William Penn Lecture
1946
The City of God
and The City of Man
Delivered at
Arch Street Meeting House
Philadelphia
by
Gilbert H. Kilpack
"Behold: in peace is my bitterest bitterness" the
words of the prophet Isaiah say what our hearts should say
but cannot. Though our hearts break with bitterness, we
are dumb, or we chatter without sense, for we are a people
who lack even the wisdom of lamentation. We staked our
very souls on the coming of peace out of war, and now we
stand alone, in bitterness, without our souls, with a peace
more bitter than war. What bitterness is to be compared with
the bitterness of those who have thought good might come
from evil. Persevering in so long and bitter a conflict it
became necessary to see ourselves clothed in righteousness, but
it was self-righteousness which frequently conquers,
but never makes, peace.
Our bread of peace is bitter because we told
ourselves that democracy is superior to dictatorship. And that
was right. But we did not see and have not yet seen how
neutral, how negative our beloved democracy is. We did not
ponder the fact that a negative Christian democracy may
overthrow a continent, but cannot conquer a positive barbaric
force. While we were busy conquering our enemy's body, our
enemy was busy conquering our soul, and this was revealed to
us out of our own actions, out of a horrible flash of light
which spread from Hiroshima over the world, entering even
the seclusion of our quiet democratic homes. The atomic
bomb has fallen with the power of a revelation from God,
but unexperienced as we are with the revelations of God,
the atomic rays of Hiroshima are just commencing to
penetrate our souls. Still, two things should already be clear to
us through the light of this "revelation."
First, we should begin to suspect the hidden depths
of uncalculated evil in the souls of "good" people. Now that
it is possible, as it has been observed, to breathe in the
ashes of the citizens of Hiroshima as one takes a morning
stroll on Market Street or Park Avenue, it should be not quite
so easy to talk about the natural goodness of all men
particularly of ourselves. There is something of God in
every man, let us affirm it more certainly than ever,
but surrounded as we are by millions of new-made graves
and with the voices of the hungry and the dispossessed in
our ears, let us not easily accept the impious hope that
the natural goodness of ourselves is sufficient stuff out of
which to fashion a better world.
I am not so much talking about a
carefully-tailored philosophic system as about the unorganized but
dominant hope which lingers in millions of minds and forms
itself into the touchstone of our civilization the faith that
man is sufficient unto himself and has but to strive to bring
the good new kingdom in. Hear me, I cry it with all my
strength, and my voice rises out of the suffering and the bitter
crucible of our times: man is not by nature good. We are all
born with a freedom to turn to the good, but the Source of good
is Beyond, and the power of human transformation is a
given power. We may labor, study and weep for it, which we
must do, but in the end it is given.
What else can one read out of our bitter chapter?
We have a light within, a light which shows up our poor
beggarly selves and points to the all-sufficing God whose life is
ever so near yet ever so distant by the immensity of our
self-centered wills. Ours is the power to will what God has
willed before us. In our human freedom there is no assurance
of progress; by ourselves we can only destroy; true
freedom consists in our perfect availability to divine will all
else makes for destruction in the long run. The most
highly trained and the keenest minds that our world can
command, put to work as our guides will, if not bound to the
self-denying spirit which was in Christ, bring us right back
to the kind of world we now have. That is what I mean
by saying that man is not naturally good. Not only does
all absolute human power corrupt but all science and
knowledge corrupt, apart from prayer, the everlasting purifier.
We have all too easily supposed that the progress
of humanity comes through a system of intellectual trial
and error, and evil is therefore nothing more than an
incorrect choice. If the chaos of our times arises out of
undeveloped human intellect, then our civilization is on the right
track and needs only to persevere. If evil arises out of our
corrupt human wills, then something else must enter in to
save even our most brilliant human achievements.
It has been said that the love of money is the root of
all evil; more exactly speaking, the love of money is a
perennial shoot from the root of all evil, which is human
self-sufficiency. And whatsoever good intentions, ideals,
and labors for the common good are grafted onto this root
are thereby corrupted. How can we escape self-sufficiency
except through God-sufficiency, that is to say,
worship.
Two forces form our modern civilization. The first is
a movement across the world striving for the betterment
of the lot of common peoples, of the dispossessed and
the oppressed; the second is the almost universal reliance
upon the innate powers of man to achieve the best. The tragedy
is that the latter cancels out the former. In such a world,
where men see the need but not the source of the good, the
truest contribution Friends can make is the demonstration of
that full life of worship which seeks God for Himself and
relies only on whatsoever actions spring from this Source.
