The Secret of the Untroubled Heart

Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.—John 14:1.

1. There is one chapter in the biography of distinguished persons—in the biography of great geniuses, or of eminent saints or seers—which has for us special interest, the chapter entitled “Closing Days.” We are curious to learn how the great man bore himself, or what fell from his lips, during those days, in the shadow of the approaching end; to see something of the thoughts which then occupied his mind, or to hear something of his latest words. What of his behaviour, his expression, we ask, in his latest hours? The favourite pursuit—was its influence upon him then exemplified? The ruling passion—was it strong with him in death? Geoffrey Chaucer died making a ballad; Waller, reciting verses from his beloved Virgil; Haller, the famous physician, fingering his pulse and murmuring, when he found it almost gone, “Yes, the artery ceases to beat”; John Keats, whispering low in reply to a friend who inquired how he felt, “Better, better. I feel the daisies growing over me.” “Let me hear once more,” sighed Mozart, “those notes, so long my solace and delight.” Rousseau, when dying, bade his attendants place him before the open window, that he might take a final look at his garden, and bid adieu to Nature.

In this scene we have the beating of Christ’s heart and the vision of His soul. Here He is, we may say, in His habitual considerateness and sympathy, in the quick, tender considerateness and sympathy that characterized Him all through His course, from the moment when, at the beginning of His ministry, He was filled with compassion for the multitude because they were as sheep without a shepherd, to the moment when, in the night of His betrayal, He pleaded, “If ye seek me, let these go their way.”

2. Night had fallen with Oriental swiftness upon Jerusalem; and there, in the guest-chamber of a friend’s house, Jesus was partaking of the Passover Supper with His disciples. Not with all of them. Judas had gone on his mission of darkness. The shadow of some boding treachery had fallen on these men and chilled their hearts. “One of you shall betray me.” In the intense quiet that had followed those words, they had looked at one another and doubted one another; they had searched their own hearts and almost doubted themselves. Only one of them had been free from doubt, and he had something worse—he knew. But he had gone; and after his departure the cup of foreboding was filled to the brim by Jesus Himself. Quietly, but with an awful intensity of meaning, He told them that He too was going away—going where they could not follow Him then. Not by any dusty Syrian highway was He going from them.

No farewell in history approaches this in bitterness. Before another sun had set Jesus was lying low in death. His disciples were orphaned. No wonder that they were troubled. Their universe seemed shaken. Every ambition, every hope, was taken from them. Failure appeared to be written on their Lord’s mission and on their own. Such trouble is not mere sorrow. That may be hard to bear, but this is the collapse of all plans of service, all visions of future good and blessing. The sky was falling; all the lights in the firmament were being put out. Their life had become like a heaving sea, and even Jesus seemed powerless to quiet it. Their Master bids them conquer that passion of anxiety, of fear, of bitter disappointment. They are not to yield to it, for yielding means despair; it is paralysis for every hope of influence and usefulness. There is a glorious picture in St. John’s Apocalypse: God “shall wipe away every tear from their eyes.” That is a golden promise. Here is something still more suggestive. The disciples are themselves to dry up the fountain of tears; they are to quiet their own heaving breasts. Trouble has come, but Jesus bids them master it.

3. How does He comfort them? Not by commonplace ethics or moralizings, but by drawing aside the veil that conceals the spiritual world, and revealing to them entirely new conceptions concerning the Father Himself, the future life, and their own relations to it. He, their Lord, is the Lord of life, and He will prepare for them a place in the glorious world which He Himself is about to enter. He does not so much teach truths as reveal facts about the future life. He “brings life and immortality to light.” He is to depart, they are to remain. More remains concealed than even He can reveal to them. They can only trust Him, their loving Lord, and wait for the heavenly life of which He assures them. His chief urgency is that they should implicitly trust in Him—trust Him even as they trusted God Himself: “Ye believe in God, believe also in me.”

