Pax Vobiscum by Henry Drummond
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PAX VOBISCUM
BY HENRY DRUMMOND, F.R.S.E., F.G.S., LL.D.
1890
"PAX VOBISCUM," prepared for publication by the Author, is now published
for the first time, being the second of a series of which "The Greatest
Thing in the World" was the first.
Nov. 1, 1890. "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and
I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am
meek and lowly in heart and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my
yoke is easy, and my burden is light."
CONTENTS
PREFACE
PAX VOBISCUM
EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES
WHAT YOKES ARE FOR
HOW FRUITS GROW
PAX VOBISCUM
I heard the other morning a sermon by a distinguished preacher upon
"Rest." It was full of beautiful thoughts; but when I came to ask
myself, "How does he say I can get Rest?" there was no answer. The
sermon was sincerely meant to be practical, yet it contained no
experience that seemed to me to be tangible, nor any advice which
could help me to find the thing itself as I went about the world that
afternoon. Yet this omission of the only important problem was not the
fault of the preacher. The whole popular religion is in the twilight
here. And when pressed for really working specifics for the experiences
with which it deals, it falters, and seems to lose itself in mist.
The want of connection between the great words of religion and every-day
life has bewildered and discouraged all of us. Christianity possesses
the noblest words in the language; its literature overflows with terms
expressive of the greatest and happiest moods which can fill the soul of
man. Rest, Joy, Peace, Faith, Love, Light--these words occur with such
persistency in hymns and prayers that an observer might think they
formed the staple of Christian experience. But on coming to close
quarters with the actual life of most of us, how surely would he be
disenchanted. I do not think we ourselves are aware how much our
religious life is made up of phrases; how much of what we call Christian
experience is only a dialect of the Churches, a mere religious
phraseology with almost nothing behind it in what we really feel and
know.
To some of us, indeed, the Christian experiences seem further away than
when we took the first steps in the Christian life. That life has not
opened out as we had hoped; we do not regret our religion, but we are
disappointed with it. There are times, perhaps, when wandering notes
from a diviner music stray into our spirits; but these experiences come
at few and fitful moments. We have no sense of possession in them. When
they visit us, it is a surprise. When they leave us, it is without
explanation. When we wish their return, we do not know how to secure
it. All which points to a religion without solid base, and a poor and
flickering life. It means a great bankruptcy in those experiences which
give Christianity its personal solace and make it attractive to the
world, and a great uncertainty as to any remedy. It is as if we knew
everything about health--except the way to get it.
I am quite sure that the difficulty does not lie in the fact that
men are not in earnest. This is simply not the fact. All around us
Christians are wearing themselves out in trying to be better. The amount
of spiritual longing in the world--in the hearts of unnumbered thousands
of men and women in whom we should never suspect it; among the wise and
thoughtful; among the young and gay, who seldom assuage and never betray
their thirst--this is one of the most wonderful and touching facts of
life. It is not more heat that is needed, but more light; not more
force, but a wiser direction to be given to very real energies already
there.
The Address which follows is offered as a humble contribution to this
problem, and in the hope that it may help some who are "seeking Rest and
finding none" to a firmer footing on one great, solid, simple
principle which underlies not the Christian experiences alone, but all
experiences, and all life.
What Christian experience wants is _thread_, a vertebral column, method.
It is impossible to believe that there is no remedy for its unevenness
and dishevelment, or that the remedy is a secret. The idea, also, that
some few men, by happy chance or happier temperament, have been given
the secret--as if there were some sort of knack or trick of it--is
wholly incredible. Religion must ripen its fruit for every temperament;
and the way even into its highest heights must be by a gateway through
which the peoples of the world may pass.
I shall try to lead up to this gateway by a very familiar path. But as
that path is strangely unfrequented, and even unknown, where it passes
into the religious sphere, I must dwell for a moment on the commonest of
commonplaces.
EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES
Nothing that happens in the world happens by chance. God is a God of
order. Everything is arranged upon definite principles, and never
at random. The world, even the religious world, is governed by law.
