Isaiah 29:11-12

The Unread Vision

Isa 29:11-12

So the vision remains unread. There are two roads to this insuperable and invincible "cannot." We are always breaking our heads against that granite "cannot." Surely the learned man can do it? He says, No: I could read it if somebody else would break the seal, but the book is sealed; I cannot get at it, my learning is not available. Then take it to the ignorant man: he says, I have the poetic faculty, I can idealise, but as for reading, I do not know even letters, much less syllables, I am no scholar; if you want anything out of my own consciousness, you can have it, but as to reading a vision written by Isaiah or Jeremiah or flaming Ezekiel, it is all mist and cloud to me; the writing has no shape. All writing is alike to ignorance. Then has it come to this? Yes, exactly to this, in our age, in the Church, in the family. Here we have one man saying, I can read, but I cannot break seals: and another saying, I could break the seal, but it would be useless, for having broken the seal the page would just be one blur to my unlearned eyes; I cannot read. To this has the vision of God come in our day! This is the Lord's doing. Is the Lord to be credited or discredited with this "cannot"? Yes:

"For the Lord hath poured out upon you the spirit of deep sleep, and hath closed your eyes: the prophets and your rulers, the seers hath he covered" ( Isa 29:10 ).

We live in a constructed universe, not in a desolate chaos. We are at liberty to build within certain lines, but we cannot transgress the greater geometry. We think we are building when we are only playing at toy-houses. All building was done before we began to disport ourselves in the quarries and in the forests of the earth: the geometry was settled before the stones were put together by human hands. Who is responsible for the fallen wall? God. Why is he responsible for the wall that has fallen? Because he is the Author of the true geometry; he has so constructed the universe that it we do not walk and work according to all his provisions our walls will tumble down, and every tumbling stone is a tribute to the throne of God. Do not suppose that you are little accidents, occasional appearances and disappearances on the surface of the earth; do not imagine that you are the mere sport of the statistician and the census-taker; you are here because God is Lord and Ruler. The Lord reigneth; he fixeth the bounds of our habitation; we say we will live here or there, and we will hasten to yonder city, and we call this liberty. In a narrow, subordinate sense, convenient for the interchange of human promise and opinion, this is true; yet it is only part of the truth: the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Men misuse or disuse their religious faculties, drink themselves into stupidity, lose their sensitiveness: this is the divine law; God is responsible. He is responsible for the law. He will not he cannot change it. We are constituted that we cannot allow a limb to fail into desuetude, and retain its vigour. Who is responsible for the numbness, the paralysis? God is. He has not made a law we can play with; he did not make the law merely for the sake of making it; law expresses himself: and God is love. Who is responsible for this issue? Man is. But you have just said that God is responsible. That is true; and so is man. You can start the argument from either of two points; you must neither exclude the divine nor the human: "Wherefore the Lord said, Forasmuch as this people draw near me with their mouth, and with their lips do honour me, but have removed their heart far from me, and their fear toward me is taught by the precept of men: Therefore" ( Isa 29:13-14 ). That is precisely how this mysterious life stands. Can there be evil in the city, and the Lord not have done it? No. Can there be evil in the city, and man be held guiltless? No: God did it; man did it; these would be irreconcilable paradoxes in words: we come down upon their meaning through the agony, the shame, the disappointment, and occasionally the joy of our lives. Experience keeps her school: life is its own university.

Here, then, we have men representing two classes. The learned man has been making too much of his learning. He would rest upon it; he would be his own deity: and the Lord says, This cannot be, and "Therefore... the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hid." You have put the lamp in the wrong place; you have endeavoured to supersede the sun: what shall I do to you? O vain, vain soul, what shall I do? this will I do, I will blow out your candle. There comes a point when it is useless to reason with men; they are neither above the line of argument nor below it; they are wholly outside of it, it has no relation to them: the only thing left even for God's almightiness to do is to blow out the artificial flame. So great men become imbeciles, men who yesterday governed the world are today asking little children to help them across the busy thoroughfare, for a sudden dizziness has seized their heads; men who yesternight presided at the board and dictated the policy of the consultation, are this morning asking what day of the week it is. What has happened an earthquake? No; some subtle action has taken place in the brain: the inner eyes are dull of sight. See these wise men reel; they have been early at their cups today, they must have been sitting up overnight and drinking deep. No, they are quite sober; yet they are drunk they are drunk, but not with wine. The Lord keeps us all under him: beyond there is no finite power; it is in the under-world that finiteness plays its little game of invention and rushes upon its blasphemy of trying to be infinite. Here, then, is a responsibility on the one side divine and on the other side wholly human. It is a law fixed by God. "Whoso breaketh an hedge, a serpent shall bite him." Who made the hedge? God. Who made the serpent? God. Who made the serpent bite just at that moment? God. Who broke through the hedge? Man. It is a marvellous education, a mixed and manifold discipline, full of eccentricity and self-contradiction, and yet ending in reconciliation, if not literal, yet experiential, attested by the judgment and the conscience of men.