My last lesson was the fullest revelation of the master (James Prince Lee). I was staying with him for a day or two at Mauldeth, a short time before his death. We were alone. After dinner I turned the conversation from work at Manchester to work at Birmingham. He was glad, I think, to go back to the old days. He spoke with proud delight of his favourite classical authors, as if they were still his familiar companions. He poured out quotation after quotation as we used to hear them at school, and dwelt on that finest single line, as he said, in Latin literature, “Virtutem videant intabescantque relicta.” Graver, sadder subjects followed; memories of failures and disappointments. Then came a long silence. It was growing dark. Suddenly he turned to me and said, “Ah, Westcott, fear not, only believe.” In those four words—no more was spoken—there was a true interpretation of life as the teacher saw it, and as he prepared his scholars to see it: Work to be done, work to be done in the face of formidable difficulties, work to be done in faith on God.1 [Note: Life and Letters of Brooke Foss Westcott, i. 28.]

I

Faith in God

“Ye believe in God.”

“As ye believe in God, so believe in me.” This seems to be the true relation of the two clauses of our Lord’s command. The words of the original are capable of a fourfold interpretation, but this seems to be the simplest, and most consistent with the moral and spiritual truth of our Lord’s teaching.

He would not call them to believe in God as they believed in Himself, for that would really be setting forth His created manifestation as more trustworthy than the Divine reality.

Neither would He bid them practise a double faith, believing in God and believing in Himself. Such a command would imply the insufficiency of believing in God. We are not to believe in God as an abstract object, and in Christ as a collateral object; not in God as an eternal object, and in Christ as a distinct object more available as being within the reach of our natural senses.

We are to believe in God with a supreme all-absorbing faith, and because we do so, we are to believe in Christ as the manifestation of His eternal love, not separate, collateral, instrumental, but identical, co-essential, indissolubly one with Himself. The belief which we have in God will be the measure of our true belief in Christ. As God is independent of all outward circumstance, so are we to believe in Christ with an entire independence of all outward circumstance. The events of the world do not shake our belief in God. Neither must they shake our belief in Christ.

1. Faith in God implies an act of the will.—Faith in God is a moral act; it is not an emotion, an impression, the result of considerations which act upon a man from without; it is an act in which he exercises moral choice. To have faith we must will to have it. This is not to say that there can be a true faith apart from reasonable grounds of faith. But these grounds may exist, they may be apparent, and yet faith may be absent, because the temper and spirit of the man make him reluctant to exert his will, or because he misconceives the nature of the act. Men confound faith and opinion; even in opinion a man’s moral habits and tendencies count for a great deal; and we often predict what a man’s opinions will be from what we know of his character. But in the formation of opinion the will has no direct function except to compel the intellect to investigate the facts by which opinion should be determined. In faith the case is wholly different. When the facts which should command faith are present and seen, faith may be withheld. Faith is an act of the will; and if we suppose that we shall come to believe in God and in Christ as the result of external forces which compel belief, we shall not believe at all. And when faith, resting on adequate grounds, is assaulted by doubt, the doubt must be met by a resolute decision.

No man can ever estimate the power of the will. It is a part of the Divine nature, all of a piece with the power of creation. We speak of God’s fiat. “Fiat lux et lux erat” (Let light be and light was). Man has his fiat. The achievements of history have been the choices, the determinations, the creations of the human will.1 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 1.]

2. Belief in God precedes belief in Christ.—Manifestly, everybody must believe in God before he can believe in Jesus Christ in any deep sense; for to say that “Jesus is the Son of God” already implies a belief in God. This was clearly true of the Christian converts from among the Jews, who were already worshippers of Jehovah; and it was true also, though to a less extent, of the Greeks, as St. Paul recognized in his famous speech at Athens; and it remains true of the converts from heathendom to-day. In the mind of all men there is some recognition of a Creator Spirit, with whom they are led to identify the Spirit of Jesus. And so the progress of belief is logically from the first article of the Creed to the second, from belief in God the Father and Creator to belief in Him whom the Father sent. At the same time, the belief in Jesus at once reacts upon the belief in God. The heathen convert, though he may employ the same word for God as before, has very different thoughts about Him; he is taught to believe that the holiness and loving-kindness of Jesus are the holiness and loving-kindness of the Creator God; and even the pious Jew gained a new insight into what these great qualities meant—the mercy and truth which he had always held to be the attributes of Jehovah. The two beliefs therefore go together. First, I learn to believe in God the Father, who has made me, and all the world; secondly, in God the Son, who has redeemed me, and all mankind.

