The Place and Hour When We Become True

Shall we ever be real? Shall we ever put off this teasing, clinging falsehood which adheres to all we do, and say, and suffer, and are? Our souls manage to disentangle themselves out of our bodies; but it is a sharp process. Perhaps the process of extricating ourselves out of the meshes of self-deceit will not only be like that other process, but may be nothing less than a part of it. If we look at what is practically success, then self-deceit may be regarded as curable. If we look at absolute success, there is no cure for it short of death, which is obviously an extinction rather than a cure. The knowledge that self-deceit is never completely overcome only makes us pine the more for heaven, and for the far-off springs of everlasting truthfulness. Earth cannot do all the work. Something must still be done beyond the grave, or in the act of descending into it.

But is it so? Will nothing make us real? Think o of sorrow, and of how many cloaks it strips the soul. True. Sorrow is one of God s most ablebodied labourers. It does great things, and works thoroughly what it has to work. But it cannot cope with self-deceit. It is not its line. On the contrary it often only increases our power of deceiving ourselves. There is a vast deal of unreality in most sorrow. It muffles our conscience.

One moment, it puts our soul into studied positions, and the next moment, it throws it into confusion. It holds a mirror to us, in which we see ourselves caricatured. The image is often exaggerated, always distorted. Consolation degenerates rapidly into flattery. Bodily comforts creep in, and no one turns them from the door. Prayer tends to be peevish. The atmosphere of the house is the spirit of dispensations. The temperature in which mourners dwell, except the mourners among the poor, is always relaxing. Hence it is, that in sorrow we so commonly lose sight of God, and so unsuspiciously magnify ourselves. Too many of us have to look back on seasons of grief rather as breaks and interruptions in our spiritual life, than periods of luxuriant and at the same time hardy growth. Even when sorrow sanctifies, it does not deliver us from self-deceit. It has no gift that way. Glorious sorrow! alas! we treat it very ill. For not unfrequently, so far from its making us more true, it seems like a joint conspiracy of God and self and our friends to deceive us the more completely. Yet this is not sorrow s fault, but ours.

Will joy then make us true? ~No! Perhaps it may deceive us less than sorrow; but it deceives us grievously. There are certainly some natures which expand in the sunshine, some characters which undo their folds and uncrease themselves in the presence of strong heat and bright light. "With such persons joy seems to unlock the heart like wine, and a heart that has been once opened is not soon closed again. Joy has even sanctified some souls altogether. But this is not the common lot, nor would it have that effect on the multitude of men. Joy suits admirably those whom it suits at all; but sorrow suits the greater number. "We are all of us no doubt indebted to joy for many bright thoughts of God; and certainly he, whose thoughts about God are the brightest, will suffer least from self-deceit in the long run, though he will have varieties of self-deceit peculiar to himself. Let us grant, then, that with some men, and those more numerous perhaps than is generally supposed, joy does more than sorrow. Hortatory books will not concede this to us; but of course it is their profession to be dismal, and we will assume it in spite of them. Nevertheless the delivery from self-deceit is not among the gifts of joy. Even when it seems to help us to serve God better, and not only seems but actually does so, it hides from ourselves our own poverty of pure disinterested love. It is hard to believe that spiritual sweetness, if not all our own, is not in part our own. It is hard to believe that our heart, which feels so hot amid those heavenly ardours, is in reality hardly warmed through, and that, if God withdraws His gift, we can be wellnigh as mean and selfish and cowardly as we were before. We soon begin to think that we love God disinterestedly, and serve Him for His own blessed sake, and that the fear of hell or the hope of heaven are motives to which we need not now have recourse. But the repeated disenchantment of that idea is one of the most familiar dis comforts of the spiritual life. When the joy goes, the disinterestedness goes also. The languor of our reaction is often also the fault of joy, because it has all along been deceiving as to the real amount of solid love of God which there is in us, and so the spirit of elation has stolen upon us, and men after spiritual elation are as broken and haggard, as opium-eaters when the effect of the drug has passed away. Self-love every where! I am angry with myself for seeing it in so many places where it should not be: I could wish to think it was an hallucination peculiar to myself. Look at that beautiful sight, that exquisite piece of spiritual statuary. It is the joy of a devout soul, running over with sun shine, its very look giving out a sort of silent inward music, pouring itself out in almost passionate gratitude before God. The soul, the Guardian Angel, the emblems of spiritual graces, the Throne in front of which the worship is, how wonderful a group! Yet my jaundiced eye persists in seeing there -self worship ping self, even while it worships God.

