IT IS of children the Psalmist (127) saith: “They are an heritage of the Lord”, and, “happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them”; but it may equally be said of great men: They are an heritage of the Lord, and happy are the nations that have their quiver full of them.
So it is not without significance, that every nation has its rosters of great men, of men who are national figures, and of international interest; men who by their deeds have written their names on the pages of history, and whom no student can ignore; men who have made national renown a matter of just pride, and are the honored possessors of those deathless tributes which form the ties that bind the nations of the world as into one bundle of world-wide human life. It is to them that we, who are “merely folks”, owe debts which we can not hope to pay. And in any land recognition of the “God of the nations” brings to His altars continuously the sacrifices of joyous praise and thanksgiving for “great men” as His gift.
Abraham Kuyper was one of these in a rare sense. In ways more varied than falls to the lot of many, he performed well-nigh herculean tasks. For more than fifty years his work held him in the lime-light. And the history of his country in those years can not be read, without meeting his name on well-nigh every page.
It is not often that a nation is enriched by the gift of a man of the Kuyper type. Endowed with unusual powers, he set himself unusual tasks, which he accomplished with equally unusual measures of strength. The one which claims our attention in connection with the volume in hand, was, the writing of devotional meditations.
That in the midst of his gigantic public labors, which held him subject constantly to keen scrutiny and sharp criticism, he had spirit, let alone time, for more than forty years, to write devotional “Meditations” on some text or passage of Scripture, at the rate of one a week, till at the time of his death they had reached the almost unbelievable number of more than two thousand, is by itself a matter of absorbing interest. For these “Meditations” are cameo studies of Revelation and life. They are masterly correlatives of the one to the other. They are a varied analysis of the Christian life, as lived in the soul and practiced by the individual believer. They approach this from well-nigh every conceivable angle. To mention a few: From the angle of the home, in 58 meditations, under the title, “When thou sittest in thine house”; from the angle of the Lord’s Day, presenting a meditation for every Sunday of the year, under the title, “An Omer for the Sabbath”; from the angle of the sickroom and deathbed, in 50 meditations under the title, “In the Shadow of Death”; from the angle of mourning for the dead, in 52 meditations, under the title, “Asleep in Jesus”; from the angle of personal, mystical fellowship between the soul and the Eternal Being, in 110 meditations on “To Be Near Unto God”, which title may well be taken as title for all the meditations he ever wrote. For he wrote from the conviction, that conscious nearness to God and unbroken fellowship with Him, is Christian living, and through grace is bound to bear fruit worthy of being laid as “good works” on the altar of God. All his meditations borrow their title and content from the Word of God. As a whole they present a mine of instruction in personal religion, both devout and mystical, but always practical and of sound common sense.
Even a cursory glance at these meditations rouses wonder, that a man of his stamp would write week by week such personal, admonishing and edifying short essays for the spiritual life of the people. It was a piece of heroism. It demanded laying bare something of his innermost self. As a whole, his meditations are not only an open confession of Christ, but a zealous defence as well of “the truth as it is in Christ”, the “Christ of the Scriptures”. And a man of his conspicuous station might well have shrunk from so open a confession of Jesus, and have spared himself the loss of popular applause, which it entailed.
There is much reticence abroad, regarding one’s personal religious faith, under the guise of modesty and of respect for privacy of Christian feeling and conviction. Such silence, ordinarily maintains a popularity, perhaps superficial, which by an open confession of the Nazarene, is sacrificed.
Kuyper realized this. He felt what his witness for Christ did for him in the minds of those who differed from him. In 1897 he frankly confessed, that more than once he had been sorely tempted to sacrifice some part of the whole truth of the Christ of the Scriptures, for the sake of retaining the cordial fellowship of his brethren.
But in an unusual way the reality of the living Christ had taken hold of the man. He did not begin life with it. Even when he began his ministry he was a stranger to it. But by deep and searching experiences he learned Christ. And the battle was not fought in a day. Self was not brought into subjection to the obedience of Christ, save at the price of a long and hard-fought fight. Master of powers such as his, he was open to attacks from within and from without, to which the very greatness of his spirit exposed him. In words of another: “There was the iron strength of this Napoleon of intellect; the passion for rule natural to one born to lead; the autocratic bend of spirit, as well as other ‘defects of greatness’ which were bound to give offence. Writes one, on Kuyper’s seventieth birthday: “We are not blind to the defects of this man, in whom, more than in many of his nature, the eternal human was bound to come to vehement revelation.”
And to no one did this assume more real proportions than to Kuyper himself. No one entered under the impression of it more deeply than he. In his own heart he faced the presence of indwelling sin. He felt a shudder at the sight of the moral leprosy of unregenerated human nature. In the light of God’s Word he saw and sensed the manifold hideousness of sin. In himself he knew himself lost. But with it came to him the vision of the world’s Savior from sin. In his own soul he experienced the cleansing power of the blood of Christ, not as a lifeless dogma, but as a vital force, a regenerating reality, which made him glory in Christ and Him crucified.