It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that modern Christians have inverted the order of the text. They believe in Christ, and therefore they believe in God. Indeed, this would seem to be the inevitable order of discipleship. Christ calls men to Himself. “Come unto me,” “Follow me,” and in obedience to His summons men come also to God; but Christian Apologetic is concerned not with disciples, as such, but with those who are not disciples, but, at most, friendly inquirers. Therefore the order of reason is the order of Apologetic. First Theism, then Christianity. “Ye believe in God, believe also in me.” Every Theist is to that extent Christian, that is to say, Christianity is the logical inference from his Theistic belief. A Christianity which violates Theism is a contradiction in terms.1 [Note: H. Hensley Henson, The Value of the Bible, 143.]

II

Faith in Christ

“Believe also in me.”

Christ makes for Himself the most majestic claim. “Believe in Me,” He says, “as you believe in God, and so you will believe in God in a richer and fuller form.” “Ye believe in God—as all your Jewish ancestors believed in Him—add to that faith all the things I have shown you and taught you. Believe in God, as He has spoken to you with My lips, and dwelt with you in My fellowship with you, and loved you with My heart. You know I have dwelt with you and loved you. Do you know why? It is that you may know that God is love. It is that you may come to know that beyond the darkness of the hour and the loneliness of the years—alike in the starlight and in the storm—there is but one thing: the breath, the light, the end of being; and that thing is the love wherewith God loves you.”

There is a clear claim put forward by Christ that His disciples shall repose in Him the same absolute, unquestioning, unlimited faith that they repose in God. It is not merely that Jesus claims absolute infallibility for His teaching concerning God and man, though this is necessarily included; and, if there were no clear assertion beyond this, we should still be driven to seek a deeper explanation of it. Even if we had nothing to direct us beyond our Saviour’s repeated assertions that the words He spoke were without any exception or qualification the words of God, that not the slightest taint of imperfection marked His presentation of eternal truth, that His union with God was so perfect that He could say: The Father loveth the Son, and showeth Him all things that Himself doeth;—even if there were nothing more than this we should find it utterly impossible to explain Jesus Christ by any principles of human development, or by any conceivable communication of the Divine Spirit to one who was a son of Adam and nothing more. Nowhere except out of the very bosom of the Father could He come who was the effulgence of the Father’s glory, and the express image of His person.

Is not Christendom built on the “also” of Christ’s supper table? Luther has remarked that in this fourteenth chapter “we have the great articles of Christian doctrine in most impressive exhibition, and fundamentally established as in hardly another place of Scripture.” This is true. Sometimes we turn with a sigh from the elaborate confessions of later ages to the confession summed up in the short saying of the Lord. Less than this there may not be, more than this there need not be, in the faith of a Christian. The “also” must stand out in bold relief, rightly apprehended and firmly grasped; but when it is so grasped the mind holds the essential Christian verity. It is the plus in respect of which the faith of the Christian Church is apart from and more than every mere theistic religion—a plus that is not an addition only, but a new faith. For the trust in God, which is “also “with trust in Christ, is not the same as the trust which is without.1 [Note: J. M. Laing.]

1. Christ is the Revealer of God.—Jesus Christ is the Divine Revealer of God. Without Christ there is no real knowledge of God in the depth of His love, the tenderness of His nature or the lustrousness of His holiness; there is no certitude; the God that we see outside of Jesus Christ is sometimes doubt, sometimes hope, sometimes fear, always far-off and vague, an abstraction rather than a person, “a stream of tendency” without us, that which is unnameable, and the like. Jesus Christ has showed us a Father, has brought a God to our hearts whom we can love, whom we can know really though not fully, of whom we can be sure with a certitude which is as deep as the certitude of our own personal being; He has brought to us a God before whom we do not need to crouch far off, He has brought to us a God whom we can trust. Very significant is it that Christianity alone puts the very heart of religion in the act of trust. Other religions put it in dread, worship, service, and the like. Jesus Christ alone says that the bond between men and God is that blessed one of trust. And He says so because He alone brings us a God whom it is not ridiculous to tell men to trust.

