The Potter and the
Clay

By the

Right Rev.
Arthur F. Winnington Ingram, D.D.

Lord Bishop of London

The Young Churchman Co.

484 Milwaukee Street
Milwaukee,   -   -   -   Wis.

Contents

PREFACE

Another year, and we are still at War! But we must not mind, for we must see this thing through to the end. As Mr. Oliver said in his letter on "What we are fighting for," published this week: "We are fighting for Restitution, Reparation, and Security, and the greatest of these is Security." He means security that this horror shall not happen again, and that these crimes shall not again be committed; and he adds: "To get this security we must destroy the power of the system which did these things."

Now it is clear that this power is not yet destroyed, and to make peace while it lasts is to betray our dead, and to leave it to the children still in the cradle to do the work over again, if, indeed, it will be possible for them to do it if we in our generation fail.

This book, then, is an answer to the question asked me very often during the past two years, and very pointedly from the trenches this very Christmas Day: "How can you reconcile your belief in a good God, who is also powerful, with the continuance of this desolating War? How can we still believe the Christian message of Peace on earth with War all around?"

It is with the hope that this book may comfort some mourning hearts, and bring some light to doubting minds, that I send forth "The Potter and the Clay."

A. F. LONDON.

Feast of the Epiphany, 1917.

I

I

THE POTTER'S VESSEL[1]

"Arise, and go down to the potter's house, and there I will cause thee to hear My words. Then I went down to the potter's house, and, behold, he wrought a work on the wheels. And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter: so he made it again another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it."—Jer. xviii. 2-4.

I suppose there is no metaphor in Holy Scripture that has been so much misunderstood and led to more mischief than this metaphor of the potter and the clay. Do not you know how, if any of us dared to vindicate the ways of God to men, again and again we were referred to the words of St. Paul: "Who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to Him that formed it: Why hast Thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?" And so the offended human conscience was silenced but not satisfied. There is no doubt that the monstrous misrepresentation of Christianity which we call Calvinism arose chiefly from this metaphor; and few things have done more harm to the religion of the world than Calvinism. Those who believe that God is an arbitrary tyrant who simply works as a potter is supposed to work on clay, irrespective of character or any plea for mercy—how can such a person love God, or care for God, or wish to go to church or even pray? You cannot do it!

Thus there sprang up in some men's minds just such a picture of God as is described by that wonderful genius, Browning. Some of you may have read the poem called "Caliban on Setebos," in which the half-savage Caliban pictures to himself what sort of a person God is. He had never been instructed, he knew nothing; but he imagined that God would act towards mankind as he acted towards the animals and the living creatures on his island; and this is a quotation from that poem:

In other words, his picture of God was that of an arbitrary tyrant who rejoiced in his power, who did what he liked, who enjoyed tormenting, who would have looked down in glee upon the pictures that have so touched us in the paper of a woman, as she taught a Bible-class, killed by a Zeppelin bomb; and most touching of all of the little child who, with the stump of his arm, ran in and said: "They've killed daddy and done this to me." These things stir our deepest feelings; but such a God as Caliban pictured his Setebos to be would have rejoiced at them and laughed to see them.

No wonder that this picture of God which has grown up in some minds produces absolute despair. People say, "If God is like that, what is the good of my doing anything? God will do what He likes, irrespective of what I do." Or, again, it produces a spirit of fatalism: "I'm made like that! It's not my fault." Like Aaron when reproached about the golden calf—"I cast the gold they gave me into the fire, and there came out this calf." And all this produces in the mind of mankind a kind of rebellion—nay, a hatred of God ("I hate God," said a man once to me)—which makes it quite impossible for any religion or trust or desire to pray to exist in the human soul. It is well worth while, then, to run this metaphor of the potter and the clay back to its source.

Here in Jeremiah is the original passage about the potter and the clay. Now if you read for yourself this passage in the eighteenth chapter of Jeremiah, you will find an absolutely different picture given. If you go with Jeremiah to the potter's house you find a humble, patient man at work dealing with refractory clay, patiently trying to make the best he can out of it, and when he is defeated in producing one object he makes another. If he cannot make a porcelain vase he will make a bowl; if he cannot produce a beautiful work of art he makes a flower-pot.