Character is governed by law. Happiness is governed by law. The
Christian experiences are governed by law. Men, forgetting this, expect
Rest, Joy, Peace, Faith to drop into their souls from the air like snow
or rain. But in point of fact they do not do so; and if they did they
would no less have their origin in previous activities and be controlled
by natural laws. Rain and snow do drop from the air, but not without a
long previous history. They are the mature effects of former causes.
Equally so are Rest, and Peace, and Joy. They, too, have each a previous
history. Storms and winds and calms are not accidents, but are brought
about by antecedent circumstances. Rest and Peace are but calms in man's
inward nature, and arise through causes as definite and as inevitable.
Realize it thoroughly: it is a methodical not an accidental world. If a
housewife turns out a good cake, it is the result of a sound receipt,
carefully applied. She cannot mix the assigned ingredients and fire them
for the appropriate time without producing the result. It is not she who
has made the cake; it is nature. She brings related things together;
sets causes at work; these causes bring about the result. She is not
a creator, but an intermediary. She does not expect random causes to
produce specific effects--random ingredients would only produce random
cakes. So it is in the making of Christian experiences. Certain lines
are followed; certain effects are the result. These effects cannot but
be the result. But the result can never take place without the previous
cause. To expect results without antecedents is to expect cakes without
ingredients. That impossibility is precisely the almost universal
expectation.
Now what I mainly wish to do is to help you firmly to grasp this simple
principle of Cause and Effect in the spiritual world. And instead of
applying the principle generally to each of the Christian experiences in
turn, I shall examine its application to one in some little detail.
The one I shall select is Rest. And I think any one who follows the
application in this single instance will be able to apply it for himself
to all the others.
Take such a sentence as this: African explorers are subject to fevers
which cause restlessness and delirium. Note the expression, "cause
restlessness." _Restlessness has a cause_. Clearly, then, any one who
wished to get rid of restlessness would proceed at once to deal with
the cause. If that were not removed, a doctor might prescribe a hundred
things, and all might be taken in turn, without producing the least
effect. Things are so arranged in the original planning of the world
that certain effects must follow certain causes, and certain causes must
be abolished before certain effects can be removed. Certain parts of
Africa are inseparably linked with the physical experience called fever;
this fever is in turn infallibly linked with a mental experience called
restlessness and delirium. To abolish the mental experience the radical
method would be to abolish the physical experience, and the way of
abolishing the physical experience would be to abolish Africa, or
to cease to go there. Now this holds good for all other forms of
Restlessness. Every other form and kind of Restlessness in the world has
a definite cause, and the particular kind of Restlessness can only be
removed by removing the allotted cause.
All this is also true of Rest. Restlessness has a cause: must not _Rest_
have a cause? Necessarily. If it were a chance world we would not expect
this; but, being a methodical world, it cannot be otherwise. Rest,
physical rest, moral rest, spiritual rest, every kind of rest has a
cause, as certainly as restlessness. Now causes are discriminating.
There is one kind of cause for every particular effect, and no other;
and if one particular effect is desired, the corresponding cause must be
set in motion. It is no use proposing finely devised schemes, or going
through general pious exercises in the hope that somehow Rest will come.
The Christian life is not casual but causal. All nature is a standing
protest against the absurdity of expecting to secure spiritual effects,
or any effects, without the employment of appropriate causes. The Great
Teacher dealt what ought to have been the final blow to this infinite
irrelevancy by a single question, "Do men gather grapes of thorns or
figs of thistles?" Why, then, did the Great Teacher not educate His
followers fully? Why did He not tell us, for example, how such a thing
as Rest might be obtained? The answer is, that _He did_. But plainly,
explicitly, in so many words? Yes, plainly, explicitly, in so many
words. He assigned Rest to its cause, in words with which each of us has
been familiar from his earliest childhood.
He begins, you remember--for you at once know the passage I refer
to--almost as if Rest could be had without any cause: "Come unto me," He
says, "and I will _give_ you Rest."
Rest, apparently, was a favour to be bestowed; men had but to come to
Him; He would give it to every applicant. But the next sentence takes
that all back. The qualification, indeed, is added instantaneously.
