An Eternal Weight of Glory

For our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory.—2 Corinthians 4:17.

George Herbert, in his Country Parson, describes this Epistle as “full of affections.” Beyond any other of the Apostle’s letters it lays bare the deepest feelings of that great heart, which has been keenly wounded by sufferings more acute than the trouble that came upon him in Asia and pressed him out of measure, beyond his strength, so that he had despaired even of life. Life is still his: but he has been made to feel, as he had not felt before, the pain which can be inflicted by coldness, suspiciousness, and something like hostility on the part of those towards whom, as he says, with touching emphasis, his heart has been habitually “enlarged.” They have listened to malignant misconstructions, set afloat by those Judaizing teachers who made it their business to stamp out his work wherever Jewish Christians were to be found. It was bitter indeed for him who during a year and a half had been the guest of Justus, who had baptized Crispus and Gaius, and the household of Stephanas, to have to defend himself against the imputation of double-mindedness, of shifty diplomacy, and of what in modern phrase might be called priestcraft. It might well make him write warmly, and also mournfully. Much, he felt, was against him; he was hard put to it, “perplexed, cast down”; it was as if a “process of dying” had begun in him; his bodily health, continually impaired by the “thorn in the flesh,” had been yet further affected by the mental distress of an intensely sensitive nature. But faith comes to his aid; “though the outward man be decaying, the inward man is daily renewing its strength”; the “momentary affliction seems light” after all, when he considers that it is producing, in a manner and to an extent surpassing all thought, “an eternal weight of glory”; and this comes home to him when he seriously contrasts “the things seen,” as “temporal,” with “the things not seen” as “eternal,” and, at that high standpoint of illuminated reason, looks resolutely away from the former to the latter.

It is no mere poetical hyperbole which finds expression in such words as these:

We live in thoughts, not breaths;

In feelings, not in figures on a dial.

    We should count time by heart-throbs.

    Or again,

Our noisy years seem moments in the being

Of the eternal Silence.

Who is there, indeed, whose familiar experience has not taught him, in some ways at least, the power of thought to master time, of feeling to lend wings to the leaden hours, or, what is relatively to us the same, to render us unconscious of their flight? Absorbing employment, intense excitements, critical emergencies, things and events that deeply affect or move us, often, as we all know, make hours to vanish unnoted and unmeasured, whole days to contract almost into the brevity of hours. When the flow of composition urges the writer’s rapid pen, when the inspiration of a congenial subject kindles the artist’s mind and lends deftness to his touch, when the orator is borne onwards on the swift tide of successful speech, when the trial is proceeding on whose issue life or death is suspended, when the decisive engagement, big with the fate of nations, is being lost or won—these, and such as these, are occasions on which time is not reckoned by physical measures, on which intensity of thought and feeling quickens the rate at which life moves.1 [Note: J. Caird, University Sermons, 361.]

I

The Weight of Affliction

1. Afflictions never seem light to those who are called upon to bear them. By some remarkable condition of things, heavy afflictions may seem light and be accounted as nothing at all, but, naturally and by themselves, we always regard our own afflictions as heavy. It is very easy for spectators to say, when they hear another complaining of sufferings, “Oh! they are nothing at all, not worth a moment’s attention”; and to be astonished that so much should be made of a little. But spectators of suffering may not be the best judges of its weight. In the first place it may be that they are not suffering themselves, and so look at things very comfortably. Then again, men differ as to their sensibility to pain. Circumstances which may be nearly unheeded by one who has but dull sensations may be agony to another more finely constituted. Or again, if both are sensitive, yet one may have a special wound or sore which the other is happily without, and then even the touch of a fly drives to madness. Therefore, when we see another in pain, it is not for us straightway to declare that there is nothing to be pained about. We are all better aware of the stress of our own sorrows than we are of those of other people, and the heart knoweth its own bitterness. Naturally we all feel our afflictions to be heavy.