The potter has three things to notice about him. First of all, there is his patience. Then there is the fact that he is checked in his design by the clay at every moment. He has no arbitrary power; he is checked because he has to deal with a certain substance. And the last beautiful thing about the potter is his resourcefulness; he has always got the alternative of a second best. Though something has wrecked his first plan he has got another. This is the picture of God, these are the characteristics of God which we are to carry away from the potter and the clay.

1. Now just see, if this is so, what a tremendous light this throws upon the war. There are many to-day who do not think things out deeply, who look on this war as the breakdown of Christianity altogether. They say: All we have been taught, why, look how vain it is! Here are seven Christian nations at war and dragging in the rest of the world. All you have taught us about God, all you say about Christianity, is shown to be futile. We see the breakdown of Christianity indeed.

But wait a moment. Look at the potter and the clay, and see if you do not get some light from this. Here is the Potter, our great God; the great Potter knows what is in His mind; He has in His mind a world of universal peace. He is planning a porcelain vase in which the world is at peace. He meant men to be all of one mind. He made people of one blood to be of one mind in Christ Jesus. That is clearly His plan, His design, and we do well to pray for—

That is His plan, that is His design, and some day He will see it accomplished. "He shall see of the travail of His soul and shall be satisfied."

Meanwhile, because He acts like a potter, He is defeated again and again by the character of the clay, for He will not run counter to the free will of the individual or of a nation. If a great and powerful nation deliberately turns back from Christianity to Paganism, if that nation deliberately declares regret that it took up Christianity in the fourth century, if it has adopted the gospel that Might is Right, if the people turn to Odin as their ideal instead of to Christ, they defeat the plan of the great Potter; and so He cannot have the porcelain vase of universal peace. You have no right to blame God; it is the work of the Devil. God is hindered at every moment by the Devil and all his works; you cannot therefore blame our great and glorious God for the defeat of His design. The great Potter is not to be blamed because of the refractoriness of the clay.

But here comes the splendid resourcefulness of the great Potter. Although He cannot get out His first design of the porcelain vase of universal peace, He is not defeated. He has got a second-best; He will have a beautiful bowl of universal service—a people offering themselves out of sheer patriotism for the service of their country. And that is what He has produced to-day. Who would have thought that five millions of men would have volunteered to fight for their country? Who would have thought that every woman would feel herself disgraced if not doing something for her country as nurse, physician, or in a canteen? Why, the spirit of service abroad to-day among men and women is something we have not seen in our country for a hundred years. The great Potter, then, has produced something from the clay; He has produced the beautiful bowl of service. Let us thank Him for that!

2. But it is not only upon the war that the picture of the potter and the clay throws such light; it also shows what we have to do with our country. There are some people who imagine it is inconsistent to say two things at the same time. People blame me for declaring two things in the same breath. One is that we never have had such a righteous cause; that we are fighting for the freedom of our country, for the freedom of the world; that we are fighting for international honour, for the future brotherhood of nations; we are fighting for the "nailed hand against the mailed fist." But, on the other hand, are we to speak as if we had no faults of our own? Are we to take the tone of Pharisees and say, "We thank God we are not as other men, even as these Germans"? We have to admit that we have grave national sins ourselves, and if we want to shorten the war we have to put these national sins away. That is why we are going to have a national mission this autumn, and we are preparing for it now.

The Church is going to preach this great national mission, and—please God—our Non-conformist brethren will fall in on their own lines and do the same. We have great national sins, and we have to put those away if we would shorten the war. What a disgrace it is still to have a National Drink Bill of 180 millions! What a disgrace it is that we have not yet more thoroughly mastered immorality in London! What shame it is that still there is so much love of comfort, and that there are people making all they can out of the war!

We have to get rid of all this; we must have the spirit of sacrifice from one end of the nation to the other. We have to ask the great Potter to remake the country, to give the Empire a new spirit. Why was it that, when I had myself pressed a Bill to diminish the licensing hours on Sunday from six to three—a harmless reform, you would have thought—to give the barmen and barmaids a chance of Sunday rest, that was shelved in the long run? Why was it that we could not raise the age for the protection of girls even to eighteen? There is much to be purged out of our country, and there could be no greater calamity than for this war to end and England still to be left with her national sins.

