Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2079
Delivered on Lord’s Day Morning, April 14, 1889
“The heart knows his own bitterness. And a stranger does not understand with his joy.” Proverbs 14:10.
YOU lift up your eyes and you behold the stars. Surely, it is no idle imagination that these heavenly lights are distant worlds. But they are entirely separated from the inhabitants of this globe. You may peer at them through the telescope as long as you will, but you cannot enter into the feelings and pursuits of the dwellers in those worlds. You know nothing of the nearest planet, nor even of the world’s own satellite. Some look up and declare that they see a man in the moon. It is the fancy of the ignorant. Others gaze at it till they discover huge volcanoes. It is the belief of the astronomer. But do what you will, you cannot enter into conversation with the moon-dwellers.
You cannot sympathize with their politics, nor share their domestic experiences. There is a great gulf fixed and we who would pass to them cannot—neither can they pass to us who would come from there. In a great measure such is our relation to our fellow men. Men are microcosms, or little worlds—each man has his distinct sphere, wherein he dwells. We are so many worlds and no one world of man exactly overlaps another. You cannot completely know your fellow man. All that you know concerning your fellows—and there is much which we can know—leaves a great deal as unknown to us as the fixed stars.
There is a bitterness which each man feels alone and a sweetness with which none can understand. Every man is, in a measure, self-contained. His being is detached from other beings in certain matters. There are bonds which unite us to our fellow man, and there is a solidarity about the race. But for all that, each man is a distinct atom and item and there are portions of his nature in which he does not touch his fellow man at all but displays his own individuality and personality. Alone are we born, one by one. Alone do we die, one by one. Though we shall stand with the great multitude before the Throne of God, yet that judgment will be of individuals and the sentence will be passed upon us one by one.
Heaven will be an enjoyment which the Believer himself possesses—or Hell a misery which the impenitent himself endures. No one can merge himself in another man, nor so blend himself with the mass as to cease to be an individual existence. For weal or woe we are each one launched on the ocean of life in his own vessel. “Every man shall bear his own burden.”
It is not surprising that we must be, in a measure, unknown to others since we do not even fully know ourselves. Mysteries exist within our own bosoms and abysses which we have never yet explored. Their own personal humanity is to many an utterly unknown land. And none know themselves so fully as they think. “Man, know yourself,” is a precept much more profound than it appears. If we do not know ourselves, how shall we know our fellows?
Besides, there are points of individuality in each man which render him distinct from every other. No two women— although they are born of the same parents, have been trained in the same home, and have lived together in close companionship—will be found to be precisely alike. No man could find his exact counterpart among all the millions of the race. In some point or points each man is inscrutable by his companions. Either from one peculiar element which is in him or from the peculiar proportions in which qualities are blended in his constitution, each man is a being after his own kind.
How can we know beings so strangely different from each other? Remember also, that men in their highest and deepest conditions, are remarkably secretive. The extreme heights and depths lie in darkness. A man may openly show himself in his ordinary life and “wear his heart upon his sleeve.” But when he reaches a especial grief the waters are still deep. The keenest griefs cut a narrow but deep channel and as they wear into the inmost soul they flow without noise. The grief that babbles is a shallow brook. Silent sorrow is profound. Great misery is dumb with silence—it opens not its mouth. It is precisely the same in the higher ranges of joy. When once we soar into the heavenlies we are alone.
As I rode along in the South of France, the driver, turning to me, exclaimed, “See, there are eagles!” “No,” I said, “not eagles, for eagles fly alone.” Seven or eight large birds together might be hawks, or falcons, or kites but not true eagles. A royal eagle soars alone into the blue—his mate may bear him company but he has no crew of comrades around him. The child of God—the true eagle of the skies—when he rises into the more Divine ranges of his spiritual life is, and must be, alone. Like their Lord, all saints will have a winepress which they must tread alone. And even so, they will have a Pisgah to which they will climb unattended. I marvel not that men hide those lives which God has hidden in Christ and that their fellows see not the part of them which lives upon the invisible.