St. Paul had his afflictions. He did not find the Christian life easy. He was speaking for himself and his companions when he said “We are troubled on every side,” “perplexed,” “persecuted,” “cast down,” “always delivered unto death.” These are not rhetorical phrases which spring to the pen of an eloquent and ready writer. They are words which tell us of hard experiences, harsh treatment, real pain and suffering. In another part of this letter he tells us something more of what he had endured as a Christian. Five times he was beaten by the Jews, thrice by the Romans. (The strokes of the whip and the rods were not make-believe.) Once he was stoned, thrice he suffered shipwreck. Everywhere perils awaited him—perils of waters, perils of robbers, perils of the Jews, perils of the heathen, perils in the wilderness, perils in the city. He had endured weariness and painfulness, hunger and thirst, cold and nakedness.

2. How can afflictions, naturally heavy, come to be regarded as light? We know quite well that it is possible for the attention to be so occupied with one thing that it does not notice another. A man engaged in deep thought does not see the friend who recognizes him in the street. A philosopher like Newton may be so deeply involved in his problems as to forget the body and its want of food. In the excitement of battle men have not noticed the wound they have received, and not until they have begun to faint from loss of blood have they perceived what has happened to them. A mind intensely occupied with one thing has little to bestow upon others. We cannot be alive with the same intensity all over. Great concentration of vitality at one point lessens it at others. So that the constitution of our nature points out the direction in which the answer to our question is to be sought. If there be something else of more importance than the pain upon which the attention can be fixed, then, for every degree of such attention there is a degree less of pain; with almost complete attention upon something else, the pain will very nearly disappear; until, by absorbing devotion to some great thing, it is possible for afflictions which naturally are heavy to become graciously light.

The vision of the unseen has this power. It interprets and transforms life. In this way “our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory.” We are to get the clue to the mystery of life, we are to cease to be puzzled by the pain and suffering. The meaning and end of the seen are hidden in the unseen. To see with any clearness the end will help to interpret the ways by which it is reached. Light from the unseen will give an interpretative value to life and its trials, and with the vision will come the transformation. That which was a tangled puzzle will solve itself when viewed from a right standpoint. Now St. Paul was always a traveller through the seen to the unseen, where he found the Aladdin’s lamp which revealed the meaning of his present affliction, which, though often sore, became “light,” working not sores in him, but rather great glory. And so it is that here the mind of the Apostle is overwhelmed by the contrast between the seen and the unseen, and, as he rises in his flight of contemplation, the calamities of earth dwindle into insignificant smallness till there is nothing visible but glory.

Yet, strange to say, he describes the glory by an old earthly metaphor, by the very metaphor, indeed, which he used to apply to his afflictions; he calls it a weight. We speak of a weight of care, a weight of sorrow, a weight of anxiety; but a weight of glory!—surely that is a startling symbol. We do not think of a man as being crushed, overwhelmed, weighed down by glory. We should have thought that the old metaphor of care would be repulsive, that it would be cast off like a worn-out garment and remembered no more for ever. But the old garment is not worn out when the glory comes, it is only transfigured; that which made our weight of care is that which makes our weight of glory. We need not a new object but a new light—to see by day what we have seen only in darkness.

What is the use of all our reading and writing and speaking and thinking about God, and His love, and His care over us, if we are to see in an affliction nothing more than the distress which it brings? There is something else in the affliction besides this distress, and that something is God’s love and eternal life. And the only use of all our reading, etc., is to fix our attention on this which is enclosed within the affliction, instead of having it engrossed by the envelope—the outward form in which God sends it.1 [Note: Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, i. 246.]

If from the shores of eternity we cast back our gaze over the path we have travelled in this world, which regions will shine most brightly and beautifully in the view? Not, I think, those that have seemed to be joyous in the passing—not the years of youth and health and strength and earthly happiness—but much rather the spaces that here have seemed perhaps the darkest and dreariest; for these have drawn us nearer to God, these have been fullest of prayer, on these have fallen the purest, brightest rays from the Father of lights and from Him who is the brightness of that Father’s glory and the Light of the World.2 [Note: Bishop Walsham How, Pastor in Parochiâ.]

