495. Wonders of the Hand

Wonders of the Hand

1Co_12:21; ’93The eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee.’94

These words suggest that some time two very important parts of the human body got into controversy, and the eye became insolent and full of braggadocio, and said: ’93I am an independent part of the human system. How far I can see, taking in spring morning and midnight aurora! Compared with myself, what an insignificant thing is the human hand! I look down upon it. There it hangs, swinging at the side, a clump of muscles and nerves, and it cannot see an inch either way. It has no luster compared with that which I beam forth.’94 ’93What senseless talk,’94 responds the hand. ’93You, the eye, would have been put out long ago but for me. Without the food I have earned you would have been sightless and starved to death years ago. You cannot do without me any better than I can do without you.’94 At this part of the disputation Paul of my text breaks in, and ends the controversy by declaring: ’93The eye cannot say unto the hand I have no need of thee.’94

Fourteen hundred and thirty-three times, as nearly as I can count by aid of concordance, does the Bible speak of the human hand. We are all familiar with the hand, but the man has yet to be born who can fully understand this wondrous instrument.

So we are all going on opening and shutting this divinely-constructed instrument’97the hand’97ignorant of much of the revelation it was intended to make of the wisdom and goodness of God. You can see by their structure that shoulder and elbow and forearm are getting ready for the culmination in the hand. There is your wrist, with its eight bones and their ligaments in two rows. That wrist, with its bands of fibres and its hinged joint, and turning on two axes’97on the larger axis moving backward and forward, and on the smaller axis turning nearly ’91round. And there is the palm of your hand, with its five bones, each having a shaft and two terminations. There are the fingers of that hand with fourteen bones, each finger with its curiously-wrought tendons, five of the bones with ending roughened for the lodgment of the nails. There is the thumb, coming from opposite direction to meet the fingers, so that in conjunction they may clasp and hold fast that which you desire to take. There are the long nerves running from the armpit to the forty-six muscles, so that all are under mastery. It at first seems a misfit, a mistake, a miscalculation that the fingers should differ in length; would it not be more symmetrical to have them terminate alike, instead of having them steps ascending from the little finger to the longest, and then descending to the index finger? And the child asked his father, the scientist, why the fingers were of such different lengths. The father told his child to close his fingers on his palm, when they were seen to be even; or to hold an orange, when the thumb also ended evenly. You see the Creator makes no mistakes. The whole anatomy of your hand as complex, as intricate, as symmetrical, as useful as God could make it. What can it not do? It can climb, it can lift, it can push, it can repel, it can menace, it can clutch, it can deny, it can affirm, it can extend, it can weave, it can bathe, it can smite, it can humble, it can exalt, it can soothe, it can throw, it can defy, it can wave, it can imprecate, it can pray.

A skeleton of the hand traced on blackboard, or unrolled in diagram, or hung in medical museum, is mightly illustrative of the divine wisdom and goodness, but how much more pleasing when in living action all its nerves and muscles and bones and tendons and tissues and phalanges display what God invented when he invented the human hand. Two specimens of it we carry at our side from the time when in infancy we open them to take a toy, till, in the last hour of a long life we extend them in bitter farewell.

With the Divine help I shall speak of the hand as the chief executive officer of the soul, whether lifted for defense or extended for help or busied in the arts or offered in salutation or wrung in despair or spread abroad in benediction. God evidently intended all the lower orders of living beings should have weapons of defense, and hence the elephant’92s tusk and the horse’92s hoof and the cow’92s horn and the lion’92s tooth and the insect’92s sting. Having given weapons of defense to the lower orders of living beings, of course he would not leave man, the highest order of living beings on earth, defenseless and at the mercy of brutal or ruffian attack. The right, yea! the duty, of self-defense is so evident it needs no argumentation. The hand is the divinely-fashioned weapon of defense. We may seldom have to use it for such purposes, but the fact that we are so equipped insures safety. The hand is a weapon sooner loaded than any gun, sooner drawn than any sword. Its fingers bent into the palm, it becomes a bolt of demolition. Solomon speaks of the hands as the ’93keepers of the house,’94 or the defenders. Surely, such a castle as the human body needs such protection as the hand alone can offer.

What a defense it is against accident! There have been times in all our experiences when we have with the hand warded off something that would have extinguished our eyesight or broken the skull or crippled us for a lifetime. While the eye has discovered the approaching peril, the hand has beaten it back or struck it down or disarmed it. Every day thank God for your right hand, and if you want to hear its eulogy ask him who in swift revolution of machinery has had it crushed or at Chapultepec or South Mountain or San Juan Hill or Sedan lost it.