Will suffering deliver us from, the thraldom of self-deceit? No! It would not be a universal remedy even if it did. For suffering is by no means so universal as men often take for granted it is. Suffering is a very dignified word. It imports a great deal more than the little pains of life, or the ordinary sor rows of humanity. In these smooth times a great proportion of men go to their graves, without having had what could rightly be called suffering. They have outlived those whom it was natural they should outlive. Death has, perhaps, not altogether kept his incursions within these bounds. They have had two or three serious illnesses in threescore years. There have been the failings of age, following upon a more or less arduous application to their professions. But on the whole their heritage has been tranquillity. They have had a modicum of pain, an allowance of annoyances, a sprinkling of dissatisfactions and disappointments. But this does not amount to suffering, The fact is that those who have hearts noble enough to suffer are a minority of mankind. Most men are too selfish, or too elastic, or too easy-going, or too concentrated, to suffer from any event in life, short of those thunderbolts, which only fall now and then in the experience of a neighbourhood. Moralists overshoot the mark when they exaggerate the misery of the world. Men of the world feel the unreality of this prosing, and laugh at it, and despise religion, to whose account they put it.

Indeed all this wailing about the wretchedness of the world is but the threadbare pathos of an old-fashioned pastoral. It is worn out. No one is moved by it, unless indeed it makes men bad by irritating their common sense against religion, which has no ally one half so valuable as common sense. The fact is, the world is a very bright world, and, all things considered, an extremely satisfactory world, so far as comfort is concerned. The wonder is, nay the misery is, that it can be so comfortable when it is so sinful. However the practical fact is that in these days nobody behoves the other view. They taste the world, and smack their lips; for it is very sweet. If the world was so obviously miserable, moralists would be spared the trouble of their exhortations. Men are not so bent on being miserable, that they need to be threatened with hellfire for wilfully expatiating in dismal and repulsive wretchedness. Why warn us so vehemently against the unhappiness of the world, when that very unhappiness will keep us from it more effectually than all these admonitions? In truth, the moralists themselves do not believe their own teaching. Look at them. They utter their lamentations, and enjoy themselves. It is the ascetics who are right, and not the moralists. For the ascetics admit the charms of the world, and are timid and nervous about them. They say of the wickedness of the world, what moralists say of its wretchedness. They are dismayed by its attractiveness. This is the true view, and even the man of the world admits the truth of it in his heart. Some day that heart may be softened by a sense of the world s wickedness-, while it is only hardened now by the preaching of the world s wretchedness.

Thus, even if suffering were a deliverance from self-deceit, it would be a much less universal remedy than we need. But in truth, though suffering is an angel from God, and does the work of justice in such a manner as to make it more like a work of love, our own vileness is so great that the results of suffering upon us are more frequently humiliating than other wise. It is often too strong a medicine for our weakness; and this may be the reason why the compassion of our Heavenly Father in so many cases withholds it. When He punishes, He punishes far below our power of endurance; and when He comes to heal our souls, He spares us even in the bitterness of His remedies. Have you ever suffered yourself? Then did you not find how suffering concentrated you upon yourself? It was so hard to be unselfish, so hard to think for others, so almost impossible to legislate for them. There was in you a backwardness to make sacrifices to others, which would have been incredible to you before the suffering came. You never dreamed you were so completely your own centre as the suffering proves you to have been. Even God is to revolve round you. You look at Him as a power that can lighten your load, or as a fountain of consolation, or as a source of miraculous strength, or as one to whom you may lawfully complain. But in your own mind God has reference to you, not you to God. Was it not so? But is not this going deeper into the thickets of self-deceit instead of getting out upon the open plain?

