IV.
THE PASSING OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
Long, long ago, when simple and primitive peoples found room in their folk-lore for hobgoblins, unicorns, witches, and trolls, there were those who were actually sufficiently superstitious to believe that such things as ‘impossibilities’ really existed. These milestones in the progress of the race from barbarism to civilization are most fascinating! Of course we know, being the Christians that we are, that there is no such thing as an impossibility in the world or out of it. An impossibility is an impossibility. Impossibilities belong to the realm of mythology. They inhabit the same weird world as the brownies and the elves, the fairies and the ghouls. As serious and scientific and practical and believing men, we must frankly confess to ourselves that the very notion of an impossibility is, on the face of it, a ludicrous absurdity. I know that Professor Dryasdust will hotly challenge my conclusion. He will crush me, to his own entire satisfaction, by saying that a triangle with four sides is an impossibility. But poor old Professor Dryasdust really does not know what he is talking about! He most certainly does not know what he is talking about when he talks of a triangle with four sides. For a triangle with four sides is a contradiction in terms, a mere mental aberration, a confusion of incomprehensible sounds, a mathematical gibberish, an intellectual Borrioboola-Gha. There is no such thing as a triangle with four sides. There is no such thing as an impossibility. Professor Dryasdust is right after all. The triangle with four sides and the impossibility stand or fall together. They fall.
Nothing is impossible. The very word is relative and not absolute. It was simply impossible yesterday to do the things that we do with ease to-day. And the very fact that we do them with ease to-day proves that they were not really impossible yesterday. We cannot do to-day what our children will do tomorrow. But the fact that our children will do those things to-morrow shows that they are not absolutely, but merely relatively, impossible to-day. Leander would have considered it impossible to have crossed the Hellespont in an aeroplane! But it wasn’t! He didn’t know how to do it, that was all! Julius Caesar would have regarded it as impossible to flash his famous ‘Veni, vidi, vici!’ to the Senate by wireless! But it wasn’t! The only trouble was that he didn’t know how! Homer would have supposed that it was impossible to write the Iliad with a fountain pen, or to click off the Odyssey with a typewriter! Nero never dreamed of driving down the Appian Way in a motor-car! But these things were not impossibilities. We have demonstrated that. And our children’s children will prove in like manner that the things that seem to us grotesquely impossible are as simple as simple can be. We may hope to become in time like Alice in Wonderland when she was pursuing the White Rabbit. ‘For you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened to her that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.’ It would do us all a world of good to chase white rabbits if, in doing so, we could all make the same splendid and invaluable discovery. Things are never impossible. The only obstacle is our own pitiful ignorance, or our own pitiful indolence.
‘It is utterly impossible!’ said the natives of Central Africa to David Livingstone when the intrepid explorer proposed to cross the Kalahari Desert in the course of his first missionary journey. ‘It is utterly impossible, even to us black men!’ Livingstone smiled. He knew that impossibilities belong to the same realm as witches and trolls. He gathered around him his wife and little children, and, in their company, crossed that impossible desert!
‘It is utterly impossible!’ said the Spanish priests to Columbus. ‘We can prove from the Bible that a new hemisphere in the West is an absolute impossibility!’ Yet there it was; and Columbus found it!
‘It is utterly impossible!’ said Augustine. ‘I can prove from the inspired Scriptures that an antipodean world is an utter impossibility!’ Yet here am I writing these words in Australia!
‘It is utterly impossible!’ said some very learned doctors of the Church when a nest of consecrated cobblers suggested missions to the heathen. ‘Savages can never be anything but savages!’ To which let Henry Drummond’s great chapter on ‘The Dawn of Mind’ make answer. He instances people after people that have been suddenly transformed from abysmal depths of barbarism to high levels of civilization. ‘The situation is dramatic!’ he exclaims.
The fact is that the next step in human progress is always an invasion of the territory of the impossible. Always ! The directors of a shipping company, for example, propose to build a new vessel. The most brilliant and daring nautical architects in the world are summoned to their council-table. A plan is at length submitted. The directors, eager for the best, turn upon the architects. ‘Is it not possible, gentlemen, to improve upon this in some particular?’ ‘It is absolutely impossible!’ the architects reply. Yet, before the steamer is launched, proposals for the erection of a much more stately ship have been submitted; and, by the time that the second vessel is ready for the sea, the first is ridiculed as old-fashioned and obsolete! What has happened? We have invaded the impossible, that is all. To send a telegram would have seemed a screaming impossibility to our great-grandfathers. To send a telegram without wires would have seemed just as quixotic to their sons. But, one after the other, each frontier was happily crossed. Yes; the next step in the progress of the world is always an invasion of the impossible. When Lord Russell of Killowen and Sir Frank Lockwood visited Mr. Edison, he told them that he never attempted possible things. Impossibilities were the only things worth trying ! Mr. Edgar A. Guest has finely sung :
Somebody said that it couldn’t be done,
But he with a chuckle replied,
That’ maybe it couldn’t, but he would be one
Who wouldn’t say so till he tried.’
So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin
On his face. If he worried he hid it.
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done—and he did it!
