Chapter XIII: The Eternal Idea

"See that thou make all things according to the pattern shewed thee in the Mount."--HEB. viii. 5.

When we speak of a pattern, we generally understand by it some temporary or partial representation of an idea that is to be or has been realised--such as the plan of a house, or the mould of a casting, or, to take a more definite illustration, like the little silver models of the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, or the carved wooden lions which are sold in the shops in the neighbourhood of the Lion Monument at Lucerne. In these last two instances we see that the greater is made the pattern of the less; and it is important for us to remember this; we are not to suppose that God showed to Moses a diminutive tabernacle, a sort of doll's house, in accordance with which he was to construct his house of skins, or that He impressed upon him the nature of the priestly and sacrificial worship by altars and offerings of a lower degree, of small quantities. It is more like what Philo explained it to be, that the outer world is fashioned upon the model of the World of Ideas whose centre is the Divine Word; or like Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence, by which we may learn

Cup, column, candlestick,
All temporal things related royally,
And patterns of what shall be in the Mount.

But, to get a more simple and exact idea, let us observe the means which those who have studied the heavens have taken to illustrate astronomical facts. There is an astronomical toy called the orrery, which can be made, by proper mechanism, to represent, with tolerable accuracy, the actual motions of the planets in their orbits, and which can serve to illustrate the phenomena which from time to time occur in the heavens. Now the tabernacle of Moses is precisely like this; it is a religious orrery, a means of representing religious truths and bringing home religious facts to the consciousness of those who are unable to study the skies and the lunar and planetary theories for themselves. But no one who wishes to be a real astronomer would be content with winding up the orrery and watching the balls go round; he would know that the heavens must be studied for themselves, if one was ever to understand them accurately: and no one who wishes to be more than moderately religious can remain satisfied with the meagre assistance obtained by ritual and externalism.

We observe, too, that no one who wished to chronicle fresh facts would go to the orrery to learn them. He would, for instance, turn his spectroscope on the sun, and not on the great ball which represents it in the mechanism, if he wanted to determine the constituents of that great luminary. And let us remember that we shall never get at any fresh religious truth by means of ritual; the proper destination of all orreries, religious or otherwise, is the museum. But meanwhile the heavens still go round, which are the work of Thy fingers; and the moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained, can still be studied, even when all the imitations of the universe have been swept away. We desire for ourselves an emancipation from all that is merely traditional in the religious life; we would refer back our lives to the original thought of God concerning them. Our life needs emendation, which can only take place satisfactorily by reference to the original design. We are often perplexed in our study of Scripture, by various readings and incorrect texts, and we wish that we could attain to something like the possession of an exact copy, if it were only of a single gospel. We read of Tischendorf finding the precious Codex in the monastery on Mount Sinai, and cannot forbear wishing that, perhaps, in some of the waste places of the East, there might be found a copy, not of the fourth or fifth century, but, if possible, of the first.

Suppose, for example, that a copy of the Gospel of St. Matthew, signed with his own hand, should come into our possession, in which it should be stated that "I, Matthew, sometime a tax-gatherer for the Romans, and now a collector of dues for the Almighty, and one of them that are set to ask, 'How much owest thou unto my Lord?' have written this book, by the aid of the Holy Spirit; wherein may be heard many voices of the Lord; and lo! some of them have already come to pass, and the rest must shortly be done. And may the peace of him that wrote this book abide also with them that read." The supposition is not so very absurd, and if it could be demonstrated to the satisfaction of the learned (a people hard to persuade) that the Book and the hand were genuine, what a number of questions would be settled. An end would be made of all glosses and emendations of the text over which there have been so many disputes, and there would be an excision of all parts that have been added by later hands.

But we must admit that the corruptions of the sacred text are insignificant in comparison with the deviations that we find in our own lives from the original thought of God concerning us. Registered and chronicled in heaven is the mind and will of our Father about us; registered and chronicled also are the defects which have marred the handiwork of God in the soul. We do not always set out with the intention of spoiling our souls, and of keeping them from being holy books, in which he that runs may read; but as a matter of fact what self writes in the margin soon creeps into the text; and what we write between the lines soon becomes a part of the manuscript.

Let who says
The soul's a clean white paper, rather say
A palimpsest, a prophet's holograph,
Defiled, erased, and covered by a monk's--
. . . . . . . we may discern perhaps
Some upstroke of an Alpha and Omega
Expressing the Old Scripture.

But if we are to undergo a real emendation, it must be by detecting something more than an upstroke of the Divine Will; it must be by reference to the original plan of God, and by a surrender to the same.

In the chapels at the back of the choir of Cologne Cathedral are preserved the original parchments on which are drawn the plan of the great minster. All the centuries through which this building has been raising, the men that have been working at it have had in reverence the original thoughts of the master-minds at the first: and those who have been chosen to the superintendence of the work have been men who were reckoned the most conversant with the laws of the Gothic architecture. One can imagine that Archbishop Englebert sleeps the more softly in his silver shrine because of the completed work of to-day. So we speak and think of a great stone-temple, the working out of an idea whose details were at first but scantily given, carried out in ages during which the master-minds that planned it could no more be consulted.

