d it constantly in his songs and in his
prayers. He literally pressed his forehead to the ground in his eager
fervid worship of the Third Person of the Godhead. In one of his great
hymns to the Holy Spirit he sums up his burning devotion thus:
O Spirit, beautiful and dread!
My heart is fit to break
With love of all Thy tenderness
For us poor sinners' sake.
I have risked the tedium of quotation that I might show by pointed
example what I have set out to say, viz., that God is so vastly
wonderful, so utterly and completely delightful that He can, without
anything other than Himself, meet and overflow the deepest demands of
our total nature, mysterious and deep as that nature is. Such worship as
Faber knew (and he is but one of a great company which no man can
number) can never come from a mere doctrinal knowledge of God. Hearts
that are "fit to break" with love for the Godhead are those who have
been in the Presence and have looked with opened eye upon the majesty
of Deity. Men of the breaking hearts had a quality about them not known
to or understood by common men. They habitually spoke with spiritual
authority. They had been in the Presence of God and they reported what
they saw there. They were prophets, not scribes, for the scribe tells us
what he has read, and the prophet tells what he has seen.
The distinction is not an imaginary one. Between the scribe who has read
and the prophet who has seen there is a difference as wide as the sea.
We are today overrun with orthodox scribes, but the prophets, where are
they? The hard voice of the scribe sounds over evangelicalism, but the
Church waits for the tender voice of the saint who has penetrated the
veil and has gazed with inward eye upon the Wonder that is God. And yet,
thus to penetrate, to push in sensitive living experience into the holy
Presence, is a privilege open to every child of God.
With the veil removed by the rending of Jesus' flesh, with nothing on
God's side to prevent us from entering, why do we tarry without? Why do
we consent to abide all our days just outside the Holy of Holies and
never enter at all to look upon God? We hear the Bridegroom say, "Let me
see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice and
thy countenance is comely." We sense that the call is for us, but still
we fail to draw near, and the years pass and we grow old and tired in
the outer courts of the tabernacle. What doth hinder us?
The ans
|