“An Unction from the Holy One.”
What strange and wonderful results come from apparently slight causes. Almost every week now we hear of some ship’s being delivered from wreck by the use of a little oil on the waves: we read such paragraphs as this: “... the captain and other officers declare that but for this the vessel must have foundered. Captain Wren states that as a result of using the oil the ship lay splendidly in the trough of the sea, and for about twenty yards from the ship’s side the water was as smooth as a millpond, whilst beyond that distance the waves were running mountains high. The weather afterward moderated and the Saltram proceeded on her voyage.”
Yet what a ridiculous thing it used to seem when first we heard of it, to think that a little oil should deliver from the power of a tempest. But who has ever properly appreciated the value of oil, so fitly used in Scripture as a symbol of the Holy Ghost—light-giving, warmth-giving, health-giving, ease-giving: without oil, no muscle of the body could be moved, as without the Holy Spirit’s grace the soul is incapable of action.
When N―went out on the prairies with an old trapper, he watched him at night take his horse-hair rope, and coiling it round him in a circle, lie down to sleep. “What’s the good of that?” said the novice. “Snakes,” replied the veteran. The young man smiled, but he learned from all the prairie hands that no snake will ever crawl on horse-hair rope. One is — like the Israelites inside the blood-sprinkled door, or the ship encompassed with oil — as secure as if within the stone walls of a fortress.
“Our God is a strong fortress,” the German hymn says.
“The name of the Lord is a strong tower,” says the Scripture. A name seems such a poor protection to the natural mind, though it might be remembered that many a great battle, like Otterburn, has been won by merely shouting a name, and that there are even human names powerful enough to float or wreck a kingdom.
Will you be in a fortress or a prison? They are not dissimilar from the outside perhaps, but how different within! The prison at Wormwood Scrubs was built by the prisoners themselves, and there are those around us who in a more terrible sense than this are all day long occupied in building their own prisons.
J. C. B.