Tempest and tumult, tumult and tempest, the waves breaking over it all
the time till the worn body was laid in the grave. But the inner life was
a sea of glass. The great calm was always there. At any moment you might
have gone to Him and found Rest. And even when the blood-hounds were dogging
Him in the streets of Jerusalem, He turned to His disciples and offered
them, as a last legacy, "My peace." Nothing ever for a moment
broke the serenity of Christ's life on earth. Misfortune could not reach
him; He had no fortune. Food, raiment, money-fountain-heads of half the
world's weariness-- He simply did not care for; they played no part in
his life; He "took no thought" for them. It was impossible to
affect Him by lowering His reputation; He had already made Himself of no
reputation. He was dumb before insult. When He was reviled He reviled not
again. In fact, there was nothing that the world could do to Him that could
ruffle the surface of His spirit.
Such living, as mere living, is altogether
unique. It is only when we see what it was in Him that we can know what
the word Rest means. It lies not in emotions, nor in the absence of emotions.
It is not a hallowed feeling that comes over us in church. It is not something
that the preacher has in his voice. It is not in nature, nor in poetry,
nor in music--though in all these there is soothing. It is the mind at
leisure from itself. It is the perfect poise of the soul; the absolute
adjustment of the inward man to the stress of all outward things; the preparedness
against every emergency; the stability of assured convictions; the eternal
calm of an invulnerable faith; the repose of a heart set deep in God. It
is the mood of the man who says, with Browning, "God's in His Heaven,
all's well with the world."
Two painters each painted a picture to illustrate
his conception of rest. The first chose for his scene a still, lone lake
among the far-off mountains. The second threw on his canvas a thundering
waterfall, with a fragile birch-tree bending over the foam; at the fork
of a branch, almost wet with the cataract's spray, a robin sat on its nest.
The first was only Stagnation; the last was Rest. For in
Rest there are always two elements --tranquillity and energy; silence and
turbulence; creation and destruction; fearlessness and fearfulness. This
it was in Christ.
It is quite plain from all this that
whatever else He claimed to be or to do, He at least knew how to live.
All this is the perfection of living, of living in the mere sense of passing
through the world in the best way. Hence His anxiety to communicate His
idea of life to others. He came, He said, to give men life, true life,
a more abundant life than they were living; "the life," as the
fine phrase in the Revised Version has it, "that is life indeed."
This is what He himself possessed, and it was this which He offers to all
mankind. And hence His direct appeal for all to come to Him who had not
made much of life, who were weary and heavy-laden. These He would teach
His secret. They, also, should know "the life that is life
indeed".
THERE is still one doubt to
clear up. After the statement, "Learn of Me," Christ throws in
the disconcerting qualification, "Take My yoke upon you and
learn of Me." Why, if all this be true, does He call it a yoke?
Why, while professing to give Rest, does He with the next breath whisper
"burden"? Is the Christian life after all, what its enemies take
it for--an additional weight to the already great woe of life, some
extra punctiliousness about duty, some painful devotion to observances,
some heavy restriction and trammelling of all that is joyous and free in
the world? Is life not hard and sorrowful enough without being fettered
with yet another yoke?
It is astounding how so glaring a misunderstanding
of this plain sentence should ever have passed into currency. Did
you ever stop to ask what a yoke is really for? Is it to be a burden to
the animal which wears it? It is just the opposite. It is to make its burden
light. Attached to the oxen in any other way than by a yoke, the plough
would be intolerable. Worked by means of a yoke, it is light. A yoke is
not an instrument of torture; it is an instrument of mercy. It is not a
malicious contrivance for making work hard; it is a gentle device to make
hard labour light. It is not meant to give pain, but to save pain. And
yet men speak of the yoke of Christ as if it were a slavery,
and look upon those who wear it as objects of compassion? For generations
we have had homilies on "The Yoke of Christ," some delighting
in portraying its narrow exactions; some seeking in these exactions the
marks of its divinity; others apologising for it, and toning it down; still
others assuring us that, although it be very bad, it is not to be
compared with the positive blessings of Christianity. How many, especially
among the young, has this one mistaken phrase driven for ever away
from the kingdom of God? Instead of making Christ attractive, it makes
Him out a taskmaster, narrowing life by petty restrictions, calling
for self-denial where none is necessary, making misery a virtue under the
plea that it is the yoke of Christ, and happiness criminal because
it now and then evades it. According to this conception, Christians are
at best the victims of a depressing fate; their life is a penance; and
their hope for the next world purchased by a slow martyrdom in this.
The mistake has arisen from taking the word
"yoke" here in the same sense as in the expressions "under
the yoke," or "wear the yoke in his youth." But in Christ's
illustration it is not the jugum of the Roman soldier, but the simple
"harness" or "ox-collar" of the Eastern peasant. It
is the literal wooden yoke which He, with His own hands in the carpenter's
shop, had probably often made. He knew the difference between a smooth
yoke and a rough one, a bad fit and a good fit; the difference also
it made to the patient animal which had to wear it. The rough yoke
galled, and the burden was heavy; the smooth yoke caused no pain, and the
load was lightly drawn. The badly fitted harness was a misery; the well
fitted collar was "easy."