The inabilities and confusions of the world are of man's creating. We have spoiled our faculties, we have blinded ourselves by indulgence, we have stupefied ourselves by excesses; and now the quality of men reveals itself. In vino veritas , and in this other drink that is not wine there is also truth. Having risen from the banqueting of self-indulgence what happens? Two things. How does the banqueting tell upon the learned man? He says, "I cannot." How does it tell upon the ignorant man? He says, "I cannot." Can neither of you do this thing? No: but you are two totally different men. Yes, but this banqueting and rioting develops the quality of each, and the learned man is as the fool, and the fool is as the learned man; and the wisdom of God remains unread. Why palter about the diversity of the roads when they both come to the same point? Self-degradation is the answer. We have taken things into our own hands, and therefore we are drunken but not with wine; we stagger but not with strong drink. God will not have us share his throne. We cannot be both God and men. We must know our place, and our place is that of scholars; our disposition should be that which says, Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth. To that disposition God never returned any answer but the reply of love. Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye cannot see the kingdom of God. You may even be talking about it without seeing it The age is cursed with sermons about the Gospel. We do not want to hear anything more "about" the Gospel, we want to hear the Gospel itself.

Then our hope is not in the learned man as such, nor is our hope in the unlearned man. There are persons who will tell you that the pulpit is enfeebled because of the learning that is in it now, the literal learning; the brain of the pulpit is overloaded with literature; the references to literature are all displays of intellectual vanity, and therefore we must turn to the simple, the unlearned, and the ignorant. Very good; let us go to them: will you read us the vision of God? The answer is, if they be honest men, We cannot read it. When learning has drunk itself into stupidity by the wine of its own vanity, and when ignorance has done the same thing, taking refuge in indolence rather than accepting the discipline of industry, genius and stupidity confront one another at the same point, and say, What! you here? Yes! both here, both fools.

All this accounts for the religious weakness and powerlessness of the times. We have not sufficiently waited upon God; we have not lived and moved, and had our being in the Cross. We have become an inventive Church. We must, at least, have now nearly five-and-twenty different theories of every doctrine supposed to be contained in the Bible. There is the catechism view, with proof and without proofs, mainly the latter; there is the trust-deed view, in which some man has been paid so much in silver and pence for writing out the faith of God's own heart, minting the thought of infinity into phrases that have been engrossed and docketed in chancery. We have trusted too much to mechanism, and too little to simple childlike faith in God; we have placed upon the mountains of knowledge and progress and holiness a number of whitewashed posts, and we have said, Follow these posts, and inquire when you get to the last of them where you are. All this means that the vision is being lost. The real reading, the poetical, idealistic, spiritual meaning, the moral penetration, the function of conscience, the prerogative of sanctified judgment, all the noblest aspects and powers of man are being subordinated to these little tricks of management and vanity, these little bubbles of ambition. Is it not well to have a post or two on the mountains? Under some circumstances, yes; but when there is a living Guide to take you home, you trust to the life and not the timber. We are living in the reign and dispensation of God the Holy Ghost. How seldom do we hear him referred to! We hear much exclamation about preaching Christ; we uphold that exclamation with the vehemence of the most excited love; but such preaching is impossible apart from the direct and continual action of God the Holy Ghost. Who are the men that run down anything that is really spiritual, even if it be an imposture or misconception of spirituality? The men whom we have most difficulty in convincing that there is a spiritual universe are professing Christians. Of course the whole spiritual conception of things has been debased, impoverished, dishonoured; there have been quacks and impostors innumerable in the interpretation of spiritual realities. Who ought to preserve that great department of thought, and secure it as far as possible from invasion and violation? Christian teachers. Do not let imposture cheat you out of your inheritance. What you have heard of spiritualism or debased spirituality may be lies from beginning to end, and probably is; but that ought not to quench your faith in the fact that God is a Spirit, and that we are now under the dispensation of the Holy Ghost.

There is only one cure for this loss of faith, and that cure is in two things, leading to a third, penitence. That old word penitence is dropping into disuse. In a letter recently received a man said: "When people are converted (whatever that may mean)." It was a fool's parenthesis; every man ought to know what converted means. We know it in politics, we know it in art, we ought to know it also in the soul. "Converted" why it means turned round, turned up, turned God-ward. "Whatever that may mean" thou poor simpleton, if not thou meaner knave; it means change in soul, life, thought, purpose, point of vision, point of aspiration, and range of service. The penitence will go when the word conversion goes. Penitence ought to mean brokenheartedness, shame on account of sin, bitterness of soul because of the broken law, self-renunciation, self-repudiation. Then after penitence will come obedience. Oh, the sweetness of obedience! that is the great scholar; obedience has all the certificates of heaven, obedience wins all the prizes of God. If we could be obedient we should have great visions every day above the brightness of the sun. If we would know the doctrine we must do the will; some things come to us in the act of doing them; our doing is very imperfect, but still it is doing, it is action; we are on the way towards the happy conclusion. If you would understand the Cross you must first die upon it. Oh, thou who hast not tasted the agony, do not try to preach the Gospel! Words of passion on lips of ice are the basest blasphemy against God and man. First go, be reconciled to God through Christ; then come, and with the music of thankful love tell us what his face is like: hath he marks to lead us to him, if he be our Guide? and you will say, "In his feet and hands are wound-prints, and his side," and we shall know then that thou hast been in communion with the Cross.

Out of penitence and out of obedience will come self-distrust Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. We shall then know how to read the Bible. Many men can only parse it; they think parsing is reading. You begin Milton's "Paradise Lost" by parsing it, and you will never touch the music. The parsing is right, no man has a word to say against grammar, but do keep them both in their own places; above all that is literal, wooden, mechanical, and essential to human convenience above all that, there is light. What is light? No man knows. Love what is love? No man knows. Music what is music? Music!