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And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth are passed away.—Rev_21:1.
In this chapter the writer is drawing to the close of his task. He has described fully the unseen enemies which threatened the life of the Church in his own days, and which threaten it still, and he has traced to their true source the evils which beset her. He has further shown how in the end Christ vindicates His cause, and triumphs over the powers of evil, whose downfall and final doom have been disclosed. But though he has thus set forth the victory of the Church, he has said but little of her future, or of the character of her life. He has briefly alluded to these things, but that is all. He now therefore goes back, and closes the series of visions with a description of the bliss which is laid up for the faithful.
1. The belief in a happier age, a peaceful earth, a gracious and bountiful heaven, and a strong race of immortals, is as old and as common as man. The ancient Greeks knew it. Hesiod describes how the gods who dwelt on Olympus made a golden race of speaking men. They lived in careless felicity, free from the labours, sorrows, tribulations of men, fed by a bountiful earth which of its own sweet will blossomed into plenty, ever delighting in festivals; and when death came it came to them as it comes to those overtaken with sleep. But that golden age was in the past; the present, and, so far as they saw, the future, was an iron age. The men who lived in it knew no joy, but had the “sorrow’s crown of sorrow,” which is “remembering happier things.” They toiled, fretted; corrosive care claimed them for its own; and they anticipated a miserable old age and a painful death. Neighbour robbed neighbour; city sacked city; parents grew old and lost their honour; men who were evil were more respected than men who were good; malice, envy, with its millionfold tongue of poison, exulted in ills, and turned on all pitiful mortals its pitiless and baleful glance. The golden age was past; the iron age had come; the men who lived in it lived far from those happinesses which speak of toil rewarded, hope realized, and joy attained. That is the language of Nature, not of grace. Nature looks back, sees there the happiness, a thing lost and irrecoverable. Grace looks before, sees there the joy, and anticipates by labour the moment of its coming.
Every religious enthusiast and reformer from St. Paul to John Wesley has been fired with a devout imagination. They were each and all filled with some vision of a new heaven and a new earth, and were happy only so far as they were permitted to pursue it unmolested. And if there is one lesson more than another which history has to teach, it is this, that without the vision there is no progress, and without fidelity to unrealized ideals there can be no solid advancement in any department of life.… And so, looking for a new heaven and a new earth simply means that we are for ever exchanging the rule of the sensuous for the rule of the spiritual, and that we are seeking our motives for conduct and character in the absolute gospel of Jesus Christ, and not in any of the commonplace maxims of self-indulgence or earthly expediency.1 [Note: J. Cuckson, Faith and Fellowship, 54.]
2. It is well to remember the time at which the words were written down. The Revelation came to St. John in a time of the utmost danger to the Church. Jew and heathen were at last united in hatred to the name of Christ, and were putting forth all their power to destroy those who believed in Him. St. James, St. Peter, St. Paul, had lately passed to their heavenly home through the gate of a glorious death. The fall of the Holy City was close at hand. The old memorials of God’s presence were vanishing from the earth. They whom from of old He had chosen to be His own people were being cast away and scattered upon the face of the world. Death and hell were riding triumphant over everything that was marked with God’s name. Change was come in its most terrible form, as sheer destruction, destruction most of all of that which was best of all. Then it was, when God seemed to be deserting the earth, that a great voice was heard out of the throne saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he shall dwell with them, and they shall be his peoples, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God: and he shall wipe away every tear from their eyes; and death shall be no more; neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain, any more; the first things are passed away.” The first heaven and the first earth were passed away; a new heaven and a new earth could already be seen by one whose eyes God opened. But behind the new heaven and the new earth was He who made them; and what, when He Himself spoke, He announced as His work was the work of making all things new.
The new heaven and the new earth are here already, for they mean only a new and different relation between God and men—between heaven and earth—from that which existed before. Since Christ ascended and sat at the right hand of God, the new heaven has begun. Since the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and the glory of the only-begotten Son of the Father appeared, the earth also has become new.1 [Note: Schleiermacher.]
The magnificent hope and prediction of God’s final and decisive victory find expression in nearly every part of the sacred volume. The Psalms and Prophecies, not less than the Gospels and Epistles, recognize the conflict which is going on unceasingly between God and forces hostile to Him; between God and the Satanic hosts, the powers of darkness and the obstinacy of depraved and misguided man. But, one and all, they declare that the conflict is not to be perpetual. The underlying and final note of all their predictions is keyed to a song of Divine victory, which will be complete and universal. There is to be an end of iniquity, and the wicked are to cease from troubling. The enemies of the Lord, and all that is opposed to Him, are in some way to perish, or be subdued under His feet. There are to be new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness, and nothing but righteousness will be known, and God is to be King over the whole earth, and by implication over every unimaginable place beyond the earth.1 [Note: J. G. Greenhough, The Doctrine of the Last Things, 234.]