Moreover, when interior vigilance is suspended, self-deceit is left unresisted. At best we are resting on our arms, while self-deceit never rests at all. It is a great thing for a general to be able to do with little sleep, and the devil finds his account in his characteristic wakefulness. Yet I hardly know a rarer grace than inward vigilance in suffering. Suffering wearies us. We cannot keep up so many combats on all sides so unintermittino;lv. Like a burn, suffering calls our o i/ * * vital heat to itself, to the spot injured. Our other limbs grow cold. Our heart is dangerously drained. Meanwhile there is no such generosity among our spiritual foes as that they should grant us a truce, and not harass us in front while suffering is charging us in the rear. But, by wearying us, suffering also blinds us. If we do not perceive this in ourselves, we do not fail to notice it in others. Nothing strikes us so much in our intercourse with suffering persons, and in our most intimate ministries to them, as their blindness. We do not know which to admire most, the amount of their delusion, or its unsuspecting tranquillity. A time of suffering is for the most part a time of un reality. Suffering there will not extricate us from that which its tendency is rather to increase.

Will death deliver us from self-deceit? It will come nearest of all things to doing so. Being dead will deliver us, but not the act of dying. But can we be unreal when we are dying? The experience of death beds is at hand with a melancholy affirmative. How far it is conscious unrealitv or unconscious, how far, that is to say, it is a moral act, is another question. But there is no doubt, that even good persons can be somewhat dramatic in death. The dying bed can be the boards of a playhouse. We can act even then and there. The desire to please which is so deep in our nature appears even then, and animates the desire to give edification. The old Roman is not the only one who has gathered his toga round him to die gracefully, though it was but a heathenish grace to seek. Indeed perfect simplicity is not common on a deathbed, unless it be a rapid ending. Grace seems to wear out, and ignoble self shows through. But not unfrequently there is much more acting than this implies. Perhaps it may in some degree be referable to a sort of habit of playing at dying, which is occasionally recommended in pious books, and which pleases certain minds. When a man has been inventing last words for years, rehears ing the manner of receiving the last sacraments, and making pictures for himself of a modestly triumphant end, it is difficult to suppose that all this imaginary scene-making will not appear to a certain extent, even in the presence of the grim realities. On the whole it comes to this. If in life we have already tried to be real, death will show us how little we have done. If we have not made that trial in life, we shall only be startled by waking up to die, and then die before the amazement is past and we can collect ourselves. Alas! few men die more than half awake.

What then will make us real? The Face of God will do it. The first kingly touch of eternity will not only wake us, but it will heal us also. Self-deceit is the king s evil of the soul, and the Sovereign s hand alone can cure it. The self-knowledge flashed upon us by the glance of Jesus at the judgment will in one moment unclothe the soul of all untruthfulness, and clothe it in its vesture of immortal truth. The utter self-abasement caused in us by the ravishing beauty of the Godhead will be the ultimate truth of our created natures.

Clearly, then, the nearest approach to this which is possible on earth will be our best defence against self-deceit; and the nearest approach to it is the serving God out of personal love. Love, not all love, but divine love, has a specialty to make us real. Communion with God eats away our unreality, something after the fashion of a sacrament. We catch simplicity as part of the likeness of Jesus; and it is His likeness which love fastens on. When we look out of ourselves in loving faith, our inward processes are fewer in number, and amazingly simplified. But their majesty is only enhanced by their simplicity. When our interior life is reduced to a single operation of grace, it is then that we are safest. When many things are going on in us at once, there is little growth, and much self-deceiving. We must look out to God, pass over to Him. lean upon Him, learn to be one with Him, and let love of Him burn love of self away, so that our union may be effected. Out of God all is unreal. Away from God all is untrue. Untruthfulness is the condition of the creature. How painfully we feel, when we are at our best estate, and even better people than ourselves when they are at their best estate, that we are helplessly pretentious, indeliberate unrealities, unintentional hypocrisies! It is a sober cheer, that the time will come to all of us, when we shall play parts no more, neither with others, nor with ourselves, nor yet with God.