IX

BACK MOVES

I WAS enjoying the rare blessedness of an evening free from engagements. I was revelling in the luxury of a glorious arm-chair, a blazing fire, and a fascinating book. The children were seated at the table behind me, absorbed in the desperate hazards of the game that lay between them. The only noise was the rustle of the leaves of my book. But at length the silence was broken. ‘You can’t do that!’ I heard one of the players cry, ‘there are no back moves!’ I read on; but had not gone far when I came upon this sentence: ‘The unseen opponent in the great game of life, while scrupulously fair, will allow no back moves, and makes us pay in full for every blunder.’ The words, of course, are Huxley’s. I wonder if he is right! I am not at all sure that he has spoken the last word.

So many men find their lives entangled, prejudiced, compromised, that unless you can promise them something in the nature of a back move the most you can offer seems so paltry and small. Go to an almshouse, for example, and the eld people will remind you that you can’t give them their lives over again. Visit a jail, and, in some form or other, the terrible question will present itself in every cell: ‘Can I begin again at the point at which I went astray?’ Talk to a man who is in the grip of the drink fiend. He does not doubt for a moment the willingness of God to forgive. He is even inclined to think it possible that the power of God might be able to keep him from the dreadful snare. But see the stain on his life! He thinks with unspeakable horror of his tarnished name, his humiliated wife, his trembling hand. Have you nothing to say to him about a fresh start, a clean sheet, a back move? If not, you will lose him in spite of everything.

Now I imagine that most of us have passed through three distinct phases of thought on this subject. I confess that I have. They are three inevitable stages of development. First of all, there was the period at which we assured men, with the most sublime confidence, that their sins, like a dark cloud, could be blotted from the face of the sky and wiped into oblivion. The ugly stain, we told them, could be perfectly and eternally erased. We boasted, in our fine evangelistic fervour, that a sinner might not only be pardoned, but be justified. For a sinful man to be justified, we elaborately explained, was for a wicked man to be made as though he had never been wicked at all. Sin is not only forgiven; it is annihilated, cast behind God’s back, hurled into the depths of the sea. Salvation, under that first interpretation, was nothing less than a magnificent back move.

Then came doubts, suspicions, and the second phase. We found it was not all so simple as we thought. The jail-bird is converted; but who will trust him? The old record is so damning! The drunkard kneels in a tempest of tears at the penitent-form; but the bloated face, and the palsied hand, and—worse still—the awful craving are there still. We recalled John B. Cough’s bitter, bitter cry: ‘The scars remain!’ he lamented, ‘scars never to be eradicated, never to be removed in this life. I have been plucked like a brand from the burning; but the scar of the fire is on me!’ And George Mac Donald emphasizes, with a very tender but a very telling touch, another aspect of the same problem. The passage occurs in Wilfrid Cumbermede. ‘Do you know, Wilfrid, I once shot a little bird for no good, but just to shoot at something. I knew it was wrong, yet I drew the trigger. It dropped, a heap of ruffled feathers. I shall never get that little bird out of my head. And the worst of it is that, to all eternity I can never make any atonement.’ ‘But God will forgive you, Charley!’ ‘What do I care for that,’ he rejoined almost fiercely, ‘when the little bird cannot forgive me?’ Yes, there is just that element in life that makes back moves very difficult. And, unhappily, the wreckage men have wrought is not always confined to a heap of ruffled feathers. What if, whilst Heaven absolves, earth finds it hard to entertain kind thoughts of us? What if, instead of little birds, our own flesh and blood rise up in judgment against us? There is, undoubtedly, a good deal to give pause to our early theology; a good deal to enforce the cheerless philosophy of Omar Khayyam:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your piety nor wit
    Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.

We abode among these sombre thoughts for many years, and fancied that we had reached finality. We pitched our tent in this dismal wilderness and regarded it as home. We foolishly imagined that this was the last phase, and that there was no more to be said. And when the felon looked eagerly up into our eyes, as he sat in his lonely cell, and asked about the new start, the clean sheet, the back move, we were dumb.