II

The Duration of Affliction

1. Affliction is often life-long, as the Apostle well knew. Why then does he call it momentary? He compares it with what is unseen and eternal. He looks away from seen vicissitudes to unseen possessions. These vicissitudes may be manifold. They may be constant. There is the change from health to sickness. There is the change from wealth to poverty. There is the change from companionship to solitude. But let a man look away from them all, from the seen mutations to the unseen certitudes, and what then? Why, then he thinks of a place prepared where the inhabitant says no more, “I am sick”; of a treasure laid up “where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal”; of a friendship that neither fails nor falters, but is always faithful, always sure, and always near. Who shall separate us from the love of God? Who shall exclude us from the grace of Christ? Who shall deprive us of the communion of the Holy Ghost? These form abiding realities, which the shocks of circumstance are as powerless to change as the rocking earthquake is to ruffle the pure blue sky, or disturb the solemn marching of its silent stars. So may we all, receiving a kingdom that cannot be moved, serve God acceptably and with godly fear.

2. Although St. Paul places the emphasis on the eternal, he does not despise the present. He was far too healthy-minded a man to rail at a summer day because it does not last, or to depreciate the beautiful home in which the great God has placed us here because this, some day, has to make way for another; he was far too human to depreciate friendship or love because there are partings and families are broken up. He was not so much absorbed in the thought of death as to forget the warmth, the majesty, and the mystery of being alive at all; and therefore those completely travesty St. Paul’s philosophy of life who fix their eyes so exclusively on another world that they take no interest in this, or who are so absorbed in thinking of the God whom they have not seen that they have no eyes to see and care for the brother whom they have seen. No, he calls these things, not unimportant, but temporal. And what he means evidently is this: that underneath the seen and passing things, here and now and in our midst, is a world of unseen reality; that “heaven lies about us,” not only, as the poet says, “in our infancy,” but all our days; that these unseen realities make use of the seen, but exist independently of them; that it is possible as we walk the earth day by day to have our head above the mists in heaven; that our calling is to be eternal beings in a world of time, and that the real test of the use of life is what life leaves us when it has passed away.

This valley [the Yosemite] is flanked by towering mountains, cleft for the most part right up in every variety of extraordinary summit. The rock is granite of flashing whiteness, rising into triangles, squares and domes. The feature of the valley is two gigantic domes, the one split like the half of a helmet, the other running up in a mass of rock till an entire helmet crowns its mass. Yesterday I walked to the Mirror Lake on the one fork of the valley. The pines at first by their reflection almost absorbed the view; but when you look far enough down, in quite distinct perspective you see to almost infinite depths the outline of the rocks and of the sky. Thus the transient in the glass of time captivates many; we need to look deep enough to catch the eternal.1 [Note: Life and Letters of John Cairns, 697.]

III

The End of Affliction

1. Affliction is the precursor of glory. It cannot be said that trial and suffering in themselves have power to make men holier or more heavenly. Upon many they have the very opposite effect, making them gloomy, selfish, and envious. They harden the heart instead of making it tender and sympathetic. They may come and overwhelm a man in their dark waves, and yet when their tide recedes it may leave him impure and worldly as before. Let no one think, then, that he is necessarily the better for having been tried. It is not so; and yet it is true that trial is most generally the instrument which God employs for softening the hard-hearted, for subduing the proud, for teaching endurance and patience, for expanding the sympathies, for exercising the religious affections, for refining, strengthening, and elevating the entire disposition and character. You cast the ore into the furnace in order to obtain the pure gold unalloyed with any dross; so men must pass through those fires of affliction which try every man’s work of what sort it is. “And no one,” it has been observed, “who has borne suffering aright has ever complained that he had been called on to endure too much of it. On the contrary, all the noblest of our race have learned from experience to count suffering not an evil but a privilege, and to rejoice in it as working out in them, through its purifying and perfecting power, an eternal weight of glory.” St. Paul had learned to “glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience”; in other words, that the result of trial is, or ought to be, the discipline and enlargement of the spirit.

