JESUS AND THE WAY TO GOD THROUGH NATURE

Every year after the long strain of winter our whole being begins to ache for all that the summer means. Quiet Sunday afternoons, for instance, with a book on a secluded lawn, the shadow of beeches on the grass, and the clouds floating slowly across the blue above our heads, the silence defined rather than broken by the occasional hum of a bee passing from flower to flower. ' Like a walled‑in garden to a troubled mind.' What a description of the peace of God I I know some gardens that seem to have about them a secret peace in which the whole personality seems bathed and restored.

It is hardly to be wondered at, then, that some who are cooped up at wash‑tub and warehouse, in office or factory, consulting‑room and study, should become impatient, at times, of even the most beauti­ful church and most reverent service and seek for God in His garden, where still He walks with His children in the cool of the day. Sometimes, indeed, men have said that nature can bring them to God and that they need nothing else. Let us look at the question.

To all of us, unless our eyes are sealed by utter materialism or sensualism, or some other ' ism ' with
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an ugly name, nature has lifted us to those high places of the spirit where men hear the voice of God and look upon His face. The purity of the dawn has called us to holy dedication. The glory of the sunset has seemed to speak of some splendid destiny for man. We have gone out on some starlit night and lifted our hot, flushed faces up to the heavens and felt the grandeur and peace of the sky. Night, like some great mother, has lifted our tear­stained faces up to hers and smiled, until, in the presence of the infinite serenity, our pain has been hushed away. Many a time, like the Psalmist, we have lifted our eyes to the hills, and our hectic littleness, our feverish anxieties, have given place to that quietude and strength which only mountains know how to give. To thousands, nature has been the hem of a garment. They have touched it and been made whole.

But wait! I love nature with all my soul. All that I have written above has been true for me at various moments of my life. But we must think things out further than this. Tennyson was a great lover of nature. Instance after instance leaps to the memory. Then the mind drops on the phrase which describes how 'Nature, red in tooth and claw with ravine,' shrieks against man's creed of a God of love. Readers of H. G. Wells's The Undying Fire will not soon forget his pictures of the rabbit caught by the stoat, the victims of the butcher‑bird spiked on the thorns of the hedge, the beautiful bird in the mouth of a cat, the war of the penguins on their kind, and those other similar details by which a picture is
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painted representing all the country‑side as one vast shambles. We must remember that many an agnostic has taken us to nature to prove that there cannot be a God, but that there may be a cruel and malignant fiend on the throne of the universe. That glorious sea whose waves will shout back the gleeful laughter of our kiddies this summer is, to some people who have lost their loved ones by drowning, a pitiless monster, now cold and grey and cruel, now smiling and mocking and treacherous.

And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill,
But O for the touch of a vanished hand.
And the sound of a voice that is still.

Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, 0 sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.

Are we not beginning to come to this conclusion, then, that nature does not inevitably lead men to God? I have seen a haunt in India on a glorious afternoon of blue and green and gold, with mighty forest trees rising a hundred feet into the burning sky, with undergrowth spangled with wild flowers making a veritable paradise of beauty, with majestic mountain ranges making a background of soft blue which would captivate the eye of any artist‑‑and, in a little clearing, an Indian maiden, tortured, the blood still warm and red upon her breast, the victim of beastliness and cruelty.

Does nature lead men to God ? In the very places where nature is fairest men are often the farthest
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from God. The savages of Central Africa and of certain South Sea Islands sit round their bestial orgies, tearing human flesh between their teeth, indulging in excesses which can hardly be mentioned, while all around them nature spreads out before their unperceiving eyes the most perfect scenery which God's world contains.

Nor need we go so far afield. We take up the crime records of our own country villages, those sweet little hamlets which seem to sleep so inno­cently on the bosom of the hills, and in very un­romantic, unsentimental language those records betray that the amount of crime committed in the villages, in proportion to‑ the population, is higher than the average of many a sooty city in which the influence of nature counts for nothing at all.

