JESUS AND OUR CONFLICTING HUNGERS

IT is the way of some people to assert that men cannot be happy without God. When the solemn pietist sees the fascinating, jolly, and lovable pagans of to‑day, apparently enjoying themselves to the full, he is wont to say to himself that they cannot be really happy, and to imagine that the gaiety is rather put on to stifle a deeper hunger for God, in whom alone true happiness is to be found. This diagnosis of the situation, I think, is rather biased by a desire that it should be true; and some who have denied themselves what they would now call t worldly pleasures ' cover up their continued hunger for them by pretending darkly that other people do not enjoy them.

I think it is absurd to suggest that a man cannot be happy without God. He is often as happy as he knows how to be. It may be that he doesn't know how to be very happy, that his capacity for happiness is small. But many a worldling is as happy as he can be, and cannot conceive a greater happiness. In a way this is a tragedy, and amongst such people the man of religion is as unpopular as was the man who had sight in Mr. H. G. Wells's The Country of the Blind, and for the same reason. If you're as happy as you know how to be, you feel mocked and outraged and annoyed by some one
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who says to you, 'Your happiness is nothing to be compared with the joy that might be yours if your eyes were once opened.'

It is one of tb:e mysterious facts of life that con­centration on the material makes you less conscious of the spiritual. One might imagine that God would have so made man that if he concentrated on material things he would become more and more hungry for God, until at last he was just flung back on God and couldn't bear to be kept from Him any longer. The facts are the opposite. It is a yet further sign of God's respect for human per­sonality and of His faith in us that religion is not an instinct‑a thing that will not be denied ‑but a faculty which needs cultivation. The longer a mzn is content with happiness on a low level the less sensitive does he become to the exist­ence of happiness on any higher level. The inexor­able law of nature' by which it is ordained that an unused faculty becomes incapable of use, works its terrible nemesis on this high plane, and a faculty for enjoying the spiritual, if unused, becomes incapable of being used; and while a man is still happy, as happy as he is able to be, yet he is oblivious to the fact that his 'power to be able ' is becoming less and less. For the difference between an instinct and a faculty can be seen in the desires which spring from them. In the case of the former, the less you have the more you want. In the case of the iatter, the less you have the less you want.

It is really amazing how a man can get on
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without God. If trouble comes he worries through, wretched and miserable, but still not believing there are any higher resources with which to meet that trouble. Often he is brought to the dust by disaster in a way that hurts any one who is trying to help him. Still he seems to have no power to call to his aid spiritual resources ; and sometimes, when death faces him, it is pitiful to feel that one cannot bring the aid one would like to bring because there seems to be no faculty functioning within the sufferer capable of responding to that aid.

Happiness, then, is relative to our capacity to be happy. The worldly man is as happy as he is able to be, but he is not able to be very happy. His happiness is circumscribed by his capacity, and his capacity is made up from material elements. So many a man, especially in middle age, settles down to shut himself up in his own little world­for example, the world of his business. He will be respectable, no one can criticize his way of life, his business will occupy most of his hours, and his pleasure the rest. Like a shell‑fish, he manu­factures his own shell, thinks it is the world, and settles down. He is happy, no one could deny it.

Fortunately for him, God has not forgotten him. God eagerly desires to revivify those dying faculties. God made him for something else, and God has influences at work which can break up that shell just as one might break a shell of a shell‑fish, and leave it on the shore of a boundless ocean. The self‑enclosed life that felt itself so safe and so happy
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is awakened to the fact that there is another world; and, thank God, no one is ever quite safe from this revealing of God. A certain mood creeps over a man, perhaps after a Sunday evening service; or something far simpler breaks the shell of his prison ‑an evening star in a bed of daffodil sky, the sound of the sea heard in the distance at night, a woman's eyes, the hand of a little child, a nocturne of Chopin, one flash of memory‑and a man knows that he belongs to the Infinite and that the finite can never mean complete happiness.

