Christ and the Salvation 15
By
Horace Bushnell
"Then answered the Jews and said unto him-say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?"-John viii, 48.
It is often remarked as a curious, half ludicrous distinction of insane persons, that they look on others round them as being out of their head. And yet this kind of phenomenon is more or less observable, in all cases of diseased action, whether mental or spiritual; the subject sees his disorder, not in himself, but in the objects and conditions round him.
Under the disease or disaffection called sin, the same is true; as we may see by the answer of these carping hypocrites, when Christ reproves their high pretenses, and sanctimonious lies. "You call yourselves children of Abraham," he says, "when you do none of his works, when your fatherhood is more truly discovered in the father of lies. And as he abode not in the truth, and has no truth in him, so because I tell you the truth ye believe me not."
They feel the sharpness of the words, but do not perceive the solemn justice of the argument-throwing it captiously back upon him as in the text; "say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan and hast a devil?" Just as they should if his argument was true; for the men who have a devilish spirit are sure to see their devil objectively in others. There must be a devil on hand somewhere, they are sure, and who will expect them to find it where it is, in themselves? The truth accordingly which I now propose for your consideration is this:
That a bad mind sees bad things, and makes to itself a bad element. In other words, a bad mind projects its own evils into persons and conditions round it; charging the pains of its own inward disorder to the objects that refuse to bless it, and counting, it may be, Christ himself a sting only of annoyance.
It would be far more agreeable to me to assert this truth universally, or so as to include the good; showing how they convert all things to good by their bright and loving spirit, and how the stones even of the field are in league with them to bless them; but this would take me over too large a ground, and therefore I must be content to occupy you, for the time, with a subject not grateful in itself, hoping that you may even find the greater benefit in it.
If the errand we are after is not pleasant, if it compels us to go burrowing into the dark, underground, abysses and pains of evil in the soul, let us not recoil from the task, because we find a great deal of our conceit inverted and a great many of our complaints of God and the world turned back upon ourselves.
I do not mean, of course, to say, that we can have nothing to complain of, or that other men can not do us bitter wrongs. Neither do I undertake to say, that we shall not feel them. But he that suffers a wrong rightly, finds a law of compensation going with him, as with God, so that his injury, or injured feeling, is repaid many times over, like that of God, by the consciously sublime repose of his own self-approving spirit. And, this being true, it is only the bad mind in us, after all, that allows us to be really troubled and harassed by wrong. I will only add that what I am going to say may seem to be an over-statement, or exaggeration of the truth, without this qualification, and must therefore ask to have it remembered.
We shall best open the gate of our argument on this subject, if we notice two great facts, or laws of our nature, which are the ground of this tendency in us to refer our own evils to things about us, and in the same way to keep us from a discovery of them as being in ourselves.
First, by a fixed necessity of language, we are obliged, apart from all the blinding effects of our sin, to represent. a great part of what transpires in our experience, in a way of objective description. For example, it is the natural way of language to call things "hot," "sweet," "bitter," and the like, when in fact the words really describe nothing but our own inward sensations. So we say that a "subject is dark," not because there is any thing dark in the subject, but that we are dark to it. So again we say. that a thing bears a "suspicious look," when we are suspicious of it; or of some spectacle that it "is fearful," when we are fearfully moved by it.
We speak in the same way of "taking our chances" and "meeting our dangers," when in fact there is neither chance nor danger in things at all, but only an absolute certainty that this or that will take place. The uncertainty, or ignorance of what is to come is in us, and we call it chance or danger in things.
Now the great part of mankind go through life, using every hour these objective terms of language, without ever once suspecting that what they describe as without, is nothing but an experience within themselves.
Almost all staple words of language, as related to our inward experience, are of just this kind; it could not, as might easily be shown, have been otherwise. In this manner, we put almost all that we suffer, enjoy, feel, and think, into the objects and doings and characters round us, not understanding that what we figure, as in them, is really transpiring in ourselves-just as we say, how often, that we have "taken a cold," and verily believe that a cold something, we know not what, has seized us; whereas we have simply gotten up a fever-probably by over-indulgence-and then the shiverings and atmospheric chills that follow we take for the causes of the mischief.
