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T. The Mystery of Ixtqutty 1

"The Mystery of Iniquity/' — II. Thess. ii. 7. (March 19, 1865.)

II. The Valley Of Baca

"Who passing through the valley of Baca make it a well; the rain also fiUeth the pools." — Psalms Ixxxiv. 6.

The prayer-book version of these words, yon will remember, is a little different : '' Who going through the vale of misery use it for a well ; and the pools are filled with water." Let us try to keep both versions in mind while we are speaking of it.

The verse gathers its beauty from the circumstances of the Psahn. It is drawn out of the richness of that picture-land of Palestine. The more we read the Psalms, and indeed all the Bible, we are impressed with the remarkable value which belongs to the Holy Land as representing in a continual map or picture not merely the localities of certain historical events, but also by a higher association the geography of the spiritual life of man and the relations of spiritual truths to one another. The sacred names have passed from being merely the titles of hills and rivers and cities, and belong to principles and moral verities. In tlie world's great heart there will forever be a holy land besides that to which pilgrims travel halfway round the globe. Though tlie historic land which lies between the Mediterranean sea and the Asiatic deserts should be blotted from the surface of the earth to-morrow; though some strange miracle shoiikl roll the whole roiio'h surface of the country smooth, and mix in indistinguishable confusion hill and valley, upland and river-bed, still there would be eternally a holy land. Still all over the world, whereever sacred associations had transfigured the old names, the Jordan would roll down its rocky bed to the Dead sea; still the hills would stand about Jerusalem ; still the desert would open between Judea and Galilee ; still Egypt must mean captivity, and the Red sea deliverance, and Gilgal providence, and Bethany domestic piety, and Calvary redeeming love, — although the visible places to which those names belong should cease to be forever. We little know how much we owe to this eternal picture drawn in the hearts of men, this mapped-out Palestine of the inner life.

Our text is one of the passages which have contributed to draw this picture. '' Who passing through the vale of Baca use it for a well." Students have not been able to identif}^ and locate the valley Baca, but it evidently refers either generally or specially to those difficult ravines which the people had to cross in coming up to Jerusalem to the feasts. The Psalm was probably written by David at some time when he was kept in exile and could not go up to Jerusalem. It is the yearning of a loving and devoted heart for the privilege of worship. '' O how amiable are thy dwellings, thou Lord of hosts. My soul hath a desire and longing to enter into the courts of the Lord ; my heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God. Yea, the sparrow hath .found her an house and the swallow a nest where she nvdy lay her young, even thy altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God." Then mounting up to the height of his sorrow (that height from which so often the best and widest visions come to men) a vision comes to him. He sees the multitude, whom he may not join, going up to worship. He Avatches their winding line from hill to hill as thej^ draw nearer to Jerusalem. " Blessed is the man in whose heart are thy ways, who going through the vale of misery use it for a well; and the pools are filled with water. They will go from strength to strength," he cries, exulting in their progress, "- and unto the God of gods appeareth every one of them in Zion." Then he falls back upon his own need, '-' O Lord God of hosts, hear my prayer, hearken, O God of Jacob. I had rather be a door-keeper in the house of my God than to dwell in the tents of ungodliness."

The lesson of the vale of Baca, the vale of misery, evidently is, the turning of sorrow into joy. Let us try to read the parable and understand it. Notice, then, it is the turning of sorrow into joy; the turning into, not merely the supplanting, the succeeding of sorrow by joj^ There are two theories about this thing : One we may call the theorj^ of compensation, the other the theory of transformation. The compensation theory is the commonest, the one most easily and so most generally understood. Even Christians are found continually confusing it with and so substituting it for the higher and better truth. Its idea is that the world is full of evil and discomfort, and that discomfort is to be borne only by the assurance that it is not universal or perpetual, that it is varied and mixed up with pleasure, and that if we can only set our lips tight and w^alk on over the sorrow Ave must come to the happiness by and by. We are told that if it storms to-day the sun will be out to-morrow ; if this week's speculation fails, the market is still open and to-morrow's investment or the next day's or the next day's may succeed ; if our country is down in the depths of trial, another somewhere else is sunning itself on the summit of success. There is this poise and balance and make-up all through life. This is a favorite doctrine of our philosophy. I do not find it anywhere more strikingly stated than in these words of Emerson : " Polarity, or action and reaction," he declares, " we meet in every part of nature, in darkness and light ; in heat and cold ; in the ebb and flow of waters; in male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and animals ; in the systole and diastole of the heart; in the undulations of fluids and of sound; in the centrifugal and centripetal gravity ; in electricity, galvanism, and chemical affinity.