A friend of mine, Mr. Houston of Johnstone Castle, died last week at the age of eighty-two, who had for fifty years suffered uninterruptedly from neuralgia. Many years ago he told me that for twenty years he had never been so sound asleep as to lose the consciousness of suffering. He died praising God for His tender mercies, which had led him all his journey through.1 [Note: Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, ii. 144.]

2. Affliction “worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory.” More is said here than at first appears; more than the hasty reader would observe. It is not merely asserted that we shall be relieved of pain by-and-by; it is not merely stated that they who suffer here on earth shall cease to suffer in heaven; this were no new thing to tell. But what is said is this: that pain is the forerunner of joy, as its efficient cause. “Affliction” is not merely followed by “glory”; it “worketh” that glory, it maketh that glory to be. “Our light affliction worketh for us a weight of glory.” This is a specific truth of Catholic Christianity, and one unknown to the wise and sagacious of this world.

There is nothing more characteristic of the scientific thought of to-day than the law of progress through struggle. Scientists show us that its working is found in every kingdom of the animate universe; that there is no progress apart from struggle and labour and suffering; and that in this conflict only the fittest survive, and by their survival raise their species to a higher plane. And this which philosophers of the nineteenth century claimed as the great discovery of their age is anticipated in these words of St. Paul. Our sufferings and struggles, if rightly used, lead to the development of our powers, and work for us a splendid result—the life of glory. He shows us that in this struggle alone is spiritual progress possible, and that the result of it is the survival of the fittest, of the saints, in the kingdom of glory.

A bar of iron worth £1, when wrought into horse-shoes is worth £2. If made into needles it is worth £70. If into pen-knife blades it is worth £650. If into springs for watches it is worth £50,000. Thus the more it is hammered and pounded and polished, and brought through the fire, the more valuable it becomes. Does not this throw light upon many a perplexing providence and many a crushing sorrow? The afflictions of this present time are preparing us for service here and for glory hereafter.1 [Note: E. W. Moore, Life Transfigured, 122.]

Without, as I heard the wild winds roar,

And saw the black clouds their floods outpour,

As the lightnings flashed,

And the thunders crashed,

And the hurricane’s force waxed more and more,

I said, as I looked from my window warm,

“Heav’n never on me send such a storm!”

Then came a dark day, when fierce and fast,

Down fell on my head the blinding blast!

Yet tho’ sore assailed,

I nor shrank nor quailed,

For tho’ loud the gale raged, as ’twould rage its last,

The struggle I waged, as I journeyed on,

Awoke in me powers before unknown!

I felt my hot blood a-tingling flow;

With thrill of the fight my soul did glow;

And when, braced and pure,

I emerged secure

From the strife that had tried my courage so,

I said, “Let Heav’n send me or sun or rain,

I’ll never know flinching fear again!”2 [Note: T. Crawford, Horae Serenae, 17.]

3. It is Christ who makes affliction work out such glorious results. He has transformed pain and sorrow into beneficent angels. We cannot tell how it happened, but grief, through her acquaintanceship and familiarity with the Son of Man, became like a new creature; in her were seen a certain softness and pensiveness which she never had before; her form became altered and her footsteps light, until she seemed to take the air of a Sister of Mercy, and to breathe forth a wondrous benediction while she walked with Him. Doubtless it was His influence that worked the change; it was He who turned into a cross that scourge of small cords which she had carried from time immemorial, and gave to her eyes that tender look which seems to say, “I do not willingly afflict nor grieve you, O children of men.” Thus they went through the world hand in hand, until He went out of it by the gate of the grave, tasting death for every man. And grief has been acting ever since as one of His ministers, and representing Him, and doing the works of mercy in His Kingdom. She has given to men in these latter days more than she ever took away; she is a dispenser and not a spoiler; her hands are full of goodly gifts, and though her discipline be painful, yet it is ever merciful, and as a gentle almoner she offers and bestows, wherever faith and love dispose the heart to receive them, sure and perfect pledges of eternal blessing and glory.