3. When we give the words the widest range, and understand them of God’s whole government of the world, He is always making all things new. Even when the course of the world is very quiet and seems to be at a standstill, He is but changing the manner of this His work, for some of His most wonderful renewals are wrought in silence. He is Himself described as He that sitteth on the throne. He rules, but rests as He rules. The Author of unceasing change, He knows no change within Himself. He is older than the oldest things; His name is the Ancient of Days. The old and the new have thus alike their perfect pattern in Him. His counsels partake of both; on the one hand, they stand fast from age to age; on the other, they are ever advancing from step to step by new births of time.
The ends for which nature exists are not in itself, but in the spiritual sphere beyond. Nature always points to something beyond itself, backward to a cause, above to a law, and forward to ends in the spiritual system. God is always developing nature to a capacity to be receptive of higher powers. Under the tension of the Divine energy in it, it always seems to be “striving its bounds to overpass.” This discloses in nature a certain reality in Hegel’s conception, that nature is always aspiring to return to the spiritual whence it came.2 [Note: S. Harris, The Self-Revelation of God.]
Some have interpreted this passage as applying to the millennium, but, as St. Augustine says, to do so is “audacious,” because the previous chapters clearly show that the millennium, the resurrection and the judgment have all preceded this, the final, act in the awe-inspiring drama shown to us in the Revelation. That there are several “heavens” such references as the “seventh” and the “third” seem to indicate; and if, as many think, our earth is only one of many worlds, peopled it may be by beings of varied forms, powers and attainments, it may easily follow that after being caught into the clouds for judgment, the saints will descend to a renovated “heaven and earth”—the “Holy City,” purified and cleansed for a people beloved of the Lord. That His earth, thus changed, will be the final home of the righteous is no new idea, but one which has been taught from the beginning by Justin Martyr, Irenæus, Theodoret, Jerome, Augustine, Chrysostom, Luther, Adams, Wesley, Chalmers, and a host of others.1 [Note: J. E. Watts-Ditchfield, Here and Hereafter, 238.]
4. God not only makes the new world, but gives the power to see and appreciate its beauty. God creates the paradise and catches up a St. Paul to hear unspeakable words—unspeakable for grandeur and infinite sweetness. We can soar into paradises of beauty only as we rise by means of the upbearing wings of infinite power and love. When a man enters the spirit sphere, he sees a new heaven and a new earth. When the earth child is born, the natural eye is dim, and the mind is sleeping. When the heaven child is born, the spiritual eye is quickened to see, the mind is awake to appreciate loveliness. A man like St. John, who had a clear eye for the great new conception that God is love, was the man to see a new heaven of love and a new earth of sweetness. He that dwelleth in love will see new worlds of love. Greatness is seen and appreciated by the great. New worlds of love must be seen and appreciated by the loving. There must be not only the beautiful, but also an eye and a mind for the beautiful. The apostle of love must see the vision of love. Pearls are trampled by swine. A new heaven and a new earth are not seen by eyes which are earthbound.
It was of the essence of Blake’s sanity that he could always touch the sky with his finger. “To justify the soul’s frequent joy in what cannot be defined to the intellectual part, or to calculation”: that, which is Walt Whitman’s definition of his own aim, defines Blake’s. Where others doubted he knew; and he saw where others looked vaguely into the darkness. He saw so much further than others into what we call reality, that others doubted his report, not being able to check it for themselves; and when he saw truth naked he did not turn aside his eyes. Nor had he the common notion of what truth is, or why it is to be regarded. He said: “When I tell a truth it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those who do.” And his criterion of truth was the inward certainty of instinct or intuition, not the outward certainty of fact. “God forbid,” he said, “that Truth should be confined to mathematical demonstration. He who does not know Truth at sight is un worthy of her notice.”1 [Note: Arthur Symons, William Blake, 243.]
5. St. John saw a beautiful world; but he looked beyond, and saw a new heaven and a new earth. What a difference in the exiles of time! Napoleon on St. Helena, fretting and fuming with disappointment, sees no bright visions. No heavens of beauty, no earths of glory pass before his enraptured gaze. St. John in Patmos makes the island glow with celestial colours. He dwells no longer in a lonely and forbidding island; he lives in a new earth adjacent to a new heaven. Columbus, after a long voyage, rejoiced to see the land birds of beautiful plumage that told of a new world near at hand. St. John, without moving from his island, saw not only the birds of beautiful plumage which sing of a new world, but also the new world itself; he rejoiced to see a sight which men had never before witnessed. St. John’s vision is resplendent with material and moral beauty. The bright vision is not darkened by the sad shades of sin, pain, sorrow, death. He saw a new world of marvellous creation, of inexhaustible loveliness. The new world was to be one in which there would be day without night, land without sea, summer without winter, pleasure without pain, smiles without tears, health without sickness, joy without sorrow, life without death, love without any alloy, without any tendency to decay.
