The passage: Lord, I am not proud or haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters too high for me. Instead I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like a weaned child. Israel, trust in the Lord, now and forever.
After this Psalm, as after every other, we say “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.” We praise and worship the Trinity in Unity.
Isn’t that exercising ourselves in great matters? Isn’t this Name too high for us? If we truly kept our souls low, would we intrude into these mysteries? If our souls were like weaned children, wouldn’t they be content with the practical parts of religion, leaving the doctrines of the Creeds to those who feed on nothing else?
Many have thought so, but not all. Some have learned from this Psalm what the Gloria Patri has to do with it. While meditating on it, while the words “I am not high-minded” have seemed to put them at a vast distance from the Psalmist, and while they have almost despaired of ever ceasing to be restless and occupied with things too high for them — this Name has sounded to them as a witness of real peace, unending life, unending hope, a bond joining the lonely sufferer to the whole Church, an abyss of love into which they could cast themselves and the whole universe. I believe we can find a test of the connection between the Psalm and the ascription apart from the experience of simple, lifelong worshippers. We may find it in people very different from each other in habits and opinions — alike only in regarding our creeds and worship with suspicion — who, in acquiring the temper of this Psalm, learn by degrees why we acknowledge the Trinity and in what power we worship the Unity.
I. I begin with those in whom dislike of the Church and its Creeds was strongest in the last century, and is perhaps not weakest now. Picture a man devoted to studying Nature with deep, passionate love, who will not be held back by moralists telling him to think more of man than of the universe, or by divines telling him to attend to his own soul. He is sure his calling is to follow truth wherever it leads. He has listened reverently to Natural Theologians who find everywhere marks of design and a living Creator, and he does find wonderful adaptations of organs to uses. But he refuses to be limited to such findings — it would be dishonest science to twist facts to yield a moral — and he cannot pretend there aren’t times when he fails to find the exact fit of means to ends that Paley’s school always expects. At times he senses something grander in the order of the universe than any such neat arrangement could express. The endless, teeming, self-renewing life of the world baffles anyone told it was made by a perfect Mechanist who allows nothing without a precise use. Wouldn’t it be better to use some general term for the world’s productive energies than to assume some being standing apart from them? Isn’t “Nature” enough? Does the physical scientist have any need of God?
I know this perplexity brings many close to atheism. Yet there is such a faithful, humble spirit in the true student of Nature — his very refusal to strain evidence or use religious words he doesn’t feel to be real is itself a sign of grace — that I wonder whether his glimpses into that dreadful void may not be one of God’s best gifts to him, a step toward a fuller revelation of Himself. I will venture, with some hesitation, to describe how this has happened in more than a few cases. The man called to seek the laws of Nature cannot abandon that calling, but he may discover that his relation to human beings is even more wonderful than his relation to the things he studies — generically different, and unmixable with it. This difference can strike him with great force, sometimes delightful: the birth of a child may bring a joy no discovery of a planet could give. Sometimes it strikes with terrible force: the death of a child may darken the world and make him feel it doesn’t matter whether the universe runs by law or without it, whether its creatures are cared for or simply perish — a frightful place to rest. Is there no escape? Through that very feeling of fatherhood and childhood, in the desolation when the bond seems snapped, is there not the dawn of a new discovery, a new Name? The student cannot “exercise himself in great matters” — he is overwhelmed by questions about Creation. But is not a Father more than a Creator? If the world could live without a Creator, could he live without a Father? That is the first all-embracing question. Hidden within it, to be drawn out later and to renew his old studies, is another: may not that Father be the Creator? May not a Father’s love explain those designs and adaptations better than an architect’s ingenuity? That is a hint for later; what meets him now, in his weakness, is this: his soul is a child weaned from mother earth, brought to confess it needs a Father in Heaven. He can hardly say where he first heard that Name — it sounds old yet feels fresh to him as an early spring morning. Did he find it in the New Testament? It is certainly there — he hears it often in the Sermon on the Mount; Jesus spoke it as no one had before. That is perhaps nearly all he has yet grasped of the Gospels or of Christ; whether he strictly accepts them as divine he does not know. He may go further still: longing for some way to worship this Father, he may attach himself to those who fiercely reject our Creeds, who say our Doxology dishonors the Father and denies God’s Unity. Such teachers seem to him less demanding, and to affirm what he has found while opposing what looks like its contradiction. I won’t ask how long he stays in this position — only that if his scientific honesty finds he cannot hold what he has grasped without also accepting convictions now strange to him, he will open his heart to those too.