Therefore the great Potter must remake us. He may have to break some nations to pieces like a potter's vessel. It is possible for a nation to be so stiffened in national sins that there may be nothing for it but to break it in pieces. We pray God that we may not be so far gone as that, that we may still be plastic clay in the hands of the Potter. That is our prayer, that is our ideal, to be a new England, a new British Empire, and that God may use us as His instrument in freeing the world.

3. But—and let this be my last word—we ourselves individually must be re-created. Have you ever thought, brother or sister, that the great Potter had a design for you? That, when He planned you, He planned a devoted man who would be a powerful influence in the world; that He planned you, my sister, to be an example of attractive goodness. How many people have you brought to Christ? How powerful a witness do you give in this city? Suppose that you, who were meant individually to be powerful instruments in God's hand, vessels He could use, have become middle-aged cynics, or sneer at the religion you profess to believe in, there is only one thing to be done. You must get back to the design the great Potter had for you. We have all some reason to admit that we have been marred in the hands of the Potter, and to ask the Potter to make us into another vessel as it may seem good to the Potter to make us. In this there are only two conditions—to look up and to trust heaven's wheel and not earth's wheel.

We have to realise this, that we can be remade, that God's power can do anything; but that we may go on for ever as we are unless we really put ourselves in the hands of God. What, then, I ask every one of you, is to take the clay of your nature with the prayer, "Just as I am, without one plea," and place it in the great Potter's hands, that He may re-create you into the man or woman God meant you to be. Nothing can more effectually shorten the days for our boys in the trenches.

II

THE SPLENDOUR OF GOD

"O God, wonderful art Thou in Thy holy places: Thou wilt give strength and power unto Thy people. Blessed be God."—Ps. lxviii. 35.

At the great Convention of all the clergy of London in Advent, 1915, we saw reasons for thinking that what the world had been losing sight of was the majesty of God; the lowered sense of sin, the neglect of worship, the uppishness of man, the pessimism of the day, and the querulous impatience under discomfort, are all signs of the loss of the sense of the majesty of God.

But I want now to go farther than this; I want to prove that the only way to revive praise, hope, peace, sacrifice, and courage, is to revive a belief, not only in the majesty, but in the splendour of God. It was said not long ago that even good Christians believed all the Creed except the first clause of it.

But if we leave out the first clause, "I believe in God," see what happens.

1. Prayer becomes unreal. It is only a delight when it is felt to be communion with a very noble and splendid person.

is only true if that short and glorious hour is spent with an inspiring and glorious personality. When, like Moses, our faces should shine as we come down from the mount.

2. Praise becomes practically impossible. Sometimes we say, "We really must praise God more." But we cannot make ourselves praise, any more than we can move a boat by swinging up and down in it. We must pull against something to make it move. What we want is an adequate idea of the splendour of God. When we come in sight of Mont Blanc or Niagara, or when we hear of some gallant deed on the battlefield, we say "How splendid!" quite naturally. We shall praise quite naturally when we catch sight—if only for a moment—of the true character of God, or believe He has done something great.

3. Religion, which means something which binds us to God, becomes an uninspiring series of detailed scruples about ourselves. Self-examination is most necessary; but it was well said by an experienced guide of souls that, "for every time we look at ourselves, we ought to look nine times at God."

Do some of you feel as I speak that your religion does not help you; that, while you have not given up your prayers, or coming to church, it is rather a burden than a help, or at any rate not such a help as it might be? It is because you have lost sight of the splendour of God.

4. Or, again, are you suffering from depression? You hardly know why, but everything seems to go wrong; you seem oppressed with what old writers called "accidie." Your will has lost its spring; the note of your life has lost its hope and its joyousness. You drag through life rather than "rise up with wings like an eagle" or "run," or even "walk." This is all because you have lost faith or never had faith in the splendour of God.