For what the first sentence seemed to give was next thing to an
impossibility. For how, in a literal sense, can Rest be _given_? One
could no more give away Rest than he could give away Laughter. We speak
of "causing" laughter, which we can do; but we cannot give it away. When
we speak of giving pain, we know perfectly well we cannot give pain
away. And when we aim at giving pleasure, all that we do is to arrange a
set of circumstances in such a way as that these shall cause pleasure.
Of course there is a sense, and a very wonderful sense, in which a Great
Personality breathes upon all who come within its influence an abiding
peace and trust. Men can be to other men as the shadow of a great rock
in a thirsty land. Much more Christ; much more Christ as Perfect Man;
much more still as Saviour of the world. But it is not this of which I
speak. When Christ said He would give men Rest, He meant simply that
He would put them in the way of it. By no act of conveyance would, or
could, He make over His own Rest to them. He could give them His receipt
for it. That was all. But He would not make it for them; for one thing,
it was not in His plan to make it for them; for another thing, men were
not so planned that it could be made for them; and for yet another
thing, it was a thousand times better that they should make it for
themselves.
That this is the meaning becomes obvious from the wording of the second
sentence: "Learn of Me and ye shall _find_ Rest." Rest, that is to say,
is not a thing that can be given, but a thing to be _acquired_. It comes
not by an act, but by a process. It is not to be found in a happy hour,
as one finds a treasure; but slowly, as one finds knowledge. It could
indeed be no more found in a moment than could knowledge. A soil has to
be prepared for it. Like a fine fruit, it will grow in one climate and
not in another; at one altitude and not at another. Like all growths it
will have an orderly development and mature by slow degrees.
The nature of this slow process Christ clearly defines when He says we
are to achieve Rest by _learning_. "Learn of Me," He says, "and ye shall
find rest to your souls." Now consider the extraordinary originality
of this utterance. How novel the connection between these two words,
"Learn" and "Rest"? How few of us have ever associated them--ever
thought that Rest was a thing to be learned; ever laid ourselves out
for it as we would to learn a language; ever practised it as we would
practise the violin? Does it not show how entirely new Christ's teaching
still is to the world, that so old and threadbare an aphorism should
still be so little applied? The last thing most of us would have thought
of would have been to associate _Rest_ with _Work_.
What must one work at? What is that which if duly learned will find the
soul of man in Rest? Christ answers without the least hesitation. He
specifies two things--Meekness and Lowliness. "Learn of Me," He says,
"for I am _meek_ and _lowly_ in heart." Now these two things are not
chosen at random. To these accomplishments, in a special way, Rest is
attached. Learn these, in short, and you have already found Rest. These
as they stand are direct causes of Rest; will produce it at once; cannot
but produce it at once. And if you think for a single moment, you will
see how this is necessarily so, for causes are never arbitrary, and the
connection between antecedent and consequent here and everywhere lies
deep in the nature of things.
What is the connection, then? I answer by a further question. What are
the chief causes of _Unrest_? If you know yourself, you will answer
Pride, Selfishness, Ambition. As you look back upon the past years of
your life, is it not true that its unhappiness has chiefly come from the
succession of personal mortifications and almost trivial disappointments
which the intercourse of life has brought you? Great trials come at
lengthened intervals, and we rise to breast them; but it is the petty
friction of our every-day life with one another, the jar of business
or of work, the discord of the domestic circle, the collapse of our
ambition, the crossing of our will or the taking down of our conceit,
which make inward peace impossible. Wounded vanity, then, disappointed
hopes, unsatisfied selfishness--these are the old, vulgar, universal
sources of man's unrest.
Now it is obvious why Christ pointed out as the two chief objects for
attainment the exact opposites of these. To Meekness and Lowliness these
things simply do not exist. They cure unrest by making it impossible.
These remedies do not trifle with surface symptoms; they strike at once
at removing causes. The ceaseless chagrin of a self-centred life can
be removed at once by learning Meekness and Lowliness of heart. He who
learns them is forever proof against it. He lives henceforth a charmed
life. Christianity is a fine inoculation, a transfusion of healthy blood
into an anaemic or poisoned soul. No fever can attack a perfectly sound
body; no fever of unrest can disturb a soul which has breathed the air
or learned the ways of Christ. Men sigh for the wings of a dove that
they may fly away and be at Rest. But flying away will not help us. "The
Kingdom of God is _within you_." We aspire to the top to look for Rest;
it lies at the bottom. Water rests only when it gets to the lowest
place. So do men. Hence, be lowly. The man who has no opinion of himself
at all can never be hurt if others do not acknowledge him. Hence, be
meek. He who is without expectation cannot fret if nothing comes to him.
