Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

CHAPTER XIX

THE BIBLE AND INDIVIDUAL SOULS.

O that I knew how all thy lights combine,
And the configurations of their glorie!
Seeing not only how each verse doth shine,
But all the constellations of the storie.

G. HERBERT.

I WILL now furnish a few instances in which isolated words and passages of the Bible have had an overwhelming influence for good upon individual souls, who, after having been themselves won, mastered, converted by those texts, have, in some cases, swayed the tendencies of generations of mankind for long centuries.

A poet tells us that he was once walking over a wide moor; at one point of it he picked up an eagle's feather; well, he forgot the rest of his journey, but that spot was imprinted on his mind. I once stood upon a pier and was struck, as I had never been before, by the way in which each separate wave seemed to flash up into the sunshine a handful of diamonds. I shall never forget those particular

waves.

We may sometimes walk on long shores of yellow sand, and here and there one single sand-grain out of the innumerable multitudes may seem to flame out into a ruby or an emerald, because a sunbeam has smitten it and trans

figured it! So in Holy Writ: words of it, expressions of it, separate points of it, by themselves, may sometimes create an indelible impression. The Jewish High Priest wore on his ephod a breastplate, 'ardent with gems oracular,' to which was, in some mysterious way, attached an oracle, the whole being called Urim and Thummim, or 'Lights and Truths.' The old Rabbis said that the way in which the High Priest ascertained the will of God from the Urim, was, that he gazed on the graven names of the tribes of Israel, until a fire of God stole in mysterious gleams over the letters, and spelt out words of guidance. The Holy Scriptures are, if we make them so, such a Urim and Thummim; such manifestations of truths, such gleams and flashes of Holy Light. Sometimes the Spirit of God, without our desire, may, as it were, flame out before us, in letters of intense revelation, on the emerald or chrysolite of some familiar text; sometimes in the night of meditation, it may vivify with celestial glimmerings some long-remembered but hitherto inoperative words.

Let me illustrate the fact by actual transcripts from human experience.

i. Fifteen hundred and seven years ago there was a dark, brilliant, beautiful, hot-blooded youth, born in Tagaste:

Into the presence of the lad did pass
An influence from a climate as of flame;
And in those lustrous eyes of his there was
A tint of flowers and oceans far away
Amid the woods and waves of Africa.

This youth had a heathen father, but a saintly mother. He had been under religious teaching from earliest years; but, overpowered by the seductions of sensuality, he had lived an impure life, and forged for himself fatal fetters

ST. AUGUSTINE

293

of habit which he could not break, and which he thought that no force on earth could ever break. At Milan he was influenced by the great Bishop St. Ambrose, 'having been led unknowingly by God to him, that he might knowingly be led to God by him.' One day the story of the lives of some saints of God had flung this youth into a tumult of agitation beyond all wont. His forehead, cheeks, eyes, colour, and tone of voice were more eloquent than his words. He rushed into his little garden to fight out the battle with his own tumultuous soul. A violent storm,' he says, 'raged within me, bringing with it a flood of tears. Rising, I flung myself under a fig-tree in an agony of remorse, exclaiming, "How long, O Lord? how long? Remember not my former sins! To-morrow? and to-morrow?-why should there not be in this very hour an end to my baseness?" In the midst of his agitated prayer, he heard the voice of a child-whether boy or girl he knew not-singing, again and again, the words' Tolle, lege; tolle, lege. Believing this to be a voice from God, bidding him to open a book, and read the first verse on which he lighted, he repressed his tears, and rushing back to the place where he had left his friend Alypius sitting, he opened the MS. of St. Paul which was lying there, and read in silence the verse on which his eyes first fell. It was, 'Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof.' 'I wished,' he said, 'to read no more. There was no need. For, instantly, as though the light of salvation had been poured into my heart, with the close of this sentence, all the darkness of my doubts had fled away!

The name of that youth was St. Augustine; that Divine lightning flash fused the sensualist into the saint; that

one text rescued him, and since then he has exercised untold influence over thousands of human souls.

ii. A second instance. Just 387 years ago, in 1510, a German youth, a pious monk, full of intense ardour and enthusiasm, went on a pilgrimage to Rome. His visit frightfully disenchanted him. He found a hollow religion -a form which evinced no corresponding reality. He found Popes, Cardinals, and Priests tainted with atheism and indifference, amid the terrible prevalence of unblushing immorality. There is at Rome a staircase, called the Santa Scala, which professes to be that which Christ ascended to the judgment seat of Pilate. No one is allowed to go up except upon his knees; and to every one who ascends it on his knees are promised, I know not how many Papal Indulgences. This earnest and devout German youth-a youth terribly in earnest, a youth who could not live on gilded shams-began the ascent on his knees; but when he was half-way up, there burst upon his soul, like the rush of an avalanche, the text, 'The just shall live by faith.' By faith, not by sham penances; by faith, not by will worship and voluntary humility; by faith, not by external mechanical acts. Of what use to him, in comparison with even one of the sacrifices which God approves, would be 100,000 years of such indulgences as such priests as he saw at Rome, or as all the priests in the whole world, could idly promise? They were not worth the breath that uttered them or the paper on which they were written.

He who hears the voice of God in his soul can listen no longer to the lies of man. Luther, for it was Martin Luther, the son of the German miner of Eisenach, rose from his knees, walked down the steps; and by that one text, the glory of the bright and blissful Reformation-in which 'the sweet odour of the returning Gospel of Christ

FRANCIS XAVIER

295

has embathed men's souls in the fragrancy of heaven,' and emancipated millions from Egyptian darkness-was kindled in his soul.

iii. Yet a third instance. Nearly four centuries ago, there was, in the University of Paris, a gay young nobleman of Navarre, who charmed all by his eloquence and knowledge, whose beautiful face beamed with genius, and whose bright temperament made him delight in scenes of festivity and mirth. With him was a stern Spaniard, who had been a soldier and a student of romance; but who, having been crippled and wounded in the siege of Pampeluna, suffered months of torture and devoted himself to spiritual warfare. Wherever the gay noble went the Spanish soldier limped after him; and, whenever he was flushed with enjoyment and gratified vanity, said to him, 'Yes! but what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?' At last the oft-repeated words of Christ burnt themselves on the young man's soul. Ah, what would it profit? What is our life? Is it not as vapour, so soon passeth it away, and we are gone?'

And so the gay young noble, disillusioned of the lower temptations, and brought to his knees, resolved not to live to the world, or for pleasure, but to give his heart to God. That youth was Francis Xavier; that Spanish soldier was Ignatius Loyola; and in the power of that one text-seizing a heart which would not make, as we most of us make, 'the great refusal'-lay the first mighty work of modern missions to the heathen in Ceylon, in India, in China, in Japan.

iv. I might give many instances more; but my last shall be told in the homely words of a living traveller. 'I have been in Africa seventeen years,' he said to a newspaper

« AnteriorContinuar »