Mark 12:30

THE DISCIPLINE OF THE SOUL

‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all … thy soul.’

Mark 12:30

Let me speak of the discipline of the soul as tending to perfection here, and also as an indispensable condition of the higher energies of the spirit.

I. The soul contains the affections, passions, desires of the man, under the rule of the will and conscience. It is to a great extent what in popular language we often speak of as the heart. It is an organ of vast power. The soul is the form which determines and indeed contains the body. Sometimes the body is spoken of as a sort of case or vessel, as containing the soul. But it is more proper to say that the soul, which is the living principle—the soul contains the body. The soul is the ruler of the body. Whenever the body appears to rule the soul, well then it is, self-evidently, rebellion, revolt against the right and sovereignty of the superior soul. Hence it comes to pass that there is no method of releasing man from the degradation of the body except by working upon his soul.

II. The influence of the soul on our own life.—There in your soul are the passions, instrumental for good and instrumental for evil. Take one—take resentment, as a noble quality, part of the equipment of all honourable men, if it be resentment against sin, vice, meanness, cruelty, injustice, and if it be under control as a war-horse is under its rider. But if that passion break into angry violence, revenge, hatred merely against those who offend us, or we sink down stupid, morose and sullen—where, I ask you, can you find an enemy more deadly to life, health, or happiness, or a poison more virulent even against the welfare of the body than this passion of the soul? Or take the kindly affections of the soul. Man lives by what he loves. Knowledge and power and ambition and pleasure and ease will not support you. The soul with its secret beatings longs for love, to love and to be loved. It is the constant pulse of the human heart, yea, and of the heart out of which are the issues of life and of death. To love nothing which God hates, to grow towards loving all that God loves, to love whom and what He will and as He will, and to love or fear nothing more than God—that is the discipline of the affections of the soul.

III. The discipline of the individual soul is an antecedent condition of the energy of the spirit. For ‘who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?’ The soul which has been purified and perfected by the discipline of the Sermon on the Mount may take comfort in the encouragement of the words, ‘As we have borne the image of the earthly, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly.’ Were the climax of perfection in the Church on earth only the consummate symmetry and beauty of the human soul, we might well look down and say, ‘The well is deep, and we have nothing to draw with.’ But though the infinite depth we know not, we do know, thank God, that we have something to draw with. We have what was implanted within us by the Holy Spirit of God in the beginning, and has been renewed to us again and again, day by day, ever since. The discipline of the soul will prove to us to-day and to-morrow, and to the end of our days, that according to the Lord’s promise it should be even in us as ‘a well of water springing up into everlasting life.’

—Archdeacon Furse.