The Old and New Paradise

“And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take of the water of life freely.”—Revelation xxii. 17.

The passage: The Spirit and the bride say, “Come.” Let everyone who hears say, “Come.” Let anyone who is thirsty come, and let whoever wishes take the water of life freely.

At the beginning of the chapter these words come from, we read of a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, flowing out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. Closely joined to this vision is the tree of life on either side of the river. It bore twelve kinds of fruit, yielded its fruit every month, and its leaves were for the healing of the nations.

Such passages in the last book of the Bible can hardly fail to recall what we read a week ago in the first. There a Tree of Life grew in the garden where Adam and Eve walked, and four rivers are mentioned, parted into four heads. The fancy of allegorists has been inexhaustible in following out these likenesses: what Christian mysteries may not the Tree of Life foreshadow, and what lessons of wisdom may not lie in the names of those early rivers, to which this latest river so plainly corresponds!

I cannot say that devout people have gained nothing from these speculations. We may hope that light will one day be thrown on the cabalistic lore which ingenious men suspect in all words, numbers and signs. But life is now too busy and serious for such inquiries. Whatever profit or entertainment they offer, it does not make up for the impression they leave on many minds that the Bible is a book of tricks and not the book for practice and work. It is not too much to ask pious people to give up even their most innocent playthings if these tempt anyone to think the words of Apostles and Prophets were meant for children rather than men.

I. Still, the likenesses between Genesis and the Apocalypse are too remarkable to go unexplained. If the allegorists offered an explanation, they would deserve respectful attention. But I suspect that those have helped most toward one who have refused to let any private fancy divert them from studying the Bible as the interpreter of our deepest wants and the guide in our daily perplexities. Such readers cannot open Genesis without finding the creation of man in the image of God. They read on and find a man made of dust, into whose nostrils the breath of life was breathed, so that he became a living soul. He is placed in a garden among trees and rivers, learns to name the things around him, exercises dominion over them, discovers his need of fellowship, and is given a helpmeet. It is a pleasing picture, and its simplicity bears the stamp of truth. But it does not at all satisfy the idea set before us in the previous chapter. If that idea is true, an Arcadian, paradisal existence is not what a human being should long for or could be content with. A solitary happiness, or the happiness of one pair of creatures, could never be the end God had in view in creating. So when we are told that this beautiful infancy of the race quickly ended, that the woman was tempted by an inferior creature to crave a forbidden thing, good for food and likely to make her wise, and that the man disobeyed the command of his unseen Lord, I welcome it as the beginning, a sad one but the only one we can imagine, of the actual history of mankind. That history is not a downward but an upward progress, if the Bible is taken literally and in its order. It is an education of men, through work, suffering and sin, into the discovery of their real capacities and their divine parentage. It vindicates the truth of the original record, in spite of, and by means of, the deepest unbelief and contradiction of it by those whose destiny and glory it proclaims.

If we hold this thought, which comes from taking Scripture as it stands and discarding the conceits we have wrapped around it, and then compare the opening of Genesis with the last chapter of the Apocalypse, the Tree of Life and the Water of Life become useful and precious signs. They connect the beginning of human discipline with its climax, and mark the passage from sensible life to spiritual, from the solitary to the truly human. What must have happened between these extremes? What has turned the rivers marked by bdellium, gold and onyx into a river flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb? What has made a tree in the middle of a garden where two people lived into a tree whose leaves heal the nations? What has changed a Garden into a City, the New Jerusalem, coming down from heaven as a bride adorned for her husband? Let us consider.

1. First, he who is described in the first record as the Creator of man must have revealed himself as a Father, and the father not of a single soul but of a family. The command to increase and multiply has been obeyed, and has been a blessing, not a curse. What has tried to turn it into a curse is each member’s desire to be divided from the rest, a merely separate soul. That desire has been a virtual denial of the name of Father. But the name has been a reality and the denial a lie. All may hold to the reality and renounce the lie, and those who deny their birthright are the ones the Father seeks to bring home.

2. Next, if that command has had time to fulfil itself, so has the threat, “Thou shalt die.” If Adam came under the power of death the day he ate of the tree, everyone has been born under the same death, and each has felt that death is somehow connected with the knowledge of evil. The sting of death was sin. But in all that time was there no knowledge of good too? Was there no perception of a life struggling with the death, or rather, against which the death was struggling? Was no one actually bruising the serpent’s head? Had not every mother, as a man was born into the world, been sure that there was? And who that was has been revealed. The seed of the woman, the object of trust, has actually come, not as the child of Eve but as the head of the race, the Son of Man. His heel was bruised. He solved the mystery of death and turned it into a sacrament of fellowship. He rose out of it, declared to be the Son of God. The Word of Life is the substitute for the Tree of Life.

