The Potter and the Clay. Arthur F. Winnington Ingram
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—
" … the promised time
When war shall be no more,
And lust, oppression, crime,
Shall flee Thy face before."
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.
"Look not thou down, but up!