1. It is by wrestling in faith that the treasures of God’s grace are made ours. If He who inspires and safeguards our faith were to keep us in those smooth, stormless, well-sunned enclosures, where we should like to live our lives, He would limit His own opportunities of self-revelation to us. Faith is the faculty which apprehends the unseen; and whilst our faith is devoid of exercise and discipline, the unseen seems a very little part indeed of the real universe. The grace and the help that are hidden in its incalculable immensities can be touched only by the faith that has become dauntless and full-statured through many a sharp struggle. By continued wrestlings, this great God-created principle comes to a surer consciousness of its own power and the things it can achieve through Christ Jesus. If the scenes of trouble and conflict through which God’s servants of old battled could be blotted from the pages of the Bible, how much of God’s glory would be left there? It is the oft-contested and the much-exercised faith that wins the richest apprehension of God.
In the present half-believing age we are tempted to concentrate our strength upon work the benefits of which are immediate and visible. The man who loses some part of his faith often turns his back upon purely spiritual tasks, and sets himself to secular philanthropies which promise speedy and immediate transformation. Whilst we must never disparage gracious social enterprises, or think of them as of inferior sacredness, the highest tasks are those which demand the most gigantic faith, and force us into arduous conflict.
The sovereigns of earthly kingdoms reserve their highest honours for those who distinguish themselves in the hazards and hardships of war. Sometimes the old orders seem stale and insufficient, and new decorations have to be devised for the heroes who have surmounted difficulties which thwarted their predecessors. And God crowns with rare, fresh splendour the faith which persists and achieves through much buffeting and conflict. To awaken within us this saving and uplifting principle, and then to allocate our faith to spheres of congenial, unbroken quiet, would have been to circumscribe our opportunities of distinction, and to put a petty term to the promise of our destiny. Faith must be allowed to unfold itself to the uttermost, for it is the soul of every other virtue, and it finds its largest opportunities when events arise and issues are raised which tax its strength and incite it to feats winning the high praises of heaven.
“Faith,” says the writer of the Hebrews, (Heb_11:1) “is the proving of the things unseen.” The dignity of the man of faith the very angels well may envy. The beings in the presence of God have never known the discipline of faith. They can never prove the things unseen: heaven may have lent to them its undimmed loveliness on which a stain has never rested. But earth can lend the nobler grandeur, when the spirit arises from its baptism of fire purified, exalted, and transfigured. To believe where all things are revealed and known—that is no virtue. But to believe where
Faith and form
Are sundered in the night of fear,
to have touched in the darkness the hand of God and followed His guiding “o’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent”; to have pierced the veil of sense and time and beheld the Unseen and Eternal; to have trusted when life was most a blank; to have hoped when earth seemed darkest, to have loved when God seemed cruellest, this is to have proved the empire of the spirit and its dominion over the world of sense. “Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed”—they are conquerors in the struggle—victors in the fight of faith.
Say not, the struggle nought availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.
If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in you smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright. [Note: Clough.]
2. It is by wrestling that progress is made in the life of faith. The stress under which primitive man found himself was one of the causes which helped to convert him from a mere hunter into a founder of civilizations. We can never know our debt to those hot fierce pressures in our lives which we at first are tempted to resent as the work of a malign fate. Children of straitened circumstances are beginning to win the best prizes of scholastic life, and they well deserve them. The shrewdest inventors have often been struggling operatives. Dominant personalities do not grow where there are no difficulties, any more than the cedar of Lebanon will flourish side by side with the palm and the pomegranate in the hot plain. And what is true in common things applies to religious character, and to the life-principle out of which religious character grows.
You remember what Christian saw in the Interpreter’s house, where the meaning of Life was made clear to him by picture.
“And the Interpreter took him by the hand and led him into a pleasant place where was builded a stately palace, beautiful to behold; at the sight of which Christian was greatly delighted: he saw also upon the top thereof certain persons walking who were clothed in gold.
“Then said Christian, ‘May we go in thither?’
“Then the Interpreter took him and led him up toward the palace, and behold at the door stood a great company of men, as desirous to go in but durst not. He saw also that in the doorway stood many men in armour to keep it, being resolved to do to the man who would enter what hurt and mischief they could. Now was Christian somewhat in amaze; at last when every man started back for fear of the armed men, Christian saw a man of very stout countenance come up to the man that sat there to write, saying, Set down my name, sir,’ the which when he had done, he saw the man draw his sword and put a helmet on his head, and rush toward the door upon the armed men, who laid upon him with deadly force; but the man, not at all discouraged, fell to cutting and hacking most fiercely: so after he had received and given many wounds to those that attempted to keep him out, he cut his way through them all, and pressed forward into the palace: at which there was a pleasant voice heard from those that were within, saying,
‘Come in, come in,
Eternal glory thou shalt win.’
So he went in and was clothed with such garments as they. Then Christian smiled, and said, I think verily I know the meaning of this.’ ” [Note: C. S. Horne, Sermons and Addresses, 93.]
One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake. [Note: Browning, Epilogue to “Asolando,”]