3. Third, the first chapter of Genesis hints at a Spirit who moved on the face of the waters, and in the chapter we read this afternoon we hear of that Spirit striving with man. The first hint rules out all hard, mechanical notions of creation. We cannot describe it by saying that things were called into existence; the phrase implies the communication and unfolding of vital principles. The second is said of a proud, rebellious human society hurrying to destruction. It makes us remember that what resists destruction, in man as in nature, is not a force from outside but an energy within, an energy that holds together social elements always ready to break loose, and that comes from God. Such language needed to be unfolded. Christ began to unfold it as he sat by Jacob’s well and told the Samaritan woman of a water he would give, which would be in her a spring welling up to everlasting life. He unfolded it further when, at the Feast of Tabernacles, he invited all who were celebrating the striking of the rock in the wilderness to come to him and drink. But as St. John says in his comment on that saying, it could not be fully unfolded until Christ was glorified. Then, when the Son of Man had been proclaimed as sitting at the right hand of God, the Spirit of God could be given to men. He could come down on different tribes and races to bind them into one, take possession of their thoughts and lips, quicken their hearts with new fire, speak through their different dialects, and form a Church out of every kindred under heaven, representing humanity redeemed by God, the Bride of his Son. That was the preparation for the words of my text, in which the Spirit and the Bride invite men to take the water of life freely. Every part of their speech is addressed to one age as much as another. May it reach us!

II. 1. If by the Bride we meant the Church as represented by the doctors of some particular age, we might well doubt whether these voices could be in harmony. Often it seems that Churchmen are bidding us seek some outward means of quenching our inward thirst. The words of our Lord about the well of water within, springing up to everlasting life, seem to frighten them, as if, though he spoke them, they were unreal and mystical, or at least not to be set before common people, though he addressed them to an ignorant and sinful woman. But the voice of the Church, as it sounds clear and strong through the generations in the confessions, prayers and songs of those who witnessed that Christ truly died for man and truly raised humanity to the right hand of God, echoes the voice of the Spirit. That voice says: “Come within. Turn from shows and appearances and glittering outsides. Come to him who is the root and ground of your being, the source of all the life within you. Leave the circumference, where you may wander forever, changing place and finding no rest, seeking a home in new sects or churches, always the prey of some old or new delusion, always learning and never able to arrive at the knowledge of the truth. Come to the centre from which all the scattered lines of light that reached those sects and churches radiated. Come to your true home, your Father’s house, which you left in search of one elixir after another, until you found sickness instead of health, poverty instead of gold, and the food of swine instead of the nectar you dreamed of. Come back to this home, where your spirit, for all its weariness and helplessness, will still find a welcome, the new robe, music and dancing, and the Father’s embrace.” So the Spirit of Holiness and Truth speaks to the spirit in you and me. The sacraments of the Church, which are the ring and vesture of the Bride, the pledges of our adoption as children, the assurance that we are bound to an eternal Husband, and the witnesses of an inward, ever-renewing life, speak the same language: “Come, not to the end of the earth, not to some temporary shelter from heat or rain, but to the house not made with hands, where all human hearts may live together.”

2. The Apostle goes on: “And let him that heareth say, Come.” The voice of the Spirit and the Bride may reach spirits that are closed against it, those of whom Isaiah says that they have made their hearts fat and their ears dull of hearing. He does not mean that a human messenger’s words may fail to reach the man they are meant for, or fail to impress his understanding, or even fail to strike painfully on his conscience. He means that they are taken as only a few of the myriad voices ringing and buzzing in the air, not as the voice of a Deliverer and King. So the invitation is not obeyed, because it is not felt to be an invitation. Or if it attracts, it is not recognized as having a right to command; we would like to accept it, but how can we, in fetters? Still there may be an indistinct hearing, a half-conviction that the message is for us and that God sent it. Let him who hears even in this way say, “Come.” Let him say to his own heart: “You are tied with heavy chains, but this is surely the angel bidding you rise and shake them off. It is not you who must strain to stand upright and be free. The Spirit of God will give you power and remove the hindrances. Only be sure that it is he who speaks, and that you have only to submit to his guidance and let him purify and govern you, and you will be led by the straight way, rough though it may be, to your proper home.” All the weary metaphysics about necessity and freedom are contained in this sentence, but translated into life. It avoids the narrowness and hopelessness of the two party theories, confesses the truth of each, and lets them support rather than contradict each other. The Spirit of God comes to vindicate man’s freedom, not to crush it. When the will stops being independent and obeys its true ruler, its slavery ends.