And what was the "burden"? It was
not some special burden laid upon the Christian, some unique infliction
that he alone must bear. It was what all men bear. It was simply life,
human life itself, the general burden of life which all must carry
with them from the cradle to the grave. Christ saw that men took life painfully.
To some it was a weariness, to others a failure, to many a tragedy, to
all a struggle and a pain. How to carry this burden of life had been
the whole world's problem. It is still the whole world's problem. And
here is Christ's solution: "Carry it as I do. Take life as I take
it. Look at it from My point of view. Interpret it upon My principles.
Take My yoke and learn of Me, and you will find it easy. For My yoke
is easy, works easily, sits right upon the shoulders, and therefore
my burden is light."
There is no suggestion here that religion
will absolve any man from bearing burdens. That would be to absolve him
from living, since it is life itself that is the burden. What Christianity
does propose is to make it tolerable. Christ's yoke is simply His secret
for the alleviation of human life, His prescription for the best and happiest
method of living. Men harness themselves to the work and stress of the
world in clumsy and unnatural ways. The harness they put on is antiquated.
A rough, ill-fitted collar at the best, they make its strain and friction
past enduring, by placing it where the neck is most sensitive; and by mere
continuous irritation this sensitiveness increases until the whole nature
is quick and sore.
This is the origin, among other things, of
a disease called "touchiness"--a disease which, in spite of its
innocent name, is one of the gravest sources of restlessness in
the world. Touchiness, when it becomes chronic, is a morbid condition of
the inward disposition. It is self-love inflamed to the acute point; conceit,
with a hair-trigger. The cure is to shift the yoke to
some other place; to let men and things touch us through some new
and perhaps as yet unused part of our nature; to become meek
and lowly in heart while the old nature is becoming numb from want of use.
It is the beautiful work of Christianity everywhere to adjust the burden
of life to those who bear it, and them to it. It has a perfectly
miraculous gift of healing. Without doing any violence to human nature
it sets it right with life, harmonizing it with all surrounding things,
and restoring those who are jaded with the fatigue and dust of the world
to a new grace of living. In the mere matter of altering he perspective
of life and changing the proportions of things, its function in lightening
the care of man is altogether its own. The weight of a load depends upon
the attraction of the earth. But suppose the attraction of the earth were
removed? A ton on some other planet, where the attraction of gravity is
less, does not weigh half a ton. Now Christianity removes the attraction
of the earth, and this is one way in which it diminishes men's burden.
It makes them citizens of another world. What was a ton yesterday is not
half a ton today. So, without changing one's circumstances, merely by offering
a wider horizon and a different standard, it alters the whole aspect of
the world.
Christianity as Christ taught it is the truest
philosophy of life ever spoken. But let us be quite sure when we speak
of Christianity that we mean Christ's Christianity. Other versions are
either caricatures, or exaggerations, or misunderstandings, or short-sighted
and surface readings. For the most part their attainment is hopeless and
the results wretched. But I care not who the person is, or through what
vale of tears he has passed, or is about to pass, there is a new life for
him along this path.
WERE Rest my subject, there
are other things I should wish to say about it, and other kinds of Rest
of which I should like to speak. But that is not my subject. My theme is
that the Christian experiences are not the work of magic, but come under
the law of Cause and Effect. And I have chosen Rest only as a single illustration
of the working of that principle. If there were time I might next run over
all the Christian experiences in turn, and show how the same wide law applies
to each. But I think it may serve the better purpose if I leave this further
exercise to yourselves. I know no Bible study that you will find more full
of fruit, or which will take you nearer to the ways of God, or make the
Christian life itself more solid or more sure. I shall add only a single
other illustration of what I mean, before I close
Where does Joy come from? I knew a Sunday
scholar whose conception of Joy was that it was a thing made in lumps and
kept somewhere in Heaven, and that when people prayed for it, pieces were
somehow let down and fitted into their souls. I am not sure that views
as gross and material are not often held by people who ought to be wiser.
In reality, Joy is as much a matter of Cause and Effect as pain. No one
can get Joy by merely asking for it. It is one of the ripest fruits of
the Christian life, and, like all fruits, must be grown. There is a very
clever trick in India called the mango-trick. A seed is put in the ground
and covered up, and after divers incantations a full-blown mango-bush appears
within five minutes. I never met any one who knew how the thing was done,
but I never met any one who believed it to be anything else than a conjuring-trick.
The world is pretty unanimous now in its belief in the orderliness of Nature.
Men may not know how fruits grow, but they do know that they cannot grow
in five minutes. Some lives have not even a stalk on which fruits could
hang, even if they did grow in five minutes. Some have never planted one
sound seed of Joy in all their lives; and others who may have planted a
germ or two have lived so little in sunshine that they never could come
to maturity.
