THE LAND OF LONELINESS
"And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden."Gen. 3 8.
LAST time we met together we were talking over the wonders that the Light had done for us, and of all the marvels that it had shown to us, and we listened while its voice cried to us of the great Creator God; but now we are going to talk over a subject more serious, and perhaps more solemn even than that— a subject about which it is very difficult to speak in simple words; so difficult that although this very title came into my mind as I closed our talking’s on Light twelve years ago, I have been unable to take it up until now. I had to own to God that I knew nothing about it myself, and how then could I possibly talk about it to others? We cannot teach others what we do not really know ourselves. Many years ago I remember overhearing my parents talking together, and my father said to my mother, "This governess will not do for us. I was listening to the lessons the other day, and I found that she merely sets the children their lessons out of books; she explains nothing to them; she has not properly mastered the subjects herself, so that she cannot impart them to others." So, for all these years, I have had to go to God's school, that might be able to tell you simply, and by experience, about "The Fire," and of what has been done for us through it.
Not long ago a lady said to me, "What is Eastbourne like?" "I cannot tell you much about it," I replied, "for I have never been there. I have heard it described as a very pretty place, but that is all I know about it." But how differently I answered when asked about Scarborough! "Yes," I said, "I know Scarborough; I have been there myself." I could speak with authority, because I knew the place myself. And if I had not been in the Land of Loneliness, and had not myself trodden the way of escape from it, how could I hope to describe it to you? And if I had not tasted in spirit something of the joys of "Relationship," how could I tell you about them?
God's school is called the "School of Experience." All His real children have to go to that school. He teaches them there what they could never acquire out of books, and He chastens them there, that they may learn their lessons thoroughly, and so be fitted to represent Christ in His absence, and to serve Him both here and hereafter.
But now let us begin this wonderful subject. Do you remember when we were talking about the sunlight I asked you to put your hand into the golden beam that was streaming in at the window from the far West? And you not only saw the light, but you felt "a glow of heat." Now it is about this "glow of heat" that we are. going to talk this time. The Light affects one set of nerves in your body, and you see objects outside of you; the heat appeals to another set of nerves, and you feel something within you, that is "a glow of heat." It is just so with the things of God. The Light of God—moral light—shows you objects outside of yourself. People say "seeing is believing," so when the Light of God streams upon a truth, the soul sees it, and there is faith. Your soul sees objects, and so these are called "objective" truths. But when the Holy Spirit of God comes to dwell within your body, He sheds abroad the love of God in your heart, and this is like the "glow of heat" that you felt from the warmth of the great furnace ninety-one millions of miles away from you. It is something within you. You are subject to the heat, so these are called "subjective" truths, because you are subject to them; you are the subject which they affect.
Now I do hope that I have made this plain to you, for when once you understand what these words mean, you will find it a great help to you. The truth that shows you the Lord Jesus as a living Savior in heaven is objective truth; you see Him by faith, it is Light to your soul. The warm glow of love in your heart, and all that the Holy Spirit does for you, is subjective truth. You are acted upon by Another.
I have been praying that I may be able to make difficult things plain to you, but remember no words of mine will ever be able to explain the things of God to you. No; there is only one way by which these things can really be understood, and that is by the Holy Spirit. Your natural mind cannot understand the things of God; no effort of your own brain, no deep thinking, can ever unravel the mysteries of God. This is one of the mistakes Christian people have often made—they have forgotten one very solemn verse that God sent, by the Apostle Paul, in a letter to the Corinthian Church. He said, "But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned" (1 Cor. 2:1414But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. (1 Corinthians 2:14)). This means that not only must there be the moral Light that shows up the things of God, but also "the glow of heat" which is felt within. If you want to get any real help or cheer out of our little talking’s together this time, lift up your cry to God, as you open chapter after chapter, that He will make what is according to His mind plain to you by His Holy Spirit.
Perhaps some of you are thinking, "Light is beautiful, but" Fire "seems such a dreadful subject that we almost shrink from looking into it. It may seem so at first, but no soul could ever live to God but through that which His" Fire " has done for it. Do not judge hastily, but let us see what we can learn about it. All God's illustrations are perfect, and if He pleases to use the natural fire as an illustration, we may be quite sure that it is a perfect picture of something which He has to teach us.
I was sitting one evening in a drawing-room, where a number of people were met together to read the Word of God. A gentleman read the twelfth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and when he came to those words, Our God is a consuming fire," he paused for several seconds, and then added very solemnly,. "And we would not have it otherwise." Could you say that? Perhaps not, but let us hope. that when we have finished our Talking’s on Fire, you will be able to do so, and that your soul will have passed from the sorrows of Loneliness to the joys of Relationship.