I stand in one of our harbours, and see beyond its shelter the waves lift themselves mountains high; my ears are filled with the roar of the angry wind. Ignorant of vessels and of navigation, I observe a goodly ship putting forth to sea, and the conviction steals over me that she will be engulfed in the waters or cast by the wind upon the shore; but I do not know the power of the engines that propel the vessel or the skill of the captain who is in command of her. Did I realize these I should be assured that she would force her way through the waves, and in due time reach the desired port in safety. It is thus with the world. We see, we realize, the misery, the strife, the confusion that prevail; but we do not see, we cannot realize, the wisdom, the love, the power in the nature of Him who, in spite of all these, reigneth King for ever, or we should be assured that, though “the kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed,” yet “there is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the most High. God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved. God shall help her, and that right early.”1 [Note: W. G. Horder.]

“Open the door and let in more of that music,” the dying man said to his weeping son. Behmen was already hearing the harpers harping with their harps, he was already taking his part in the song they sing in Heaven “to him who loved them, and washed them from their sins in his own blood.”

Some one will enter the pearly gate

By-and-by, by-and-by;

Taste of the glories that there await,

Shall you? Shall I?

If we are to be there, we must, like the saintly Behmen, “wash our robes and make them white in the blood of the Lamb.” Everlasting life begins on this side the grave, and our Heaven, like his, must begin on earth. The Life Eternal, the life in which time is as eternity and eternity as time, is the life hid with Christ in God. In the measure in which we experience it, we shall rise above earth’s changing scenes. Our sorrows will not crush us; our successes will not elate us; our difficulties will not daunt us; death itself will not appal us, because, taught by the great Apostle, we are beginning to appraise the events of life at their true value, we are learning, through many a painful experience, slowly but surely to look “not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are unseen,” and we find that the things which are unseen are eternal, for “Eternity is the Diamond in the Ring.”1 [Note: E. W. Moore, Life Transfigured, 126.]

Of fret, of dark, of thorn, of chill,

Complain no more; for these, O heart,

Direct the random of the will

As rhymes direct the rage of art.

The lute’s fixt fret, that runs athwart

The strain and purpose of the string,

For governance and nice consort

Doth bar his wilful wavering.

The dark hath many dear avails;

The dark distils divinest dews;

The dark is rich with nightingales,

With dreams, and with the heavenly Muse.2 [Note: Sidney Lanier.]

An Eternal Weight of Glory

Literature

Caird (J.), University Sermons, 360.

Church (R. W.), Cathedral and University Sermons, 294.

Dix (M.), Sermons Doctrinal and Practical, 65.

Finney (C. G.), The Way of Salvation, 447.

Henson (H. H.), The Creed in the Pulpit, 179.

Matheson (G.), Moments on the Mount, 62.

Maurice (F. D.), Sermons Preached in Country Churches, 250.

Moore (E. W.), Life Transfigured, 105.

Mortimer (A. G.), Studies in Holy Scripture, 258.

Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, ix. 337.

Roberts (W. P.), Reasonable Service, 66.

Shedd (W. G. T.), Sermons to the Spiritual Man, 69.

Stevenson (J. F.), God and a Future Life, 16.

Thom (J. H.), Laws of Life after the Mind of Christ, 393.

Vince (C.), The Unchanging Saviour, 278.

Walker (E. M.), Signs of the Times, 40.

Watson (J.), The Inspiration of Our Faith, 348.

Welldon (J. E. C.), The Spiritual Life, 45.

Christian Age, xliv. 322 (J. Galbraith); xlvi. 404 (C. H. Parkhurst).

Christian World Pulpit, xiv. 331; xix. 204; xxiii. 266 (H. W. Beecher); xxviii. 115 (W. G. Horder).

Expositor and Current Anecdotes (Cleveland), xiv. (1913) 665 (C. C. Albertson).

Homiletic Review, New Ser., xix. 322 (W. R. Davis).