The real question everywhere is whether the world, distracted and confused as everybody sees that it is, is going to be patched up and restored to what it used to be, or whether it is going forward into a quite new and different kind of life, whose exact nature nobody can pretend to foretell, but which is to be distinctly new, unlike the life of any age which the world has seen already.… It is impossible that the old conditions, so shaken and broken, can ever be repaired and stand just as they stood before. The time has come when something more than mere repair and restoration of the old is necessary. The old must die and a new must come forth out of its tomb.2 [Note: Phillips Brooks.]
6. But if the earth as it left the hands of its Maker was “very good,” what need is there for a new earth? There are some who tell us that the creation of the earth was a bad piece of bungling; that a wise Creator would not have made “nature red in tooth and claw”; that He would never have allowed sin to come in and leave its foul trail in the Garden of Eden, and in all the gardens of the earth. Such people fail to understand that when God peopled the earth with men made in His own image, these men were to be co-workers with Him in making the earth what it was in God’s dream of it. God sketched a picture, but He intended man to fill in the details. There is nothing wrong with the sketch: God’s work was “very good”; it is the details that man should fill in that are botches and blotches on the pictures of God’s conception. Is not this the teaching of the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven”? The doing of God’s will is the co-working with God in the completion of His picture of an earth that is “very good,” that is “as Eden the Garden of God.” St. John, in his Patmos vision, saw prophetically an earth that was the earth God intended it should be when His design was completed. Some day the botches and blotches will all be removed; all the stains of sin will be cleansed away; all the disfigurements due to perverted human will shall give place to the beauty of God’s perfect plan, and then indeed there will be “a new earth,” and yet not entirely a new earth, for it will be just the old earth which God intended, but which has never yet been realized.
I find it written very distinctly that God loved the world, and that Christ is the light of it. What the much-used words, therefore, mean, I cannot tell. But this, I believe, they should mean. That there is, indeed, one world which is full of care, and desire, and hatred: a world of war, of which Christ is not the light, which indeed is without light, and has never heard the great “Let there be.” Which is, therefore, in truth, as yet no world; but chaos, on the face of which, moving, the Spirit of God yet causes men to hope that a world will come. The better one, they call it: perhaps they might, more wisely, call it the real one. Also, I hear them speak continually of going to it, rather than of its coming to them; which, again, is strange, for in that prayer which they had straight from the lips of the Light of the world, and which He apparently thought sufficient prayer for them, there is not anything about going to another world; only something of another government coming into this; or rather, not another, but the only government,—that government which will constitute it a world indeed. New heavens and new earth. Earth, no more without form and void, but sown with fruit of righteousness. Firmament, no more of passing cloud, but of cloud risen out of the crystal sea—cloud in which, as He was once received up, so He shall again come with power.1 [Note: Ruskin, Modern Painters, pt. ix. ch. xii. § 18 (Works, vii. 458).]
7. St. John saw at once a new heaven and a new earth. The Scriptures are all against the unnatural separation of heaven and earth, which has been too common in vulgar thought and talk. The vulgar way of looking at it has been, earth here, heaven hereafter—which is quite unscriptural. Heaven is here to the Christian, and is, or may be, as real to him as earth. And as heaven is here as well as earth, earth will be hereafter as well as heaven. Listen to the Apostle: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth.” No Nirvana, no cloudland, no dreamland, no mere spirit country or cold expanse of mists for ghosts to float in, but a veritable homeland is there before us.
It was round the thought of the Inner Mission that all his subsequent activities were built up. At a second conference in Nottingham, at the Jubilee of the Institute, in the last paper he wrote, indeed in all his addresses on modern church questions, he goes back to the Inner Mission as the corner-stone on which to build. Among its main principles are:
The kingdom of heaven Christ came to establish is not in the clouds, but here on earth. It exists wherever and whenever God’s will is done upon earth as it is done in heaven. We have thought of the New Jerusalem as “stored up perhaps in heaven,” like Plato’s ideal city; but the apostle saw it “coming down from God out of heaven.” There is to be a new earth, “wherein dwelleth righteousness,” as well as a new heaven.
To establish this kingdom is the great business of the Church; needing, like all human business, only in higher degree, “rigorous method, indomitable persistency, and wise application of means to ends.” Silver and gold may be wanting, but heart-service, pity, willing personal help—these things, which the Lord freely gives, men should freely give. And no redemptive impulse must be stifled, or allowed to remain unused. Each varied gift, what-ever it be, must be trained and used and disciplined “under wise and definite direction” in the work of the Church, which work is the establishing of the kingdom of God on earth.2 [Note: John Brown Paton, by his Son (1914), 190.]