To those who can receive this heavenly vision all human life is altered. We have dimly seen the heart of God, and we are no longer scared by the strangeness of His vesture or by the rough voice with which He sometimes seems to speak to us in the course of the world. We believe that His very nature and property is to forgive and pity, that the central core of His ethical being is love, that He withdraws Himself from us at times, only in order to increase our hunger and thirst for His presence, that though for a small moment He may forsake us, yet with everlasting kindness will He have mercy upon us. And thus by His sublime anthropomorphism Jesus assuages for His followers all the worst terrors and sorrows that Nature brings upon us. Through Him we have learnt that love, and even self-sacrificing love, is no local and transient product, but something at the very root of the universe, as it were, “the lamb slain from the foundation of the world,” a partial manifestation of that which was in the beginning with God, of the very soul of God. The God disclosed to us by Christ is not one who regards the terrible drama of human suffering from afar, but one who Himself shares our strife and bears our woes. Christ gave us the conception of a God who actually leads struggling souls on personally, and is not content with merely pointing out the road to them.

St. Philip and other anxious and sorrowing spirits need no longer go about groping for guidance and crying mournfully, “Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us.” Jesus has already shown us the Father. Those who have really seen Him have seen the Father so far as it is possible or necessary that we should see Him in this life. God has fulfilled to man that old gladdening promise, “I will make all my goodness pass before thee.”

Christ is the ladder between God and man. In His humanity He touches the earth; in His Divinity He touches the heaven, and on Jesus Christ as a ladder God comes down from heaven to earth and makes Himself known to man; on Jesus Christ as a ladder man climbs up from earth to heaven and is joined to God. Wonderful is the comprehensiveness of this short creed which Jesus Christ taught us: “Believe in God,”—that solves all the problems of creation; “Believe in me”—that solves all the problems of redemption.1 [Note: A. T. Pierson, The Hopes of the Gospel, 130.]

2. Christ is Himself Divine.—Not only is Jesus Christ the Revealer of God, but He Himself is God. Light shines through a window, but the light and the glass that makes it visible have nothing in common with one another. The Godhead shines through Christ, but He is not a mere transparent medium. It is Himself that He is showing us when He is showing us God. “He that hath seen me hath seen”—not the light that streams through Me—but “hath seen,” in Me, “the Father.” And because He is Himself Divine and the Divine Revealer, therefore the faith that grasps Him is inseparably one with the faith that grasps God. Men could look upon a Moses, an Isaiah, or a Paul, and in them recognize the irradiation of the divinity that imparted itself through them, but the medium was forgotten in proportion as that which it revealed was beheld. You cannot forget Christ in order to see God more clearly; to behold Him is to behold God.

This was reached at a very early stage of Christian thought by a writer of inspired insight who seized his pen and, without argument or explanation, wrote: the Word was God. The critical penetrativeness of that writer is too little recognized. He overleapt centuries of controversy. He saw at the first glance, what all history has abundantly demonstrated, that all intermediate compromises, such as the Arian, were neither historically nor logically tenable, and that, therefore, the issue was clean and clear between mere humanity and very Deity. With that issue before him, he wrote, not so much the best or highest but the only description of Jesus that he could write. As a Christian, he could not describe Christ as mere man; nor can we. As a thinker he could not describe Him as an intermediate divinity; nor can we. If then he was to write at all he could write but one thing, and if we are to say at all what Christ is, we can say but that one thing too. It is saved from being quite incredible only by being quite inevitable.2 [Note: P. C. Simpson, The Fact of Christ, 111.]

3. All imperfect revelation of God is prophetic of, and leads up towards, the perfect revelation in Jesus Christ.—The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews gives that truth in a very striking fashion. He compares all other means of knowing God to fragmentary syllables of a great word, of which one was given to one man and another to another. God “spoke at sundry times and in manifold portions to the fathers by the prophets”; but the whole word is articulately uttered by the Son, in whom He has “spoken unto us in these last times.” The imperfect revelation, by means of those who were merely mediums for the revelation, leads up to Him who is Himself the Revelation, the Revealer, and the Revealed. And in like manner, all the imperfect faith that, laying hold of other fragmentary means of knowing God, has tremulously tried to trust Him, finds its climax and consummate flower in the full-blossomed faith that lays hold upon Jesus Christ. The unconscious prophecies of heathendom; the trust that select souls up and down the world have put in One whom they dimly apprehended; the faith of the Old Testament saints; the rudimentary beginnings of a knowledge of God and of a trust in Him which are found in men to-day, and amongst us, outside of the circle of Christianity—all these things are as manifestly incomplete as a building reared half its height, and waiting for the corner-stone to be brought forth, the full revelation of God in Jesus Christ, and the intelligent and full acceptance of Him and faith in Him.