If the south attracts, the north repels. To empty here you must condense there. An inevitable dualism bisects nature so that each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole ; as, spirit, matter ; man, woman ; odd, even ; subjective, objective; in, out ; upper, under; motion, rest; yea, nay." This endless up and down is the law which this philosophy assumes to be the great consoler. And far-sighted faith, hunted and tried by suffering, carries this philosophy out far beyond the limits of this world. To how many Christians Heaven and the eternal happiness present themselves under the guise of this compensation theorj^ This world is the great down. The next world is to be the great up which is to make it good. The bad prosper here, the good prosper there. The Christian suffers now to be rewarded then. This world is miserable, we must wait for our happiness, and struggle on with tight lips and torn feet to find it in the next. The deeper the misery, tlie more complete the future joy. It would be easy to point out passages in Scripture which seem to confirm this doctrine ; passages in which the superior bliss of the perfect life casts the miniature experiences of this state of being into a darkened shade ; but he who accepts it as the general rule of existence has to do it against the general tone of the Bible and the general verdict of experience, both of which declare the possibility of happiness this side of l^he grave. It is the idea under whose strange tyranny some very earnest and conscientious souls have been made morbidly miserable because, forsooth, they could not help being happy. This would be the idea under which the pilgrim through the vale of Baca would not turn it into a well, but only be kept up through it by far-off visions of the waters of salvation which, when he got to Jerusalem, he should find flowing out of the mount of God. It would make earth not a foretaste, an earnest, but onl}^ a discipline of Heaven. Whatever truth there maj^ be in it, it evidently is not the whole or the best truth. Such a faith, with all honor to its exaltedness and nobleness, be it said, resembles that over far-sightedness which is a disease, not because it sees things afar off, but because it sees only things afar off and is blind to the beauties and helps that lie about its feet.

Souls of less intense faith, who cannot cany the doctrine of compensation into the next life, keep it and try to use it in this. Nothing is more sad, as it seems to me, than the way in which we comfort ourselves and one another for our sorrows, by vague, unrealized promises that sorrow cannot last forever.

We conceive of life as a great swinging sphere which must forever run a vast orbit, doomed to perpetual change, and so sure by and by to sweep into the sunlight, if we can only keep alive and wait. It is a forlorn and miserable comfort. It loses all the certainty and personal graciousness of Christianity. There is no piety about it. No man can get into the habit of thus comforting himself every day and seeming to be satisfied with this comfort, and yet keep a real faith in a real, constant, unchanging, infinite, good God ; and yet how common it is and how pious we count it. We sing it into songs that sound almost religious, and feel as if we were comforted and resigned when their barren words fall on us.

"Be stiU, sad heart, and cease repining, Behind the clouds is the sun stiU shining. Thy fate is the common fate of all, Into each life some rain must fall. Some days must be dark and dreary."

That means, (if it be not going too far to seek a meaning in what is perhaps meant for mere sentimentality,) that there is nothing to do on rainy days but to sit still and be drenched till it clears up. It is the theory of compensation. There is so much rain to fall, and if it did not fall to-day it would to-morrow; liaving fallen to-day, to-morrow we shall have the sun. There is so much suffering to suffer. If we get through with it this year, the more certainly next year will rise clear. I presume it is by no means certain that that is true in })hysics, it certainly is false in morals.

Nor can this barren consolation ever give anything that is worthy to be called patience or resignation. Patience and resignation are both calm and cheerful. This will be either the dogged and sullen yielding of a brute to a burden he cannot escape (losing cheerfulness), or else the reckless excitement of a gambler kept alive by the perpetual and unreliable alternation, losing calmness. These travellers through fhe vale of Baca liave not even the distant vision of the holy city to inspire them. They can only plod along the dusty way in the vague hope that some oasis will appear where they can get a shadow and a drink. Such is the comfortless comfort that Ave give and take.