- Now consider a man who cares little for physics or natural theology, though more for them than for the authority of the Church, national or Catholic. He has spent his youth carelessly, following impulses, scorning religious people, stifling occasional pangs of conscience. Some calamity or sermon startles him. He becomes conscious not of faults but of sin — he has committed it and is its slave. The yoke is heavy and he cannot break it. He hears of a Deliverer, a Lord who came from heaven, died for sinners, and rose again, and that believing in this Saviour makes him a justified, new man. This message reaches his conscience — he may have heard it before, but now it means something; it answers his need. He cannot be deceived: this faith actually gives him victory over the evil that had mastered him.
At first this faith is enough. He asks for nothing more; he can live and die on it. He values the Bible for showing him the Saviour; whatever else it says, he neither understands nor cares much for. The Sermon on the Mount means little to him, nor does any continuous Scripture narrative, except perhaps the story of someone who struggled as he has. But texts on the blessings of believers in the crucified Jesus he treasures and feeds on.
This state feels happy, and he supposes it will last forever, though he does nothing to sustain it by thought. Gradually he finds he was wrong; questions he hadn’t considered arise, raised by the Bible itself and pressed by the teachers he trusts most. What was that redemption he rested in so simply? Was it for others too? For whom, then? What made it necessary? Great matters for a simple man, often too high for him. To escape them he adopts a theory: a scheme of divinity explaining why God must inflict endless punishment on him unless Jesus intervened as his substitute and bore God’s wrath. This scheme replaces the faith that had first freed him from moral evil. It touches his conscience at some points, his heart at others, and is designed above all to satisfy his restless understanding. He adopts it as the only security for his weakening trust in Christ as Saviour, and defends it fiercely, taking that fierceness as proof of firm belief.
He too has family and friends. In his first fervor he wanted to share his faith with them as equally true for all; in this second stage he begins congratulating himself on being different from them. Then comes a time of weakness, bodily or mental, when old sins return and his conscience stings him for his high-mindedness and pride. He can no longer recall the arguments that once proved his ground firmer than others’. A stern Lawgiver frowns from heaven; he longs for assurance that the Mediator has delivered him from that Lawgiver’s demands. But seeking that comfort, a terrifying thought seizes him: Do I actually wish to meet such a Being? Do I long to be made in His likeness? Am I satisfied merely to be protected from Him? Can I bear that all mankind is left to His vengeance?
There is a pit of Atheism near this man too, and he must look into it. It may lead him, as it led the other, to a calmer, humbler faith than before. For what name meets his eye at every turn as he searches the New Testament for comfort? Jesus calls Himself a Son. Did that never strike him before — “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father”; “Lo, I come to do Thy will, O God”; “I came down from Heaven not to do My own will, but the will of Him that sent Me”; “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them”? He has heard these texts a thousand times and thought he believed them, always ready with an explanation that let him hold his system while still calling them inspired. But now he is too weak for such explanations. He wants the reality behind them. He wants to know that God is not different in will and nature from the One who died on the Cross. He wants to feel reconciled to God, not merely delivered from God. He wants to feel that the God who loves him loves the world.