As ideas, the central points of Christian faith—such as a trust in the Divine Fatherhood and a hope beyond the grave—are not altogether new. Many earnest and noble souls have stretched out their minds towards them. What, then, was lacking for faith? Just that, after all, there were but ideas, speculations, yearnings; and our thoughts on these matters are not the sure measure of what really is. Before the stern unyielding facts of life and especially before life’s final fact of death, how easily such thoughts falter and fail.

Man is of dust: ethereal hopes are his,

Which, when they should sustain themselves aloft,

Want due consistence; like a pillar of smoke,

That with majestic energy from earth

Rises; but, having reached the thinner air,

Melts, and dissolves, and is no longer seen.

Who will assure us, in face of “the thinner air” that is the breath of death, that these hopes and speculations are the sure “pillar of cloud” leading us truly to a promised land, and are not but a “pillar of smoke” from the fires of human fancy? A faith thus founded will always be cherishable by certain temperaments—and it is largely a matter of temperament—but it will never really grip the mass of men, simply because it is a mere edifice of conceptions insecurely founded on the bed-rock of fact. But it is just this that Christian faith possesses. Its basis is not the ideas of Jesus but the fact. It brings, not a new doctrine merely, but new data. It comes not with the theory of a fatherly God, but with a phenomenon, in history and experience, which means that. Now all this is precisely what faith needs. Faith—as indeed may be said of all truth—is like Antaeus in Greek legend, who was invincible when touching mother-earth; and the mother-earth of faith is fact—the fact of Christ.

It was as if God had a revelation to make to the world, a word to teach it, His own name; and He taught it as we teach a little child, letter by letter. To one nation came a message by Buddha, to another by Zoroaster, to another by Confucius, to another by Moses, until at last the full Word was revealed, the Word that was made flesh and dwelt with us.… No truth can be taught until the world is prepared for it.… To me it seems I can read my Bible with a greater reverence and interest now I see in it a continuous record of a continuous revelation, wherein God appears ever growingly more tender, more merciful, where the false human ideas of Him as held by Abraham, Joshua and Saul are softened down in the tenderness of Isaiah, and finally in the life of our Lord Jesus.1 [Note: Quintin Hogg, 307.]

4. Without faith in Christ, faith in God is incomplete.—Without faith in Christ such faith in God as is possible is feeble, incomplete, and will not last long. Historically a pure Theism is all but impotent. There is only one example of it on a large scale in the world, and that is a kind of bastard Christianity—Mohammedanism; and we all know what value that has as a religion. There are many among us who claim to be very advanced thinkers, and who call themselves Theists, and not Christians. That is a phase that will not last. There is little substance in it. The God whom men know outside of Jesus Christ is a poor, nebulous thing; an idea, not a reality. He, or rather It, is a film of cloud shaped into a vague form, through which you can see the stars. It has little power to restrain. It has less to inspire and impel. It has still less to comfort; it has least of all to satisfy the heart. You will have to get something more substantial than the far-off God of an unchristian Theism if you mean to sway the world and to satisfy men’s hearts.

Mr. Fujimoto was led to tell us some of his early difficulties in the Dôshisha University at Kyoto. He had been baptized, but had adopted extreme views on Higher Criticism. He could acknowledge the one God and Father, but beyond that he could not see. Various “holiness” and other meetings were held, but he found no comfort in them. Mr. Barclay Buxton tried hard to help him, but still he had no real light. One day having been pressed hard to attend one of these meetings, he said to himself, “No, I am going instead into the country alone to fight it out with myself and God!” He went and spent four hours in agonizing prayer to the God and Father for further light, if such light was really to be had. It was about 1.30 p.m. (halfway through the four hours) that a moment came which he says he shall always distinctly remember. He seemed to hear a voice saying in the concluding words of St. John 14:1, “Believe also in me.” He instantly took out his Testament and read straight through the chapter and on to the end of chapter 16, and he returned from that four hours a believer in our Lord Jesus Christ.1 [Note: Bishop Ingham, From Japan to Jerusalem, 48.]

