XVI

THE THIRST OF THE SOUL

There is nothing which to an intelligent and thoughtful mind would furnish ampler evidence of the inspiration of our sacred books than a profound study of our own human nature. Those parts of the Bible which deal with the internal life of man have an ability of recognizing man just as he is beyond any other literature with which we are acquainted.

I have often said that the amazing knowledge of human nature in its most hidden depths which the Bible manifests, is in itself sufficient evidence that the men through whom the Bible came to us were under the special guidance of a higher inspiration than was common to men. These Scriptures help us to understand our own nature more thoroughly than any other literature with which we are acquainted.

Take the one subject of discontent. It is universal. What does it mean? Why is it that, put men where you will, in affluent or stingy circumstances, that contented mind which, we are told, is a continual feast, is unattainable? It is attainable in imagination; but only there. We think, "If only I could have so-and-so- or be so-and-so —

I would ask no more!" We don't know ourselves. If only we would look into the lives of those who have what we want and are what we think it would be so agreeable to us to be, we should find that the same discontent is there, only the appetite is keener. Imagination is a great artist. She can paint the most attractive and bewitching pictures. She can lure us on by her prophetic representations of a future in which the atmosphere is always a kind of Indian summer. Equinoctial storms are past. The flies and mosquitoes are all gone. Everything external is most exquisitely adapted to yield comfort and satisfaction. But when the man gets there, he finds that fact and prophecy do not accord. The new conditions soon lose their newness and the old discontent is as real as ever it was. Why is it?

The answer is that no externals can ever satisfy a human spirit. It was never made to be satisfied with anything that money can buy. The nature of man is such that it contains in itself the secret of its divine origin. "My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God? My tears have been my food day and night, while they continually say unto me, Where is thy God?" To some, such language is rhapsody, scarcely intelligible. It is not the common language of common human nature. But is it not illuminating? Does it not start inquiry as to the meaning of the universality of the discontent we find in human nature?

The meaning of it, that is what we need to inquire into before we can say anything very intelligent

about it. Always in our sacred books it is assumed that this discontent of which we are all conscious is a thirst for the divine. It is natural therefore; not something to be repressed, but guided. Man's life is not intended to be a peaceful pond in a sheltered wood, covered with the sluggish scum of inactivity. Rather is it intended to be a river, rising in the silences of the high mountains and flowing on, with ever-deepening volume, until it finds the Eternal Ocean from which it originally was drawn.

Growth, movement, not stagnation, is the law of the inner life. Evolution, development - these are the modern philosophical terms for this inner order of our invisible nature. "I shall be satisfied," said the old Hebrew seer. When? "When I awake in thy likeness." He never expected to be satisfied until then. He had learned the secret, that satisfaction would come when God and man were so adjusted to each other that man's life was an immediate and natural response to the life of Deity.

We need not, then, be troubled about our own. discontent, this feeling of unsettledness and restlessness within us. It means spiritual aspiration. It means upwardness and onwardness of life. It is the pull of the divine nature on our own. It means “that this is not our rest. It means that we are strangers and pilgrims. It means that our present state of life is not final, that it is preparatory and provisional, that all our best life is in the future, that our golden age is not in the past and that it is not in the present. There is no understanding

the discontent and dissatisfaction we find within ourselves, until we get the perception that it is the pull of the divine upon our spirits. There is a law of gravitation for souls, as well as for bodies. The pull of the divine upon our spirits is indicated by an inward discontent which nothing can appease but that which causes it.

And that the children who are here may understand what we mean, allow me just to recall a story of the days of the Civil War. In those days when the President's soul was weary, a little boy playing outside the White House became involved with another little boy and they fought madly. He came in with his face bleeding and his body aching and cried out: "I want my father!" Well, there was the secretary of the treasury. Suppose Secretary Chase had said: "I know where the greatest master of finance this age has produced is." "But I want my father!" the boy would say. And another in that cabinet might have said: "I can get for you the commander-in-chief of the armies and navies of the United States." "Oh, but I want my father!" And so, if the mightiest diplomatist in foreign affairs, or the greatest lawyer in the country had been offered him, the boy still would have cried: "But I want my father!" That is the cry of the human soul, when it is in trouble. That is the meaning of the unappeasable discontent of the human heart. That is why no externals can ever be to any of us more than the merest temporary palliative.

The first necessity for living a wise and profitable life is the understanding of our own nature. Until

we know ourselves and our real wants, our lives will be a series of blundering incapacities and indirections. Without knowing it, we shall be making mistakes all the time. Instead of feeding our deepest nature on "bread of life," we shall be feeding it on stones. We must know ourselves and what the unappeasable cravings of our nature mean, before we can get steadiness and right direction into our lives. "My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God?" That man had discovered himself. He knew himself. And that is one of the most momentous uses of an intelligent Church life, to make us know ourselves. We may know all the geography of the external world and yet be as blind as bats to the geography of our own inner life.

From this lack of accurate acquaintance with our own inner life comes those types of life which proclaim to the world around them, in that unspoken speech which is most persuasive, the speech of daily living, that there is nothing great in man, nothing divine. He is nothing better than a developed baboon and the present is his all, his heaven and his hell, his highest good and his lowest misery. The most real thing in any of us is the thirst of the soul, that unappeasable discontent which shows itself in such a bewildering multitude of human efforts to get something we have not already got.

For, to a thoughtful, devout, penetrating intelligence one of the most saddening things in life is its blundering heedlessness, its non-recognition of its deepest needs. The writer of the book of Eccle