So we cry with Job,' Where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding ? . . . The deep saith, " It is not in me ": and the sea saith, " It is not with me,"' and the hills and the woods, the streams and the meadows, the mountains and the valleys, all say the same thing.

Do you suppose I could help some man, who came to me utterly bowed down with a sense of personal spiritual failure, by saying to him,' Go to the Isle of Man for a week: the mountains will forgive you your sins, the dawn will fill you with new life, the flowers will make your soul clean and frag­rant, the sea‑breezes will cleanse your secret impurity of soul ' ? No I He wants something that nature can never give him; Some One to whom nature will never introduce him. He wants a personal Saviour.
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The fact about nature is this: when a man feels uplifted in soul by his contact with nature it is because he brings something to nature first. Nature will give you nothing unless you bring to her your own knowledge of God, and a belief that you are going to find God there. Then, and only then, will your faith be rewarded. There is all the difference between the man who eats bread at home and the man who eats it at the Holy Communion. The first nourishes his body; the second his soul as well; for the second brings faith to the feast, and it is that faith that makes the bread sacramental. Nature can be sacramental, but you must supply the faith that makes it so. The case of the savage is evidence of this. The case of Saul Kane, in Masefield's The Everlasting Mercy, is evidence of this. He had worked in the fields all his life, but only after a Quakeress had spoken to him of Christ did he break out in rapture:

The station brook, to my new eyes,
Was babbling out of Paradise;
The waters rushing from the rain
Were singing Christ has risen again!

Take the case of Wordsworth, who is sometimes said to have derived his faith purely from nature. Wordsworth is often quoted by young people who want to go for a walk on fine Sunday evenings in the summer. In a letter to Sir George Beaumont he says, ' I look abroad upon nature, and I meditate upon the Scriptures, especially the Gospel by John, and my creed rises up of itself, with the ease of an
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exhalation, yet a fabric of adamant.' Is it wresting the sense of the matter to say that Wordsworth took his faith to nature, and nature gave it back to him magnified a thousandfold? Longfellow says :

If thou art worn and hard beset
With sorrows, that thou wouldst forget,
If thou wouldst read a lesson, that will keep
Thy heart from fainting and thy soul from sleep,
Go to the woods and hills!

But this will only be true if you meet the God of the woods and hills.

St. Augustine expresses the same idea in his dialogue with nature.

' I asked the earth, and it said, " I am not He," and all that is upon it made the same confession.
' I asked the sea, and the depths, and the creeping things that have life, and they answered, " We are not thy God ; look thou above us."
' I asked the breezes and the gales, and the whole air with its inhabitants said to me, " Thou art in error; I am not God."
' I‑asked the heaven, the sun, the moon, the stars. "We too," said they, "are not He whom thou seekest. "
'And I said to all the creatures that surround the doors of my fleshly senses: " Ye have said to me of my God that ye are not He. Tell me somewhat of Him," and with a great voice they exclaimed, " He made us!" '

This is as far as nature can go.
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There is a true sense in which we get from nature what we take to her. If we take our joys, all nature will seem to sing with us. If we take our sorrows, she seems to throb with the echo of our grief. We really imaginatively transfer to nature the mood of our own heart. Think of the stars in this connexion.

Matthew Arnold talks for instance of the 'shining eyes' of the stars, suggesting the sorrow in eyes shining with unshed tears.

Now He is dead, far hence He lies
In the lorn Syrian town,
And on His grave with shining eyes
The Syrian stars look down.

Longfellow says the stars, to Hiawatha, are the eyes of hungry wolves:

Hungry was the earth beneath them,
And the hungry stars in Heaven
Like the eyes of wolves glared at them.

Joseph Mary Plunkett says:

I see His blood upon the rose,
And in the stars the glory of His eyes.

Tennyson talks of

A cry that shiverd to the tingling stars.

Poets of love make the stars 'smile down upon lovers.' They are shining stars or hungry stars or tender stars or hostile stars, the eyes of wolves or the eyes of Christ, according to the state of mind of the seer. It is what Ruskin calls ' the pathetic fallacy.' It is the source of a great deal of good poetry. It is the source of a good deal of pleasing and legi­timate aestheticism. But it is not nearly deep
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enough or satisfying enough for the hunger of a man's soul.