III

The Secret of a Quiet Heart

“Let not your heart be troubled.”

The word used here by our Saviour and translated “be troubled” does not signify any kind of sadness or sorrow; nor are we to understand that it is either desirable or possible to banish all sadness and sorrow from the mind of any son of man under the conditions that prevail upon this earth. The word used by Jesus signifies to be agitated, perplexed, and thrown into confusion. It is the description of a life thrown as it were off its centre, and tossed hither and thither by the force of perplexing and adverse circumstances.

It is the antithesis of that state which Christ described as peace, the rocky strength that is not exempt from sorrow, but remains unshaken by it. For we must remember that Jesus Christ Himself, though He spoke of giving His peace to His disciples, was “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.”

“Troubled” is the best English equivalent we can give for the Greek; but, as generally employed, its force is fainter. The original verb—used often of the agitation of waters, the heaving and surging of the sea—aptly represents the deeper agitations of the soul, painful to strong natures, dangerous to the weak. Thrice it is used of our Lord Himself in some access of vehement emotion. So He shared the experiences which in us He would comfort and control. Such a condition needs control, tending as it does to confusion of judgment and suspension of faith. “Let not your heart be troubled” was then not only a word of sympathetic kindness, but a needful counsel; and it is so still, falling with composing power on many an agitated mind.1 [Note: T. D. Bernard, The Central Teaching of Jesus Christ, 125.]

I happened to read, one immediately after the other, the lives of two women written by themselves; the one was Sarah Bernhardt’s, the other Marianne Farningham’s. I gathered little in the way of help from Sarah Bernhardt’s. She is a woman with a kind heart. That at least can be said of her. At the siege of Paris she got all her friends safely out of the city, but remained herself, and turned her house into a hospital where she nursed the wounded soldiers. But in looking for any guiding principle of her life, it seemed to be chiefly this—that whatever she was thwarted in, whatever she was asked or recommended not to do, that was the very thing she would set herself to do with all the somewhat hysterical energy of her nature.

It was refreshing to turn to Marianne Farningham’s. In quoting what have been the two mottoes of her life, she says, “We change our mottoes as we proceed through life. Mine is now ‘Let not your heart be troubled,’ but through all my working years my favourite was ‘I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.’ ” One can understand why she changed her motto in later life, from a remark she made in reply to an Address presented to her—“The beauty of getting old is that not so much is expected of one, and one has time to sit and think.” In her strenuous years she had the earlier motto. For the “doing” we need Christ’s strength, for the “thinking” we need Christ’s comfort. The evening of her days had come, when the hands had to be folded from much labour, and she had to face the approaching night. We are so helpless, so ignorant, in view of the great unseen realities which each day’s journey is bringing us nearer to, We need hope and comfort, and Christ’s words are specially suited to such conditions and such times.1 [Note: John S. Maver.]

1. Christ does not offer exemption from sorrow.—It has been a mistake of most of the remedies proposed for a troubled heart that they have aimed at eliminating sorrow from the earth. In this they have aimed, not only at what is impossible, but at what is, as a primary aim, undesirable also. Ancient Epicureanism, for example, sought to banish sorrow as far as possible by avoiding excess of pleasurable excitement, by making the tenor of life so even that extravagant excesses in pleasure should not occur to plunge men into consequent excess of pain. Modern Epicureanism, a more wretched fallacy still, adopts as its watchword: “A short life and a merry one; let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.” It endeavours by the constant inoculation of pleasure in its most feverish form to exclude the possibility of pain, and to drive life’s pulse at its hottest pace, let the end come when it will. Stoicism sought to remove sorrow by the destruction of feeling, to create men who should not be flesh and blood, but iron and brass. It tried to crush and destroy the emotional side of life by such tremendous acts of self-conquest, or rather of self-mutilation, as to make man a monster—a “reason” with an iron will and no heart. And Buddhism, with all its beauty, has at the very centre of it a feminine anguish to be released from sorrow, and knows no way to cure earth’s heart-break except in an unmanly longing for extinction, in giving up the life, not in the Christian way so as to find it again, but in such a way that it disappears altogether into the great abyss of the Infinite.