8. The vision of the new heaven and the new earth does not necessarily suppose the annihilation of the old creation, but only its passing away as to its outward and recognizable form, and renewal to a fresh and more glorious one. The idea of the term “new” used by the writer of the Apocalypse in this verse is not that things present are blotted out of existence, and a new order of things quite strange, foreign, and novel is brought into being, but that the things of old are made new, raised to a higher plane, given a fresh start, free from all that has marred their beauty, and hindered their due development. While, then, the continuity is not broken, the change is very great, so great that it can be said that “the first heaven and the first earth were passed away.”
Two words in the New Testament are translated “new,” but there is a difference between them. The one contemplates the object spoken of under the aspect of something that has been recently brought into existence, the other under a fresh aspect given to what had previously existed, but been outworn. The latter word is employed in the text, as it is also employed in the phrases a “new garment,” that is, a garment not threadbare, like an old one; “new wine-skins,” that is, skins not shrivelled and dried; a “new tomb,” that is, not one recently hewn out of the rock, but one which had never been used as the last resting-place of the dead. The fact, therefore, that the heavens and the earth here spoken of are “new,” does not imply that they are now first brought into being. They may be the old heavens and the old earth; but they have a new aspect, a new character, adapted to a new end.
Life is always opening new and unexpected things to us. There is no monotony in living to him who walks even the quietest and tamest paths with open and perceptive eyes. The monotony of life, if life is monotonous to you, is in you, not in the world.… It is God, and the discovery of Him in life, and the certainty that He has plans for our lives and is doing something with them, that gives us a true, deep sense of movement, and lets us always feel the power and delight of unknown coming things.1 [Note: Phillips Brooks.]
With brain o’erworn, with heart a summer clod,
With eye so practised in each form around,—
And all forms mean,—to glance above the ground
Irks it, each day of many days we plod,
Tongue-tied and deaf, along life’s common road.
But suddenly, we know not how, a sound
Of living streams, an odour, a flower crowned
With dew, a lark upspringing from the sod,
And we awake. O joy and deep amaze!
Beneath the everlasting hills we stand,
We hear the voices of the morning seas,
And earnest prophesyings in the land,
While from the open heaven leans forth at gaze
The encompassing great cloud of witnesses.1 [Note: Edward Dowden.]
9. We need not be staggered by this prophecy, for science delights to show that many heavens and many earths have already passed away. As the geological world was the rough draft, or series of rough drafts, of this more beautiful and finished world on which we now gaze, so this present world is a dim foreshadowing of the ultimate spiritualized theatre of human life. There is much in nature to-day that mars its loveliness, that spoils its music; it is full of sad facts which sorely puzzle and distress reflective men; but we may confidently believe that in the ages to come these painful problems will be eliminated. The process of perfecting is ever going on, and who shall say when or where it will stop? Nature has emerged out of so many catastrophes with added glories that we are perfectly justified in once more looking beyond fire and flood for new heavens and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. The “new heavens” and the “new earth” shall be purified from every blot; the thing becomes, with time, more reasonable; all the splendid possibilities of the universe shall be realized; earth and sky shall cease to groan; the whole creation shall be adorned as a bride for her husband.
Brotherhood, peace, glory to God in the highest, good will towards men—all are coming, fast coming. The world began with a paradise, and it shall end with one. The first was a corner of the planet; the second shall stretch
From where the rising sun salutes the morn,
To where he lays his head of glory on the rocking deep.2 [Note: W. L. Watkinson, The Blind Spot, 197.]
It is the hope of a new heaven and a new earth that cheers the emigrant as he comes out for the first time to Canada. “I shall find there,” he says, “ ‘a new heaven and a new earth.’ I am weary of these sweating-dens in old London; I am siek to death of looking for work day after day and finding none. I shall find a ‘new earth’ beyond the seas. I see pictures of men like myself who went out years ago, and they are new men to-day. I will go to the granary of the world, and I shall surely find bread; I will go to the wide prairie, and I shall find space to breathe; I will leave this old land where men tread on one another’s heels, and I will find this new earth which covers one-third of the British Empire, and has only as yet seven million people, and I shall surely find there ‘room to live.’ ” And with the new earth something tells him that he may find a new heaven. It is hard to believe in God when the children cry for bread in London; but when the earth becomes new the heaven becomes new. I have known many a man in East London give his soul a fresh chance on going even to a new district outside London. In breaking loose from the old associations and the bad habits of the past, many a man looks to Canada for a “new heaven.” “Old things are passed away, all things are to become new”—he gives his soul another chance. The very sound of church bells has an attraction connected with home which they did not have in the old homeland, and, unconsciously to himself, he looks for a fresh glimpse of God and a new view of eternal truth more glorious than the first sight of the Rocky Mountains.1 [Note: Bishop Winnington-Ingram, in The Guardian, Sept. 23, 1910.]