This is the theory of compensations. Now see how different it is from this other theory of transformations. David's pilgrims going through the vale of misery "use it " for a well. They were looking forward to Jerusalem. Their hearts leaped, as every traveller's must when any greener spot promised them a richer resting-place ; but their life was not one altogether of the future, not kept distressed and anxious with uneasy alternations. They made the vale itself a well. It was not simply a sorrow that was succeeded by joy, not merely a peace promised and looked for and waited for, it was a peace found. When they grew thirsty they looked, not merely farther on into the heart of the future, but deeper down into the bosom of the present.

It seems to me the very drawing of this picture must describe to many a soul its own unspoken need, and make it recognize it. " Yes, that is what I want. Heaven is glorious, but it is far away. To-morrow may be all steeped in sunshine ; but meanwhile to-day is dark. There surely must be something better to do than to sit down and wait. What is it ? " We all feel that a religion which lives only on the future, dwells only in the future, is not a whole, cannot be a wholly efficient faith. What the world needs is present work, and what all men need are present working conditions, a present life. Hope is a splendid power, but I can hope fully, because I can hope intelligently, only as 1 already taste some intimation of the thing I hope for. I can strive after the streams of Zion only as I strengthen myself out of the wells of Baca.

If we look, then, to see if this doctrine of transformation be possible, it starts out of that word '-' use." Things are Avhat they are used for. So it is all over nature. There stands a tree in the forest. What is it — a tree ? Yes, but a tree only as material. It is, in possibility, countless things. What it shall be, in reality, depends upon the superior will that uses it. The savage comes with his use, and the tree is a canoe and floats upon the river. The builder comes with his need, and the tree is a wall of planks and shields a house. The physician comes with his use, and the tree-bark becomes a medicine and cures the sick. The farmer comes with his use, and the tree turns into a roaring fire to keep the winter out at his door. So of all things. The artist uses a stone, and it is a statue ; the mason uses a stone, and it is a doorstep. And beyond mere nature. See how we use men. We are each other's raw material. I make vou up in some shape into my life, and you in some way make me up into yours. But what man is of so fixed a character that he can be made up only into one invariable thing ? Each man makes of his neighbor that for which he uses him. Why is it that two men both know and use one other man of rich and gracious nature, and one gathers and makes out of him nothing but envy, and jealousy, and discontent, while the other shapes into his own life a largeness, and sweetness, and fineness, like that with which he has to deal? Why, except that the determining power lies finally, not in the one identical character of the man who is used, but in the two different natures of the men who use liim? So of all influences and motives. The same educations wall and press upon two lives. One rises on them into greatness, the other drags them down upon it and is crushed beneath them into ruin. So, go to Heaven. The same eternal glory feeds two heavenly spirits ; the same great throne looks down in loving authority on both. They tread together the same glassy streets ; they wait together for the same far-reaching messages ; they bend together, looking down into a wisdom they both crave to fathom. Why is it that Gabriel stands unstained out of all the glory, gathering strength and grace, while his brother Lucifer falls from his side, full of his hate, and treason, and revenge ? We need not go to angels. How is it that men use God and make of him such different things grow by their use of him to saints or devils ? How is it that the Pharisee and Publican came down the same temple steps, one cold, and proud, and bitter, and the other with his heart full of tenderness, and gratitude, and humblest charitj^?

As the world goes on and man becomes a more complete being, the truth that comes out more and more must be this of the regal importance of the using moral force. Man the savage is ruled by things, — rivers, hills, forests, — they make of him what their own tendencies suggest ; and on the other hand, man the citizen, man civilized, rules things, makes of them what he pleases. Man the child is obedient and plastic ; man the man is authoritative and decisive. Surely there is no picture in history so striking and sublime as that which is the one picture of all history : the soul of man which seemed at first so insignificant, so weak a thing among all these stupendous things and forces, slowly, surely, going up into its own place, taking its stand in the very central midst of all of them, moving them all, making them all be what it will, deciding their nature by their ase.

Now, I said that in this truth lies the key to the difference between the doctrine of compensations and the doctrine of transformations. The mere compensatioii theory forgets this regal position of the human life. It puts humanity in the power of things. Man must be carried where things carry him, and trust to their continual changes to float him off to-morrow, if they ground him perchance to-da3^ "Nay," says the Christain doctrine of transformations. " things are in the jDOwer of man ; as he uses them so they are." As God said to Adam about the beasts, " AVhatsoever thou callest each, that is his name.'' In him, the user, rests the real nature of the things he uses. They have no invariable fixed nature apart from him.

