03.04 The hid treasure

IV. THE HID TREASURE The labourer is working in the field, fulfilling the routine of his daily task. Suddenly his attention is arrested. Perhaps the ploughshare turns over with the earth some unfamiliar object. The labourer stoops down, and he discovers a mass of treasure which some one in these unsettled districts had buried in the soil for safety. So it has often happened in the story of the soul. It may be that while the daily life is running its usual course suddenly some familiar words of the Bible stand out with new clearness, or arrest the conscience with new force and power. The spirit is seized and stirred by some new throb of insight or of penitence. I have known, for example, an instance in which the truth and wonder of the reality of Christ’s human nature and sympathy flashed upon a man as he was almost casually reading a description of the boyhood of Jesus. It was hearing the Gospel for the day in church which changed the whole life of S. Francis of Assisi. Sometimes a sudden sense of sin and craving for the assurance of salvation have pressed in upon the soul with overwhelming urgency.

You remember the life-stories of Bunyan and John Newton. Some of you may have been spectators of the strange drama of a great “revival.” Make all allowance for the atmosphere of a common excitement, for the mysterious influences of the body upon the soul; analyze as we will the “psychology of conversion,” and account as we please for the “sub-conscious self” and its capacity for sudden emergence into activity; yet it is impossible to see or hear of these sudden and surprising movements of the soul without a renewed conviction that they are also the signs of that Spirit of God Who blows where He lists and men cannot tell whence He comes and whither He goes, and of the deep and ineradicable correspondence between the need of man and the Gospel of Christ.

TAGS: [Parables]