And in passing let me say that he who has the weapon of the hand uninjured and in full use needs no other. You cowards who walk with sword-cane or carry a pistol in your hip-pocket had better lay aside your deadly weapon. At the frontier or in barbarous lands or as an officer of the law about to make arrest, such arming may be necessary, but no citizen moving in these civilized regions needs such re-enforcements. If you are afraid to go down these streets or along these country roads without dagger or firearms, better ask your grandmother to go with you armed with scissors and knitting-needle. What cowards, if not what intended murderers, uselessly to carry weapons of death! In our two hands God gave us all the weapons we need to carry.

Again, the hand is the chief executive officer of the soul for affording help. Just see how that hand is constructed. How easily you can lower it to raise the fallen. How easily it is extended to feel the invalid’92s pulse or gently wipe away the tears of orphanage or contribute alms or smooth the excited brow or beckon into safety. Oh, the helping hands! There are hundreds of thousands of them, and the world wants at least sixteen hundred millions of them. Hands to bless others; hands to rescue others; hands to save others. What are all these schools and churches and asylums of mercy? Outstretched hands. What are all those hands distributing tracts and carrying medicines and trying to cure blind eyes and deaf ears and broken bones and disordered intellects and wayward sons? Helping hands. Let each one of us add two to that number, if we have two, or if through casualty only one, add that one. If these hands which we have so long kept thrust into pockets through indolence or folded in indifference or employed in writing wrong things or doing mean things or heaving up obstacles in the way of righteous progress, might from this hour be consecrated to helping others out and up an on, they would be hands worth being raised on the Resurrection morn, and worth clapping in eternal gladness over a world redeemed.

The great artists of the ages’97Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci and Quentin Matsys and Rembrandt and Albert Durer and Titian’97have done their best in picturing the face of Christ, but none except Ary Scheffer seems to have put much stress upon the hand of Christ. Indeed, the mercy of that hand, the gentleness of that hand, is beyond all artistic portrayal. Some of his miracles he performed by word of mouth, and without touching the subject before him, but most of them he performed through the hand. Was the dead damsel to be raised to life? ’93He took her by the hand.’94 Was the blind man to have optic nerve restored? ’93He took him by the hand.’94 Was the demon to be exorcised from a suffering man? ’93He took him by the hand.’94 The people saw this, and besought him to put his hand on their afflicted ones.

His own hands free, see how the Lord sympathized with the man who had lost the use of his hand. It was a case of atrophy, a wasting away until the arm and hand had been reduced in size beyond any medical or surgical restoration. Moreover, it was his right hand, the most important of the two, for the left side in all its parts is weaker than the right side, and we involuntarily, in any exigency, put out the right hand because we know it is the best hand. So that poor man had lost more than half of his physical armament It would not have been so bad if it had been the left hand. But Christ looked at that shriveled-up right hand, dangling uselessly at the man’92s side, and then cried out with a voice that had omnipotence in it: ’93Stretch forth thy hand,’94 and the record is, ’93he stretched it forth whole as the other.’94 The blood rushed through the shrunken veins, and the shortened muscles lengthened, and the dead nerves thrilled and the lifeless fingers tingled with resumed circulation and the restored man held up in the presence of the skeptical Pharisees one of Jehovah’92s masterpieces’97a perfect hand. No wonder that story is put three times in the Bible, so that if a sailor were cast away on a barren island, or a soldier’92s New Testament got mutilated in battle and whole pages are destroyed, the shipwrecked, or wounded man in hospital, would probably have at least one of those three radiant stories of what Christ thought of the human hand.

How often has the hand decided a destiny! Mary Queen of Scots was escaping from imprisonment at Loch Leven in the dress of a laundress, and had her face thickly veiled. When a boatman attempted to remove the veil she put up her hand to defend it, and so revealed the white and fair hand of a queen, and so the boatman took her back to captivity. Again and again it has been demonstrated that the hand hath a language as certainly as the mouth. Palmistry, or the science by which character and destiny are read in the lines of the hand, is yet crude and uncertain and unsatisfactory; but as astrology was the mother of astronomy, and alchemy was the mother of chemistry, it may be that palmistry will result in a science yet to be born.

Again, as the chief executive officer of the soul behold the hand busy in the arts! What a comparatively dull place this world would be without pictures, without statuary, without music, without architecture. Have your ever realized what fifty seeming miracles are in the five minutes’92 fingering of piano or harp or flute? Who but the eternal God could make a hand capable of that swift sweep of the keys or that quick feeling of the pulses of a flute or the twirl of the fingers amid the strings of the harp? All the composers of music who dreamed out the oratories and the cantatas of the ages would have had their work dropped flat and useless but for the translations of the hand. Under the deft fingers of the performer, what cavalries gallop and what batteries boom and what birds carol and what tempests march and what oceans billow! The great architects of the earth might have though out the Alhambras and the Parthenons and the St. Sophias and the Taj Mahals, but all those visions would have vanished had it not been for the hand on hammer, on plummet, on trowel, on wall, on arch, on pillar, on stairs, on dome.