Now, let this great user man, this one moral force, be called upon to go down into the valley of Baca, into the vale of misery. He finds there all the circumstances of suffering, poverty, sickness, bereavement, sin itself ; what then, these are things and he is man. They are what he is. Let him rule them, not be ruled by them. Let him take down there a religious, trustful nature, a pious, cheerful heart, and there is more promised than just that his cheerful piety shall be able to support him through; he shall exercise his human right of ruling and of using these, and his cheerful, trustful heart shall come out with a more perfect joy and a more certain faith than he had carried in. He shall not come out half-dead with thirst, just able to drag himself up to the fountain at the end, but it shall be as David so beautifully says, " He shall drink of the brook in the way, therefore shall he lift up his head."

Tliis, then, is the Christian economy of suffering ; this is the hioh tlieorv of transmutation. In a world full of sorrow and distress how noble, how benignant an economy it is ! Our human instinct craves something like it. We cannot think complacently of this life or any part of this life as something just to be endured, to be got through with, as a preliminary to some unknown happiness in store beyond. We long for a present religion, a present strength, a present joy, a present God, and we find them all, not in any weak ignoring of the misery of life, but in tlie way in which that misery may become instinct with happiness, by the sublime mercy of '' the vale of Baca."

If we go on, then, a little farther to try to find out something about tlie methods of this economy of transformation, how it is that suffering is not merely succeeded by but turned into joy, I suppose the one great answer that includes all others must be this : that suffering contains the elements of the highest happiness because it involves the condition of weakness, of helplessness, of dependence. If the condition for which man was made was a religious condition, that is to say a related, a bound up, a dependent condition, then the highest human happiness must always come Avith the most complete conformity to that first idea of human life. If dependence, then, be happiness, independence, (which if you take the word apart means just the same as irreligion,) independence of God, self-sufficiency, must be unhappiness. And then since suffering in all its various departments is the breaking up of self-sufficiency, of self-confidence, is it not evident at once that rightly used it may be the setting free of the human soul from an unnatural and forced condition, into its natural, regular, intended, and so happiest life ? It is simply the conviction of weakness in one's self letting a man free to return to the strength in which he belongs. It matters not what the weakness be, whether the breaking of a leg, so that the man wlio Avalked and earned his bread j^esterday has to lie still and be fed to-day. Or the death of a friend, so that he who used to lean on a strong shoulder as he walked feels for it now in vain. Or the disproving of a favorite proposition, so that where we used to tread firm on what we thought was certainty, we now go cautiously and tiptoe over doubt. Anything in body, brain, or heart that gets that idea of insufficiency home to us, may set us to digging beneath the self-surface of our vale of misery to find the God below for whom the thirsty soul was made.

There is something very beautiful to me in the truth that suffering, rightly used, is not a cramping, binding, restricting of the human soul, but a setting of it free. It is not a violation of the natural order, it is only a more or less violent breaking open of some abnormal state that the natural order may be resumed. It is the opening of a cage door. It is the breaking in of a prison wall. This is the thought of those fine old lines of an early English poet :

" The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed, Lets in new light through chinks that time has made. Stronger by weakness, wiser men become As they draw near to their eternal home."

Oh, how many battered cottages have thus let in the light ! How many broken bodies have set their souls free, and how manj^ shattered homes have let the men and women Avho sat in darkness in them see the great light of a present God ! '' Stronger by weakness ! " '' Who passing through the vale of misery use it for a well."

We have spoken thus of irresponsible suffering only; but in a far nobler way it is true of the responsible suffering which comes of sin. This is the hardest to believe ; but yet, my dear friends, this is wdiat we need to believe most of all. Beyond all suffering which comes by natural dispen-. sation or by human weakness there is another which exceeds them all. A man loses his friend and he is sorry, he loses his property and he is crushed, he loses his health and he almost gives up ; but there is a jet untasted woe of which that man knows nothing jet. With all his wading through deep waters, there is a suffering in which he has not yet dipped his foot. Let that same man find himself a sinner ; let him wake up and see how his sin has set him far away from God; let him feel how antagonistic his whole life is to holiness ; let him stand guilty, guilty, without a plea, without a hope, just with his stained and frightened soul naked before the eye of God, and then in tlie conviction of sin, then he has found what suffering is — sorrow! The other sorrows of his life all fade back out of sight and this is left alone. He walks the valley of his misery and all is dark. And can this valley too break forth in wells ? Can these dry pools be filled with water? Tell me, O Christians, you who out of the conviction of your sinfulness have found a Saviour from your sin, — tell me, all ye who, bowed down in the dust in the humiliation of your worthlessness, have heard there, with your face close to the ground, what you could never hear wliile you stood upright, the streams of pardon running sweet music down below, — tell me, is not the well of richest joy right here in the midst of the valley of completest sorrow ; where sin abounded does not grace much more abound?