Why, when you come to think of it, we are for ever and ever doing impossibilities. We are at it morning, noon, and night. It is one of our most inveterate habits. The food we eat, the clothes we wear, the papers we read, the engines we drive, the houses in which we live, and the conveyances in which we ride — all have emerged from the embryonic condition of impossibilities. Yet here they all are! If any reader is inclined to suspect that a real live impossibility does somewhere lurk among the shadows of the solar system, let him begin his education all over again. Let him reach from its obscure shelf a book that enchained his fancy in his infancy. I mean the Water Babies. That second chapter is a capital piece of writing. And it abounds with illustrations that are right into our hands at this point. ‘The truth is,’ Kingsley concludes, ‘that we fancy that such and such things cannot be simply because we have not seen them, just as a savage fancies that there cannot be such a thing as a locomotive because he never saw one running wild in the forest.’
Now, there is one text among the great sayings of Jesus that I confess I never understood until very lately: ‘Verily, I say unto you, if ye have faith as a grain of mustard-seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove ; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.’ Now, I was so incredulous about the possibility of removing mountains that I had to see it done before I really and truly believed. I am writing in Tasmania. And here in Tasmania we have a mountain — Mount Lyell. And gradually a strange faith stole into the hearts of men. They believed that underneath Mount Lyell there was an abundance of copper. They suspected it. They investigated it. They believed it ! And when they really believed it, they actually said unto the mountain, ‘Remove hence into yonder place!’ They believed; they moved the mountain; and nothing was impossible to them. The men who drove the spectral impossibilities from the shadows of our civilization were great believers, all of them. Columbus did not believe in the new world because he discovered it; he discovered it because he first of all believed it. Sir James Simpson believed that it was possible to perform the ghastliest operations painlessly. And he invented chloroform. Marconi, Rontgen, Edison, and the rest all believed that certain things were possible. And they soon actualized their creeds. Their mirages became pools. All human experience goes to show that ‘nothing is impossible to him that believeth.’
Now, all this proves that we are living in a very possible world. Its people are possible people; its problems are possible problems; its tasks are possible tasks. Yes, its tasks are possible tasks, even the greatest of them. Nothing has militated against the Christian conquest of the world more powerfully than the secret suspicion that the splendid enterprise is impossible. That dark nightmare always paralyses. Great achievers were ever great believers. And great believers were ever prodigious workers. Let them but believe, though it be only in copper, and they will move mountains.
The history of missions is one continuous story of the invasion of the impossible. Take three illustrations: (1) When Robert Moffat set out for Namaqualand, the people of the Cape wept over his certain destruction. ‘The great chief Africaner will tear you to pieces!’ they cried. ‘He will strip off your skin and make a drum of it to dance to!’ said one. ‘ He will make a drinking-cup of your skull!’ exclaimed another. Yet in a few weeks Moffat and Africaner were partners in the sweetest Christian fellowship, and comrades in devoted Christian service! (2) And again, there is no ghastlier page in our missionary annals than the story of Liwanika and the Barotse people. Read Coillard’s letters to Arnot. I once heard Arnot tell the story. ‘I do not know what is in store for these poor tribes,’ Coillard writes. ‘The horizon is dark, and the sky very stormy; it seems as if we were witnessing the last days of the Barotse nation… Liwanika has exterminated his enemies, even those whom he feared might one day become his enemies. I never saw such bloodthirsty people.’ It is a grim and ugly story of ceaseless brutality, cruelty, and carnage. Yet a few years later that very chief, Liwanika, as a Christian ruler, represented his people, as a Christian people, at the Coronation of King Edward in Westminster Abbey, and went out of his way to show practical sympathy with all aggressive missionary enterprises. (3) Henry Martyn once said that he would as soon expect to see one rise from the dead as to see a Brahmin become a Christian. Yet in the very pagoda where a century ago Henry Martyn kneeled in prayer, Christian Brahmins from every province in India recently met to organize a native missionary society under native management, and to be supported entirely by native money ! Who believes in impossibilities after that?
Is the immediate conquest of the world possible? The question is ridiculous. The world contains millions of Christians. But the task does not need millions. Millions ought to be able to evangelize the entire universe. Fifty men of the stamp of Paul and Xavier and Wesley would make Christ known to every living soul on the face of the earth in twenty years. That is our shame. If I could call spirits from the vasty deep, and if they would come when I did call for them, I would undertake to summon to the task a hundred heroes who would make the whole wide world ring with the praise of Christ, whilst we were still droning over our minute-books. It is the indisputable possibility of the task that makes our tragic failure so shockingly humiliating. Yes, it is all quite clear. We simply need to visit the Delectable Mountains with Christiana and her party, and to climb Mount Marvel, ‘where was a man who tumbled the hills about to show pilgrims how to tumble their difficulties out of their way.’ This redoubtable son of Great Grace knew perfectly well that there is no room in the universe — nor in a million universes — for both a God and an impossibility. If you are quite sure of God, there is no crack or crevice among all His worlds that can harbour an impossibility. Atheism alone is the religion of the impossible; and, for that very reason, it is an impossible religion. No man yet born has a faith roomy enough to permit of his believing in God and in the impossible at one and the same time. All things are possible to him that believeth.
-F.W. Boreham
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