3. Still, “he that heareth” does not express the full Gospel the Apostle preaches. It holds the truth but not the whole truth. A man may say, “You demand hearing of me, but the world has so dulled my organs and deafened me with bewildering cries that I cannot hear.” So St. John adds, “And let him that is athirst say, Come.” At first this might seem a greater requirement, since to be athirst for the Water of Life implies a high state of feeling, a craving found in very few. If the words were “athirst for the Water of Life,” that criticism would be just. But the word is simply “athirst.” The man may not know for what. He may have tried, and still be trying, many ways to satisfy the dry aching in him, and be conscious of nothing but that. Let anyone conscious of that say, “Come.” Let him say: “I sought the good that was to satisfy me at a distance, and did not find it. The faster I pursued it, the faster it fled. The Spirit and the Bride say this could not be otherwise, because the good was close to me. I had it within me and did not know it. It was beneath myself, beneath all the dark and dreadful thoughts and visions about myself that scared me, and from which I was asking the world to deliver me. They say, ‘Come and look through these. If your own dark self, which you dread to meet, is there, so is Christ, the deliverance from yourself, in whom you may sink and drown yourself, the true Lord and Friend of Man. Come, for if an Evil Spirit claims dominion over you and seeks to fill you with his own nature, there is one who casts out the Evil Spirit: the Son of God, the Prince of Peace, who came from the bosom of the Father, from Absolute, Eternal Love, and can lead you into it.’”

4. There is another clause, and at first it sounds as discouraging as the last. “Whoso will, let him take of the Water of Life freely.” “So,” we exclaim, “it comes to this at last. At the threshold of the Bible we were shown this great obstacle in the very state of man, in the very gift of his Creator, and in almost the last words of the Bible the puzzle is still unsolved. The will is still here. If it is obstinate, and it has the power to be, and for six thousand years has proved and used that power, what does Redemption mean? What has been done to save the earth from its curse, when the one made its ruler has a perpetual faculty to create and renew it?” Thousands who are not in earnest play with this thought as an excuse for frivolity, and it torments some who are earnest for years. How can we answer it? We cannot answer it at all, but the Spirit and the Bride can. They answer by speaking to the will, to the spirit in us. They make it feel that its capacity to go wrong is its glory and not its curse. They awaken it to the effort and energy that belong to it and to no stone, or even tree, river or star. They make it feel that its efforts and struggles, even when feeble, ill-directed and mischievous, are in themselves greater and dearer to God than all the unconscious movements of the Universe, however calm. They make the man understand that because these efforts are dear to God, he does not leave them to work on turbulently to their own destruction, and that the whole scheme of his providence and grace has been for the Redemption of this Will: to bring it out of the dominion of its oppressors and regenerate it to be his servant and child. They say to the man: “It is true that at the end of the Bible, as at the beginning, you find that a man cannot be blessed as a mere animal is blessed. That is an Eternal Law which God will not set aside, and which he will confirm in Heaven, Earth and Hell.” That is the very explanation of the history of the Bible, and of the history of your existence and every man’s. Because you cannot be blessed as a mere animal is blessed, God would bless you as a man is blessed.

5. And here is the blessing: “Take of the Water of Life freely.” You thought you were to purchase eternal life by a number of good acts, or certain states of mind, or a vigorous faith. You found it very hard, indeed impossible, to bring the purchase-money. The acts you did were not good but selfish; the states of mind were not real but artificial; the faith was in itself, not in God. Take of the Water of Life freely. Receive the eternal life which is the spring of all just works, good counsels and healthy faith. Receive it as God’s own gift, earned by nothing in you, and sought by you because he made you conscious of evil in your deeds and thoughts and of unbelief in your inmost heart. Let it enter you, purify you and refresh you. Take it afresh day by day, as the ground takes in fresh moisture and as you, your children and your cattle drink at the well. There need be no painful thirst in you, though there will be if you refuse this water. There will always be a healthy desire for more of what you have found necessary and enjoyable. It is the life of God, the highest, the eternal life, that you are bidden to share. Yet it is a life we are to share with his poorest creatures, because it is the life of him who gave his flesh and blood for all. It cannot simply dwell in whoever possesses it; it must go out, as God’s life goes out, blessing and creating. The commonest symbol is used for it, so that our sense of its wonder may not make us think it less general. These symbols belong to the completion of God’s work as much as to its beginning. The sensible thing has all along been seeking the spiritual substance beneath it, and when that substance is found it keeps its own worth and beauty. There is a new earth as well as a new heaven. The Jerusalem that comes down from above transfigures the elements of Nature but destroys none of them. Nor does its transcendent greatness make any earlier condition of the race insignificant. In its brightness the garden age of the world gains a new brightness, which takes nothing from the brightness of any age that follows. The boyhood of mankind and its mature growth each have their own nobleness, temptations and counterfeits. The Spirit who strove with men before the Deluge has striven with them in every period since, and is striving now against the tendency of every family, nation and Church to become divided, heartless and base. The first Adam was made a living soul, and would have sunk that soul in the appetites of the body and the enjoyments of sense if God had not led him by toil and suffering to seek a higher good and a divine helper. The second Adam was made a quickening spirit, to renew the human spirit, soul and body, and to bring all Creation out of bondage into the glorious liberty of the Sons of God. The dreams of a golden age among nations that have not confessed a Son of Man are beautiful, because they witness that all have a sense of a better state meant for man, from which his sins shut him out, though they throw that state back into the past. We who know it to be an eternal state may interpret these dreams, but we may not indulge in them. How can we lament the fall of Adam, if we believe it has led to the manifestation of the glory of God and of his Kingdom over the earth and over the spirits of men?