It is, then, not the atomic bomb which is the
tragedy, but the self-sufficient despotism of human will which
the bomb has laid bare that is the real tragedy. Out of this
limbo world where men are neither exalted nor humbled
through the contemplation of God, the atomic bomb was
inevitably conceived; and its explosion has brought, like the
first workings of God upon the soul, not light but darkness,
or rather enough light to see the awful extent of the
darkness. I see, Lord, help Thou my blindness; I believe, Lord,
help Thou mine unbelief.
The second "revelation" of Hiroshima is the
painful awareness that we stand at the threshold of a new era
in human history. We have hastily christened it "The
Atomic Age," with never a doubt that the future belongs to the
atom. With never a doubt? No; the priest looked anxious, I
think, as he gave the blessing, the godfather trembled and
the parents were gloomy. In a word, our atomic age is not a
new age; it is the old reign of the self-sufficient mind of
man raised to new heights on our modern tower of Babel.
The atomic discovery may precipitate a new age. It
may throw us into an age of unleashed violence and
subsequent barbaric darkness that is, the atom may destroy the
atom. Or, it may throw the opposing forces of our world into
such a new and evident perspective that a great many people
will be led to see that there are other foundations upon which
to build a new cultural order, foundations which our
present world despises, or still worse, ignores.
We are now set upon a pinnacle and made to look
upon the kingdoms of the earth. The centuries of human
history are now compressed, they become as but a day, and we
are given to stand upon a vantage point, to see before and
after, to see as Augustine saw at the beginning of the fifth
century after Christ. May grace be given us to see as clearly as
he did that there are two powers in this world struggling
for our lives, powers making for two cities let us call them
by their ancient names: Jerusalem and Babylon. All that
exists and has being is contained in these two cities, the city
of God and the city of man, the city of eternal giveness and
the city of human sufficiency, the city of light and the city
of darkness, the city of the humble and the city of the
proud, the city of love and the city of the atomic bomb. What
forces to conjure with: Jerusalem and the atom. Jerusalem
the primitive town of a despised people, become the symbol
of the city, the kingdom of God begun silently, secretly in
the hearts of men; and the atom, a thing too small for the
human eye, the apotheosis of our civilization, become the symbol
of man's titanic evil. Jerusalem, centuries in the building;
the new city of the atom to be built in ten, fifteen, or
twenty years possibly. Who is willing to labor for fulfillment
in eternity when success is offered for tomorrow ?
Jerusalem and Babylon contain the whole history
of man. In the beginning was the Word and the Word
became flesh, became in the heart of Christ the City of God on
earth. In the beginning was the atom, and the atom took wing
and dwelt in the mind of man, a servant of man's self
regard and king of Babylon. For the present the citizens of
these two cities are mingled together but in heart separated,
for the end of Jerusalem is eternal peace, and the end of
Babylon is temporal advantage.
In a majestic flight of divine wisdom, St.
Augustine described "the two loves which have created these two
cities, namely, self-love to the extent of despising God, the
earthly; love of God to the extent of despising one's self, the
heavenly city. The former glories in itself, the latter in God. The
former seeks the glory of men while to the latter God as
the testimony of the conscience is the greatest glory
the
one is holy, the other impure; the one is social, the other
selfish; the one consults the common good for the sake of
the supernal fellowship, the other reducing the affairs of
the commonality to their own power for the sake of
arrogant domination; the one subject to God, the other
endeavoring to equal Him; the one tranquil, the other turbulent, the
one working for peace, the other seditious; the one
preferring truth to the praise of those who are in error, the other
greedy for praise however got; the one friendly, the other
envious; the one guiding the neighbour in the interest of
the neighbour's good, the other in that of its own
.
Wherefore let each one question himself as to what he loveth; and
he shall find of which he is a citizen. And if he shall have
found himself to be a citizen of Babylon, let him root out
cupidity and implant charity. But if he shall have found himself
a citizen of Jerusalem let him endure captivity and hope
for liberty."
To point out the sharp opposition of these two
cities may seem to imply that they are easily distinguishable.
