- The Shadow Declineth

When he had been in New York only a little more than a year Mr. Simpson’s labors were suddenly interrupted by a break in his health so serious as to force him to quit all pastoral duties, as he then thought, for good. He had never been robust. At fourteen years of age he had been brought near to death when his whole nervous system went into complete collapse. A few years later, during his first pastorate, and while still a very young man, he had suffered another physical breakdown so severe that he was compelled to drop all activities and rest for a period of weeks. During much of the time he had been at Louisville he had labored under the handicap of painful physical infirmities. “I labored on for years,” he declared, “with the aid of constant remedies and preventives. God knows how many hundred times in my earlier ministry when preaching in my pulpit or ministering beside a grave it seemed that I must fall in the midst of the service or drop into the open grave.” Now the strain of his many activities in New York had done its evil work. The old trouble of heart and nerves came back upon him with increased terror. So grave was his condition this time that a prominent physician told him frankly that his days were numbered.
Along with brain weariness and weakness of nerves and body came a heavy visitation of gloom, totally depressing all his powers and plunging him into a Slough of Despond so deep that further work was impossible. He secured a leave of absence from his church and left for the health resort at Saratoga Springs to try to recruit his wasted powers. But nothing helped much. “I wandered about,” he later wrote in describing his experience, “deeply depressed. All things in life looked dark and withered.” And that from a man who had told of spiritual joys and ecstasies and high flights into the realms of love and bliss. So it was, and so it is; and once more the low flying Christian will find it hard to understand.
This work is trying to be what it set out to be; no defense, no uncritical eulogy, but a fair and frank portrayal of a man whose common human nature made him subject to all the temptations flesh is cursed with, and who yet deserves to be studied as a thrilling example of what the grace of God can do for and through human weakness. A. B. Simpson needs no gloss from us; he is well able to stand on his own legs; his place in modern church history is secure.
Nevertheless, to sharpen our focus somewhat, and bring our picture into better perspective, we point out that Mr. Simpson’s conflict with Giant Despair was nothing unusual in one of his temperament. On those occasional descents which he admittedly made into the nether regions, those Dantean visits through the dark forest and into the blind world, he was not alone. The company he shared on those painful journeys (if he could but have remembered it) was probably far better than that he left behind him. For the great had traveled that way. David had wandered there sometimes, his voiceless harp under his arm, all its strings hanging broken and mute; Jeremiah had been often there, and the rough stones of the way had been damp with his tears; even the mighty Elijah had spent a little while in the shadowy vale in full retreat—we wince to admit—from an angry woman; Luther had gone at least once down the dark road and—as if to balance accounts—had been led by a woman back into the sunshine again.
It is characteristic of the God-intoxicated, the dreamers and mystics of the Kingdom, that their flight-range is greater than that of other men. Their ability to sweep upward to unbelievable heights of spiritual transport is equaled only by their sad power to descend, to sit in dazed dejection by the River Chebar or to startle the night watches with their lonely grief. A long list of names could be appended here to support this statement; and it would be a noble and saintly list indeed, for Moses’ name would be there, and Thomas Upham’s and Brother Lawrence’s, and St. Francis’, and Madam Guyon’s and a host of others. It might well read like a little Who’s Who in the Kingdom of God, if the whole truth were told of the gloom of the great, which overtakes them sometimes on their journey to the City of God.
While at Saratoga Springs Mr. Simpson chanced to stroll out to a religious meeting at a near-by camp ground. He was not greatly impressed with what he saw and heard till a Negro quartette stood up and sang what has now come to be known as a “spiritual.” It was one of those single-string affairs, carrying but one idea, and repeating that idea over and over, English round style, till the end of the song and the bottom of the page were reached:
“My Jesus is the Lord of Lords:
No man can work like Him.”
It was not much, but it was enough. It took nothing more artistic than a braying ass to rebuke the madness of a prophet, and the crowing of a barnyard cock turned the feet of an apostle back into the narrow way. So it came to pass that a simple “spiritual” was used of God to lift a future world—missionary from despair.
There is a compensating feature about the mystic temperament: that is its quick pick-up, its astonishing ability to take off from a standing start. That quaint Negro song acted like a catapult to launch A. B. Simpson into the air. “It fell upon me,” he said later, “like a spell. It fascinated me. It seemed like a voice from heaven. It possessed my whole being. I took Him also to be my Lord of Lords, and to work for me. I knew not how much it all meant; but I took Him in the dark, and went forth from that rude, old-fashioned service, remembering nothing else, but strangely lifted up. Strangely lifted up: there you have it, the language of deliverance, the voice from the heights. This was not imagination; it was real. The wounded eagle had found his wings again and was soaring back into the sun.
Only slightly improved physically, but now altogether out from under the spiritual cloud, he returned to New York to take up his pastoral duties again. But there was no use telling himself that he could carry on; he was clearly a sick man. The physician’s prediction seemed to be on its way to fulfillment. The shadow was declining. It looked as if his sun was about to go down while it was still day.
There was every reason why Mr. Simpson should desire to live. His family needed him. Two daughters there were, and three sons, the eldest boy being still in his early teens and the youngest girl a mere baby. And he loved these noisy youngsters, did their father, with an over-flowing tenderness of devotion possible only to one of his torrid emotional nature. To leave them now, and to leave their none-too-robust mother with the burden of their upbringing! It was more than he could bear. And the call of the lost world, the unevangelized masses who might never hear the Gospel if he failed them, what could he do about these? What about the magazine, and the “Yes, Lord” which he had said to foreign missions, had repeated as a bride repeats “I do” at the altar? And the multitudes “in mute anguish wringing their hands?” The high ambitious plans and the long dreams, what of these?
It was a trusting, but confused and frustrated minister who would walk slowly, painfully about the streets of New York during those summer evenings, old, tired and through—at thirty-seven.