And now it is time for us to look round upon the Land of Loneliness. It is a desolate land, a land of perpetual solitude and of fearful gloom. It is not to be found upon this upper earth, nor under the light of our golden sun; but it is an inner land, and as I tell you about it, I trust you will each of you find out whether you are living there now or not. Many people are living there who have hardly found it out. It is not a happy place, and people try to forget it. It is not exactly like the Land of Darkness, about which we talked last time, because we could all go there together, and grope about in its gloom in company; but in this Land of Loneliness we each one of us live alone, and nobody can get to us. You do not like being much alone, do you Nobody does. If you watch animals, you will see that even they always like to be together. Sheep always keep together; if there are two cows in a meadow, they will graze and lie down near each other, and birds fly together. But are you puzzled how you can be living in the Land of Loneliness and yet have fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters and friends all around you? It is your soul that lives in solitude; your body does not live there. Fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters cannot get in to where your soul is. Shall I tell you how I first found out that I was in the Land of Loneliness?
The calm, peaceful light of a summer's evening was fading gradually out of my nursery bedroom. I was lying in a snug little bed in the corner of the room, and through the uncurtained window I was watching the tops of some old fir trees which were waving their dark foliage athwart the pale, clear sky. I was a very little child, but I have never forgotten that moment. Suddenly I felt that I was alone. It was not that my nurse and my brothers were not near me; it was a feeling of awe, a consciousness that there was something about me and beyond me which I did not understand. I think now that on that quiet summer's evening a loving Hand had touched my soul where it was, shut in in loneliness, and it had been awakened to feel its condition. Alone. Fast streamed my tears as I buried my face in the bed-clothes to stifle my sobs. I knew no fear of loneliness on earth, but this secret awe, this strange, secret sense of unseen realities around me was terrible to my soul. A year or two passed, and again it was a summer's evening. The shadows of the great trees that surrounded my home lay long upon the pleasant lawn, while the murmur of the flowing river fell softly on the ear. The sun was setting in a cloudless sky, and all was lovely and peaceful, when suddenly the roll of distant thunder shook the closing day. I ceased my play, the merry shouts of my brothers died upon my ear, and over my soul again swept the never- to-be- forgotten sense of its utter loneliness, shut in in the darkness, far off from everybody. "There is something vast and wonderful which I do not understand," I said to myself. " Nobody knows what I think, or what I feel, or what I dread. I cannot tell anybody; I cannot describe it. Oh, where am I, and what am I,
and where am I going? " I was in the Land of Loneliness; I had been born there, but I had only found it out as I lay in my little bed in my nursery bedroom, and as I grew older the sense of it grew stronger, and the dread of my soul deepened.
What I want to try and explain to you is, that our souls are each of them shut in away from each other. I cannot tell what you are thinking about, or what you are planning. Your soul uses your mind, and is incessantly talking over things about which I know nothing. It can hide its fears or its joys, its hatred or its love; it is alone, and so is mine. You may have fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters on the upper earth, to whom you are linked by the ties of nature, but they cannot reach your soul, nor can you reach theirs. When we want to communicate with one another, we have to use our bodies to make our communications known. The tongue can tell of love, the arms can cling round a mother's neck, the eyes can shed tears of sympathy; but the lonely soul is wrapped in solitude, and no one on earth can reach it, no one can help it, no one can dwell with it, no one can assuage its fear as it cries, "Where am I? What am I? Where am I going?" Oh, it is a lonely dwelling, and as I tell you about it, I trust you too will feel how sad and terrible a place it is!
How did we get there? We were each of us born there. Just as English people are born in England, and French people are born in France, so we each of us are born into the Land of Loneliness. Our fathers and mothers belonged to that land, and their fathers and mothers belonged to it also. Every one in the world, by nature, belongs to it, and the strangeness of it is, that though there are so many millions of people living on the earth, each soul is a solitary soul; no one knows it thoroughly—it is hidden in its lonely cell.
When God created Adam and Eve, their souls were not in that lonely land; they knew no dreadful darkness, no fearful secret awe; but on that sad day when Eve listened to the tempter's voice and sinned, she plunged her soul into that dreary land, and Adam, thinking to be with her there, sinned also, and his soul was in a moment in the Land of Loneliness, apart from God, and apart from the wife he loved. How do we know it? Because as soon as they heard the voice of God they hid themselves away from God, —they were afraid of Him; and when He found them behind the trees of the garden, Adam laid the blame of his sin on Eve. He thought, you see, that he could screen himself. He had become selfish. True love had died out of his soul; it was alone, shut in to itself, and Eve was shut in to herself. Each of them loved Self better than each other.