In their essential beings they are contraries with no point
of meeting. Yet most people are citizens neither wholly of
the one city nor of the other, a fact which makes it all
very confusing if one relies upon the judgment and action
of people to point out the way. Many are thereby led to
the conclusion that it is quite permissible to take refuge in
the great foggy mass of humanity which in this world
connects the two cities. It was to save us from all such confusion
that Jesus taught the love of God as the commandment of
first importance, without which it is impossible perfectly to
obey the second, to love our neighbors.
I take it to be the genius of Christian ethical
teaching that we are to love our brothers not after our own
lights, but in the manner in which God has everlastingly
shown His goodness toward us. We not only labor in vain
apart from this great doctrine, but we carry the spirit of
Babylon into the city of God; in endeavoring to love men without
the continued inward dependence upon God, we love
ourselves in those we endeavor to serve. Thus Baron von Hügel
has said that "we are so fond of men, we can't keep God.
The most subtle enemy of religion is humanitarianism." This
is not to turn us from those minute acts of every-day
labor, nor from those great corporate projects of charity
which occupy us as a Society; it is rather to make us inquire
each day whether the city we seek is built of human notions or
is that city already founded in the mind of God.
Perhaps no wrestler with Christ in modern times
has suffered so profoundly in search of that city of light in
the midst of human darkness as has Féodor Dostoievsky,
born as he was in a time when socialism, communism and a
host of benevolent schemes for the betterment of mankind
were cut off from all thought of divine parenthood. Let us
consider a magnificent passage from one of his novels,
describing men in a future state of society. "When they are
deserted they will stand together more closely and more
affectionately, they will hold each other's hands
men will give to
the world, to nature, to their neighbors, to every blade of
grass, that overflowing love
. So frenziedly will they cherish
the earth and its life that gradually they will
cherish it with
a special affection, no longer the same as before. They
will explore the phenomena of nature and discover
unexpected secrets in her, for they will be looking at the world with
new eyes, as a lover looks at his mistress. They will come
to themselves and hasten to embrace one another
.
They will work for one another, each giving his earnings to
all and being only too glad to do so. Every child will know
that he can find a father or mother in any human creature."
Beautiful, isn't it? I suppose most of us would say
so, would we not? Here I confess to deception and trickery
in order that you may see how we are all, at times,
carried away by fine words. What I have here done is to
abridge Dostoievsky's grim picture of human society after it
has somehow succeeded in renouncing once and for all
the eternal life of God's reign among men. Let us now read
the whole passage and we shall see.
"I suppose the struggle to be over," says Versilov to
the young man. "There is quiet again after the curses and
hissing and the mud; men are left alone as they desired, the
great idea of the past is gone from them; the mighty disposer
of power from whom they drew their food and warmth for
so long has disappeared like the sun at evening in the
pictures of Claude Lorrain: one would think that it is the last day
of mankind. All of a sudden men realize that they are
alone, they feel as though they were orphans. My dear boy, I
have never been able to imagine men as boorish and
ungrateful. When they are deserted they will stand together more
closely and more affectionately, they will hold each other's
hands in the knowledge that henceforth they together
represent the whole universe. For to fill the place of the lost great
idea of immortality men will give to the world, to nature, to
their neighbors, to every blade of grass, that overflowing
love which they formerly consecrated to the vision of eternal
life. So frenziedly will they cherish the earth and its life
that gradually they will grow accustomed to seeing in it
their beginning and end, and they will cherish it with a
special affection, no longer the same as before. They will
explore the phenomena of nature and discover unexpected
secrets in her, for they will be looking at the world with new
eyes, as a lover looks at his mistress. They will come to
themselves and hasten to embrace one another, knowing that their
days are numbered and that there is nothing else. They will
work for one another each giving his earnings to all and
being only too glad to do so. Every child will know that he can
find a father or mother in any human creature for every
man and woman will think as he watches the setting
sun: tomorrow may be my last day; but what matter? There
will be others here when I am gone, and after them their
children. So they will be supported not by the hope of meeting
beyond the grave, but by the thought that others will replace
them on earth who will always love and tremble for one
another. They will turn quickly to love to stifle the sorrow that will
be deep down in their hearts."
Do you see the tragedy herein? the vision of
our world put in order, with God left out. It is not so much
a violent once-and-for-all choice we have made as it is an
easy day-by-day denial of our human destiny to enter into
the eternality of God in the midst of flesh and time. Unwilling
to declare one thing imperative above all else, we settle
for social betterment and let the rest go hang. I do not ask
you whether this temptation is real, I tell you, I feel it in
my bones, and I see it in the life of Jesus who spent forty
days in the wilderness struggling to conquer the insidious
notion that His Kingdom of the Spirit was not the real
Kingdom, and that the attractive kingdom of man was all that
could hope to succeed.