10. It is objected that the new heaven and earth is only an idea. The vision is still only a vision. The heaven looms in the distance. “All things continue as they were” (2Pe_3:4). Well, the ideal has been powerful. Many a Patmos has been cheered. Many an exile has been filled with gladness. We cannot afford to lose our ideals, though they may be only ideals. But they are something more. “Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness” (2Pe_3:13). Our faith is not shaken by seeming delays. The vision still cheers in cheerless times, and strengthens in days of weakness, so that out of weakness men have been made sublimely strong. The cheerful notes of St. John’s song have rung through the world with gladness to many hearts. The earth without a heaven would be as the Arctic winter. Let the sun shine, and it will-fertilize and gladden. Perpetual summer will reign, and all beauties and glories flourish.
Well might St. John who “saw,” look up and lift up his head; for however remote, his redemption, the general redemption, was drawing nigh. Meanwhile the first heaven and the first earth make up our own present lot. Of those others God giveth us not as yet so much as to set our foot on, although He promises them to us for a possession. The temporary heaven and earth above, around, beneath us, import us now, supply now things convenient for us. These we are bound to use, and by no means to misuse or neglect. And though the things which are seen be but temporal, yet a work of the Great Creator is and cannot but be so great, that I suppose neither the profoundest and most illuminated saint, nor all saints summed up together, will have exhausted the teaching of things visible, even when the hour comes for them to give place to things invisible.1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, The Face of the Deep, 477.]
We heard the other day of a Baptist working man, esteemed by all who knew him for the purity and elevation of his character, who died of a painful disease. In his last moments his face became suddenly irradiated. “What is it you see,” asked his wife. “It must be heaven,” he replied, “I see angels, the most glorious, beautiful things.” And with that light on his face he passed away. “Purely subjective, of course,” says the critic; “an affair of his theological prepossessions, an exhibition of his pre-existing mental furniture.” Take it even at that lowest level, does it not suggest something? That a soul, in a body dying of torturing pains, finds its last earthly moment a triumph scene of gladness, its vision fed with a sense of glorious beauty; is there not here an unspoken argument for the life of faith deeper than all our philosophy, more eloquent than all our eloquence?2 [Note: J. Brierley, Religion and To-Day, 45.]
William Hazlitt said: “In the days of Jacob there was a ladder between heaven and earth; but now the heavens are gone farther off and are become astronomical.” That may be our first feeling; but no, in spite of our thought of the heavens having become astronomical, even in spite of disenchanting errors, the sensitive heart, bred in Christ’s school, has its own skies and mystic influences.
And still the soul a far-off glory sees,
Strange music hears.
A something, not of earth, still haunts the breeze,
The sun and spheres.
All things that be, all thought, all love, all joy
Spell-bind the man
As once the growing boy,
And point afar—
Point to some land of hope and crystal truth,
Of life and light,
Where souls renewed in an immortal youth
Shall know the infinite.
That ladder has ceased to be astronomical and has become flesh. The ascending and descending blessings and communications linking heaven with our hearts are now “upon the Son of Man”; by Him come down those white thoughts and forces of grace which prove God near, and by Him we climb to God’s feet. You cannot throw off the leash of His Spirit.1 [Note: R. E. Welsh, Man to Man, 42.]
Literature
Bonar (H.), Light and Truth: The Revelation, 323.
Cairns (D. S.), Christianity in the Modern World, 220.
Cuckson (J.), Faith and Fellowship, 45.
Gibson (E. C. S.), The Revelation of St. John the Divine, 237.
Henson (H. H.), Notes of My Ministry, 47.
Hiley (R. W.), A Year’s Sermons, i. 85.
Hort (F. J. A.), Cambridge and Other Sermons, 39.
Hughes (H. P.), Ethical Christianity, 73.
Jeffs (H.), The Art of Exposition, 127.
Lockyer (T. F.), The Inspirations of the Christian Life, 244.
Milligan (W.), The Book of Revelation (Expositor’s Bible), 361.
Molyneux (C.), The World to Come, 86.
Sampson (E. F.), Christ Church Sermons, 159.
Swing (D.), Sermons, 181.
Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), x. (1873), No. 820.
Watkinson (W. L.), The Blind Spot, 182.
Watts-Ditchfield (J. E.), Here and Hereafter, 236.
Cambridge Review, iii., Supplement No. 57 (J. Foxley).