Then came emancipation, and the third phase. And, as usual, the Bible brought it. We were browsing among the prophecies; we came upon Jeremiah’s story of the potter. ‘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. Then the word of the Lord came to me saying, O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter? saith the Lord.’  He made it again! That is surely as near to a back move as it is possible to get! I remember hearing the Rev. F. B. Meyer tell of a woman who, on her way to commit suicide, heard the singing in Christ Church, Westminster, and stole into the porch. She was only a poor, soiled, broken bit of London’s outcast womanhood. It happened that Mr. Meyer preached on the story of the potter, the vessel marred and remade. There was no further thought of suicide. She was charmed at the prospect of a back move. Surely when Jesus talked to Nicodemus of being ‘born again,’ He was promising a back move!

Then, too, in turning over these ancient prophecies, I came to Joel. Everybody knows that the entire prophecy of Joel was suggested by the historic and unprecedented plague of locusts which had just devastated the entire land. The very sun was darkened, the fields and vineyards were a howling wilderness, business in the city was paralysed; even the sacrifices in the Temple were suspended. In the midst of this awful visitation, this fearful scourge, this national calamity, the prophet was commanded to cry: ‘Fear not, O land; be glad and rejoice: for the Lord will do great things. I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten.’ And the promise, royally given, was royally fulfilled. The sun was once more shining out of a clear sky. The vines were bowing beneath the burden of wealthy and luscious clusters. The hills, with rich, delicious grass for the cattle, were as green as emerald. The valleys laughed and sang with their golden crops of corn. The city was humming with commercial prosperity. And, to crown all, the temple was once again crowded with devout worshippers. The years that the locust had eaten were all fully restored.

Now if only I could go to that felon’s cell, to that drunkard’s home, and to a hundred other places that occur to me, with a message like that! ‘I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten!’ That would be grand! That would be a gospel of back moves with a vengeance! And may I not? Now let me think!

How was the promise fulfilled? How did the Most High restore the years that the locust had eaten? It is very simple. What the locusts took, they took; and there was no return. But the next year? Why, the next year the hills and valleys of Palestine were such a scene of abundant harvest and prodigal growth that the people were fully compensated for the loss of the previous season. Now, as the children say, we are getting warm!

Have we never known a life that, in its later years, displayed a sweetness and a purity and a grace which were the direct outcome of earlier suffering or of earlier sin? Can we not recall the memory of saintly and fruitful lives in which both the sanctity and the fruitfulness were the natural result of hideous memories of former transgression? It was the haunting nightmare of their old sins that drove both Bunyan and Newton to such intense personal piety and to such fervent evangelistic zeal. We have all known men who, in days gone by, lived in open and notorious shame. Then came the change. Their faith was a pattern to us all in its exquisite and childlike simplicity. The very enormity of their transgressions made religion a revelry to them and the thought of pardon a perpetual luxury. Their faces were radiant. They never referred to their experiences but with streaming eyes and faltering voices. Their testimony was so impressive as to carry conviction to all who heard it. And as we saw how strong men were moved by their utterance we felt that God, in His own wise and wonderful way, was restoring to them the years that the locust had eaten. In the familiar lines of Hezekiah Butterworth there are two significant buts, and we are in danger of noticing only the one:

But the bird with the broken pinion
Never soared so high again.

This is the first. That is the truth that Huxley saw. But it is not the whole truth. There is another but:

But the bird with the broken pinion
Kept another from the snare,
And the life that sin had stricken
Raised another from despair.

Each loss has its compensations,
There is healing for every pain;
Though the bird with the broken pinion
Never soars so high again.

And, surely, surely, to ‘save another from the snare,’ or to ‘raise another from despair’ is the very best of back moves! ‘I do not regret the past,’ cried the ‘Lady of the Decoration,’ at the close of her story, ‘for through it the present is. All the loneliness, the heartaches, and the pains are justified now! I believe that, whilst I have been struggling out here in Japan, God has restored to me the years that the locust had eaten, and that I shall be permitted to return to a new life, a life given back by God!’ Who shall say that life has no back moves after that?

F. W. Boreham