5. Or, on the contrary, you are busy from morning till night, and you are too busy for prayer or church; you are immersed in a thousand schemes for making money for yourself or for your family or for the good of mankind. And yet, with all your business abilities, you don't inspire people; you are conscious of a want yourself, and other people are more conscious of it. It is simply that you are without the one thing which matters; you are the planet trying to shine without its sun; you are ignoring the splendour of God.

I. For consider how splendid God is! These writers of the psalms had many limitations. They had a very inadequate belief in the life after the grave; they knew nothing about the Incarnation; they had no Christmas Day, Easter Day, Ascension Day, or Whit Sunday, to inspire them. But they are bursting with glorious song, because of their sense of the splendour of God. "Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made, Thou art God from everlasting, and world without end."

1. He is splendid, first, in His wonderful Power. I should not think of arguing with you as to the existence of God; although, to any thinking mind, the marvellous intricacy of the whole creation, from the largest sun to the smallest insect, demands a Thinking Mind; the thunder of the four hundred million consciences of mankind demands a Righteous Person. And a Creator who is at once wise and good is a God. No! it is not only His existence which should mean so much to us, but His astonishing power.

I remember when I was at Niagara being taken down to the great power-station, and through that power-station the power of Niagara Falls lighted, among other things, the whole of the great province of Ontario so that the solitary worker in some small town was working with the light from a great power-station which he had never seen, and in which he only, perhaps, partly believed.

But think of the Power-Station which works the whole universe; which gives the light to twenty million suns which have been counted and God knows how many which have never been seen, and yet which gives strength to the boy far from home as he leaps across the parapet into the battle. Well may another psalmist cry: "O God, wonderful art Thou in Thy holy places: Thou shalt give strength and power unto Thy people. Blessed be God."

And, surely, even if there were no other characteristic of the splendour of God, this ought to encourage us more than it does. To believe that in prayer you are in touch with unfathomable strength; that if you co-operate with God you have at your disposal His unrivalled and incomparable power—this ought to put heart into the most timid. We understand what Archbishop Trench meant when he said:

"We kneel how weak; we rise how full of power!"

2. But the power of God is really only the beginning of it. The next characteristic of the splendour of God is in His Generosity. "Thou openest Thine Hand, and fillest all things living with plenteousness," says the psalmist. You could scarcely get a more beautiful description of the open-handedness of God, and the ease with which God showers His gifts upon the world.

(a) When you come to think of it, there is no explanation of man's possession of life, except the open-handedness of God. He simply gave him life, and there is nothing more to be said about it. It is at present still a scientific truth that "Life only comes from life." Life has never been yet spontaneously generated. When men thought they had succeeded in creating life, it was discovered that some previous germ of life had been left in the hermetically sealed vessel. But even if, in the years to come, some sort of life was produced from apparently dead matter, would it really have any bearing on the age-long belief that this free, joyous life of man and animal has come from God? When you ask why He gave life, there is only one answer: That so many more living, sentient beings might sun themselves in the sunshine of His own happiness, He opened His Hand and life came out.

(b) But He was not content with giving life. He gave all the colour of life; He painted the most glorious world out of the riches of His marvellous imagination; every variety of flower; every plumage of bird; every species of tree—often brought to the best by the slow process of evolution. He gave it all; He flung it out in all the exuberance of delight in what was "very good." He gave colour to our own life. He gave us our warm friendships; our keen intellectual interest in problems; the love of mother, wife, husband, father, child. He flung it all out, like a joyous giver; "He filled all things living with plenteousness."

(c) But not content with this life, He had another ready when this was over. He knew the boys wanted life, and that this life would not be enough to satisfy them, especially if they died early; so He had another ready for them. And here, again, another psalmist dashes in with his word of praise: "He asked life of Thee, and Thou gavest him a long life, even for ever."

This is our glorious hope to-day. It is only when we have grasped the splendour of the generosity of God that we can really appraise the meanness of man.

Nearly all the ills of our life on earth—the poverty, the class hatred, the wars—come from an unfair grasping at an unfair share of the gifts of the generous God.

some poet sang of the gipsies.

God gave plenty of land, and plenty of water, and plenty of air, and if the New Testament motto had been followed, "Having food and raiment, with these we shall have enough," the generosity of God would have been mirrored in the generosity of man.