You notice that this invasion is marked with a sense of unhappiness. The other world in which we have lived is broken up, and for a little while we are between two worlds, and for a time there will be a succession of conflicts within the soul. It will be impossible to go back and find happiness in merely material things, and yet most of us do not enter the spiritual world completely at first. We have tastes, and hungers, and appetites which belong to the world of the seen. For some of us it will take a long time to resolve these conflicts by the very nature of the life we live. For instance, we have to make our living, and do our business in a material world where the world of the spiritual counts for so little. On Sunday night idealism seems attainable; on Monday morning realism confronts us, and there seems a kind of conflict between the two. On Sunday night we really do honestly and sincerely desire God; by Monday night the lure of lower things fills all our world.
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And that is why some people come to think of religion as not real at all, but as an emotional fringe on life. That is also why, I think, so many religious people are miserable. They haven't resolved their conflicts. They are trying to make the best of two worlds instead of seeing them as one. They are aware of the spiritual world, but also aware of the material world, and they are not quite satisfied that the spiritual world can bring them more happi­ness than the material world. So they try to enjoy God on Sunday, and they try to enjoy worldly things on Monday, setting up an awful conflict in the soul; and, though they are honestly desirous of becoming spiritual in mind and heart, there are so many lookings‑back, and so many fears lest, after all, worldly people are having a better time of it, that they become irritated and jarred, neither feel­ing at home in the spiritual world nor feeling that the pleasures of the material world are legitimate. In a way, they are not even as happy as the world­ling, because the worldling, at any rate, has an undivided mind and is enjoying his pleasure to the full. Mrs. Bindle had enough religion to keep her from being entirely worldly, yet she had not enough to make her happy wherever she was. She was neither saint nor sinner, but just miserable.

Such people remind one of the story told me recently of the Scotsman who went to London, and, on returning to the north, was asked by his friend what he thought of the great metropolis. His reply was, 'London is a wonderful place, but
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I do wish that, under the providence of God, I could have had a fortnight in it before I was con­verted.' The story really illustrates a great truth. A man can be happy without God, but, if he is, he might well pull himself together and ask himself whether he is happy because he is blind, whether he is missing nothing, and incidentally whether the next world, where there is no happiness but God, bears thinking about. But, when once a man has seen God and realized that there is a world of spiritual values and delights, he will never be happy again until he possesses God and is possessed by Him. And while he stands between these two worlds he will be miserable, unable wholly to enjoy either.

The solution is not to see two worlds, but one. To seek the spiritual interpretation of every part of life and seek God Himself in everything we touch. Professor Drummond used to say that if you are going to seek the‑Kingdom of God you must seek it first, otherwise you had better leave it alone. It means putting the Kingdom first in every way: thinking of your business in terms of the Kingdom, of your pleasures in terms of the Kingdom, of your friends in terms of the Kingdom. Then the whole of existence for you is an existence completely in a spiritual world, in which you will have no regrets, no lookings‑back, and in which you will find perfect self ‑realization, the resolving of all conflicts, and the harmony of a complete life. God means us to attain this or He would not have put this faculty within us, and, as I say, even a sunset may stir it into functioning. 'He hath set eternityin their hearts'.
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May I summarize in three sentences, and then give two brief illustrations ? (i) You can be happy without God by shutting God out; but remember it is the happiness of a man who chooses to be blind when the world is a pageant of beauty. (2) Once wake up to Him and you will be unhappy until you serve Him wholly and possess Him and are possessed by Him. (3) We are made in His image, and when we once awake to our true nature we shall only be satisfied with His likeness.

Now two stories, the first from Fiona Macleod. One of the gods who ruled in the depths of the sea dearly wanted a human child for his own ; and one day, as he watched, he saw a boat, carrying a child, going from one island to another of the Hebrides. The god chased the boat; but, ere he reached it, it grated on the shingle and the child was carried to land. Yet, so the legend runs, the god was just in time to throw a wavelet into the child's heart, and then the god sank down to his palace beneath the waves. ' But,' he said, 'the boy will come back to me, for the sea is in his heart.' One day the villagers saw a young man pull out in a boat towards the spot where there was no land. They said, 'Why is he pulling in that direc­tion? There is no land there.' Then they saw him stand up, throw up his arms, and dive into the sea. He had obeyed the urge of the sea that was in his heart.

Let me conclude with one little experience of my own. In Mesopotamia during the war, when I was on staff duty, visiting on horseback various
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Arab sheiks, one of them presented me with an Arab horse. It was a splendid, high‑spirited animal who loved nothing better in this world than a wild gallop across the desert. When my duties were completed I returned to the base at Basra. There for some months I was engaged in the humdrum duties of my regiment, and the horse became strangely subdued, and so docile that one could ride up on inspection duty between two ranks of men without any fear of his being violent. Then one day J took him out beyond the tents and huts and outposts till he saw the desert. With one tremendous snort of happiness, he raced away for the horizon, intoxicated, mad with joy. For­tunately I had only to sit still and hang on. There were no hedges or ditches or walls to fear, but we were out of sight of Basra before his strength was exhausted. The desert was in his heart. He just revelled in it.

God hath set eternity in our hearts, and, once we wake up to that fact, we shall never be happy till we possess Him and are possessed by Him, and death will but free us from this world's limitations and allow us to revel in that abundant life which is God's eternal purpose:

When that which drew from out the boundless deep turns again home.