12.04 The return

IV. THE RETURN At last “he came to himself.” So we read of the prodigal in the parable. It is a profound word. Deep down within every man, tossed to and fro as he may be by the stress of his passions, there is this true self: neglected, forsaken, yet not destroyed.

It is “the Man in men” that image of God in which he was made. It is, as R. L. Stevenson says, “the thought of duty, the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God; an ideal of decency to which he would rise, if it were possible, a limit of shame below which, if it be possible, he will not stoop.” In every man, if we could but reach it, there is this surviving remnant of the true self. As even poor desperate Ratcliffe, in “The Heart of Midlothian,” admits, “A’ body has a conscience though it may be ill wunnin at it.” Once won and touched, it is true to its birth. It remembers its Home.

We “come to ourselves” when we awake from this miserable feverish dream-life of sin, and realize its delusiveness and remember the real life of the Home to which in the truth of our being we belong. “When he came to himself he said, How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish here with hunger.”

Some of us, perhaps, can understand that exclamation from our own experience.

We thought, it may be, of the forces, the flowers, the birds, of Nature, the “hired servants” in the Father’s House, fulfilling quietly and tranquilly the will of God, and contrasted with their peace the restlessness and disorder of our self-chosen life. Or, we thought of the dutiful faithful men we knew, and longed for their steadfast simplicity; we shrank before the conviction that we were losing touch with them, and rapidly, if only in our secret lives, identifying ourselves with the fellowship of sin; and our heart cried, “O, shut not up my soul with the sinners.”

Then as our thought went back to the life of the Home, it concentrated itself on the centre of it all the Father whom we had forsaken. Then remorse, in itself only bitter and hopeless, became contrition, the pain of the soul which brings its own healing. At the remembrance of of His patient Love in contrast with our shame a strong emotion of penitent sorrow laid hold of us, and broke the chains of slavery, andpurheart’s desire set free turned once again towards home. “Our soul is escaped, even as a bird out of the snare of the fowler: the snare is broken and we are delivered.”

“I will arise and go to my Father, and will say unto Him, Father, I have sinned.”

There is but one step more, and the return is achieved. But it is a step of supreme importance. In real contrition, in sincere confession, the soul has offered its desire of return. But the will must turn that desire into act. It is just here that many a man has failed. It is not only by remorse, by sorrow, by confession, however sincere in its emotion, that we can make our escape from the far country. With the deliberate energy and concentration of the will we must rise up and leave it. “He arose and came to his Father.”

TAGS: [Parables]