3. But even this marvellous power and generosity would not excite the passionate love of mankind, but for His Humility. Power may only awe; the merely generous Lord or Lady Bountiful, kind as they often are, are sometimes felt to do it in a spirit of patronage and self-pleasing; they like to be thought bountiful and kind, and have their reward in the grateful looks and even obsequious demeanour of the recipients of their bounty. But it is Christmas which really stirs the blood. That this powerful, generous Being should manifest His power and shower down His gifts was wonderful; but that He should give Himself—this was sublime! This is what stirred heaven to its depths—"Glory to God in the highest!"

The crowning splendour of God was His Humility. He was great when He said, "Let there be light, and there was light." He was mighty when He opened His Hand and filled all things living with plenteousness. But He was greatest of all when He lay as a babe in the manger. Well may the adoring Christian look up at Christmas and salute this third revelation of the splendour of God:

II. What, then, ought this belief in the splendid power, generosity, and humility of God to produce in us?

1. It must produce Praise. It must make us say: "Praise God in His holiness; praise Him in the firmament of His power."

You have caught sight of Mont Blanc and you have seen Niagara, and you say quite naturally, "How splendid!"

2. It produces Hope. War, slaughter, misery, can't be the end, if such a God exists. It may be inevitable from man's lust, ambition, and greed; but it can't be the end—if God's people work with God: there must be a kingdom coming at last in which dwelleth, not ambition, tyranny, or cruelty, but "righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost."

3. It produces Peace. Once believe in the splendour of God, and you get "the peace of God, which passeth all understanding." "Thou wilt keep him," says the prophet, "in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Thee." The world is not out of God's Hand, as some people would persuade us, nor any individual in the world. "The very hairs of your head are all numbered," and "ye are of more value than many sparrows."

4. And it produces answering Sacrifice and Courage. What we want to-day is "the warrior's mind," which gives and does not heed the cost, which fights and does not heed the wounds; and we can only be nerved for this by the splendid self-sacrifice of God Himself.

If man is God's child, then it must be a case of "Like Father, like son," and the splendour of God must be answered by the nobility of man. To know such a God is to live, to serve such a God is to reign; with such a faith, death loses its sting, and the grave its terrors. For to die is to pass into the presence of One who has shown Himself powerful and generous and humble. And the response of the grateful soul, with ten times the conviction of the psalmist, when he thinks of what happened on Christmas Day, will be the same words uttered so many thousand years ago:

"O God, wonderful art Thou in Thy holy places.... He will give strength and power unto His people. Blessed be God."

III

GOD THE KING OF THE WORLD[4]

"God is my King of old; the help that is done upon earth He doeth it Himself."—Ps. lxxiv. 12.

God is either non-existent or His existence is the greatest fact in the universe. Either the secularist is right, and there is nothing but the strong hand and the keen brain of man and woman to better the condition of world, or, if there be a Person who created the great blazing suns that we call stars, whose imagination is so vast that He controls the movements of history, and yet whose knowledge is so detailed that the welfare of the smallest child in a great city is of infinite interest to Him, then the existence of that Person is the greatest fact in all the world. No question is so urgent as what He thinks about a problem; nothing is so vitally important as to know what His mind is, for instance, as to the issue of a great war. No one is quite so foolish as the man or woman who either plans his or her own life, or who propounds schemes for the improvement of the world, without taking the greatest Fact in all the world into account, or keeping in touch with what must be on this hypothesis the ultimate Source and Fount of all power and the Mainspring of all energy. If there be such a Person at all, the wires might as well expect to convey a message apart from the electric current as for the human instrument to avail without God.

Now, I think it is quite likely that among so many busy people, whose brains are all full of practical schemes, there may be some whose minds may have but little hold on God, and may be troubled by doubts, such as I remember my own mind was in the days of my youth. After all, one mind is very much like another; and in speaking to women I have long learnt to speak as if I was speaking to men, and in this I never found myself very much astray. If I tell you, then, how the reality of God gradually dawned upon one mind, it is only in the hope that through what may be similar clouds of vagueness and doubt the light may shine upon another.