my dear brethren, if any of you now are going through that valley, may He who led you there teach you how to " use it for a well." Every step as you go through it may you hear a voice beside you crying, '' Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the fountain."

It would be interesting to trace out also, as an element in this economy of transmutation, the way in which a man may get joy out of suffering by being brought through suffering into a deeper knowledge of the nature and purpose of God. Prosperity, as we have seen, is unconscious of God. Suffering, whether it will or no, has to be conscious of him. And if there be a perfectly unselfish joy, one entirely and perfectly pure, one in which the human faculty of joyfulness reaches its highest exaltation, it must be the earnest delight with which a man who loves God puts himself aside and is utterly happy in watching and seeing what God is and how he works.

1 have seen a man whom the world called a fearful sufferer living delightful days in this high study of the ways of God. Day by day his Maker took some strength out of his life, unstrung some nerve, put some pain in ; but the suffering of a decaying body was so far surpassed by the rare joy of feeling his Maker's hands busy on the body and the spirit he had made, and of studying his wondrous ways of w^orking, that his hours of sickness were the happiest that he had ever lived. He saw God glorifying himself, and was abundantly content ; that was the well of which he drank.

" Who passing through the vale of Baca make it a w^ell; the rain also filleth the pools." How beautifully the two clauses tell of the responsive positions of God and the human soul in suffering ! It is a meeting of water from below and water from above. The wells fill themselves out of the ground and the rain comes from the sky into the pools ; yet both from the same original source. Never so much as in suffering does the divinity which God gave to man come out and show itself to meet the new divinity which he sends down to it out of Heaven. Have you never been struck by coming suddenly on the face of a man whom you had known long and well, but who since you knew him had been a sufferer either mentally or bodily ; and seeing how his face had grown finer and nobler, so that you almost were awed before him at first ? Something had come out from him and something had come into him. His grossness had grown delicate and his brutishness gentle by his sorrow. And as with faces, so with characters.

Here we must stop. The Bible calls the world a world of sorrow ; but the same Bible tells us there is a way of making the vale of misery to laugh with springs and fountains. Remember, it is not just compensation, but transformation that you are to seek. Not Heaven yet. That looms before us always, tempting us on ; but now the earth, with all its duties, sorrows, difficulties, doubts, and dangers. We want a faith, a truth, a grace to help us noiv^ right here, where we are stumbling about, dizzied and fainting with our thirst. And we can have it. One who was man, jet mightier than man, has walked the vale before us. When he walked it, he turned it all into a well of living water. To them who are willing to walk in his footsteps, to keep in his light, the well he opened shall be forever flowing. Nay, it shall pass into him and fulfil there Christ's own words : " Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst, but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life."

ni.

HOMAGE AND DEDICATION.

" And the four and twenty elders fall down before Him that sat on the throne, and worship Him that liveth for ever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne." — Revelation iv. 10.

It is impossible for the mind to conceive of a more majestic picture than is presented in this fourth chapter of the Book of Revelation. The Church of Christ, with all her labors done and all her warfare over, stands at length in heaven, before the throne of Him whose servant she has been, and renders up her trust and gives all the glory back to Him. When we hear such a scene described in the few words of John's poetic vision, I think we are met with a strange sort of difficulty. Tlie great impression of the picture is so glorious that we are afraid to touch it with too curious fingers, to analyze its meaning and get at its truth. At the same time we feel sure that there is in it a precise and definitely shaped truth which is blurred to us by the very splendor of the poetry in which it is enveloped. We see on the one hand how often the wliole significance of some of the noblest things in Scripture is lost and ruined by people who take hold of them with hard, prosaic hands. Their poetry is necessary to their truth. On the other hand, we see how many of the most