When will it once be, that, weary of wickedness, and moved by divine pity, you will return to God that he may heal your backslidings? The utmost that is expressed by the strong graphic words of the proverb under consideration is the extremely difficult, and not the absolutely impossible. Similar in meaning is the hyperbolical language in which Christ represents the great difficulty of discharging the responsibilities and overcoming the temptations of riches. "It is casier," he says, "for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." Of this bold proverbial phrase Lightfoot remarks that "it was used in the schools to intimate a thing very unusual and can sur very difficult." A qualifying expression is added, "What is impossible with man is possible with God." "God's grace," says Scott, mount such difficulties as are impossible for nature to overcome, and thus we are to understand the passage before us." And thus also are we to understand the words of the prophet. Words that merely assert that no man can change his own heart or habits must not be given an interpretation which leaves out of view the contrasted truth, which if not expressed is at least assumed, namely, that what man cannot do for himself the Almighty Grace of God can do for him. No man, it is true, can cleanse his own heart and life, no man can, by his own efforts, get rid of the blackness of soul which is the result of self-developed character; but where man fails upon himself Christ succeeds. His blood cleanseth from all sin. Through the power of his cross the leprous nature of man may be renewed, the mark of the beast may be removed, the impure heart may be cleansed, the inbred habits which blackened the soul and spotted the life may be changed, the sin-seared wretch may be transformed into a heavenly child and made a fit companion for the angels. It is told of Bunyan that when garnishing his speech with oaths an abandoned woman administered to him a severe rebuke. The child's heart that still lived in him was touched. He hung his head in shame and silence. "While I stood there," he says, "I wished with all my heart that I might be a little child again, that my father might learn me to speak without this wicked way of swearing. This biographer adds, "He thought himself so accustomed to this evil habit that he could not leave it off; but he did so from that moment." And that he did leave it off he himself attributed to that divine grace, which, abounding to the chief of sinners, changed the skin of the Ethiop and the spots of the leopard. A friend wrote to Coleridge urging him to give up the use of opium. "You bid me rouse myself! Go, bid a man paralytic in both arms rub them briskly together, and that will save him. 'Alas!' he would reply, 'that I cannot move my arms is my complaint and misery.'" But what Coleridge was unable to do in his own strength he accomplished through the strength of God. Help came not from within but from without, or rather, from above. Turning from the cold comfort of an earth-born philosophy which said to one oppressed with a sense of weakness, "Be strong;" he listened to that voice of good cheer from heaven. "Be strong and of a good courage, and I will strengthen thine heart;" and, 66 Strong in the Lord and in the power of his might he brake asunder the shackles of his evil habit, as Samson his green withes." There are two symbolic works of art, the Laocoön and St. George and the Dragon, which may be taken as setting forth in contrasted form that irrepressible conflict of man with the alien forces of the spirit-world, which underlies all mythologies and religions. In the Laocoön, that peerless work of ancient sculpture, the death-like struggles of the priest-father as he vainly endeavors to tear the coiling serpents from himself and children, presents a picture of man contending in his own might against the mightier powers of evil. The artist has caught the passion at its highest point,—as Lessing with fine critical insight has pointed out. In the midst of a tempest of agony there is a calm like the peaceful depths beneath the wind tossed surface of the sea. But the calm which overspreads the face, suffusing with subtle power the lines of pain, is not the calm of resignation or of hope, but of mute, heroic despair. The Laocoön is a confession in marble of the failure of man at his best, to gain the mastery over evil. In St. George and the Dragon the same struggle is portrayed, but here the saint is victor. Entering the lists against the devouring, anarchic principle, of which the Dragon is the emblem, he returns from the conflict in triumph. The greatest object of human effort is attained, the highest hope of the human heart is met, the Dragon is slain, and man delivered. Deliverance is wrought out through the interposition of another. One whose heart. heaven has touched with a spirit of holy chivalry wins, with his own strong arm, redemption for the weak. Fit emblem of the greater victory won by the "Strong Son of God," who came down to earth to rescue perishing souls from the Powers of darkness and sin! |