Let me set side by side two recent experiences. A young man told me that he found God among the mountains in a way more real and satisfying than through any written or spoken words. I am sure he was quite sincere, but a single question revealed where he stood. He had never known any great sorrow. He had never known a poignant disappoint­ment. He had never had that sense of sin which just drives man to a personal God. When he has any of these experiences the mountains will seem very cold and grey compared with a human friend, who, please God, will be ready to stand by him in that hour with the off er of a real friendship that helps him to believe in the personal friendship of God. Two days later I drove forty miles into the heart of the country to see a young girl who had had more sorrow in her eighteen years of life than most of us have in a lifetime. She was fighting consumption of the lungs, brought on by working under damnable conditions in a big city. We sat talking in the little cottage garden, amid glorious scenery. Suddenly she burst out, ' I hate the country I Look at those friendless hills I I've only a few months to live, and I want friends to talk to. I want a heart that understands.' Both my friends had hold of a bit of the truth. I appreciate both points of view. But, when you have said all that can be said about temperament and training, that young girl's agony had taken her nearer to the truth.

We may say, then, that nature may lead men to
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God if they believe in God already ; that, if they take an ounce of faith, nature will give a pound of blessing in return ; that nature, though not the cause, has been the occasion of the healing of many diseases of the soul. But all nature cries out to us, 'It is not in me' to do more. Nature is the hem of His gar­ment, but the healing is from Him, not from the garment. And we must remember that for every person of aesthetic temperament and artistic outlook, there are ten thousand with unseeing eyes whom nature will never get to God, and that even to the most artistic there are diseases nature will never heal.

How sweet the name of nature sounds
In a believer's ear.
It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds,
And drives away his fear.

It makes the wounded spirit whole,
And calms the troubled breast,
'Tis manna to the hungry soul
And to the weary rest.

No! There is a hollow ring about that, somehow. No one has ever come home from a Sunday in the country feeling that that is true. Some friends of mme in Manchester once told me with engaging frankness that they should not come to church in the summer as they could get all they wanted in the fields. I suppose they came to church in the winter because they would have got their feet wet in the fieIds! When people say they are getting all they want, it isn't much good saying anything. They that are whole have no need of a physician. But, though it seems hateful to say it, a day will come
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when they will wake up to a sense of need that will make them feel lonely with a terrible loneliness, and only a crucified Saviour, nailed to one of the trees they love, will be enough for them then.

Look at Richard jefteries I Perhaps we may call him the greatest lover of nature who ever lived. He heard things in the fields that less trained ears never heard. He saw things in the woods that you and I would never have seen. Yet he was a man who hated religion. Before he was forty he lay dying, and turned in desperation, in the utter loneliness and hunger of his soul, to the Bible. One day, when his wife was reading to him from St. Luke's Gospel, he turned to her and said, ' Those are the words of Jesus, and they are true, and all philosophy is hollow. I have done wrong and thought wrong; it was my intellectual vanity.' Three weeks later he passed away, and the name on his lips was not nature, but the Name that is above every name.

This is not quoted as' sob‑stuff.' It reveals one of the facts of life. Nature is not enough for this human heart of ours. Nature herself is an avenue to be passed through, not a terminus in which to try to rest the soul. She herself cries out, ' It is not in me.' Before life's greatest crisis; before some un­foreseen catastrophe makes the soul stagger and reel; before that last darkness falls, through which our failing eyes can no longer discern the hills and the woods, the skies and seas, let us realize that in ten minutes we may find that which some men spend all their lives in seeking‑and oftentimes in vain, because they know not where to seek‑the personal
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companionship of Jesus. He alone is sufficient for our need, and the only Anchor of our soul. In Him we find more than nature can ever give. There are Eyes that smile into our eyes. There are Hands stretched out to grasp our own. There is a Heart that understands.