Where is the enemy with whom the battle is fought? We do not need to go far to find him. The enemy is within. As Dr. Matheson wittily said, “The number of the Beast is No. 1.” The battle is pitched where it always has been and always will be pitched—in the conquest of self for God. Now the conquest of self for God is, first, to accept faith in God as the highest condition on earth of a human being; and, secondly, to subordinate in the pursuit of it, either for use or for temporary subjugation, every faculty, every passion, and every circumstance in life.
Here is the fight of faith: we do not contend here with metaphysical objections, or with the obscurities and imperfections of rational evidence; but with fleshly lusts, which war against the soul (1Pe_2:11); with pride and undisciplined desire; with those idols which the mind makes for itself, and which gratify its covetousness, its sloth, its bigotry, its self-glory, and its hatred of subjection. Here the contest is with self. If in seeking faith in God “thy right eye offend thee,” if that which belongs to thee, which was created by God Himself for thy use, is perverted from its use, and interferes with that within thee which is higher than itself, mortify it, even though its disuse mar the symmetry of thy life; it is more profitable for thee that thou shouldest do without it; it is for transcendent interests that these temporary losses and humiliations must be incurred. Every man must determine for himself which is the stumbling-block of his path. Our Lord, by suggesting three—the right eye, the right hand, and the foot—covers everything that is supposed to minister to pleasure and advancement; by rudely treating the most delicate and sensitive organ of the body, and disabling that which gives uprightness, support, and locomotion to the frame, the Divine Teacher shows that the finest and most cultured sentiments may be in our way, and the strongest and, considered in themselves, the noblest principles, principles which are intended to lead men on, may have a fatal bias, and make them step aside instead of marching forward.
Surely it always must be full of meaning that Christ Himself, before He began His struggles with the Pharisees and Scribes, went out into the desert and struggled with Himself. It must have been present with Him ever afterwards, that wrestling with the evil spirit and all the knowledge of Himself which it called out. Many a time the wilfulness, and narrowness, and selfishness which He saw in the faces which surrounded Him in some crowd in the temple must have been clearer to Him and easier to understand because they were just the passions which had tried to take possession of His own heart, and failed, during those long terrible days in the dark wilderness. There is no way in which whatever personal struggles with faithlessness and sin we may have gone through can be made to keep their freshness am power, and at the same time be kept from becoming a source of morbid wretchedness, no way that is half so efficient as that the: should constantly be called on to light up for us the same sort of struggles in other men, and give us the power to help them with intelligence and sympathy. Demand that lofty service of every deep experience through which you pass. Demand that it shall help you to understand and aid the battles of your brethren and then the devils of memory which haunt your life may be turned into strong angels, by whose help you may do the will God, and be in some small way the Saviour of mankind.
Inside of all the other battles we are fighting, there is the battle with ourselves. Inside of the battle with the world for the world, which the great champions of righteousness are fighting in their great way, and which you and I, I hope, are fighting in our little way, there lies the battle which every true man always fighting with himself for himself—himself the hostile enemy, himself the precious prize. Oh, how real sometimes a that must become to the great workers for mankind! While Howard is travelling all over Europe, from prison to prison, while Clarkson has his hand upon the fetters of the slave, while Franck is gathering his orphans around him and struggling with the ignorance, while Garrison is striving to free the slave, sometime the heart of each of them must have grown sick and faint while the freshly heard sound of its own inner conflict; sometimes each of them must have turned aside and shut the door upon all the tumult of the world and left the great cause for an hour to take care of itself, while he fought with himself for himself—with hit self his own enemy, for himself his own prize. There are verses enough, you know, in St. Paul’s Epistles which let us see the struggle with himself going on all the time underneath the other struggle with the men of Jerusalem and Athens. While the foreign war was raging, the home country also was all up in arms. How such men must have thought often within themselves that the foreign war would be as nothing, would be a very easy this if only there were peace at home. “I could convert the woe easily,” the missionary must often find himself saying, “if only had a solid ground to stand upon, if only my own life were all soft and weak with sin and doubt.” And sometimes, too, to other thought must come, “What right have I to be busying myself with the world’s miseries while all this unrest is tumultuous within me? Why is it not best to shut in myself upon myself and fight my own battle out before I meddle with the bigger battle? “
Such thoughts come naturally; but really it is good, no doubt, that the two strifes, the outer and the inner, the strife with self and the strife with the world’s sin, should go on together. The man who knew no enemy within himself, who was so absorbed in fighting with the world’s sin that he grew unconscious of his own inner life, by and by would become arrogant and superficial. Such men the world has often seen among its philanthropists. The man who is totally wrapped up in the war within him, the war with himself for his own life, grows selfish and grows morbid. The two must go on together. Each keeps the other healthy and true. Fight with your own sin, and let that fight keep you humble and full of sympathy when you go out into the world and strike at the sin of which the world is full. Fight with the world’s sin, and let the needs of that fight make you aware of how much is wrong, and make you eager that everything shall be right within yourself. Here is the balance and mutual ministry of self-care and world-care which makes the truest man the healthiest philanthropist. [Note: P. Brooks, The Mystery of Iniquity, 82.]
“I search but cannot see
What purpose serves the soul that strives, or world it tries
Conclusions with, unless the fruit of victories
Stay, one and all, stored up and guaranteed its own
For ever, by some mode whereby shall be made known
The gain of every life. Death reads the title clear—
What each soul for itself conquered from out things here:
Since, in the seeing soul, all worth lies, I assert.”
In this passage, Browning gives expression to an idea which continually reappears in his pages—the idea that human life, in its essence, is movement to moral goodness through opposition. His fundamental conception of the human spirit is that it is a process and not a fixed fact. “Man,” he says, “was made to grow not stop.”
“Getting increase of knowledge, since he learns
Because he lives, which is to be a man,
Set to instruct himself by his past self.”
“By such confession straight he falls
Into man’s place, a thing nor God nor beast,
Made to know that he can know and not more:
Lower than God who knows all and can all,
Higher than beasts which know and can so far
As each beast’s limit, perfect to an end,
Nor conscious that they know, nor craving more ;
While man knows partly but conceives beside,
Creeps ever on from fancies to the fact,
And in this striving, this converting air
Into a solid he may grasp and use,
Finds progress, man’s distinctive mark alone,
Not God’s and not the beasts’: God is, they are,
Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.”
It were easy to multiply passages which show that his ultimate deliverance regarding man is, not that he is, nor that he is not, but that he is ever becoming. Man is ever at the point of contradiction between the actual and ideal, and moving from the latter to the former. Strife constitutes him. He is a war of elements; “hurled from change to change unceasingly.” But rest is death; for it is the cessation of the spiritual activity, whose essence is acquirement, not mere possession, whether in knowledge or in goodness.
“Man must pass from old to new,
From vain to real, from mistake to fact,
From what once seemed good, to what now proves best.”
Were the movement to stop, and the contradiction between the actual and ideal reconciled, man would leave man’s estate, and pass under “angel’s law.”
“Indulging every instinct of the soul
There, where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing.”
But so long as he is man, he has
“Somewhat to cast off, somewhat to become.” [Note: H. Jones, Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher, 214.]