Christian World Pulpit, xxxii. 73 (P. W. Darnton); xliv. 401 (A. H. Bradford); liii. 393 (W. L. Watkinson); lxi. 409 (A. M. Fairbairn); lxxii. 292 (B. S. Lloyd); lxxvi. 405 (H. Jeffs); lxxvii. 104 (H. S. Holland); lxxxi. 211 (W. R. Yates).
Church of England Pulpit, lxii. 120 (B. L. Jackson); lxiii. 14 (B. S. Lloyd).
Church of Ireland Gazette, Feb. 11, 1910 (T. A. Beckett).
Church Times, Feb. 4, 1910 (H. S. Holland).
Clergyman’s Magazine, 3rd Ser., xiii. 11 (W. Burrows).
Expositor and Current Anecdotes, xv. (1914) 407 (M. Alexander).
Guardian, lxv. (1910) 1277 (A. F. W. Ingram).
Sunday Magazine, 1892, p. 588 (J. M. Gibson).
And the sea is no more.—Rev_21:1.
There is a most charming passage in the Life of Gladstone where Mr. Morley is recalling the talks at Biarritz during the very last years, in which he tells of the old man’s passionate delight in the buoyant breakers thundering home on the reefs. He felt as if he could hardly bear to live without the sound of the sea in his ears. He had, indeed, that within him which beat in response to that tumult of waters, to that titanic pulse of the Atlantic. But he had in him a note of something deeper still. Not in tumultuous buoyancy, not in passionate upheaval, lay the secret of his primal powers. Rather you felt in him, behind and beyond this energy of elemental vitality, the spirit of the serious athlete, in possession of his soul, disciplined in austerity, secure of a peace that passeth understanding, held fast, in hidden calm, by the vision of a quiet land in which there is no more sea.1 [Note: H. S. Holland, Personal Studies, 45.]
I lie in my niche under the stunted hawthorn watching the to and fro of the sea, and Æolus shepherding his white sheep across the blue. I love the sea with its impenetrable fathoms, its wash and undertow, and rasp of shingle sucked anew. I love it for its secret dead in the Caverns of Peace, of which account must be given when the books are opened and earth and heaven have fled away. Yet in my love there is a paradox, for as I watch the restless, ineffective waves I think of the measureless, reflective depths of the still and silent Sea of Glass, of the dead, small and great, rich or poor, with the works which follow them, and of the Voice as the voice of many waters, when the multitude of one mind rends heaven with alleluia: and I lie so still that I almost feel the kiss of White Peace on my mouth.2 [Note: Michael Fairless, The Roadmender (ed. 1911), 9.]
A little girl friend of mine, whose home was by one of the great sea-lochs of the West Highlands, was being taught about heaven by her mother, and was told that there would be no sea. “Then,” she said, “I shall not like it.” All the child’s pleasures nearly were associated with the sea—bathing, fishing, boating. On that changeful coast what is one hour mist and dulness and gloom, grey rock and wan water, is the next a fairyland of lights and colours most strange and beautiful, on which to look is enough delight. All island and peninsular nations are lovers of the sea. When Xenophon’s Greeks, retreating after the battle of Cunaxa, came, after long desert marches and conflicts, in sight of the Black Sea, they burst out into joyous cries—“Thalassa! Thalassa!” A modern poet has expressed the strange fascination that the sea has for the men of these isles, in spite of all its fickleness and changes, thus:
“Ye that bore us, O restore us!
She is kinder than ye;
For the call is on our heart-strings,”
Said the men of the sea.
“Ye that love us, can ye move us?
She is dearer than ye;
And your sleep will be the sweeter,”
Said the men of the sea.
“Oh, our fathers in the churchyard,
She is older than ye;
And our graves will be the greener,”
Said the men of the sea.
The sea is our life’s symbol, the port for which we sail, that heaven on which our hearts are set, and “we are as near heaven by sea as by land.” Because we are a maritime people we symbolize the ultimate, to which we go, as a royal port. It is a simple affair to us to consider all our aids for the journey in terms of the voyage. Thus does Religion use the sea for its purpose, and it seems natural that it should do so when we remember that, in the region of fact as well as in that of imagination, Religion has used the sea. And it seems a natural use, for when a man’s mind is exercised by the highest emotions at the same time that he is about to contend with the dangers of a natural element, it is easy to believe that, from that moment, the association between emotion and element becomes for ever established in his mind, and in the mind of his kind, and that so deep is the impression made by the element that it becomes his symbol nearest at hand for the struggles in relation to which the emotions are aroused. In such manner may old thinkers have written, their mind in both worlds. And when we use a symbol such as this we do not draw a firm line between emotion and element. An earthly voyage may also signify a heavenly.1 [Note: Frank Elias, Heaven and the Sea, 6.]
