2 Corinthians 4:18 While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal… "The things which are seen are temporal" — what is it but the tritest axiom of proverbial lore? "The things which are not seen are eternal" — what is it but the furthest reach of faith, the uttermost effort of aspiration? Yet surely such recognition is needed. In view of the changes of time, the mind is in quest of the constants of eternity; but, till the problem be fully stated, what can we hope for but inadequate solutions? Let us attempt, then, to trace the development from human experience of the idea of change, and then consider the flights of fancy, the findings of the reason, and the verdict of the spirit in search for fixity. Change is a thing to which we become inured before we begin to think, while scarcely we can feel. Think of a child, upon a bright May morning, in the middle of a flowery field, himself unfolding, like a blossom in the sun, to the first keen sense of life's delightfulness. He is busy with a thousand plans which no lifetime would suffice to execute, but they are all to be carried out upon that bright May morning. Now picture the sky overclouded, the falling of big raindrops on the grass, the flowers drenched and drooping on the darkened earth, and the child hastening homeward in sorrow. Here is a first lesson in the reading-book of life, a first line in the primer of experience. But how gently is the truth conveyed! For the sun will soon shine out again. But the child will live to see the summer pass; he will live to see the bright days fewer and the dark days more; he will live to see the leaves turn yellow and fall, the flowers wither, and the year decay. Then they will tell him of the coming spring, and make him glad with the promise of fresher flowers and greener leaves. Then comes another step more hard to take, another lesson more sorrowful to learn. There are changes which outlast the seasons; there are losses which the year's revolution can never more repair. There is the change of sickness in cheeks that are daily more hollow, and eyes that are daily more dim. There is the change of death. There is change, too, in the living and the healthy — changes of tone and feeling, changes of frame and figure. There is a change of places, too, as well as of persons. Who that has revisited his childhood's playground or his boyhood's haunts, the old home of the far-sped years, but has felt it like a shock? Here the poplars and the elms of his infancy are felled. We have spoken of the changes that are measured by a lifetime, and we talk sometimes as if there were no others. The farther we extend the range of historical research, the deeper we sink the fathom-line of geological discovery, the higher we raise the scaling ladder that reaches beyond the stars, the closer we scrutinise the animal, the vegetable, and the mineral domain, the more does all seeming permanence dissolve in change. Many landmarks of supposed stability are being washed away. The doctrine of progressive development has taken the place, in scientific minds, of the once familiar notion of a stereotyped creation. We speak no longer of fixed species, but of successive and surviving forms. And thus, with a wider range of observation, and a broader field of induction, we seem to be rapidly approaching the point of view anticipated of old by Heraclitus, the sage of Ephesus, who found in nature only constant flux, and gazing on the river as it coursed along its channel, the same, yet not the same, each moment that it flowed, saw the facts of the universe exemplified, the mirrored mutability of all things. But we have not yet exhausted the realm of the changeable. For among the things which are seen may be counted, without absurdity, not only the more immediate objects of corporeal vision, but equally those products of the mind which, when formulated, registered, and promulgated, acquire an objective reality in the eyes of men. In many an ancient custom, in many a lordly structure, in many a ponderous tome, we behold the visible embodiment of some tenacious opinion, or doctrine, or phase of faith. And often the fabric outlasts the faith that reared it, the book survives the opinions of the men who wrote it, the custom perseveres when the belief that produced it is dead. The thoughts of men have undergone a revolution far greater than all the changes that have taken place in the style of our architecture, while the usages of society and the epochs of literature are but a halting and uncertain index of the progress of ideas — a progress which, indeed, they tend sometimes to hinder, and but seldom simply reflect. And now, to conclude our picture of the instability of the things of time, let us think once more of death. Let the world change much or little, we must leave it soon; our eyes shall close upon the tide of time, with its eddying ebbs and flows, the vicissitudes of human fortune, and the changes of human thought. Wherever and whenever in the history of our race the mutability of the things of sense has been strongly impressed upon the mind, the question has inevitably arisen, Is there anything steadfast and sure? Is there rest in the turmoil of life? Shall we find a fixed point amidst the vortex of existence, or a stable bottom to its rolling sea? The search for fixity in the midst of change has assumed sometimes the form of an intellectual problem. When Heraclitus had propounded his doctrine of perpetual flux, a kind of panic seized the mind of Greece. Men despaired of the possibility of knowledge. The sophists, or clever talkers of the day, took advantage of this novel