Securely cabined in the ship below,

Through darkness and through storm I cross the sea,

A pathless wilderness of waves to me:

But yet I do not fear, because I know

That he who guides the good ship o’er that waste

Sees in the stars her shining pathway traced.

Blindfold I walk this life’s bewildering maze;

Up flinty steep, through frozen mountain pass,

Through thorn-set barren and through deep morass;

But strong in faith I tread the uneven ways,

And bare my head unshrinking to the blast,

Because my Father’s arm is round me cast;

And if the way seems rough, I only clasp

The hand that leads me with a firmer grasp.1 [Note: Anne Charlotte Lynch Botta.]

2. The world cannot give us heartsease.—The worldling says “Come with me, and we will go where there is the lilt of merry music and the twinkle of dancing feet. Once at the feast, you will forget your sadness.” We know how little this man’s advice is worth. We have heard and, it may be, yielded to this plea for a little diversion; and we know that a troubled heart cannot be sung and danced and fooled out of its grieving. The world’s music may get into your feet; but only the music of heaven, of the Divine promises, can get into a troubled heart. In this world of problem and passion, and fear and distress, where the shadow of separation veils from us much that once was ours and lies soft and silent upon all that we do now possess, there is but one way to the quiet heart. It lies, not in the wisdom that would know all, or in the folly that would forget all, but in the faith that trusts the love of God the Father in the face of Jesus Christ—the faith that leads a man, in all the trouble of his days, to shelter his soul in the promise, yes, and in the silence of the Infinite Mercy. “Ye believe in God, believe also in me.”

Some think that the secret of peace is in the vision of science. There is a tendency to approach every experience of life along the line of the intellect. Faith in some quarters is depreciated. But, however men may slight it, they learn soon or late that they cannot live without it. These scientists, with their delicate instruments and their subtle treatises can say a great many things to us, but they cannot say all we need to hear. During the last fifteen years I have read many of their books. I honour them, and the service they have wrought; but I have missed one note in them all—the note of comfort. There is one thing they cannot in all their wisdom say to us: “Let not your heart be troubled.” They cannot say that. They can teach us to talk wisely, but they cannot help us to live quietly. They do not give any help in the day of a troubled heart. In that day I do not want to be reasoned with, I want to be comforted. I do not want learning, I want love. I do not want man, I want God. I do not want science, I want faith.2 [Note: P. C. Ainsworth, A Thornless World, 90.]

3. Jesus unfolds the secret.—He says that personal faith will keep the heart at peace. We may not be able to rule the storm, but we can keep the storm from ruling us. Christ tells of the man who built his house upon a rock; and flood and tempest came and beat upon the house, but it fell not, for it was founded upon a rock. God has not taught us how to rule tempests, but He has taught us how to build houses that will defy these tempests. He has not given us lordship over life’s stressful weather, but He has given us the lordship of our hearts. If we trust we may be quiet. Trust is always tranquillity. To cast a burden off myself on others’ shoulders is always a rest. But trust in Jesus Christ brings infinitude on my side. Submission is repose. When we cease to kick against the pricks they cease to prick and wound us. Trust opens the heart, like the windows of the Ark tossing upon the black and fatal flood, for the entrance of the peaceful dove with the olive branch in its mouth. Trust brings Christ to my side in all His tenderness and greatness and sweetness. If I trust, “all is right that seems most wrong.” If I trust, conscience is quiet. If I trust, life becomes “a solemn scorn of ills.” If I trust, inward unrest is changed into tranquillity, and mad passions are cast out from him that sits “clothed and in his right mind” at the feet of Jesus.