2. But the sea did not appeal to the Israelites. They never were sailors. In the only period of their history in which they did much voyaging their ships were manned by Phœnicians—“shipmen that had knowledge of the sea.” And St. John had special reasons for disliking it. We know that he took no merely material interest in the future, and that when he says “the sea was no more,” he was drawing no map of the geography of the new heaven and the new earth. But he had his reasons for choosing the symbol of the sea, for using it as a figure of the things which were to be absent from the world of the redeemed. We shall find his reasons if we consider what the sea stood for to the Apostle.
(1) Mystery.—It is largely a mystery still. It is largely unfathomed and unknown. It is our great undiscovered continent.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear.
It is itself a mystery. Says Jefferies: “There is an infinite possibility about the sea; it may do what it is not recorded to have done. It is not to be ordered. It may overleap the bounds human observation has fixed for it. It has potency unfathomable. There is still something in it not quite grasped and understood—something still to be discovered—a mystery.”
This aspect of the sea impressed itself upon the Israelites. “Thy way,” says the Psalmist, “was in the sea, and thy paths in the great waters, and thy footsteps were not known.” And so Cowper:
God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform;
He plants His footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.
The mystery of the sea is a figure of the mystery of life. It is an aspect of life that appeals to every one. “This world,” said Charles Dickens, “is a world of sacred and solemn mystery; let no man despise it or take it lightly.” Christina Rossetti sings:
The mystery of Life, the mystery
Of Death I see
Darkly, as in a glass;
Their shadows pass,
And talk with me.
The prophets have felt the mystery of life more than all others; and St. John was a prophet. Often had he prayed with Job, “Oh that I knew where I might find him!” Then Jesus came and called him. The mystery of the past, of the present, of the future—all the mystery of life was dispelled. He knew that in the redeemed world there would be no baffling questions remaining. “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in the darkness, but shall have the light of life.”
The sea is the emblem of mystery, and each wave unfolding itself from its bosom seems about to tell the secret. But it falls back, and man cannot catch its whispers; “the sea saith, It is not in me.” But the time is coming when the ocean of mystery shall open its breast and “the sea give up its dead.”1 [Note: John Ker, Thoughts for Heart and Life, 119.]
Heaven overarches earth and sea,
Earth-sadness and sea-bitterness.
Heaven overarches you and me:
A little while and we shall be—
Please God—where there is no more sea
Nor barren wilderness.
Heaven overarches you and me,
And all earth’s gardens and her graves.
Look up with me, until we see
The day break and the shadows flee.
What though to-night wrecks you and me
If so to-morrow saves?2 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Poetical Works, 286.]
(2) Treachery.—The Israelites were struck with the restlessness of the sea. But its restlessness suggested purpose. It was uncertain. It could not be counted upon. There was something akin to treachery in its moods. “It is the scene,” says Dr. Macmillan,1 [Note: Bible Teachings in Nature, 303.] “alternately of the softest dalliance, and the fiercest rage of the elements. Now it lies calm and motionless as an inland lake—without a ripple on its bosom—blue as the sapphire sky above—golden with the reflexion of sunset clouds—silvery with the pale mystic light of moon and stars; and now it tosses its wild billows mountains high, and riots in the fury of the storm. One day it steals softly up the shore, kissing the shells and pebbles with a gentle sigh as though they were gifts of love; the next it dashes its white-crested waves, laden with wrecks and corpses, against the iron rocks. Treacherous and deceitful it lures the mariner on by its beauty, until completely in its power; and then it rises up suddenly in fury, and with an overflowing flood carries him away.”
“You can domesticate mountains,” says Oliver Wendell Holmes,2 [Note: Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table.] “but the sea is ferœ naturœ. It is feline. It licks your feet—its huge flanks purr very pleasantly for you, but it will crack your bones and eat you, for all that, and wipe the crimsoned foam from its jaws as if nothing had happened.”
St. John had had experience of the treachery of the sea in the early days of his manhood on the Sea of Galilee. And now as he looked back upon his life, what had the outward circumstances of it been but a sea of uncertainty, and even of treachery? But the redeemed have sought and found a kingdom that cannot be moved. They have come to a city that hath foundations. In the New Earth the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest.
“You’re quite a sailor, I suppose?” I said to Em’ly.
“No,” replied Em’ly, shaking her head, “I’m afraid of the sea.”
“Afraid!” I said, with a becoming air of boldness, and looking very big at the mighty ocean. “I an’t!”
“Ah! but it’s cruel,” said Em’ly; “I have seen it very cruel to some of our men. I have seen it tear a boat as big as our house all to pieces.”
“I hope it wasn’t the boat that—”
“That father was drownded in?” said Em’ly. “No. Not that one; I never see that boat.”
“Nor him?” I asked her.