At that awful moment something most terrible took place, which I will try and explain to you. Do you know what a shrine is? It is the inner part of a temple. It is the secret place where the inner worship is carried on. In heathen temples the figure of the god is set up there, and it is there that the priests worship him. Now, when Adam and Eve had fallen into the Land of Loneliness, Satan, who had tempted them to distrust their Creator's goodness, and disobey Him, and who had displaced God from their hearts, set up an idol in the secret shrine of each heart. That great idol's name is Self. Adam loved himself more than Eve. Eve loved herself more than Adam. Yes, in the Land of Loneliness each dweller worships in solitude in a secret shrine, and the idol that he adores is Self.
Now, come! let us see if we each one of us have not been at our worship there this very day? Of course we do it in secret, because our souls are each of them quite alone. We often try to hide that secret worship even from our own thoughts. It makes us wretched, and yet we are always at it, for that dreadful idol is never satisfied. Morning, noon, and night he is ever demanding our worship, and terrible are the sacrifices that sometimes burn upon his secret altars. Let me explain it. Whom did you please when the knock came at your door to get up this morning? Did it please Self to get up, or did it please Self to lie still and be late? Whom did you please when you pushed through the crowd at the station door and got nearly first on to the platform, and quite first into the carriage? Whom did you worship when you slipped into the corner seat on the shady side?
Let us go a little deeper. For whose pleasure are you dressing yourself? Is it not for Self or perhaps you say, my father or my husband loves to see me look well. Who is it likes their admiration? Is it not Self? For whom are you making those deep, well-considered plans for advancement in life? For whom are you plodding so steadily through your daily labor or your office routine? Is it not for Self? No; perhaps you say, "My widowed mother, my helpless sisters are dependent upon me." Do they not love you for it? Do they not make much of such a beautiful Self as yours? Do you not admire yourself, and please him by making every exertion in your power to keep up his noble reputation? Sift it to the bottom; you will find you pleased Self. You did it for Self. Who is pleased when the family is turned out neat and tidy? Who is pleased when the children are made happy, or the wife is the best dressed woman in the neighborhood? Sift it as you will, you will find the great idol sits in his shrine, and demands your worship hour by hour and day by day and year by year.
It is quite true that there is a beautiful Self and an ugly Self in the eyes of men. Some people's idols are very beautiful to look at, and some are very hideous. The young ruler who came running to the Lord Jesus when He was on earth, and wished to know what he must do to escape death and live forever, had a very beautiful idol. lie had been a good son and a good neighbor, as he thought; but the Lord Jesus just opened the shrine of his heart, and showed him that the Self he thought so good was really set on mild, and not on his God or his neighbor.
I once stood on a hill-top on a beautiful moor. Around me to right and left rolled the wild, free hills, and below through the valley meandered a shining river. It was a spot so chosen that both the rising and the setting sun could be seen from it, and there long years ago the Druids had practiced the awful rites of their heathen worship. On that pleasant greensward had been found the strangely marked stones that had formed the altars on which they had offered their human sacrifices, and my ear seemed almost to catch from afar the shrieks of their victims, while quietly down into the far west, amidst battlements of glory-tipped sun, whose fiery disc had commanded the worship of their darkened minds.
And what did I think as I stood there? I thought that worse things go on now in the secret Land of Loneliness, for human sacrifices are ever burning on the altars before the idol, Self. The miserable victims are perishing there day by day, but the great idol must be worshipped, and we pass on and try to forget it.
Do you wonder what I mean? Come into this cottage; it is clean and tidy, but the little furniture that remains is very worn and old, and there, standing at the wash-tub, and the ironing-board, day by day, is the thin, wasted figure of a woman. She is weak and ill, but there is no rest for her. On a secret shrine in the Land of Loneliness her husband is sacrificing her, day by day and night by night. He must please Self, and Self demands of him drink and gay company, and so he goes on week by week and month by month, and the weary wife toils to keep the roof over their heads and bread in the cupboard. It is cruel work. It is a slow fire, but one day it will be over, and the sacrifice will be complete. Is that man happy while he worships Self? No; he is wretched. Sometimes he struggles desperately to get the idol down and be a free man, but he cannot. For a little while Self is pleased to let him fancy he is a free man, and a better man, and suddenly cries out again for the drink, and down he goes before him, and sacrifices to him his nearest and his dearest. What bondage! you say. Ah it is bondage. No poor slave under the lash of the taskmaster groans more bitterly than some of the poor dwellers in the Land of Loneliness.
