02.03. Signals of the Soul

Chapter 3 SIGNALS OF THE SOUL.

There are various signs given by men who are imprisoned, or floating helplessly on the wreck of a ship, or cast away on a desert island, by which their presence and peril are made known to the great busy outside world, and appeal for relief thus signaled. The minute gun at sea is a volume in itself. The poor rag fluttering from a tree top on a rocky isle in remote parts of the ocean is eloquence. The tin plate, with a few nail marks on it and flung from the grated window of a fortress, was a letter of fullest character to tell the shocked world of the life confinement of the man in the iron mask.

These signals declare existence, and suffering, and become a hail or farewell, a petition or funeral notice, according to the time they are given and observed. Some are beheld too late. The last rocket is shot from the sinking vessel before the life boat leaves the shore. The cloth is noticed in the tree, but on disembarking, the relief party discovers only a skeleton lying under its wavering melancholy shadow.

It seems to the writer that there is nothing more isolated, invisible and imperiled than the human soul. When imprisoned, it is the profoundest of bondages. When shipwrecked, it is the worst of all calamities. And as for separation, loneliness and suffering what can approximate these experiences and life condition of the human spirit.

It is so walled in by flesh and bone, that we cannot see it with the eye. It can be so buried in ignorance, prejudice and sin that one cannot get a word through the thick walls and locked doors to where it is sleeping. It can drift so far in evil that we cannot send a message to it. It can so petrify with despair and wickedness that we have no hope of making ourselves understood by what seems a captive in stone, a man with an iron mask on his face.

Through these and other reasons there are some who question soul existence, and an immortal personality, in the beings they meet. They see, they say, no sign of this captive, this shipwrecked mariner, this invisible nature or spirit, made for God and a certain kind of life, and now suffering, starving and perishing for lack of relief and deliverance. But there are many who mark the signals going up, call attention to them and are trying to bring help and comfort and liberty to the imprisoned, the entombed and the castaway, and thereby add to the sons and daughters of the Almighty, and swell the glorious population of heaven. They know there are souls in human bodies, and they must be rescued. In a sense they have the ocular and unmistakable proof that there is a prisoner in the silent castle, and a starving sailor on the lonely rock.

One signal sent up by the soul is the manifestation of a peculiar hunger.

There is a physical appetite known to us all that is met and satisfied with meat and bread.

Back of this corporeal nature is an intellectual life craving information of all kinds. It questions and receives answers; searches and obtains facts and has as a consequence a gratification peculiar to itself, and as real as the satisfaction realized by the stomach after a sufficient meal. This nature we call mind, or intellect. But back of, and higher than both of these, the physical and mental, is a something with a purely spiritual longing for God and truth. The entire separateness and distinctness of this desire and appetite, is seen in the fact that with natural hunger satisfied, and the mind filled with information to repletion, this other and third life cries out for light and food and help. Something within us different from the craving for knowledge, and unspeakably removed from bodily desire, wants not the creature, but the Creator himself.

It is remarkable how in addressing a large and mixed audience of people, when we have spoken of certain attributes of the Almighty, and the profound want of the human soul, its need of God, and eternal restlessness and despair without him, what a deep stillness has come upon the congregation. In scores of faces we saw looks cast upon us that came from the deepest and farthest away realm in man. We got a glimpse of the soul: We saw a faint skyrocket on the horizon. We beheld the fluttering cloth on the tree top of a distant shore. We knew that an immortal spirit was waving a signal to us. A second sign of the invisible soul is the flash of joy which leaps into the face when it finds and receives its Saviour and God.