conception of universal change to ridicule the reason of mankind, and rampant scepticism threatened to reign supreme. "No truth," was the alarm-cry raised, "for there is nothing steadfast to speak the truth about." If any one were hardy enough to maintain that man was a rational being, or any equally simple proposition, he was instantly met with the retort, "Man is not the same for two moments. Who, then, is the man whom you assert to be rational?" Then Socrates came to the rescue with those general definitions which his disciple, Plato, poetised into animate ideas. Socrates was the first who consciously constructed an abstraction. He was the first to see that, while men changed from hour to hour and died, man stiff continued permanent, the species outlasting the example, the kind the individual unit. Out of this piece of sober reasoning, by the aid of a vigorous imagination, Plato constructed the ideal world, and endowed it with substantial existence. And thus, behind the transient phantasms of sight and sound, he pictured an everlasting universe of unchangeable realities. Infuse into this Greek conception a little of the Hebrew spirit, endow it with an interest less purely intellectual and more essentially religious — the very fate which actually awaited it when Jews and Greeks were blended in the Alexandrian schools — and so fitly does it harmonise with the Christian mood of mind that the words of my text themselves might almost be mistaken for the verbal reproduction of an old Platonic saw. And this is no surface likeness, this is no chance resemblance. Alike to the Athenian and the Nazarene was it given to lay hold upon the unseen world, and if the grasp of Jesus was the firmer, yet the grasp of Socrates was the first. It is not the philosophical value of abstract definitions, but the moral tone which inspires the philosopher's researches, upon which we should fix our attention. And what is the verdict of the spirit upon this finding of the reason? It were needless to say we reject, as belonging to the childhood of philosophy, the notion that our abstract ideas, as such, have any substantial existence outside the mind that produced them. For us the religious and intellectual worth of the ideas is this — that they draw our attention to the fact of the permanence, the continuity of these very minds amid the shifts and changes of the outer world. True, not even our ideas are immutable — they vary and expand with our knowledge — and yet they are comparatively lasting as measured against the objects of sight, the sensuous impressions of the moment. But there is a something more enduring still the link that binds them each to each and blends them in a sovereign unity, the principle of selfhood, the consciousness that makes them ours. And here a new light breaks in upon us, for is it not this constancy of self, this perseverance of the conscious subject, to which alone we owe the knowledge that the world is changing around us? But there is yet another of the findings of reason which the spirit finds fruitful and suggestive. This is that axiom of physical science, anticipated by Empedocles and Leucippus in Greece, and popularised by Lucretius in Rome, concerning the eternity of matter. There is no such thing in nature as annihilation. All change is dissolution only. Corruption is the food of life, decay the beauty and the strength of bloom; and the same leaves that wither in the autumn, and rot upon the ground in winter, clothe the bare branches with a fresher green when spring comes round again. Here, then, we are presented with another exemplification of the truth that the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are unseen are eternal. Matter, in its outward and momentary manifestation, is visible and transient; in its inner, persistent, continuous identity, invisible and permanent. The outward changes we perceive by the senses, the inward constancy we grasp with the mind. And this power of mind to grasp the eternity of matter is a witness of its own eternity. The invisible things of faith are invisible not in fact alone, but equally in nature. The great realities of the spiritual world are neither objects of sense nor the abstractions of such objects, nor imaginative copies of material things. Rather are they certain imperishable principles that pervade the universe. The principle of love, the principle of progress, the principle of reverence, the principle of hope, the principle of trust, the principle of freedom — it is these that pervade all nature, these that outlast all change. And these, the invisible things of eternity, are clearly descried by faith in the visible things of time. For look at the very changes to which the things of time are subject, discerning the end from the beginning — is it possible to doubt that they are changes for the better? Finally, as in all else besides, so, too, in the dogmas of theology, there are permanent principles of truth underlying the changing shape. It is never the form of a creed, it is only the faith it inspires, which has wrought any deliverance in society and done any good in the world. As the chords of the spirit still vibrate when the strings of the lyre are mute, and the strain which the ear has drunk in makes melody for ever in the soul, so, though the words of ancient creeds are silent on our lips, the eternal sentiments of veneration, love, gratitude, and trust shall yet maintain their hold upon our lives, shall yet perpetuate their music in our hearts. (E. M. Geldart, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal. |
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