Here then is one who, by becoming a child, weaned from notions and systems, learns with heart and soul to give glory to the Son. I don’t assume he now accepts our creed and worship — he may still be wary of both, may think a truth so hard-won cannot be one meant for everyone, even the unconscious; he may stay with whatever sect raised him or first showed him the Gospel mattered to him. Let us leave him for now, confident he will not rest until all that acknowledging a Divine Son involves becomes truly his own.
- Though both these men belong to our time, I think neither is as characteristic of it as the one I turn to next. The power of the Spirit to free men from bondage to the letter and outward rule was strongly asserted by Cromwell’s Ironsides, took a quieter form among George Fox’s followers, and the early Methodists said only this power could awaken multitudes bound by evil habit. My third man has studied these movements. He admits fanaticism can be charged against each, but says the clergy or laity who dismissed these teachers by calling them fanatics understood little of human beings or of themselves, blinded by the conventions of their own upbringing. “Didn’t they have the wisdom to see,” he asks, “that man is a spiritual being, moved far more by what speaks to his spirit than by mechanical routines? True, these Independents, Quakers, Methodists didn’t grasp the full extent of that fact — they imagined some special gift, a Spirit descending from heaven to inspire preachers or convert sinners. You Churchmen may dispute that opinion, if you’re sure you’re free of it yourselves. But poets and artists are just as committed as the wildest sects to the idea that men are subject to spiritual influences and pass them to each other.”
On this true conviction he builds his scheme of life. He tries to open his soul to all spiritual influences and to exert spiritual influence on others. Whatever is not material, not measured by money, he counts as spiritual — a classification hard to fault. But if so, all stormy passions are spiritual too: hatred is spiritual, envy is spiritual. This is no wordplay; the man feels more and more that he cannot draw the line. He is above conventions; they cannot tell him right from wrong. What can? Do such distinctions even exist? May he set them for himself? He half thinks he may. He sees no other authority, or none whose decrees could reach him. Is he not, in effect, his own lawgiver, his own God?
This is a third kind of Atheism. Who among us can say he knows nothing of it, has never been tempted into its icy depths? How is anyone delivered from it? The paths vary, but are usually harsh. This man may find he is not above rules and conventions after all — that they bind him faster because he imagines himself free and choosing for himself. Or he may find the appetites he, the spiritual man, meant to rule instead rule him. Or he may see that he is selling the very spiritual powers meant to lift him above gold, for gold itself. Or worst of all, he may discover that whether good and evil are real or invented, he has a growing preference for what he calls evil and a growing distaste for what he calls good.
If any of this dawns on him, he feels the powerlessness of the will he had exalted so high, a sense of degradation, a bent toward self-mockery. These feelings are unlike the Psalmist’s temper, yet they may lead there. This lofty spiritualist may come to think it would be a priceless blessing to cast off his proud looks, to calm his soul, to wean it from the food that has made it bloated and sick. But how? What can bring this change? He returns to old ground and asks what those sects he used to defend against our formalism meant by a spirit given to them. Was it something different from the human spirit he has been asserting, which they seemed to care little for? He opens the book they claimed as their source. He finds the promise of baptism with the Holy Spirit, carefully distinguished from evil spirits it casts out. He reads in Paul of the Spirit of God bearing witness with our spirit that we are God’s children, of that Spirit knowing the things of God as a man’s spirit knows the things of a man. He finds every gift that distinguishes one person from another traced to this Spirit as its source — yet no narrow limits placed on its presence. “It is for you,” says Peter, “and your children, and as many as the Lord shall call.” He hears it called the Spirit of Truth who guides into all truth, that we are baptized into one Spirit whether Jew or Greek, bond or free, that this Spirit helps our weakness and prays in us according to God’s will.
These are strange words. Not long ago he would have passed over them, or treated them as Eastern descriptions of conditions we in the West explain far better. Now they come to fill gaps in our western explanations that leave those explanations useless, even false. They make no huge demand on his faith; rather they speak to his lack of faith, strength, and will. They testify to One he senses has always been near him, awakening his faith, showing him his weakness, working in him to will and to act. This is not news of some spiritual influence but of the Source of all such influence — not that men are and must be subject to some influence, but how they can tell the vile from the precious, be right within rather than slaves to convention or to their own craving for independence, know God in whose image they are made and so know themselves, worship God and so not worship themselves.