But do not think that it is only in the cottages of the poor that these sacrifices are made. Come with me to this ancient mansion, and see it as I saw it many years ago. The gates are dilapidated, the carriage drive overgrown with weeds, the shrubberies a tangled wilderness; inside the house the dust is lying thickly on the faded furniture, and each room seems full of a dank and heavy atmosphere. Down from the walls in the arched-roof dining-hall look the portraits of bygone generations, and as I gaze at them, strange tales of the past are told me by my guide. Here is a sliding panel, and a secret stairway in the wall to the rooms above; there, a cellar or a dungeon door bricked up because of strange sounds that are said to issue from its narrow portal. A desolate old place it is, and why? Because the last baronet, whose handsome face is still portrayed upon those walls, had sacrificed a defenseless relative on the altar in the Land of Loneliness, and he had sunk lower and lower from sin to sin, till he had died, leaving behind him a dishonored name.
Can children offer these sacrifices? Yes. I know a boy who is even now just beginning the cruel work; he is sacrificing his widowed mother to Self, and how many a daughter has sacrificed a loving father there! and oh, alas! alas! how many a father has laid his children one by one upon the altar of that dreadful Moloch !
I remember once a gentleman, who thought a great deal, and read a great many books of this world's wisdom, turned to me and said, "I have come to this conclusion, that if you go down to the root of things, you will find that Self is at the bottom of everything we do. Take natural affection, which is beautiful in itself, or whatever you will, you will find that the gratification of Self is at the bottom of it all with us." He was quite right, and it is the presence of this great idol that makes the Land of Loneliness. Yet there are some people who are trying hard to be happy there, and profess to find Self a wonderful and beautiful idol to worship. Only the other day I met a young man who owned quite frankly not only that he worshipped Self, but that he believed in Self, and that his Self knew better than God. Of course he put the Bible quite on one side, because his Self did not like the book; but he did not know that all the while he was proving its truth, for he was showing quite plainly that he had fallen a victim to the very same lie that Eve had believed when she first thought for herself and acted for herself. He was doubting that God—his Creator—had spoken, and making his own reason the judge of his Creator. I asked him if his reason could raise him above himself, and he frankly answered, "No." I asked him what his reason had given him. If he had anything firm and sure to build upon? He answered, "Nothing." No; alas! alas! Self reigns in the heart of fallen man and rules the mind, and blinds the soul, and leads it in its utter darkness and loneliness to deny the very fall of which it is the victim.
Do you know what a center is? It is a point in the middle of anything. You can make a magnet a center, and all the needles you scatter round it will fly to that center. Self is an internal center; all your thoughts, your wishes, your hopes, your fears center round Self, and this draws you away from God, and from other people too. This internal center for the soul makes the Land of Loneliness. An external Center only can draw us all together, for as the needles spring to the magnet they get nearer to each other. Oh! that your soul may find an external Center as we take our long journey together!
But do you know what surrounds the Land of Loneliness? A vast and fathomless sea.
Hush! Did you not hear the church bell toll? Did you not see a hearse pass slowly along with something lying there upon it, something smothered up in beautiful flowers? What was it? You know it was a coffin holding a human body, that could no longer think, or speak, or act. The great tide wave of Death had swept away a human soul. Where?
Our souls, when in the Land of Loneliness, are dwelling, as it were, on an island of clay, from which they see no escape, for the great sea of Death is round us on every side. Alone—alone we dwell, and round each one of us moans the ever-advancing tide, and very suddenly sometimes that great tide-wave sweeps away its victims.
The other day I was standing upon a magnificent ledge of rock which runs out for half a mile or so into the sea at a place on our eastern coast. At low tide it forms a sort of natural pier, where you can walk in safety, but at high tide the waters ramp and rave over its rocky barrier, and throw their spray-jets high into the air. As I stood there I listened to a sad tale of the past. About twenty years before a lady and a gentleman had walked on to those rocks just as I was doing that day. It was nearly low tide, and they wanted to see the ocean rollers come bounding in on to the jagged rocks, and to listen to the thunder of their voices as they swept into the caverned cliffs and rolled back baffled into the deep. They had stood far above the waters, at a spot seldom covered even at high tide, but suddenly—oh, so suddenly!-a monster tide-wave, which ever and anon sweeps those treacherous rocks, came rushing in from the ocean depths, and flinging itself upon the rocky rampart, swept away in one second those helpless beings. There was no time even for a cry—they were gone, they had passed from human sight forever, until that day when the sea shall give up the dead that are in it. So suddenly does the tide-wave of Death sometimes rise on the unwary dweller in the Land of Loneliness.