1. I think undoubtedly that Nature was, and always will be to most minds, the first help. It does seem more and more impossible that the ordered universe can have been produced by chance. To use an illustration I have often used, especially on Sunday afternoons at the open-air meetings in the parks of East London, if a box of letters cannot throw themselves into a play of Shakespeare because there is clearly the mark of mind in the play, how little credible is it that the atoms of the universe have thrown themselves into the universe as we see it to-day! We feel inclined to add to the trenchant questions in the Book of Job the further question: Who wrapped the atmosphere round the earth and made life possible, and stopped the friction? Was the beauty of the earth the surprise, or the gift to His children of a Being with a beautiful mind? Can the ordered course of the silent stars be produced by any amount of juggling with chance out of the atoms of the world? In other words, Nature drives us not only to God, but to a very strong God and a very present God. If the great astronomer Herschel is right, and every atom has the appearance of a created thing and every law of Nature requires, as he says, the continual application of force, we are "up against"—to use a cant phrase of the day—we are up against the most powerful Person the world has ever known. To swing the smallest planet on its orbit is beyond the power of the greatest superman ever present to the brain of a megalomaniac. But to swing twenty millions of blazing suns, and to swing them every day and every night, and to swing them, as far as we know, for millions of years, requires a Person of surpassing strength and most present power, for it is clear that of this wonderful thing which is done upon earth every day and every night "He doeth it Himself."

2. But if the philosopher Kant was right in saying that the first thing which filled him with awe was the starry heavens without, he went on to say that the second was the moral law within. And if the minds of you women are like my own, the path of the discovery of God lies next through the conscience. What is it, this indistinct knocking, this voice, which though it can be stilled can never be silenced? If it is only a product of mingled self-interest and heredity, as some would uphold, why does it persistently urge us, sometimes in almost bitter tones, against our immediate self-interest?

Why must the boy leave his brilliant prospects and put himself under the bullets and shells in the trenches? Why must the mother let him go? It is only a shallow thinker, I believe, who can remain long under the impression that the "categorical imperative," as Kant called it, or, as we might say, this insistent, imperious voice, can be produced by any process of evolution at all. It speaks like the voice of a person; it argues like a person; it refuses to be silenced like a person. And the argument is more than justified that, if there is a Person who made the world and still carries it on, it is more than probably the same Person who is speaking to us in conscience. The fact that by His warnings and encouragements He clearly cares so much for righteousness is a standing witness that the Person who swings the stars is more than a strong and clever devil, which the author of the material universe alone might conceivably be, but a Person with a passion for goodness. Otherwise, as Dr. Chalmers said, He would not have placed in the breast of every one of His children, of every one of His created beings, a reclaiming witness against Himself.

We have come, then, a good way out of sceptical vagueness when we have arrived at a Person of appalling power, and yet of equally appalling righteousness, who is thundering His will through every conscience in the world, as though standing in the midst of the universe and striking at the same time four hundred million gongs; not leaving it for someone else to do, but doing it Himself.

But, alas! we are still far from loving Him, for indeed He is still far from being lovable. Love is the only thing which we cannot command at will and which we cannot give at will; and the world would be in a sorry plight so far as loving God is concerned, if nothing more had been done by God than this.

3. After all, there are many things which might make us inclined to hate this immensely strong and righteous Person. With all His strength and with all His righteousness, there is a terrible amount of suffering in the world. The old question that some of your children may have asked you who are mothers has far more in it than appears upon the surface: "Oh, mother, why does not God kill the devil?" The world is filled with injustice and cruelty, and especially so to-day. Ypres Cathedral and the Cloth Hall, as I have seen with my own eyes, are in ruins. So are thousands of homes in Belgium, France, and Poland, and yet not one single thing was done by the innocent inhabitants to deserve this fate. Who is going to give life again to the hundreds shot in cold blood in Louvain and Aerschott and elsewhere, and seen shot by one of the clergy of the diocese of London; or honour again to the outraged women and girls; or restore the dead children—born and unborn—to the mothers who lost their children in the last Zeppelin raid? Where is the God of the fatherless and of the widow? It is all very well to say, "It is God in His holy habitation." But why does He sit up there in His holy habitation while such things are being done upon earth? Is He reclining, as Tennyson pictured the ancient gods,