It is self-evident that these things are so. The lowly man and the
meek man are really above all other men, above all other things. They
dominate the world because they do not care for it. The miser does
not possess gold, gold possesses him. But the meek possess it. "The
meek," said Christ, "inherit the earth." They do not buy it; they do not
conquer it, but they inherit it.
There are people who go about the world looking out for slights,
and they are necessarily miserable, for they find them at every
turn--especially the imaginary ones. One has the same pity for such men
as for the very poor. They are the morally illiterate. They have had no
real education, for they have never learned how to live. Few men know
how to live. We grow up at random, carrying into mature life the merely
animal methods and motives which we had as little children. And it does
not occur to us that all this must be changed; that much of it must be
reversed, that life is the finest of the Fine Arts, that it has to be
learned with lifelong patience, and that the years of our pilgrimage are
all too short to master it triumphantly.
Yet this is what Christianity is for--to teach men the Art of Life.
And its whole curriculum lies in one word--"Learn of me." Unlike most
education, this is almost purely personal; it is not to be had from
books or lectures or creeds or doctrines. It is a study from the life.
Christ never said much in mere words about the Christian graces. He
lived them, He was them. Yet we do not merely copy Him. We learn His art
by living with Him, like the old apprentices with their masters.
Now we understand it all? Christ's invitation to the weary
and heavy-laden is a call to begin life over again upon a new
principle--upon His own principle. "Watch My way of doing things," He
says. "Follow Me. Take life as I take it. Be meek and lowly and you will
find Rest."
I do not say, remember, that the Christian life to every man, or to any
man, can be a bed of roses. No educational process can be this. And
perhaps if some men knew how much was involved in the simple "learn" of
Christ, they would not enter His school with so irresponsible a heart.
For there is not only much to learn, but much to unlearn. Many men never
go to this school at all till their disposition is already half ruined
and character has taken on its fatal set. To learn arithmetic is
difficult at fifty--much more to learn Christianity. To learn simply
what it is to be meek and lowly, in the case of one who has had no
lessons in that in childhood, may cost him half of what he values most
on earth. Do we realize, for instance, that the way of teaching humility
is generally by _humiliation_? There is probably no other school for it.
When a man enters himself as a pupil in such a school it means a very
great thing. There is much Rest there, but there is also much Work.
I should be wrong, even though my theme is the brighter side, to ignore
the cross and minimise the cost. Only it gives to the cross a more
definite meaning, and a rarer value, to connect it thus directly and
_causally_ with the growth of the inner life. Our platitudes on the
"benefits of affliction" are usually about as vague as our theories of
Christian Experience. "Somehow," we believe affliction does us good. But
it is not a question of "Somehow." The result is definite, calculable,
necessary. It is under the strictest law of cause and effect. The first
effect of losing one's fortune, for instance, is humiliation; and the
effect of humiliation, as we have just seen, is to make one humble; and
the effect of being humble is to produce Rest. It is a roundabout way,
apparently, of producing Rest; but Nature generally works by circular
processes; and it is not certain that there is any other way of becoming
humble, or of finding Rest. If a man could make himself humble to order,
it might simplify matters, but we do not find that this happens. Hence
we must all go through the mill. Hence death, death to the lower self,
is the nearest gate and the quickest road to life.
Yet this is only half the truth. Christ's life outwardly was one of the
most troubled lives that was ever lived: Tempest and tumult, tumult and
tempest, the waves breaking over it all the time till the worn body was
laid in the grave. But the inner life was a sea of glass. The great calm
was always there. At any moment you might have gone to Him and found
Rest. And even when the bloodhounds were dogging him in the streets
of Jerusalem, He turned to His disciples and offered them, as a last
legacy, "My peace." Nothing ever for a moment broke the serenity of
Christ's life on earth. Misfortune could not reach Him; He had no
fortune. Food, raiment, money--fountain-heads of half the world's
weariness--He simply did not care for; they played no part in His life;
He "took no thought" for them. It was impossible to affect Him by
lowering His reputation; He had already made Himself of no reputation.