"The wages of sin is Death," and there is no escape. Sooner or later it advances upon each soul who dwells in solitude. People are afraid even to hear about death. They do not like to see funerals go by; for with all our reasonings, and all our wisdom, and all our plannings, we cannot find any way by which we can shut out death. On and on comes the mighty tide-wave, and sooner or later we know that each little island of clay must be submerged.
I once met in a London drawing-room two ladies who had everything that this world could give them to make them happy. The conversation passed from various general topics to the real things of which the Bible speaks, and I remarked on the fact there revealed that man is fallen, that his heart is all evil by nature, and that God, because He is righteous, must judge sin. To this one of the ladies would not assent. She said, we must each do our best and live rightly, and God, being all love and all mercy, would not punish sins. She did not, know that Self, however lovely an idol he might be, was even then taking God's place in her heart, and refusing to bow to what God has said about him,—"born in sin, and shapen in iniquity." I tried in vain to show her this, and then I asked her one question—"How then," said I, "do you account for death? You cannot reason away the fact that death is here." I knew that a few years before death had swept away her only daughter, a young girl in all the pride of her youth and beauty, and just upon the eve of her marriage. She was silent for a moment, and then added very seriously, "I cannot account for it. I am at a loss to explain it."
God says, "The wages of sin is death." Some say it is the result of natural decay. But why then do the young die? No; death is here, and reason cannot explain it. And not only the death-tide which is rising round each of us every day, hut death is in us, the moral death which fell on us all through Adam's sin. Are you puzzled when I say moral death? Well, that young man, as he talked to me of what Self reasoned, and Self doubted, and Self believed, showed that moral death was upon him. His soul had no link with God whatever.
Have you ever seen a person die? If not, you can hardly have a sense of what a solemn and dreadful thing death really is. Not long ago I stood by a bed of death. The last of my father's family circle of his own generation lay dying before me. She was very aged, and her summons had come very suddenly. There were but a few hours of failing strength and gasping breath, and all was still. The soul had passed from the body. "She is gone," we said, as we looked at her ashen face. The light of the spring morning was flooding over house and garden, and stealing through the closed blinds into the chamber where death was. There lay the loved form, but those closed eyes saw not the light. A chorus of exquisite music was bursting from the feathered songsters in the trees around, but those closed ears heard it not. We spoke to one another in low voices, but those lips that had spoken so many loving words were silent. That heart that had felt so keenly for every sorrow, and had throbbed so warmly in loving sympathy for us, was cold and still. "It is all over," we said, as we turned sadly away. "She is dead." Could she hear us? No. Could she see us? No. Did the links of relationship last? No. Death was there, and that poor body which had linked her with us must be buried out of our sight, for corruption was there also.
So when Eve fell there was death—not only the waters of death rolling round her because she had sinned, but moral death too. Her lonely spirit had lost all love for God, and all link between the creature and the Creator was at an end. She fled to hide herself from eyes she dreaded. A void that she could not pass over lay between her soul and God. So the eyes of fallen man are closed—he cannot see God; his ears are stopped—he cannot hear God; his lips are closed—he cannot speak to God; his heart is cold—he has no love for God.
"And Adam and his wife hid themselves." Corruption was there. We bury our dead out of sight, because they are no longer fit to be with us, and Adam and Eve tried to bury themselves out of God's sight, for their consciences told them that they were no longer fit to be near Him. Dead bodies cannot see us; dead souls cannot see God or the things of God; dead hearts cannot love us; dead souls cannot love God. This is what is meant by "moral death." It is distance from God-a lower sphere into which the soul has fallen apart from God. Thus by the sad, dark door of sin Adam and Eve entered the Land of Loneliness, and we are each of us born into it, "born in sin and shapen in iniquity"; "fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind"
But I must tell you before I close that Adam and Eve brought one useful thing with them out of Paradise, and that was conscience. Conscience is the judge in us of right and wrong, and it is the one point where God can touch the fallen soul. It was conscience which put them behind the trees of the garden; they felt themselves unfit for God. It is conscience which makes you feel that you would fain keep out of His sight; which tells you of your condition, and urges you to flee from God.
It makes you cry, "Where am I? What am I? Where am I going?"