If the saints in their moments of anguish have
been sorely tempted is it any wonder that we in our off-hand
way think upon material achievement as the real, and upon
the spiritual as the honorable but not too solid something
which is, at best, added on to life? In our life of prayer we must
be repeatedly looking to the end of all things envisioning
the accomplishment of the kind of world we desire where,
shall we say, war, poverty, disease, unemployment and crime
have been abolished. Will our highest and most persistent
human needs have been satisfied? Let us look to the end of
all, comparing our best intentions with God's full wisdom
before we settle on any humanly clever scheme.
Consider the three conceivable ways that order
might be brought about in this world. First, it might be
attained without human suffering or creative effort, without
universal tragedy, in short without freedom to accept or reject
an harmonious existence. This possibility God has rejected,
and in granting us freedom, made it imperative that we
accept one or the other of the two remaining ways.
The second way is achieved through total human endeavor, each succeeding generation building upon
the work of all history. A world conceived in the mind of
man, and a monument to man, it may theoretically at least
be based on laws of nature, but looking to the end of it all, it
is the self-sufficient mind of man which makes the
decisions. Not only does this second way, the way that we have
chosen, offer better things for better living through chemistry,
but also complete insurance coverage, a human
guarantee against fear and want.
The third way brings to earth that Kingdom
which already is in heaven. Here too, men labor with body
and mind, but always that earthly powers may become
the willing, selfless agents of the Father. This way is the
rightful heritage of all and is approached through penitence,
achieved through the suffering of our self-sufficient wills,
entered through the love of the Creator.
The fruits of these two ways often seem the same,
and this is disconcerting. The same words justice,
courage, peace, equality are heard in Babylon as well as
Jerusalem; yet the source and goal of Babylon is the perishable
man, and the peace and justice he talks about are
perishable. The citizens of these two cities may at times travel the
same road together, put their equipment in the same
luggage compartment, and seem to offer the same wares, but
their supreme allegiance leads them in opposite directions.
The leaders of Babylon offer security for all;
Jesus offered no security in this world, only an inward peace
won through much travail. Babylon is surrounded by a
fortress which assures it an arbitrated peace with the
world; Jerusalem takes its enemies into its bosom, offering itself
a living sacrifice. The Babylonians proudly raise their
heads and offer to abolish fear by emasculating man's
sensitivity to evil. Jesus called the citizens of His city to endure
evil, not to submit to it, but to weary it out in all
humility, imitating therein God in His patience. The Babylon
city council offers freedom of speech, of thought and of
worship as though one man could give these things to another.
It is something to have the liberty to speak, but not
much compared with the freedom to speak, which is God's
grace in the pure of heart, and it cannot be silenced. The
soldier slapped Jesus for speaking the truth to Pilate, but
Jesus was not silenced. The same is true with worship, which
is the business that the heart of man and the heart of
God have together; worship is freedom itself and no man
can give or take it away.
Freedom from want what nonsense! It was
Jesus who taught men how not to want by giving away what
they had. Seek first the Kingdom of God and you will then
find you want very little in this world. Give to the poor for
God's sake; be poor in good faith and fear cannot touch you. It
is our Babylonian civilization that has taught us to want,
to want ever more and more as though the desire of man
were a thing that could be satisfied. The more we get the more
we want and thus our Babylonian heart is laid bare.
Is it not clear that in all the history of
attempted progress there is a basic cleavage between those on the
one hand who look upon man as the measure of all
things, believing that man's is "the kingdom, the power and
the glory" and on the other hand there are those who
believe that man's true dignity consists in making a daily
sacrifice of self-will and who delight in seeing God exalted and
glorified in all created things. It was because of this cleavage
that Jesus likened His kingdom to a sheepfold into which
some would try to steal, climbing onto the roof or burrowing
under the foundations, instead of coming in by the narrow,
hard gateway. "What difference does it make how we get in,"
cries the world, "so long as we get in?"
