We are creatures. What is it to be a creature ? Before the sun sets in the red west, let us try to have an answer to our question. We find ourselves in existence to-day, amid this beautiful scene, with multitudes of our fellow-creatures round about us. We have been alive and on the earth so many years, so many months, so many weeks, so many days, so many hours. At such and such a time we came to the use of reason ; but at such an age and in such a way that we clearly did not confer our reason upon ourselves. But here we are to-day, not only with a reason, but with a character of our own, and fulfilling a destiny in some appointed station in life. We know nothing of what has gone before us, except some little of the exterior of the past, which history or tradition or family records have told us of. We do not doubt that the sun and the moon, the planets and the stars, the blue skies and the four winds, the wide green seas and the fruitful earth, were before our time; indeed before the time of man at all. Science unriddles mysterious things about them; but all additional light seems only to darken and to deepen our real ignorance.
So is it with the creature man. He finds himself in existence, an existence which he did not give to himself. He knows next to nothing of what has gone before ; and absolutely nothing of what is to come, except so far as his Creator is pleased to reveal it to him supernaturally. And thus it comes to pass that he knows better what will happen to him in the world to come, than what will be his fortune here. He knows nothing of what is to happen to himself on earth. Whether his future years will be happy or sorrowful, whether he will rise or fall, whether he will be well or ailing, he knows not. It is not in his own hands, neither is it before his eyes. If you ask him the particular and special end which he is to fulfil in his life, what the peculiar gift or good which he was called into being to confer upon his fellow-men, what the exact place and position which he was to fill in the great social whole, he cannot tell you. It has not been told to him. The chances are, with him as with most men, that he will die and yet not know it. And why? Because he is a creature.
His being born was a tremendous act. Yet it was not his own. It has entangled him in quantities of difficult problems, and implicated him in numberless important responsibilities. In fact he has in him an absolute inevitable necessity either of endless joy or of endless misery ; though he is free to choose between the two. Annihilation he is not free to choose. Reach out into the on-coming eternity as far as the fancy can, there still will this man be, simply because he has been already born. The consequences of his birth are not only unspeakable in their magnitude, they are simply eternal. Yet he was not consulted about his own birth. He was not offered the choice of being or not-being. Mercy required that he should not be offered it; justice did not require that he should. We are not concerned now to defend God. We are only stating facts, and taking the facts as we find them. It is a fact that he was not consulted about his own birth ; and it is truer and higher than all facts, that God can do nothing but what is blessedly, beautifully right. A creature has no right to be consulted about his own creation : and for this reason simply, — that he is a creature.
He has no notion why it was that his particular soul rather than any other soul was called into being, and put into his place. Not only can he conceive a soul far more noble and devout than his, but he sees, as he thinks, peculiar deficiencies in himself, in some measure disqualifying him for the actual position in which God has placed him. And how can he account for this ? Yet God must be right. And his own liberty too must be very broad, and strong, and responsible. He clearly has a work to do, and came here simply to do it; and it is equally clear that if God will not work with him against his own will, he also cannot work without God. Every step which a creature takes, when he has once been created, increases his dependence upon his Creator. He belonged utterly to God by creation: if words would enable us to say it, he belongs still more utterly to God by preservation. In a word, the creature becomes more completely, more thoroughly, more significantly a creature, every moment that his created life is continued to him. This is in fact his true blessedness, to be ever more and more enclosed in the hand of God who made him. The Creator's hand is the creature's home.
As he was not consulted about his coming into the world, so neither is he consulted about his going out of it. He does not believe he is going to remain always on earth. He is satisfied that the contrary will be the case. He knows that he will come to an end of this life, without ceasing to live. He is aware that he will end this life with more or less of pain, pain without a parallel, pain like no other pain, and most likely very terrible pain. For though the act of dying is itself probably painless, yet it has for the most part to be reached through pain. Death will throw open to him the gates of another world, and will be the beginning to him of far more solemn and more wonderful actions than it has been his lot to perform on earth. Everything to him depends on his dying at the right time and in the right way. Yet he is not consulted about it. He is entitled to no kind of warning. No sort of choice is left him either of time or place or manner. It is true he may take his own life. But he had better not. His liberty is indeed very great, since this is left free to him. Yet ѕυιcιdє would not help him out of his difficulties. It only makes certain to him the worst that could be. He is only cutting off his own chances; and by taking his life into his own hands he is rashly throwing himself out of his own hands in the most fatal way conceivable. One whose business it is to come when he is called, and to depart when he is bidden, and to have no reason given him either for his call or his dismissal, except such as he can gather from the character of his master, — such is man upon earth; and he is so, because he is a creature.
Is it childish to say all this ? We fear we must say something more childish still. We must not omit to notice of this creature, this man, that he did not make the world he finds around him. He could not have done so, for lack of wisdom and of power. But it is not this we would dwell on. As a matter of fact he did not do so; and therefore, as he did not make the world, it is not his world, but somebody else's. He can have no rights in it, but such as the proprietor may voluntarily make over to him in the way of gift. He can have no sovereignty over it, or any part of it, unless by a royal grace the true Sovereign has invested him with delegated powers. In himself therefore he is without dominion. Dominion does not belong to him as a creature. Dominion is a different idea, and comes from another quarter.
Furthermore— and we do not care whether it be from faith or reason, or from what proportion of both — this creature cannot resist the certainties that there is an unseen world in which he is very much concerned. He is quite sure, nervously sure, that there are persons and things close to him, though unseen, which are of far greater import than what he sees. He believes in presences which are more intimate to him than any presence of external things, nay, in one Presence which is more intimate to him than he is to his own self. Death is a flight away from earth, not a lying down a few feet beneath its sods; it is a vigorous outburst of a new life, not a resting on a clay pillow from the wearyful toil of this. All things in him and around him are felt to be beginnings, and the curtains of the unseen world, as if lifted by the wind, wave ever and anon into his face, and cling to it like a mask, and he sees through, or thinks he sees. This is the last thing we have to note of this man, as he sits upon the hill-top, in the sunshine, part and parcel of the creatures round about him. He finds himself in existence by the act of another. He knows nothing of what has gone before him, nothing of what is to happen to himself, and next to nothing of what is to come, and that little only by revelation. He was not consulted about his own birth, nor will he be about his death. He has to die out, and has nothing to do with the when or the how. He did not make the world he finds around him, and therefore it is not his. Neither can he resist the conviction that this world is for him only the porch of another and more magnificent temple of the Creator's majesty, wherein he will enter still further into the Creator's power, and learn that to be in the Creator's power is the creature's happiness.
Topic: Excerpt from The Creator and the Creature, Fr. Frederick Faber (Read 136 times)