There is a beautiful figure employed in the Apocalypse to denote the calmness of the soul which arises from the consciousness of God’s presence. Before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal. The idea conveyed to our minds by this emblem is that of a sea, not of glass, but like glass, a sea the glassy surface of whose waters is ruffled by not so much as a passing breeze, and whose crystal depths are lit up with sunshine, a sea smooth and clear as crystal. The beauty of the emblem is that it combines the most restless, unstable thing in nature with the idea of perfect repose and tranquillity. The sea in its restlessness is a true likeness of the human heart. Every breath of wind disturbs the one, every breath of adversity troubles the other. But there is something which can bring perfect repose to the soul—the presence of God. This is the truth which is taught by this sublime image of the sea like glass before the throne. It represents the calm of a soul which dwells in the presence of God. We think of heaven as calm because it is out of reach of the storms of earth, but this is not the idea conveyed by the vision. The heaven which it reveals is a heaven on earth. The scene of the Apocalypse is laid, not in some far-off sphere, some fabled Elysium, but here on earth. Heaven is within the good man’s heart. The sea which is before the throne is smooth and clear as crystal, not because it is remote from earthly storms, but because the Spirit of God moves upon the face of the waters.

I knew a man, since gone to his rest, who carried on an active service for his Master in the busiest of all cities, and who selected for himself a telegraphic address which might stand at the head of his notepaper. What do you think this busy man’s address was? It was this:—“Undisturbed, London.” And it always found him at home—that is to say, in God—so far as I could judge of his dwelling-place in the days when I knew him, before he had run out his leasehold in the Church militant and taken up his freehold in the Church triumphant. Such an one, living at such an address, verifies the truth of the Scripture which says of the good man that—

He shall not be afraid of evil tidings;

His heart is fixed, trusting in the Lord.1 [Note: J. Rendel Harris, Aaron’s Breastplate, 44.]

Oh! the bells rang out for Easter, rang strong and sweet and shrill,

And the organ’s rolling thunder pealed through the long church aisle,

And the children fluttered with flowers, and I sat mute and still,

I who had clean forgotten both how to pray and to smile.

And I murmured in fierce rebellion: “There is nought that endures below,

Nought but the lamentations that are rent from souls in pain”;

And the joy of the Easter music, it struck on my ears like a blow,

For I knew that my day was over, I could never be glad again!

And then—how it happened I know not—there was One in my sight who stood,

And lo! on His brow was the thorn-print, in His hands were the nails’ rough scars,

And the shadow that lay before Him was the shade of the holy rood,

But the glow in His eyes was deeper than the light of the morning stars.

“Daughter,” He said, “have comfort! Arise! keep Easter-tide!

I, for thy sins who suffered and died on the cruel tree,

I, who was dead, am living; no evil shall e’er betide

Those who, beyond or waiting, are pledged unto life with Me.”

Now I wake to a holier Easter, happier than of old,

And again my voice is lifted in Te Deums sweet and strong;

I send it to join the anthem in the wonderful city of gold,

Where the hymns of the ransomed for ever are timed to the Easter song.

And I can he glad with the gladness that is born of a perfect peace;

On the strength of the Strong I am resting; I know that His will is best,

And who that has found that secret from darkness has won release,

And even in sorrow’s exile may lift up her eyes and be blessed.

The Secret of the Untroubled Heart

Literature

Ainsworth (P. C.), A Thornless World, 84.

Alexander (S. A.), The Mind of Christ, 28.

Allon (H.), The Indwelling Christ, 321.

Archer-Hind (T. H.), Some Scripture Problems, 1.

Banks (L. A.), Christ and His Friends, 334.

Benson (R. M.), The Final Passover, ii. (pt. i.), 235.

Bernard (T. D.), The Central Teaching of Jesus Christ, 123.

Craufurd (A. H.), The Religion of H. G. Wells, 133.

Dowen (L. T.), Christus Consolator, 1.

Fotheringham (D. R.), The Writing on the Sky, 51.

Harris (J. R.), Aaron’s Breastplate, 25.

Henson (H. H.), The Value of the Bible, 130.

Holland (H. S.), Pleas and Claims, 18.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John ix.–xiv., 253.

Matheson (G.), Times of Retirement, 114.

Muir (P. M.), Modern Substitutes for Christianity, 127.

Owen (J. W.), Some Australian Sermons, 2.

Pierson (A. T.), The Hopes of the Gospel, 121.

Purves (P. C.), The Divine Cure for Heart Trouble, 1.

Robertson (J.), Sermons and Expositions, 275.

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Churchman’s Pulpit: Trinity Sunday: ix. 400 (Mulchahey).