Spiritual Exhaustion.
These words were spoken to men who were speculating on mysterious subjects, and they touch, of course with necessary change, one of the troubles of this time. For many of us are wearying ourselves with endless speculation on the loftier subjects of thought in religion. It is not wrong nay, it is right, for such is our nature, to speculate on these high matters; but if we do nothing else, then we injure our religious life, and lose the use of lofty speculation. Pride or despair follows, but chiefly exhaustion of the spiritual faculty, and oftentimes its death.
I. How can we retain the pursuit of high mysteries and truth and not lose ourselves in them, or be cast away in their despair? Whether in life with nature or in spiritual life, exhaustion and its results follow on a straining of our powers. We are ravished at first by the grandeur and the solemn beauty of the mighty questions of religion, and we neglect the wayside beauty of the Christian life. But after a few years at most the mystic glory dies away. These things are too much for us. We are bewildered by the multitude of questions which one after another, like a thousand paths from one centre, open out from each of the great problems. Who can count the dust of thoughts which fly around the question of immortality?
II. We should turn, when exhaustion threatens to tire and then to kill the spiritual faculty, to the simple Christian charities and tenderness of daily self-sacrifice, to the unassuming sanctities of those common duties which Christ urged us to do because God Himself did them and loved to do them. In making our home happy by filling it with the spirit of gentle love in musing on the life of our children, and seeing God in it in watching for and rejoicing in the heavenly touches of Divine things, which meet us in the common converse of life in the quiet answer, the genial smile, the patience, zeal, industry, cheerfulness, truthfulness, courtesy, and purity which God asks of us as we pass on our hourly way in doing and watching and loving these things, we shall not be wearied. They make no violent strain on the imagination or the intellect or the spirit. They do not ask us whether we believe this or that doctrine, or involve us in the storm of life's problems. They are not impossible or inaccessible to any one. Their world lies all around us in the ordinary relations of man to man, of man to animals, of man to nature, and a mighty God is in them that grows not old. They only need an attentive heart to find them out and a loving heart to do them, and they will give you rest. They will put you in possession of the promise, "Learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and ye shall find rest to your souls."
III. But we shall lose, we say, in this humbler life, the beauty and sublimity which in pursuing high things we found in youth, and we cannot do without beauty, nor aspire without sublimity. We look for beauty of act and feeling too much in the splendid sacrifices, and victories of more than ordinary life, in the lives of men at whom the world stand to gaze. The stormy life of Elijah, the agonised life of St. Paul, struggling continually with the higher questions of feeling, passed in an Alpine realm of thought. Both have their lofty beauty, but they do not win us to their side, or breathe peace into the heart, as the ineffable beauty of the simple daily love of Christ. As we understand Christ better, we see that His quietude was grander than the passionate struggle of the others, that His still obedience places Him in union with the sublimity of God, that His simplicity is the result of infinite wisdom at home and conversant with the deep roots of things. Lowland life, but always on its horizon infinite Paradise.
S. A. Brooke, The Spirit of the Christian Life,p. 177.