He was dumb before insult. When He was reviled He reviled not-again. In
fact, there was nothing that the world could do to Him that could ruffle
the surface of His spirit.
Such living, as mere living, is altogether unique. It is only when we
see what it was in Him that we can know what the word Rest means. It
lies not in emotions, nor in the absence of emotions. It is not a
hallowed feeling that comes over us in church. It is not something that
the preacher has in his voice. It is not in nature, or in poetry, or in
music--though in all these there is soothing. It is the mind at
leisure from itself. It is the perfect poise of the soul; the absolute
adjustment of the inward man to the stress of all outward things;
the preparedness against every emergency; the stability of assured
convictions; the eternal calm of an invulnerable faith; the repose of
a heart set deep in God. It is the mood of the man who says, with
Browning, "God's in His Heaven, all's well with the world."
Two painters each painted a picture to illustrate his conception of
rest. The first chose for his scene a still, lone lake among the far-off
mountains. The second threw on his canvas a thundering waterfall, with
a fragile birch-tree bending over the foam; at the fork of a branch,
almost wet with the cataract's spray, a robin sat on its nest. The first
was only _Stagnation_; the last was _Rest_. For in Rest there are always
two elements--tranquillity and energy; silence and turbulence; creation
and destruction; fearlessness and fearfulness. This it was in Christ.
It is quite plain from all this that whatever else He claimed to be
or to do, He at least knew how to live. All this is the perfection of
living, of living in the mere sense of passing through the world in the
best way. Hence His anxiety to communicate His idea of life to others.
He came, He said, to give men life, true life, a more abundant life than
they were living; "the life," as the fine phrase in the Revised Version
has it, "that is life indeed." This is what He himself possessed, and it
was this which He offers to all mankind. And hence His direct appeal for
all to come to Him who had not made much of life, who were weary and
heavy-laden. These He would teach His secret. They, also, should know
"the life that is life indeed."
WHAT YOKES ARE FOR
There is still one doubt to clear up. After the statement, "Learn of
Me," Christ throws in the disconcerting qualification, "_Take My yoke_
upon you and learn of Me." Why, if all this be true, does He call it a
_yoke_? Why, while professing to give Rest, does He with the next breath
whisper "_burden_"? Is the Christian life, after all, what its enemies
take it for--an additional weight to the already great woe of life, some
extra punctiliousness about duty, some painful devotion to observances,
some heavy restriction and trammelling of all that is joyous and free in
the world? Is life not hard and sorrowful enough without being fettered
with yet another yoke?
It is astounding how so glaring a misunderstanding of this plain
sentence should ever have passed into currency. Did you ever stop to
ask what a yoke is really for? Is it to be a burden to the animal which
wears it? It is just the opposite. It is to make its burden light.
Attached to the oxen in any other way than by a yoke, the plough would
be intolerable. Worked by means of a yoke, it is light. A yoke is not
an instrument of torture; it is an instrument of mercy. It is not a
malicious contrivance for making work hard; it is a gentle device to
make hard labour light. It is not meant to give pain, but to save pain.
And yet men speak of the yoke of Christ as if it were a slavery, and
look upon those who wear it as objects of compassion. For generations we
have had homilies on "The Yoke of Christ," some delighting in portraying
its narrow exactions; some seeking in these exactions the marks of its
divinity; others apologising for it, and toning it down; still others
assuring us that, although it be very bad, it is not to be compared with
the positive blessings of Christianity. How many, especially among the
young, has this one mistaken phrase driven forever away from the
kingdom of God? Instead of making Christ attractive, it makes Him out
a taskmaster, narrowing life by petty restrictions, calling for
self-denial where none is necessary, making misery a virtue under the
plea that it is the yoke of Christ, and happiness criminal because it
now and then evades it. According to this conception, Christians are
at best the victims of a depressing fate; their life is a penance; and
their hope for the next world purchased by a slow martyrdom in this.