How nobly he fought “the good fight” and overcame, is attested by the writer, who referred to “the eternal human” in Kuyper: “But memorable remains the fact, (and it tunes the heart to gratitude) that that same power, tempered by Christian self-control, has in such measure unfolded itself into glorious fruition, that he was able to gain the ear, even of those who were unwilling to be convinced, by his mighty plea for the good right of the Christian world-view”.
His great popularity, writes another, especially among his followers, Dr. Kuyper has not won by his greatness, but much more by his “littleness”, his being humble with the humble, being approachable by the most plain, by lending a willing ear to their requests and their griefs, and making these the subject of consideration; by showing to all who came to him to pour out their griefs or seek his advice, a knowledge of affairs of all sorts which compelled admiration and homage.”
Writes still another: “How wonderfully he revelled in the fellowship of his Savior. With his own experience he warmed the spiritual life of others, and deepened their faith. With strong wing-beat he bore our souls upward from the cheerless reality of this earth to the sunny reality of heaven.”
Without this deep personal experience, which but deepened with time, it is impossible to interpret the man and his work. This made him utter those memorable words in his brilliant oration, “Sovereignty in One’s Own Circle”, in 1880: “Were not the Christian faith original with the Mighty One of Jacob, how could it stand? It goes against everything the world calls great, against a power of learning, against an age of formidable enchantment, investigation and uprooting. Freely look down therefore, upon our persons, our strength, our intellectual significance, if such you think you must. To esteem God to be all and before Him every man as nothing, is the Calvinistic Confession, which grants you the right to do so. But I beg, though you were our most violent opponent, do not withhold from the enthusiasm that inspires us the tribute of your respect. For the Confessional Standard, from which we have removed the dust, was once the soul’s cry of a downtrodden nation; the Scripture, before whose authority we bow, has once been the comfort of your forbears; has not the Christ, Whose Name we honor, been the Inspirer, the Elect, the Worshiped One of your own fathers? Suppose that, according to everything that has been written in the sanctum of science and has echoed in the high places, suppose that according to your own confession, the Scripture were done for and Christianity a vanquished viewpoint, … . . even then I still ask, has not that Christendom, in your own eyes, been historically too imposing, too majestic and too holy a phenomenon, shamefully now to fall in a heap, and to expire without honor? Is there then no more ‘Noblesse oblige’? And shall a banner, such as they bore away from Golgotha, be permitted to fall into the enemy’s hands, so long as the uttermost to prevent it has not been tried, so long as one arrow is left for use, and a bodyguard, however small, of Him Whom Calvary crowned, still lives within our borders?
To this question, “Never as God lives”, has sounded in our souls. And to that “Never”, as oath of loyalty to higher principle, I ask for an echo, an Amen, from every patriotic heart!”
And this deep personal experience of the power of Christ in the life strikes equally the key-note of the “Meditations”. “Physician, heal thyself” is the demand made on the man who presumes to lead others in paths of virtue and godliness, in face of defects in his own life. This has silenced many a voice and paralyzed many an effort. This has forced into retirement the sensitive man, not wholly surrendered unto God, who could not lay himself bare to public gaze, at the cost of the esteem of men. It took humility and courage, for a man of such standing as Dr. Kuyper to keep on in his course of meditating in the public ear, on such themes as the struggles and defeats, the fallings and the risings again, the aspirations, discouragements and hopes of the soul, in its pursuit after “Holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord”. But it made him the wise teacher, the sympathetic friend, the counsellor in holy matters, to thousands and thousands of hearts, that during more than forty years looked eagerly from week to week for that spiritual uplift, that spiritual feeding, encouragement and comfort, which his “meditations” brought them. If “there are not many able to write on the devotional life, because not many live it”, of Kuyper it can be said: He was able to write on the devotional life, because he lived it.
In the heart of Christian Netherlands these “meditations” are imperishably enshrined. Shall this wealth of devotional and practical Christian thought be permanently barred from the English-speaking Christian world by the barrier of language? Already a summons from Japan has come for the translation into Japanese of the reecntly-published volume, HIS DECEASE AT JERUSALEM. Is there no need with us, among the preachments of novel “Christs”, of a fresh setting forth of Christ and Him crucified, of the “Christ of the Scriptures”?
It is with no small pleasure, therefore, that we welcome the announcement, that the William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Mich., intends to give Dr. Kuyper’s books a place in the English book-market. Together with the MacMillan Company of New York, they published the 110 Meditations on TO BE NEAR UNTO GOD. From their own press the fifty Meditations on “The Passion and Death of our Lord”, under the title: HIS DECEASE AT JERUSALEM have just come out. This volume: KEEP THY SOLEMN FEASTS, makes the third volume in the series. It will shortly be followed by the 58 Meditations, under the title: WHEN THOU SITTEST IN THINE HOUSE.
So by this “venture for God” on the part of the Eerdmans Publishing House, the Translator seeks to cast the bread of Dr. Kuyper’s making from the pure wheat of God’s Word, in its English mould, upon the waters of the English-speaking world with the prayer, that in the lives of those who make it part of their spiritual food, it will produce results worthy to be laid at the Masters’ feet, to the greater glory of God.
Walpole, Massachusetts.
June 20, 1928.
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