Whence, then, is Joy? Christ put His teaching
upon this subject into one of the most exquisite of His parables. I should
in any instance have appealed to His teaching here, as in the case of Rest,
for I do not wish you to think I am speaking words of my own. But it so
happens that He has dealt with it in a passage of unusual fulness.
I need not recall the whole illustration.
It is the parable of the Vine. Did you ever think why Christ spoke that
parable? He did not merely throw it into space as a fine illustration of
general truths. It was not simply a statement of the mystical union, and
the doctrine of an indwelling Christ. It was that; but it was more. After
He had said it, He did what was not an unusual thing when He was teaching
His greatest lessons. He turned to the disciples and said He would tell
them why he had spoken it. It was to tell them how to get Joy. "These
things have I spoken unto you," He said, "that My Joy might remain
in you and that your Joy might be full." It was a purposed and deliberate
communication of His secret of Happiness.
Go back over these verses, then, and you
will find the Causes of this Effect, the spring, and the only spring, out
of which true Happiness comes. I am not going to analyse them in detail.
I ask you to enter into the words for yourselves. Remember, In the first
place, that the Vine was the Eastern symbol of Joy. It was its fruit that
made glad the heart of man. Yet, however innocent that gladness--for the
expressed juice of the grape was the common drink at every peasant's board--the
gladness was only a gross and passing thing. This was not true happiness,
and the vine of the Palestine vineyards was not the true vine. Christ
was "the true Vine." Here, then, is the ultimate source
of Joy. Through whatever media it reaches us, all true Joy and
Gladness find their source in Christ. By this, of course, is not meant
that the actual Joy experienced is transferred from Christ's nature,
or is something passed on from Him to us. What is passed on is His method
of getting it. There is, indeed, a sense in which we can share another's
joy or another's sorrow. But that is another matter. Christ is the
source of Joy to men in the sense in which He is the source of rest.
His people share His life, and therefore share its consequences, and one
of these is Joy. His method of living is one that in the nature
of things produces Joy. When He spoke of His Joy remaining with
us He meant in part that the causes which produced it should continue to
act. His followers, that is to say, by repeating His life would
experience its accompaniments. His Joy, His kind of Joy, would remain with
them.
The medium through which this Joy comes is
next explained: "He that abideth in Me the same bringeth forth much
fruit." Fruit first, Joy next; the one the cause or medium of the
other. Fruit-bearing is the necessary antecedent; Joy both the necessary
consequent and the necessary accompaniment. It lies partly in the bearing
fruit, partly in the fellowship which makes that possible. Partly that
is to say, Joy lies in mere constant living in Christ's presence, with
all that that implies of peace, of shelter, and of love; partly in the
influence of that Life upon mind and character and will; and partly in
the inspiration to live and work for others, with all that that brings
of self-riddance and Joy in other's gain. All these, in different ways
and at different times, are sources of pure Happiness. Even the simplest
of them --to do good to other people--is an instant and infallible specific.
There is no mystery about Happiness whatever. Put in the right ingredients
and it must come out. He that abideth in Him will bring forth much fruit;
and bringing forth much fruit is Happiness. The infallible receipt for
Happiness, then, is to do good; and the infallible receipt for doing good
is to abide in Christ. The surest proof that all this is a plain matter
of Cause and Effect is that men may try every other conceivable way of
finding Happiness, and they will fail. Only the right cause in each case
can produce the right effect.
Then the Christian experiences are our own
making? In the same sense in which grapes are our own making, and no more.
All fruits grow--whether they grow in the soil or in the soul; whether
they are the fruits of the wild grape or of the True Vine. No man can make
things grow. He can get them to grow by arranging all the circumstances
and fulfilling all the conditions. But the growing is done by God. Causes
and effects are eternal arrangements, set in the constitution of the world;
fixed beyond man's ordering. What man can do is to place himself in the
midst of a chain of sequences. Thus he can get things to grow: thus he
himself can grow. But the grower is the Spirit of God.
What more need I add but this--test the method
by experiment. Do not imagine that you have got these things because you
know how to get them. As well try to feed upon a cookery book. But I think
I can promise that if you try in this simple and natural way, you will
not fail. Spend the time you have spent in sighing for fruits in fulfilling
the conditions of their growth. The fruits will come, must come. We have
hitherto paid immense attention to effects, to the mere experiences
themselves; we have described them, extolled them, advised them, prayed
for them -- done everything but find out what caused them. Henceforth
let us deal with causes. "To be," says Lotze, "is to be
in relations." About every other method of living the Christian life
there is an uncertainty. About every other method of acquiring the Christian
experiences there is a "perhaps." But in so far as this method
is the way of nature, it cannot fail. Its guarantee is the laws of the
universe, and these are "the Hands of the Living God."