The Expulsive Power of a New Affection
"Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him" (1 John 2:15).
There are two ways in which a practical moralist may attempt to displace from the human heart its love of the world. The first is by demonstrating the world's vanity, so that the heart is persuaded simply to withdraw its regard from an object unworthy of it. The second is by setting forth another object, even God, as more worthy of its attachment, so that the heart is persuaded not to resign an old affection and leave nothing in its place, but to exchange an old affection for a new one. My purpose is to show that, given the constitution of our nature, the former method is altogether incompetent and ineffectual, and that only the latter method will suffice to rescue and recover the heart from the wrong affection that dominates it. After accomplishing this purpose, I shall offer a few practical observations.
Love may be regarded in two different conditions. The first is when its object is at a distance, and then it becomes love in a state of desire. The second is when its object is in possession, and then it becomes love in a state of indulgence.
Under the impulse of desire, a person feels urged onward in some path of pursuit and activity toward gratification. The faculties of the mind are put into busy exercise. One great and engrossing interest holds the attention steady, recalling it from the many reveries into which it might otherwise have wandered. The powers of the body are drawn away from an idleness in which they might otherwise have languished. Time is crowded with occupation, whereas without some object of keen and devoted ambition it might have trickled along in successive hours of weariness and distaste. Though hope does not always enliven, and success does not always crown this career of exertion, yet in the midst of this very variety, and through the alternations of occasional disappointment, the whole machinery of the person is kept in a kind of congenial play and maintained in that tone and temper most agreeable to it.
So if, through the dying out of the desire that forms the originating principle of all this movement, the machinery were to stop and receive no impulse from another desire substituted in its place, the person would be left with all his impulses to action in a state of most painful and unnatural abandonment. A sensitive being suffers, and is in a kind of violence, if, after having thoroughly rested from fatigue or been relieved from pain, he continues to possess powers without anything to call them forth; if he has a capacity for desire without an object of desire; or if he carries a spare energy within himself, without a counterpart and without a stimulus to call it into operation.
The misery of such a condition is often felt by those who have retired from business, from law, or even from the occupations of the hunt and the gaming table. Such is our nature's demand for an object in pursuit that no accumulation of previous success can extinguish it. The most prosperous merchant, the most victorious general, and the most fortunate gambler, when the labor of their respective vocations has come to a close, are often found to languish in the midst of all their acquisitions, as if removed from their native element. It is quite in vain, given this built-in appetite for employment in man, to attempt cutting away the spring or principle of one employment without providing him with another. The whole heart and habit will rise in resistance against such an undertaking.
The otherwise unoccupied woman who spends every evening at some game of chance knows as well as you that the financial gain, or the honorable triumph of a successful contest, is altogether paltry. No demonstration of vanity will force her away from her dear and delightful occupation. The habit cannot simply be displaced, leaving nothing but a negative and cheerless vacancy behind it, though it may be supplanted by another habit of employment, to which the power of some new affection has driven her. It is willingly suspended, for example, on any single evening when the time usually allotted to gaming must be spent on the preparations for an approaching party. The rising power of a second affection will accomplish what no exposition of the folly and worthlessness of the first, however forcible, could ever bring about.
The same is true in the wider world. We will never be able to arrest any of its leading pursuits by a bare demonstration of their vanity. It is quite in vain to think of stopping one of these pursuits in any way other than by stimulating another. In attempting to bring a worldly man, intent and busied with his objects, to a dead stop, we have not merely to overcome the charm he attaches to those objects; we also have to overcome the pleasure he feels in the very pursuit of them. It is not enough, then, to dispel that charm by a moral, eloquent, and affecting exposure of its emptiness. We must set before the eye of his mind another object, with a charm powerful enough to dispossess the first of its influence and to engage him in some other pursuit as full of interest, hope, and congenial activity as the former.
This is what stamps an impotence on all moral and stirring declamation about the insignificance of the world. A man will no more consent to the misery of being without an object, because that object is a trifle, or of being without a pursuit, because that pursuit ends in some frivolous or fleeting prize, than he will voluntarily submit himself to torture because that torture is to be of short duration. If to be altogether without desire and without exertion is a state of violence and discomfort, then the present desire, with its corresponding train of exertion, cannot simply be destroyed; it must be replaced. Another desire, and another habit of exertion, must be set in its place. The most effective way to draw the mind away from one object is not to turn it toward a desolate and empty vacancy, but to set before it another object more alluring still.