There is no gladness like it; no light of countenance equal to it; and its very uniqueness declares something has been reached never before touched. Also that something or some one has gone where bread could not go, and swept far beyond and higher than human knowledge of any kind has or can ever possibly come. This is a beacon light, that no matter how far down the national, educational and social horizon it may glimmer, yet its reflection is certain to be seen. It is like no other shining, and declares that a soul is there and has been found. A third sign of the strangely hidden away soul is its distress signal of approaching ruin. The loss of the soul is called its everlasting death in the Bible. The term is a strange one because the same Book shows the soul still living in eternity. It is not annihilated, but has a death that never dies. In a word, failing to find God and enter upon its true life on earth, it passes into an endless existence so stripped and starved, so dwarfed and blighted and undone, that it is impossible to apply with truth and correctness so beautiful a word as life to such a woeful state of being. As the soul approaches this fearful catastrophe, it has signs of fluttering that are simply unmistakable concerning the coming disaster. No gun pealing mournfully through the stormy night more certainly declares a ship in danger and going down, than we are made to see that an immortal soul is perishing before our eyes. No leprosy leaping into the forehead of the sinning King of Israel was clearer to the view of the shocked priests that stood around, than is the vision of a soul steeped in iniquity dying to God and truth before our eyes. No spectacle of a band of Cortez’s soldiers led bound by the Mexicans to an altar on a hilltop and murdered in sight of their horror-stricken comrades on the plain, was ever more evident than is the spectacle of immortal spirits led to the slaughter by the hands of sin, the world and the devil, and slain in full view of the world.

There was no lack of signs of disaster and death in any of these cases. And in the greater woe of a perishing soul the tokens are perfectly manifest, and as melancholy as they are unmistakable. Not always does the man himself, consciously or willingly admit his ruin, but the coming calamity has a way of declaring itself in facial lines and marks, in gathering countenance shadows, and deepening spirit gloom, that cannot be misunderstood.

There is a peculiar pensiveness felt by the observer in watching the close of a day from the summit of a hill commanding a broad landscape. The wider the view the profounder is the impression made upon the mind and heart as the eye takes note of the sinking sun, the final disappearance of the red in a bank of purple clouds, the fading of the colors in the west, the creeping of gray and then black shadow over the plain, while the evening star lifts up a white hand in the sky as if to hush all nature and mankind to stillness about the dying bed, and over the death itself and departure of a day that can never come back again.

We sat on the brow of Lookout mountain a few years ago, and watched a summer day die. The memory of the gradual sinking of the crimson globe until the last glowing edge went beneath the horizon, and vail after vail of gloom was thrown over the bier, and fell upon hills, fields, valleys, and the broad silent Tennessee river, winding along far beneath in the gloaming, remains with the writer until today as one of the deep impressions or mental pictures of his life.

We listened to a whippoorwill far down the mountain side, whose note that evening sounded like a dirge. A locust was drowsily singing in a tree above our head. A sadness was upon us that we found impossible to shake off. We had seen the death of a beautiful day. It had faded away before our eyes. Its opportunities, privileges and possibilities were ended forever. Its life was gone, and it could never come back again. But melancholy and affecting as was this sight, we have witnessed far sadder and more heart-breaking scenes in the spectacle of an immortal soul dying to truth and God, and steadily sinking, and finally disappearing into the gloom of an everlasting night.

We have seen the light leave the face, the shadows creep up, the gloom settle, a distant dark world reach up and claim them, and they were gone and forever. Who that ever witnessed such a Christless, joyless, hopeless death, can forget it. What a stillness falls on the group in the room. What pathos was in the closing eye and in that last quivering breath which sounded like a sigh. How distinctly and painfully came the fall of a footstep on the pavement, and the solemn stroke of the town clock far away in the night.

We, remember that once as a young preacher on witnessing such a scene of an ended life, and far more dreadful a soul lost forever, we burst into tears and sunk on our knees with an uncontrollable fit of sobbing. And so the very shadows of twilight is a sign both of the life and death of the day. And the gloom of a sinful life, and the blackness that settles down upon the dying moments of an unsaved man, is just as unmistakably a distress signal that a soul has been in our midst and has gone down before our eyes forever.

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