Deceptions there must be; for the time being the
sheep and the goats must lie down in the fold together. The
goats sleep easily in the fold, and why should they not they
got in by themselves and have no one to thank but
themselves; they can lay themselves down in perfect
self-assurance. Strangely it is the lambs, the saints of this world who
are seldom at ease, who are always enduring the pains of
growth, always alert in prayer listening for their good
Shepherd. When He calls, they arise, but the goats sleep on in
drowsy self-sufficiency they got in by themselves, what need
then to watch and seek for Another.
It is easy to be deceived, for now as never before in
all of history perhaps, there is widespread talk and concern
for the betterment of peoples everywhere. It arises partly out
of the accumulated social teachings of the last two or
three centuries and partly it is aroused by the fear that
unless man succeeds quickly, civilization will destroy itself.
Fools we are, not to see that a civilization capable of
destroying itself is already as good as dead. The atomic bomb is not
a foundling from another world put upon our door-step; it
is our own flesh and blood, and reveals us as only a
corrupt offspring can reveal its parents.
Such a revelation should drive us back to, or should
I say forward to the teaching of Augustine: that man
has nothing which he can call his own except self-will;
whatever is imperfect arises out of man's abuse of freedom and
leads only to destruction. Out of self-will we have built us a
world lustrous with achievement, seeming to offer so much,
yet all the while balanced on the brink of chaos. Our
present course is deceptive, made up as it is of good intentions
and high-sounding slogans; but severed as we are
from continuing communion with the Source of All, our future
is sadly ordained.
I do not mean to say that by hook or by crook
our civilization may not go on prosperously for some
time, making peace, building cities and atomic bombs. The
tragedy remains; man isolated from God is a sad spectacle,
whether he sits in prosperity eating his bitter bread of peace
or whether he is blown to ashes.
Friends, in the face of the life-and-death
struggle between these two cities, let us lay aside all the burdens
of human contrivance which so easily beset us; and let us
do this not so much out of fear that Babylon will overtake
us, as from the love we bear for the City of God. Our world
is shaken with fear but it knows not what to love nor how
to love. Let us arise then to our high calling which is to
become a devout and inwardly dependent people, patient in
good works, bringing all things into the light of the Eternal.
The world needs such a people and we can work
out our salvation only as we show forth God's teaching in
the world. I say that the world waits for our testament of
religion, knowing full well that the world isn't looking for any
such thing. Everybody knows there is something seriously
wrong with the world, and everyone is looking for a practical
scheme to right it. "There has arisen in our time," as G. K.
Chesterton has said, "a most singular fancy: the fancy that when
things go very wrong we need a practical man. It would be far
truer to say, that when things go very wrong we need
an unpractical man. Certainly at least we need a theorist.
A practical man means a man accustomed to mere
daily practice, to the way things commonly work. When
things will not work, you must have the thinker, the man who
has some doctrine about why they work at all."
Now, Friends have more than a theory; they have
a conviction of faith that the prayer of waiting upon God
beats all human contriving in coming to the truth. To say,
`Yes, we Quakers are a people of prayer, but of course we are
also a practical people," is a sad denial of our supreme
testimony and reveals a basic dependence on self a fear
that Jerusalem is the true city but Babylon is the practical
one. Our Society was born out of the direct revelation of the
Spirit of God in human life. When that divine center ceases to
be the source of all our concerns and the first principle of
our ministry, then we had just as well join up with the
local Chamber of Commerce. The fact that Friends have no
written creeds or dogmas has led some Friends to suppose
that theology is to be entirely eschewed. The reverse is the
case we must, more than the people of the credal
churches, be concerned with what we believe if our message is to
be as a living flame.
We avoid creeds not in order to eliminate theology
but in order to keep it alive and growing. Let us therefore
think together on some of our beliefs which come with newness
of life to our agonized world.
(i) Our religion must proclaim the fact that God is.
It sounds so stupidly simple to write it down or say it just
like that, one so seldom does. Is it beyond our imagination
to conceive what it would do to our poor world to contain
a fellowship of people obsessed with this one fact above
all: that God is. He is the supreme, objective fact and over
and above what man thinks or feels, God is. Baron von
Hügel lays it down as a first principle, that "Religion, in
proportion to its genuine religiousness, always affirms more and
other than the laws of the mind or impressions of the soul. It
ever affirms Reality, a Reality, the Reality distinct from
ourselves, the self-subsistent Spirit, God." Without this the wings
of faith are clipped, boundaries are set upon vision, and
human pride unleashed. To think of God as all Reality is not
like making Him an honorary chairman whose venerable
name adds dignity to our committee. No, it is rather our
starting point and the one certainty to which we return. It leads
us on to a second belief.