These remarks apply not only to love as it reaches toward an object not yet obtained. They apply equally to love as it rests in quiet enjoyment of an object already possessed. Rarely do our tastes die out through a natural process of extinction. More rarely still does this happen through the force of reasoning alone. Excessive indulgence may wear a taste down, but sheer mental determination almost never kills it outright. Yet what cannot be destroyed in this way can be displaced. One taste can be made to yield to another and lose entirely its hold as the ruling affection of the mind.
This is how the boy eventually stops being a slave to appetite, not because the appetite fades, but because a manlier taste has brought it into subjection. It is how the young man stops idolizing pleasure, not through moral effort, but because the idol of wealth has grown stronger and seized the upper hand. Even the love of money loses its grip over many a thriving citizen's heart, not through any weakening of that love, but because he has been drawn into the current of city politics; a new affection has been worked into his moral system, and he is now governed by the love of power.
In not one of these transformations is the heart left without an object. Its desire for any one particular thing may be conquered, but its desire to have some object, some one thing to fix on, is unconquerable. The heart's attachment to whatever it has chosen cannot willingly be broken by mere separation. It can only be overcome by presenting something else to which the heart feels an even stronger and more powerful pull. Such is the grasping tendency of the human heart that it must have something to hold onto. If that something is torn away without another being set in its place, the result is a void as painful to the mind as hunger is to the body.
The heart may be dispossessed of one object, or of many, but it cannot be stripped of all. Imagine a living, feeling heart with no liking, no affinity for anything around it: in cheerless abandonment it would be alive to nothing but the burden of its own consciousness, and would find that burden unbearable. It would make no difference whether its owner lived in the middle of a bright and pleasant world or was placed far beyond the edge of creation, a solitary point in dark and empty nothingness. The heart must have something to cling to. Never, by its own free consent, will it strip itself so bare of all attachments that not a single object remains to draw or solicit it.
The misery of a heart thus emptied of all relish for what once gave it enjoyment is strikingly illustrated by those who, glutted with indulgence, have been so overwhelmed by the variety and intensity of pleasurable sensations that they are finally worn out of all capacity for sensation whatsoever. The disease of boredom is more common in the French capital, where amusement is more exclusively the occupation of the higher classes, than in the British capital, where the longings of the heart are more diversified by the resources of business and politics. There are the devotees of fashion who have become, in this way, the victims of fashionable excess, people in whom the sheer multitude of enjoyments has at last extinguished the very power of enjoyment. With the gratifications of art and nature at their command, they now look upon everything around them with an eye of tastelessness. Plied with the delights of sense and splendor even to weariness, and incapable of higher delights, they have come to the end of all their perfection and, like Solomon of old, found it to be vanity and vexation.
The man whose heart has been turned into a desert can vouch for the unbearable weariness that follows when one affection is plucked from the breast without another to replace it. It is not necessary that a man suffer pain from anything in order to become miserable. It is enough that he looks with distaste upon everything. In that asylum which is the repository of minds out of joint, where the organ of feeling as well as the organ of intellect has been impaired, it is not in the cell of loud and frantic outcries that we shall meet with the height of mental suffering. The individual who surpasses all his fellows in wretchedness is the one who, throughout the whole expanse of nature and society, meets not a single object with the power to detain or interest him. He knows of no charm, neither in earth beneath nor in heaven above, to which his heart can send forth one desiring or responding movement. The world, in his eye a vast and empty desolation, has left him nothing but his own consciousness to feed upon, dead to all that is outside him, and alive to nothing but the burden of his own listless and useless existence.
It will now perhaps be seen why the heart clings to its present affections with such tenacity when the attempt is to remove them by a mere process of uprooting. It will not consent to be so emptied. The strong man whose dwelling-place is there may be compelled to give way to another occupant, but unless one stronger than he has the power to dispossess and succeed him, he will hold his present lodging inviolable. The heart would revolt against its own emptiness. It could not bear to be left in a state of waste and cheerless dullness. The moralist who attempts such a process of dispossession upon the heart is thwarted at every step by the recoil of its own mechanism.
