Doctrines of Prayer, Faith, and Peace by James Hastings: Hastings, James - Doctrine of Prayer: 017. Heartfelt

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Doctrines of Prayer, Faith, and Peace by James Hastings: Hastings, James - Doctrine of Prayer: 017. Heartfelt



TOPIC: Hastings, James - Doctrine of Prayer (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 017. Heartfelt

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III.

HEARTFELT.

There must be reality in our confessions. In more ways than one we seek to escape this demand, for a true heartfelt confession is by no means easy to make.

1. We probably never pray, without making confession of sin. Do we mean it? There is a natural reluctance to that detection which all real confession presupposes. It is this reluctance which, in the last analysis, we find keeps men back from Christ.

“This is the judgment,” says St. John, “that the light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light; for their works were evil. For every one that doeth ill hateth the light, and cometh not to the light, lest his works should be reproved.” Now this natural reluctance is not for ever overcome by the initial experience of conviction and confession. It remains with us, and may even acquire fresh strength. This reluctance may easily be stronger at a later stage of a Christian’s life than it was when he first acknowledged to God his transgressions. First confessions are not always the hardest to make. If old sins treacherously recur; if we find that we have outgrown some sins by the mere lapse of time, only to develop new sins, less passionate, perhaps, but likely to be more persistent; if on a review we find that we have gone backward rather than forward, who of us would not feel humiliated? Who of us does not shrink from acknowledging such things even to himself? Who of us is not aware of a reluctance to come to the light, an unwillingness to admit what we suspect, and what an unflinching scrutiny would put beyond suspicion? Who of us that attends to his inner life does not know how the very pang of conscience which attends some sin into which he may have been surprised starts into action an exculpatory train of thought, by which the sin is relieved of its grievousness? An oyster will so cover an irritating grain of sand that it becomes a pearl. And a tolerated sin may be so enveloped in palliations, that, if we do not admire it, we are at least no longer pained by it.

A somewhat amazing fact in the strange and contradictory character of Samuel Pepys is the constant element of subtlety which blends with so much frankness. He wants to do wrong in many different ways, but he wants still more to do it with propriety, and to have some sort of plausible excuse which will explain it in a respectable light. Nor is it only other people whom he is bent on deceiving. Were that all, we should have a very simple type of hypocritical scoundrel, which would be as different as possible from the extraordinary Pepys. There is a sense of propriety in him, and a conscience of obeying the letter of the law and keeping up appearances even in his own eyes. If he can persuade himself that he has done that, all things are open to him. He will receive a bribe, but it must be given in such a way that he can satisfy his conscience with ingenious words. The envelope has coins in it, but then he opens it behind his back and the coins fall out upon the floor. He has only picked them up when he found them there, and can defy the world to accuse him of having received any coins in the envelope.

It is a curious question what idea of God can be entertained by a man who plays tricks with himself in this fashion. Of Pepys certainly it cannot be said that God “is not in all his thoughts,” for the name and the remembrance are constantly recurring. Yet God seems to occupy a quite hermetically sealed compartment of the universe; for His servant in London shamelessly goes on with the game he is playing, and appears to take a pride in the very conscience he systematically hoodwinks. [Note: Kelman, Among Famous Books, 187.]

2. Again, in many instances, self-accusation is not the outcome of a genuine self-dissatisfaction. It is often but a form of morbid self-indulgence. “There is a luxury in self-dispraise,” says one of our poets. There are people who take a strange pleasure in disparaging themselves, in charging themselves with all kinds of wickedness, railing against themselves as miserable sinners; but all their lamentations about their weak and sinful lives are not the least guarantee of a change, or as much as an effort, for the better. There is even a suspicion of hypocrisy, of posing, in many confessions of this insincere kind. Some of the Italian writers, both Jews and others, accuse themselves of sins they never committed, because those sins were regarded as fashionable marks of the man-about-town. The law does not readily condemn a man on his own unsupported confession. Corroborative evidence is demanded before a conviction is entered. Men play with the founts of their spiritual being.

Vanity, unequivocal vanity, sometimes finds vent in self-depreciation. One mode of this is when we affectedly cry ourselves down with a hope—more or less concealed even from ourselves—that others will protest and set us up again. Another mode is when we cry ourselves down as to particular faculties of a secondary order, in order by implication to set up some faculty of higher rank. [Note: Letters on Church and Religion of W. E. Gladstone, 2: 161.]