(ii) Man is made in the image of God, that is, capable
of apprehending God. This is possible because God's
loving will is ever pressing hard upon human life and
because human life carries the will to press ever on,
through continuous and increasing inward light, toward the
heart of God. All the human senses are so many ways
of approaching the divine life, but the Christly pattern
leads us beyond the exaltation of the intellect to the humbling
of the will as the high way of life in God. To be ever with
thirst, ever in travail for this experience of God is man's
destiny; and all the sorrows of our world arise out of this
divine-human disunity. Is not that fundamental? Some will
deny it and some will mark it down a beautiful irrelevance,
but all of humanity in all its evil, proclaims it to be true.
Out of a spirit of reaction to other forms of thought,
it has become almost fashionable to speak of that of God
in humanity. Now, we admire George Fox for rebelling
against Calvinism, but it is for something else that we love him; it
is for his spirited, first-hand affirmation of the life of God
he discovered in his soul. No more can our faith be a
reaction than dare it be a refuge from this or that ideology, or
from scepticism or even from barbarism. We must ever
affirm our God as the only true home of all humanity. To say
that religion is less than all of life, simply will not do. This is
not to drag religion down to the life-level of this world, rather
to lift earthly life up to the life-level of God's will.
(iii) We must ever affirm the transformation of
human nature through the fusion of human and divine will.
We look out upon our world and find some people
declaring that "human nature is what it is," and such dwell in
Babylon believing it all that is possible; others desire that
they themselves and the world shall be transformed, but
insofar as they desire and labor without continual reference to
the divine will they are carried off to Babylon in spite of all;
and then finally there are those who out of free will give up
their will their will to please themselves, and even to do
good in their own way resigning themselves into the hands
of the living God. These may be called the children of God.
That we lack strength is forgiven us, but not that
we lack will. And those of us who seek God's absolute will
must know that the Kingdom of God, though not taken
without violence (who of us can resign his will without a
struggle?), in the end is given and not humanly seized. To give way
to the will of his Father, Jesus suffered, but He was in no
way grim and hard; He suffered in love and not in fear or
anxiety. Thus von Hügel can say that, "
man attains in
religion, as truly as elsewhere once given his wholehearted
striving in proportion as he seeks not too directly, not
feverishly and strainingly, but in a largely subconscious,
waiting, genial, expansive, endlessly patient, sunny manner." It
is then, as apostles of the divine-human transformation
that we shall find our truest ministry.
(iv) The way into the largeness of divine will is by
the path of repentance. John the Baptist came
preaching repentance as preparation for the Kingdom of God. It
is sensitivity to the awful difference between Babylon
and Jerusalem that calls out our longing for forgiveness. In
our times we have so woven our natural inclinations into
the City of God that repentance has largely been stowed
away with antiquated revivalism. But in blowing off the
outer covering of our self-sufficiency, the atomic bomb has
revealed something of our universal guilt and pressed upon us
the need for reconciliation with God Almighty; not because
He is a harsh dealer but for precisely the opposite
reason: because He will permit us to destroy ourselves if we will.
Still, no such calamity as the atomic bomb will
bring humanity to the full measure of repentance, and this for
a curious reason. We cannot know the tragic depths of evil
in ourselves or in the world until we have looked
with wonderment into God's goodness. It is the contrast
that brings us to our knees. From the solitude of God John
went out preaching repentance. How strange that the saints,
not the sinners, know the most about evil. One might
almost say, the purer the saint the greater his certainty of his
own evil, and this not out of puritanical morbidity but out
of love for God and from the awareness that all outside
God's love is evil. God's light shut out is the darkness in man.
Through repentance the rough ground of self dependence within us is broken up that the seeds of
eternal growth may take root. For the world we must weep, as
well as for ourselves, and in this we are imitators of Christ
who wept over Jerusalem the unredeemed Jerusalem, the
city of unfulfilled destiny. It is over the church, that
strange compound of Jerusalem and Babylon that Christ
weeps today. He weeps, seeing us believing in Jerusalem
but delighting in Babylon.
In the old-fashioned Sunday School it was required
that one come armed with Bible verses to recite when called
upon. I remember how naughty and funny we thought it to
come out with the shortest verse in the Bible: "Jesus wept."
