Hebrews 11:16

A PREPARED CITY

‘Wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for He hath prepared for them a city.’

Hebrews 11:16

What are the special qualities of the town through which the Divine can make itself known? What are the materials which it can be put to use?

I. First of all, I think, the heightened personal vitality which the crowded town quickens into activity.—The man in us, the personal self, discloses through the town strange and exciting possibilities which lie hidden until the stress of multitudinous life awakes them. And these possibilities as they expand under the incessant pressure and growth of intercourse become to us a revelation of what the personal vitality of God might mean, if only one could enter into it more fully. This heightened vitality shows itself first in the quickened capacity for emotion. Yes, there is danger in it; yet in itself a rise in capacity to feel is a rise in the spiritual scale. Feeling, passion, impulse—these belong to the deep realities of human character. They are in our primal and most essential being. And they belong to the very central self by which we adhere to God. In raising the power of feeling, the town has raised our capacity to understand and commune with God.

II. And, secondly, this heightened vitality shows itself in the will.—The energy of the human will is evoked by the town. Through the town man calls upon his creative activities for ever-increasing endeavour. He challenges himself to higher achievement. He can never come to arrest. ‘That which he has done is but the earnest of what he will do.’ Every fresh attainment suggests a better. Always he searches after a new thing to do. And the emulation of many vitalises the energy of each. Ever he will strive to fashion some new life more true to his desire. Ever he reviews his handiwork, only to criticise, to improve, to extend it. His will-power has never exhausted itself; it has more to do; it summons out fresh forces to fulfil its need. So the town breeds energy of will. And in this emergent and unconquerable energy man can win some faint insight into the Eternal energy, with which, from the beginning to the end of the days, ‘the Father worketh hitherto, and the Son worketh also.’

III. And, thirdly, both this heightened emotion and this heightened energy reveal the possibilities of an intenser co-operation, a closer bond of brotherhood.—The town creates sympathy, companionship, communion. And as the heightened emotions draw men together into affectionate companionship, so the heightened energy of will gathers men together into the great brotherhood of labour. They knit themselves together into unions, into federations, into associations. And it is the town which makes all this possible. It forms the temper in which combination becomes an instinct. And in doing this it is offering us a glimpse into the union of the Three Persons in One Substantive Life which is the innermost secret of the innermost revelation of God Himself in His essential Being, in His everlasting fellowship, in His unwithering joy.

Here are the elements, then, through which the religion of the town can complete the religion of nature. God speaks to us through the town.

—Rev. Canon H. Scott-Holland.