Faces in the Fire Part 12

Looking up from the story he is reading, he exclaims impatiently:

'I can't think why they want to work these silly _love-stories_ into all these books. A fellow can't pick up a decent book but there's a love-story running through it. It's horrid!' He has come upon the greatest word in the language; but it has no meaning for him!

But five years later he understands! He has been captivated by a pure and radiant face, by a charming and graceful form, by lovely eyes that answer to his own. That great word _love_ has been made flesh to him, and it simply gleams with meaning. And so, all through the years, as life goes on, he finds the great key-words expounded to him through infinite processes of incarnation. 'Ideas,' says George Eliot, 'are often poor ghosts; our sun-filled eyes cannot discern them; they pa.s.s athwart us in their vapour and cannot make themselves felt. But sometimes _they are made flesh_; they breathe upon us with warm breath, they touch us with soft responsive hand, they look at us with sad sincere eyes, and speak to us in appealing tones; they are clothed in a living human soul, with all its conflicts, its faith, and its love. Then their presence is a power, then they shake us like a pa.s.sion, and we are drawn after them with gentle compulsion, as flame is drawn to flame.'

And if this be so with other words, how could the greatest, grandest, holiest word of all have been expressed except in the very selfsame way?

'_The_ Word was made flesh.' There was no other way of saying G.o.d intelligibly. I should never, never, never have understood mere abstract definitions of so august a term. And so--'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was G.o.d, and the Word was _made flesh_.' I can grasp that great word now. Bethlehem and Olivet, Galilee and Calvary, have made it wonderfully plain. The word G.o.d would have frightened me if it had never been expressed in the terms of 'a Face like my face'--as Browning puts it--and a heart that beats in sympathy with my own. And so Tennyson says:

And so the Word had breath, and wrought With human hands the creed of creeds In loveliness of perfect deeds, More strong than all poetic thought;

Which he may read that binds the sheaf, Or builds the house, or digs the grave, And those wild eyes that watch the wave In roarings round the coral reef.

And thus the most awful, the most terrible, and the most incomprehensible word that human lips could frame has become the most winsome and charming in the whole vocabulary. G.o.d is JESUS, and JESUS is G.o.d! 'The Word was made flesh.'

The same principle dominates all religious experience and enterprise.

Generally speaking, you cannot make a man a Christian by giving him a Bible or posting him a tract. The New Testament lays it down quite clearly that the Christian _man_ must accompany the Christian _message_.

The Word must be presented in its proper human setting. Our missionaries all over the planet tell of the resistless influence exerted by gracious Christian homes, and by holy Christian lives, in winning idolators from superst.i.tion. I was reading only this morning a touching instance of a young j.a.panese who trudged hundreds of miles to inquire after the secret of 'the beautiful life'--as he called it--which he had seen exemplified in some Christian missionaries. The Word, _made flesh_, is thus p.r.o.nounced with an accent and an eloquence which are simply irresistible.

'I said, and I repeat,' says Mr. Edwin Hodder, in his biography of Sir George Burns, the founder of the Cunard Steams.h.i.+p Company, 'I said, and I repeat, that if the Bible were blotted out of existence, if there were no prayer-book, no catechism, and no creed, if there were no visible Church at all, I could not fail to believe in the doctrines of Christianity while the living epistle of Sir George Burns' life remained in my memory.' That was Whittier's argument:

The dear Lord's best interpreters Are humble human souls; The gospel of a life like his Is more than books or scrolls.

From scheme and creed the light goes out, The saintly fact survives; The blessed Master none can doubt, Revealed in holy lives.

We have reached a very practical aspect now of the message that the Christmas bells will soon be ringing. The thoughts of men are only intelligibly communicable by means of words; and the words of men only become pregnant with pa.s.sion and with power when they are _made flesh_.

And, in the same way, the thoughts of G.o.d to men are only eloquent when they are so expressed. Revelation became sublimely rhetorical at Bethlehem, and we can only perpetuate its eloquence through the agency of lives transfigured.