It isn't at all funny or naughty, and I wonder why the
teacher thought he had always to put on a hard, reproving
look. There must surely be that of God which weeps over
sinful humanity, and if so, we are surely called to a "ministry
of tears," as the old monks called it pity born out of
love, sorrow born out of joy.
We share a common evil as we share a common
good. We weep as Christ wept: that we permit so little to
corrupt so much good. That is possibly why Jesus was so
fierce with the Pharisees, not that they were so low; they
were good and bad by fragments, the bad destroying the
good. "Be what you are with all your heart, and not by pieces
and in part," cries Brand in Ibsen's play. It may be too much
to suppose that in this world we shall see God's Kingdom
spread out in all completeness, but it is not too much to
suppose that through lowliness, contrition and some tears we
shall be fully resigned to His will.
(v) All that I have said before leads to this: we are to
be a people of prayer and no greater offering than this
can we make to a distressed world. We may affirm God as
the heart of all Reality, believe His true light in man and
hope for the regeneration of human will, but without the
practice of prayer it all disappears like a cloud of smoke on a
windy day, for prayer is the day-by-day and hour-by-hour
growth into life eternal. Belief is the beginning of life, but prayer
is its accomplishment.
It is like this. It's as though we had been born
the children of a king, the inheritors of untold wealth, and
the citizens of a city of great vision. But in our infancy we
were carried off by time and space to a strange land where
the recollection of our parent king, our wealth, our
citizenship, became dimmer day by day, and we settled down in
the alien land to becoming orphans, slaves, clowns,
vagabonds, and laborers. If some remembrance of our heritage came
to us the affairs of life soon crowded it out.
This is no fairy tale, it is our true story. We are
the children of God, and He has willed His Spirit to us,
ordained us citizens of His Kingdom. But we are in this life
carried away by a strange freedom; forgetfulness sets in upon
us soon, spinning us round and round in a little world of
our own creation, unless we hear a distant sound from
our homeland, an intimation of our divine origin and
destiny. The cries of earth argue against us, still we dare to
believe. Yet, in order that belief may become our very sinew, in
order that we may enter into our spiritual heritage, we
must persistently recall ourselves to this great hidden truth
about ourselves. This then is prayer and the foundation
of Jerusalem within us: to recall ourselves with
increasing eagerness to that Life from which our self-sufficient
wills have separated us. In our secret chamber we cry, "My
God, my Father," and our birthright is given; in the Meeting
we pray, "Our Father," and He draws us into His City.
(vi) Finally, Friends, we are to be an incarnate
people, showing forth the goodness of God not only in spite of
all the limitations of changing earth but through them. We
are to live as citizens of Jerusalem in the midst of Babylon,
to accept the facts of human limitation, but not to be ruled
by them. Christ, our elder brother, has shown the
way, promising us similar hardships and similar triumphs.
He has promised us success, but not as this world desires
it. For the time being Babylon must flourish, for self-love
is ever popular and love of God to the forgetting of self
ever contrary to natural inclination. We are to labor in this
world and for this world, but when our outward labors are
cast down, that is not our destruction but the testing of the
reality of our purpose.
Jesus predicted that Jerusalem would be cast
down, not one stone left upon another, but He knew the City
of God lived on forever. We labor in this world, but our hope
is in that Spirit which flashes over the shifting sands
and broods gently over the troubled waters, that Light
which shines through the human countenance and takes a
manger or any lowly spot for its ever-recurring birth.
Friends, two cities surround us. One is of our
own making and the other is of God. Whichever one we
choose, the other will ever be at hand. I do not know that we
can draw the line and say here one begins and the other
ends. We can only take heart that out of the darkness we
are given a light to show us our destiny, a comradeship
to encourage our faint hearts, and a way of preparation
for our City.
"In hours like this
No man well knows how deep he is.
Each depth a deeper depth revealing
"
In hours like this the man of leisure is called to
labor, the practical one to be impractical and foolish for God's
sake, the dilettante to yield up that reserved center of self
delight, the successful one to learn the failure of the cross,
the talkative one to be silent, the silent one to speak, the
sad ones to be gay, the gay ones to weep for the good of all,
the anxious ones to make an act of faith, and the
short-sighted ones to look to the end of life. In hours like this we are
all called to look up and know the City which is ours;
together we seek it and His Spirit is upon us.