So this man learns to say, “Glory to the Holy Ghost,” who has rescued him from low conceits that looked high and glorious, who has undertaken to calm and govern his soul and free it from its endless choosing of new, bitterer servitudes. Still, he may keep his old hatred of forms. If the quiet spiritualism of the Quaker or the noisy spiritualism of the Revivalist seems to him too narrow, too mixed with the formality he dreads, he probably stands apart from all sects and churches, waiting for some perfectly spiritual Church to appear. If he waits with real longing, perhaps he will glimpse one as pure, large, and spiritual as his heart could desire.
- It is no great stretch to imagine these three men, so different in taste, opinion, and fate, were once friends in youth, talking freely about the questions that mattered most to them. Later, as their minds hardened, their friendship grew wary, each pinning a hard name on the others; heated argument gave way to cautious reserve and careful small talk — more fatal to friendship than open dispute. But if, after each had passed through the schooling I’ve described, they met again, I think none would still want to refute the others or treat them as strangers beyond communion. Their old sympathy would revive and deepen through the experience of manhood. Gradually each discovers he has learned something he cannot give up but would gladly share, and the others would gladly receive. Their roads began at different points and seemed headed to different ends, yet all sense some shaded city they are approaching together, the goal of their pilgrimage. Where does this shared pull come from? Each has spelled out one syllable of the Name in which they live and move and have their being. The one who has faintly but truly acknowledged the Father sees he cannot know the Father except in the Son. The one who has seen in the Saviour who died for him the Son who existed before all worlds sees there could be no such Son without a Father whose express image and glory’s brightness He is. And the one who glorified his own spiritual nature, and found he could not truly realize it — could not truly be a man among men — unless the Holy Spirit dwelt in him and joined him to others, confesses that only a Spirit proceeding from the Holy Father and Holy Son can be the Comforter, Sanctifier, guide to all truth, bond of all love he had wearily sought and finally found.
So, because they are no longer high-minded or proud, because their souls have been calmed and kept low, because they no longer strain after matters too high for them, because they are children weaned from their conflicting beliefs and partial idolatries, they can join in saying, “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.” They are sure this is the one God, blessed forever, since He has made them of one heart and mind. What seemed a contradiction in the shifting lights of time becomes a necessity seen in the clear, steady light of Eternity. And they can go one step further. The Psalmist speaks of himself and the discipline that brought him low, but his last note is: “O Israel, trust in the Lord, from this time forth for evermore.” Having learned this shared Name, they can believe they have a shared Nation, that there now exists — not merely might exist someday — a common Church for all nations, for heaven and earth. Is this not the Name our Ethelberts and Edwins were sealed with when they first turned from idols to a kingdom of Heaven set up among them? Is it not the name with which the child of the Queen and of the laborer alike is sealed at the font today? If we English trusted in this Name, would it not bind fathers’ hearts to children’s, giving us a charm against sects and schisms that no persecution or compromise can give — because it would satisfy what every sect longs for and remove the excuse for schism that our own pride keeps supplying? If we trusted in this Name, might we not knit the bonds of peace and love between all Christian lands, showing Roman Catholics that we stand on the ground the Creeds proclaim, and showing Protestants that we have been brought, not by human tradition but by God’s own demonstration, to the very ground beneath both their feet and ours? If that is the calling of the English Church — Lord, calm our souls and keep them low, wean us from our pride, personal and national; remake us in the image of Him who alone could say, fully and perfectly, “I am not high-minded, I have no proud looks” — so that we do not hinder the work which, with us or without us, You will surely accomplish: the reconciliation of Your Church and Universe, the revelation of Yourself.