You have all heard that nature abhors a vacuum. Such at least is the nature of the heart, that though the room within it may change one occupant for another, it cannot be left empty without the pain of most intolerable suffering. It is not enough, then, to argue the folly of an existing affection. It is not enough, in the terms of a forcible or affecting demonstration, to make good the passing away of its object. It may not even be enough to associate the threats and terrors of coming vengeance with the indulgence of it. The heart may still resist every such application, since to obey each one would eventually leave it in a state utterly at war with all its appetites, a state of sheer emptiness. To tear an affection from the heart so completely as to leave it bare of all its regards and preferences would be a hard and hopeless undertaking. The only truly powerful engine of dispossession, it appears, is to bring another affection to bear upon it and master the first through that.
We know of no more sweeping prohibition on the affections of nature than the one the apostle delivers in the verse before us. To bid a man, in whom the great and rising influence of regeneration has not yet entered, to withdraw his love from all the things in the world is to bid him give up every affection in his heart. The world is the all of a natural man. He has not a taste nor a desire that does not point to something within the confines of its visible horizon. He loves nothing above it and cares for nothing beyond it, and to bid him love not the world is to pass a sentence of expulsion on every inhabitant of his breast.
To appreciate the magnitude and difficulty of such a surrender, consider only that it would be just as hard to prevail on him not to love wealth, which is but one of the things in the world, as to prevail on him to willfully set fire to his own property. This he might do with sore and painful reluctance if he saw that the salvation of his life hung upon it. But he would do it willingly if he saw that a new property of tenfold value would instantly emerge from the wreck of the old one. In that case there is something more than the mere displacement of an affection; there is the overpowering of one affection by another. But to empty his heart of all love for the things of the world without putting any love in its place would be to him a process of as unnatural violence as destroying everything he possesses and giving him nothing in return. So if to love not the world is indispensable to one's Christianity, then the crucifixion of the old man is not too strong a term for that transition in his history when all old things are done away and all things become new.
We hope that by this point you understand the impotence of a mere demonstration of this world's insignificance. Its only practical effect, if it had any, would be to leave the heart in a state that every heart finds unbearable: a state of nakedness and negation. You may remember the fond and unbroken tenacity with which your heart has often returned to pursuits over whose utter frivolity it sighed and wept but yesterday. The arithmetic of your short-lived days may on a Sabbath make the clearest impression on your understanding. The preacher may cause a voice to descend from his imagined deathbed in rebuke and mockery of all the pursuits of earthliness. And as he pictures before you the fleeting generations of men, with the all-absorbing grave toward which all the joys and interests of the world hasten to their sure and speedy oblivion, you may feel, touched and sobered by his argument, for a moment as though on the eve of a real and lasting deliverance from so much vanity.
But then the morning comes, and with it the business of the world, the objects of the world, and all the forces that drive it. The heart, by its very nature, must fasten onto something; it cannot float free. And so it falls back under a kind of moral compulsion to be moved exactly as before. Recoiling from the bleak condition of being stripped of both delight and desire, it feels once more all the warmth and urgency of its old familiar wants. Across the whole habit and history of the person, you cannot find so much as one sign of a new creature. The church, rather than being a school of obedience for such a person, has been merely a pleasant place to indulge a passing, theatrical emotion. And the preaching that draws crowds, that stills and sobers listeners into a kind of tragic feeling, that sustains imagination through variety and energy, that preaching is not mighty to the pulling down of strongholds.
The love of the world cannot be driven out by simply proving the world worthless. But might it not be displaced by the love of something more worthy than the world? The heart cannot be persuaded to part with the world by a bare act of surrender. But might the heart be persuaded to admit into its preference another object, one that will subordinate the world and pull it down from its long-held dominance? If the throne in the heart must have someone sitting on it, and the tyrant who sits there now holds it wrongfully, he will not leave a heart that would rather keep him than face emptiness. But might he not give way to the rightful sovereign, one who appears with every charm that can win a willing welcome, and who takes to himself his great power to subdue human nature and reign over it? In short, if the way to free the heart from its positive love of one great and ruling object is to fasten it in positive love to another, then it is not by exposing the worthlessness of the first object, but by setting before the mind's eye the worth and excellence of the second, that all old things are done away and all things become new.
To wipe out our present affections simply by erasing them, leaving the place they occupied empty, would be to destroy the old character without putting any new character in its place. But when those affections depart because new ones have arrived; when they yield their hold to the power and dominance of new affections; when, rather than abandoning the heart to solitude, they simply make room for a successor who fills it with as busy a residence of desire, interest, and expectation as before, none of this strains or overrides any of the laws of our emotional nature. And we see how, in fullest agreement with the workings of the heart, a great moral revolution may be brought about within it.
