THE

THE HIDDEN HEART.

HE word Heart, the words nearly synonymous with it or closely related to it, the kindred forms of expression, the One Great idea and the subordinate ideas suggested by them, occupy a large place in the Scriptural language and the Scriptural thought. It is the purpose of the present paper to attempt an exploration of this rich field. In so doing, the following words of Christ may be taken as the key-text, the starting-point and the returning-goal of the whole discussion: "The good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things; but the evil man, out of the evil treasure of the heart, bringeth forth evil things" (Luke vi. 45). There is no assumption here of philosophical or psychological language. It is a very common saying that the Bible was not given to teach us science-natural science or physiology. Its anatomy is not to be taken as exclusively correct, or binding upon us. So, also, is it maintained, and in a certain sense most correctly, that we must not expect to find in the Scriptures a system of mental philosophy. The remark, however, is often used to denote something different from this, as tho it were in vain to search these divine writings for any aid in discovering the deeper or more interior truths of man's nature. The Bible was given for practical purposes; so is it often and most truly said; it was intended for the guidance of plain minds in the plain duties of life and religion; we must not expect to learn psychology from it. Now it is certainly correct to say that the Scriptures are not philosophical in the ordinary sense of that term. They are not a yvoσ15, "a knowledge" or gnostical scheme affecting either a philosophical height or philosophical profundity. They are not esoteric, that is, for the initiated few. Such a style would be unworthy of truth that comes down to us from

γνῶσις,

Heaven and out of the Infinite Love. In respect to the great ideas of revelation, we are all so much on a par that any language adapted to a certain class of minds would be a mockery of humanity. It would come no nearer to truth in one direction; it would have every appearance of falsity and one-sidedness on the other.

Still may it be maintained that there is in this simple language of the Saviour, and in this plain imagery of the Scriptures, the sounding of a depth in human nature to which no mere treatise on psychology or anthropology has ever penetrated. Our a priori or rational psychology may give us the outline of the spiritual structure; it may fix for us, with more or less exactness, and in its own language, the location of this inner chamber which the Scriptures style "the heart" or "the treasurehouse of the heart;" but it fails to explore its actual moral or spiritual contents. Our empirical psychology, on the other hand, and our empirical ethics, may trace effects or things as "they come out" in experience. None but a Divine knowledge and a Divine revelation, either inward or outward, can discover to us the deep fountain of these outgoings, or the true condition of the primal source from which they flow.

There is a department of the human soul which Christ calls "the treasure" or "the treasure-house." It is the strong vault of the spirit far down below the outward word and act, below the thoughts in any objective shape they may assume to our thinking consciousness. Yes, below the thoughts, we say, for they are born in it and come up out of it. "Out of the heart come forth evil thoughts." "The imagination of the thoughts of the heart are evil, and evil continually." It is below the emotions even, which lie lower down than the thoughts. It is deeper than any motus, movement, or acting of the soul, unless we mean that static action, force, or life which is involved in its very spiritual status or constitution; since all life, all being in fact, is inseparable from the idea of a doing or an energy in some form. It is thus not only below all doing in the motive sense, but all willing as the commencement of any spiritual movement. That which energizes in us "both to will and to do," be it nature or be it a divine life, must be something still lower, still more interior than either the doing or the willing.

"For out of the heart there come forth (épxovτai) evil thoughts" (Matt. xv. 19). The words are stronger than this. They mean more than thoughts in our common conception of an image or notion, or merely passive mental exercise. "Out of the heart come forth (dialoуισμοì пovпpoì) evil reasonings," purposes, conclusions, not formed after they come out, but having received their shape and feature, their organization, their constitutive energy, down in the heart itself through some process of spiritual chemistry unfelt, as it is unknown, to the upper consciousness. They have been conceived there, to use the strong metaphor of James i. 15, and brought to birth in this interior generative chamber of the soul: "Then lust, as soon as it hath conceived (ovλlaßоõõα, aorist participle), breedeth sin, and sin, immediately finished (anoreλeσ0ɛioa), is pregnant with death." The work down there has been fully done before it comes forth. They are no abortions, no half-formed things, possibilities, susceptibilities—some would call them—tendencies to evil, but having in themselves no moral character. Such is not the meaning of the apostle's remarkable language and most expressive metaphor. The Ovμía, the desire, hath conceived and generated sin; the sin is full formed, full grown, and hath already generated death.

"Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts." And what a brood are they when they thus come forth from the dark womb of depravity, from the evil mother-heart, and take those specific names of crime, and those outward forms (as distinguished from the inner evil constitution) to which they are shaped by the relations and circumstances of the outer life. Listen to the terrible muster-roll: "Murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, blasphemies;" or, in the fuller statistics of the apostle, "enmities, strifes, jealousies, ruling passions (Ovμoi), divisions, heresies, envyings, revilings, whisperings, backbiting, malice, cruelty." They are not only lusts of the flesh, born of the sentient nature and the sentient heart, but "lusts of the mind" or spirit, pure soul-sins having no fleshly generation-sins such as devils may commit, or disembodied evil spirits "lusts of the mind," less regarded in our modern ethics, but really more intensely evil and more purely evil than their fleshly sisters.

"Murders, adulteries, enmities, strifes, envyings, whisperings,

malice”—these are their names among men; these are the forms they assume is the upper world of consciousness, but no less distinct is their being and their character in the birth-chamber of the soul. There they sleep, resting yet energizing; for rest is not inertia, but the highest energy, whether of dynamical and static or of spiritual forces. There they sleep and grow, until something rouses them to outward action, and then they come trooping forth, translating themselves, first into thoughts, then into acts, then into words, thus bringing into open view all their hidden enormity. And yet there has been no new thing created; there has been no essential change; there has been no addition, specific or generic, to the evil that before this coming forth lay slumbering in the soul. In the ordinary conditions of our humanity the naked sight of them is too horrid for us to bear unless we put masks upon them. This fact is yet a redeeming trait in human nature. Man is indeed all wrong; wrong to some extent in every natural energizing of his spirit. But he is not so bad as he might be, and yet may be. In some wholly lost state he may come to love evil, per se, and sin may look fair to him per se. But he is yet short of such an admiration of evil for its own sake. He is under the dominion of an all-controlling selfishness that makes him put evil for good, yet must he first disguise it, first clothe it in some fancied form of righteousness, before he can look it steadily in the face. The reason of this is found in that strange duality of our nature which is so clearly set forth in the seventh chapter of Romans. There lies above this deep heart the region of the intellectual consciousness, of the abstract ideal virtue which a man believes he really has because he can think it; he has not yet lost the sight of its ideal beauty; he is not so wholly gone but that he has some kind of admiration and even love for it. It is "the law of the mind," or reason, ó vóμos tov voòs, of which Paul speaks (Rom. vii. 23). This, altho in some sense a redeeming trait, as we have said, altho a remains of the divine image and the ground of human accountability, is yet, in other respects, a hindrance to a thorough self-knowledge. In passing upward through the mid-region of the intellectual consciousness, this part of the "inner man," where there may be even a seeming "delight in the law of the Lord" (ovvýdoμαι τô vóμœ

του θεοῦ κατὰ τὸν ἔσω ἄνθρωπον, Rom. vii. 22), these ugly children of the evil heart change face and voice. We could not otherwise bear their deformities when they come forth to the upper air. Even the most depraved—in intensity we mean, for in the extensity or totality of depravity all men are alike—even the most depraved have something of this "excusing conscience" (ovvɛidno 15 añoλoyovμévn, Rom. ii. 15), which, instead of being proof that man is not depraved, is the very gauge and measure of his spiritual fall. It shows the number of degrees by which the actual heart has fallen below the ideal mind, altho even the latter has been dragged down by the former to an extent immeasurable when compared with the index of the divine righteousness or the standard of perfect holiness.

We shrink from our thoughts as they rise up in the soul and stand before us, as they sometimes do, in their unclothed hideousness. The best of men have had this experience which the very evil, or those who have sunk to a lower grade, or who are more fortified in worldliness and conventionality, cannot understand. Sometimes they rise suddenly before we have had time for that habitual preparation which the soul involuntarily adopts. We see anger for a moment with its real face of murder, envy with its demon scowl, revenge before it has had time to assume its look of injured righteousness. We shudder at their momentary ugliness. Unless far gone in that intensity of evil which darkens even the ideal virtue, we cannot bear the sight, and so "Down, down!" we say. Down, down!" we say. We drive them back sometimes until we have thrown over them another dress or given them another name. We confound our reasons with our motives, the one being from this upper or ideal region, the other from the dark yet terribly moving world below. Or, rather, we invent, unconsciously invent, fair reasons for foul motives that would not bear the light, or that would frighten us should they suddenly translate themselves against our will into their native image and their true vernacular name.

No distinction is so important as this between our reasons and our motives, and yet none so seldom made either in our practical or our speculative ethics. There is no more fertile source of an ever-deepening self-delusion. Our lives are spent