And yet when a greater and more perfect tabernacle is in building, not planned of mortal thought, and whose stones were too heavy to be moved by mortal hands, how little reference there is to the plan of the Founder, how few that are desirous of living according to the counsel and will of God, and to see in that will, not a mere legal skeleton of the structure, but a pattern, good and acceptable and perfect, with no detail wanting for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. Alas! that our lives should be lived so much at random instead of being so fashioned that it might be said over the completed structure at the last, "Whose architect and craftsman is God." In Christianity the ideal is to be the actual: there is to be no "shooting at the moon, because by that means you reach higher than by aiming at a tree" (a very doubtful statement even in mechanics); what God wants us to be that we must be; and if He says, "Be ye perfect," then let us go on to perfection and reach it. The Christian is called upon by his Master to live out and actualise God's ideal thought concerning him. Upon the map of his life is already marked out the road by which he is to reach the heavenly city; if, at least, he reaches it, as God intends, by the shortest way. There are no roundabout roads marked on the map in the Mount, and yet the Divine Plan of our life will be found inclusive of the minutest necessary details, just as an Ordnance map will tell you each feature of interest and importance as you go from place to place. It is of the utmost importance that we should take counsel's opinion about our lives, and that we should pray, "Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?" that we should, if need be, weep much, until the Lamb shall take off the seals from that book of life, which, in the archives of the celestial city, is entitled "The Life of ---- taken from the Pattern in the Mount"; that we should learn to conform ourselves to the Divine original, just as a manuscript, however deformed by glosses and traditions, is accurately and certainly emended by the discovery of the original text; that we should know, in some sense, as Christ did, whence we come and whither we go; that, as He said, we also might feel that for this end we were born and for this purpose we came into the world, that we might bear witness to the truth; that, with Him, too, we might in some measure be able to say, "The son can do nothing but what he seeth the Father do"; and that at our ending it might be said, "He lived out the secret thought and counsel of the Almighty."

But in thinking of the pattern in the Mount as a pattern of life, it is important for us to see that, in the first instance, this thought was presented to us in connection with that side of life which we call worship; for there was to be a sanctuary made, etc., nor must we omit to get, with regard to our worship, a glimpse into the thought of God beforehand, consulting the oracle in advance as did men in the old days. We may not take voyage without the very best map that can be had, lest we make shipwreck; nor, because we have not taken pains to obtain the map, may we content ourselves with creeping round shores that we know we ought to leave.

We must not separate the life from the worship; in fact they are one: we learn that from the description of the ceaseless adoration of those nearest the throne; they rest not day nor night saying, "Holy, holy, holy." Are we to suppose from this that their existence is occupied in the mere repetition of an everlasting Trisagion; or that, as Beecher once said, "they stand like wax candles round the throne, uttering an occasional Hallelujah"? Is it not rather God's way of showing us how He is unceasingly glorified in those who live nearest Him, whose lives worship Him?

The worship must be continuous with the life. I have a thermometer which has become perfectly useless because the air has broken up the continuity of the alcohol; it is worth next to nothing as an index of temperature. And little can we learn from any soul in which the continuity of the religious life is broken, and which has become life streaked with worship.

Now let us learn one or two of the characteristics of a pure life-worship.

Out of the worship according to the pattern in the Mount all respectability has been differentiated: the Christian religion will not hold caste in solution; it precipitates it to the bottom; its founder died the death of a slave; how could they give the slave a back seat after that? On the contrary, they gloried in the name; Paul, a slave and an apostle; a slave, and so eligible for the honour of crucifixion; an apostle, and so sent with the good news of life. Respect of persons holds not in heaven; none there will criticise the clay out of which the first raiment of your soul was made. What need is there, then, that we should leave off holding the faith of our Lord Jesus, with respect of persons (there are few churches where the ministers dare to preach on such a text as that). Let us have done with such classifications. In Jesus Christ there is neither barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free, town nor university, but Christ is all, and in all.

We know, too, that the life-worship to which God calls us consists in abandonment and surrender to an animating, impelling spirit. "The Spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, and thou shalt prophesy, and thou shalt be turned into another man. And it shall be, when these signs are come upon thee, that thou shalt do as occasion serve thee, for the Lord is with thee." "Whither the Spirit was to go, thither was their spirit to go." The highest life is one in which we realise not merely surrender to the Divine Will, but harmony with it, so that the rails on which the life moves, the human and Divine wills, become strictly parallel.

A surrendered life implies surrendered lips: this is the key of true worship; every one having a psalm, an interpretation; ye may all of you prophesy. The ideal worship becomes the actual when heaven touches earth, as on the day of Pentecost--they were all filled, and, by consequence, they all ran over. Who would venture to tell the woman who had been a sinner, that it was not seemly that her life should proclaim the _magnolia Dei_, the wonders of God; my lips, she says, have touched His feet, and are consecrated for evermore. Who shall tell these prophesying handmaidens of the Lord that their place is in a different spiritual order: "Are there two inner courts, they will reply, to the New Jerusalem?"

Whoso hath felt the Spirit of the Highest
Cannot confound nor doubt Him, nor deny;
Yea, with one voice, O world, though thou deniest,
Stand thou on that side, for on this am I.