Little Em’ly shook her head. “Not to remember!”1 [Note: Dickens, David Copperfield, chap. iii.]
I remember once talking with a fisherwoman who had lost her husband and two sons at sea, away down in Cullercoats Bay on the Northumberland coast. I asked her what she liked most to think about when she thought about the land beyond, and I was not surprised to hear her say, “And there shall be no more sea.”2 [Note: J. H. Jowett, The Silver Lining, 221.]
I have desired to go
Where Springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail,
And a few lilies blow.
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.3 [Note: Gerard Hopkins.]
(3) Separation.—This, we may be sure, was the chief thought in the mind of St. John as he stood on some rock in the little lonely isle of Patmos and looked out across the sea. His eye was toward Jerusalem. For he was an Israelite with an Israelite’s love of Mount Zion, the place where God delights to dwell. The sea was the symbol of separation and exile. In Christ he had learned the meaning of the word philadelphia, “brotherly love.” He loved the brethren, fulfilling the New Commandment: “that ye love one another, even as I have loved you.” And the sea now separated him from them. In the New World there will be no sea of separation. All will be one, and all will be together. Different as are our thoughts of the sea from St. John’s thoughts, we are one with him regarding the pain of separation, let the separation be caused by sea or land, by life or death.
On that day, on that lovely 6th of April, such as I have described it,—that 6th of April, about nine o’clock in the morning,—we were seated at breakfast near the open window—we, that is, Agnes, myself, and little Francis. The freshness of morning spirits rested upon us; the golden light of the morning sun illuminated the room; incense was floating through the air from the gorgeous flowers within and without the house. There in youthful happiness we sat gathered together, a family of love; and there we never sat again. Never again were we three gathered together, nor ever shall be, so long as the sun and its golden light, the morning and the evening, the earth and its flowers, endure.1 [Note: De Quincey, The Household Wreck.]
On 18th May 1826, a couple of days after the death of his wife at Abbotsford, Sir Walter Scott writes in his diary: “Another day, and a bright one to the external world, again opens on us; the air soft, and the flowers smiling, and the leaves glittering. They cannot refresh her to whom mild weather was a natural enjoyment. Cerements of lead and of wood already hold her; cold earth must have her soon. But it is not my Charlotte, it is not the bride of my youth, the mother of my children, that will be laid among the ruins of Dryburgh, which we have so often visited in gaiety and pastime. No, no. She is sentient and conscious of my emotions somewhere—somehow; where we cannot tell; how we cannot tell; yet would I not at this moment renounce the mysterious yet certain hope that I shall see her in a better world, for all that this world can give me. The necessity of this separation,—that necessity which rendered it even a relief,—that and patience must be my comfort.”2 [Note: The Journal of Sir Walter Scott (ed. 1891), 194.]
In a letter to Mrs. Lydia M. Child, thanking her for her book Looking Towards Sunset—a book which he regrets that his sister, then lately dead, never saw, Whittier writes: “How strange and terrible are these separations—this utter silence—this deep agony of mystery—this reaching out for the love which we feel must be ever living, but which gives us no sign! Ah, my friend! What is there for us but to hold faster and firmer our faith in the goodness of God? that all which He allots to us or our friends is for the best!—best for them, for us, for all. Let theology, and hate, and bigotry, talk as they will, I for one will hold fast to this, God is good; He is our Father! He knows what love is, what our hearts, sore and bereaved, long for, and He will not leave us comfortless, for is He not Love?”3 [Note: Life and Letters of John Greenleaj Whittier, ii. 485.]
Yes! in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.
But when the moon their hollows lights,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens, on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing;
And lovely notes, from shore to shore,
Across the sounds and channels pour—
Oh! then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns sent;
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent!
Now round us spreads the watery plain—
Oh might our marges meet again!
Who order’d, that their longing’s fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cool’d?
Who renders vain their deep desire?—
A God, a God their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.1 [Note: Matthew Arnold, To Marguerite.]
Literature
Bushnell (H.), Moral Uses of Dark Things, 402.
Campbell (R. J.), City Temple Sermons, 234.
Forbes (J. T.), God’s Measure, 75.
Hay (W.), God’s Looking-Glass, 116.
Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Epistles of John to Revelation, 355.
Maclaren (A.), Sermons Preached in Manchester, ii. 325.
Macmillan (H.), Bible Teachings in Nature, 291.
Matheson (G.), Moments on the Mount, 32.
Parkhurst (C. H.), The Blind Man’s Creed, 219.
Spurgeon (C. H.), Evening by Evening, 356.
Spurgeon (T.), Down to the Sea, 45.
Stuart (A. M.), The Path of the Redeemed, 178.
Christian World Pulpit, lii. 374 (J. H. Burkitt); lxviii. 195 (H. S. Seekings).