In two discourses, one concerning the ear and the Other concerning the eye, I spoke from the potent text in the Psalm, ’93He that planted the ear, shall he not hear,’94 and ’93He that formed the eye, shall he not see,’94 but what use in the eye and what use in the ear if the hand had not been strung with all its nerves and moved with all its muscles and reticulated with all its joints and strengthened with all its bones and contrived with all its ingenuities. The hand hath forwarded all the arts, and tunneled the mountains through which the rail-train thunders and launched all the shipping and fought all the battles and built all the temples and swung all the cables under the sea, as well as lifted to mid-air the wire tracks on which whole trains of thought rush across the continents, and built all the cities and hoisted the pyramids.

Do not eulogize the eye and ear at the expense of the hand, for the eye may be blotted out, as in the case of Milton, and yet his hand writes a Paradise Lost or a Samson Agonistes; as in the case of William H. Prescott, and yet his hand may write the enchanting Conquest of Peru. Or the ear may be silenced forever, as in the case of Beethoven, and yet his hand may put into immortal cadences the Ninth Symphony. Oh, the hand! The God-fashioned hand! The triumphant hand! It is an open Bible of divine revelation, and the five fingers are the Isaiah and the Ezekiel and the David and the Micah and the Paul of that almighty inspiration.

A pastor in his sermon told how a little child appreciated the value of his hand when he was told that on the morrow it must be amputated in order to save his life. Hearing that, he went to a quiet place and prayed that God would spare his hand. The surgeon, coming the next day to do his work, found the hand so much better that amputation was postponed, and the hand got well. The pastor, telling of this in a sermon, concluded by holding up his hand and saying: ’93That is the very hand that was spared in answer to prayer, and I hold it up, a monument of divine mercy.’94

Again, the hand is the chief executive officer of the soul when wrung in agony. Tears of relief are sometimes denied to trouble. The eyelids at such time are as hot and parched and burning as the brow. At such time even the voice is suppressed, and there is no sob or outcry. Then the wringing of the hand tells the story. At the close of a life wasted in sin sometimes comes that expression of the twisted fingers; the memory of years that will never return, of opportunities the like of which will never again occur, and conscience in its wrath pouncing upon the soul, and all the past a horror, only to be surpassed by the approaching horror. So a man wrings his hands over the casket of a dead wife whom he has cruelly treated. So a man wrings his hands at the fate of sons and daughters whose prospects have been ruined by his inebriety and neglect and depravity. So the sinner wrings his hands when, after a life full of offers of pardon and peace and heaven, he dies without hope. When there are sorrows too poignant for lamentation on the lip, and too hot for the tear-glands to write in letters of crystal on the cheek, the hand recites the tragedy with more emphasis than anything in Macbeth and King Lear.

Worse than the wringing of the hands was the punishment that Cranmer gave his right hand when he put it in the fire of the stake and without flinching, said: ’93Forasmuch as my hand offended in writing contrary to my heart, my hand shall therefore be the first punished. It shall be the first burned. This was the hand that wrote it.’94

Again, the hand is the chief executive officer of the soul in salutation. A former President of the United States said: ’93I think handshaking is a great nuisance and it should be abolished. It not only makes the right arm sore, but shocks the whole system, and unfits a man for writing or attending to other duties. It demoralizes the entire nervous and muscular system.’94 But while this exercise may be fatiguing, it is also an opportunity. He who knows how heartily to shake hands has one of the mightiest arts for conveying happiness and good cheer and life eternal. After you have shaken hands with one, a line of communication is open that was not open before. Two hands clasped in greeting are a bridge on which all sympathies and kindnesses and encouragements and blessings cross over. To shake hands with some persons does us more good than a sermon’97ay! it is a sermon. To shake hands with a good doctor when we are sick is an anodyne, a tonic, a febrifuge before he feels the pulse or writes the prescription. To shake hands with a cheerful man when we are discouraged, fills us with faith to try again what we have failed in doing. To shake hands with some consecrated man, clerical or lay, after we have wandered away into sin, is to feel the grasp of a father’97God welcoming home the prodigal. Shake hands, O ye stolid and exclusive and cold-blooded and precise and conventional Christians! Jehu cried out to Jehonadab: ’93Is thine heart right? If it be, give me thine hand.’94

There is in an honest and Christian handshake a thrill of Gospel electricity. You take part of his trouble and he takes part of your jubilance. In that way you divide up anxieties and congratulations. The main trunk line of that handshake has branches of blessed telegraphy right down to both hearts and up to both heads, and you both get the message the same instant. Take off the glove when you shake hands, for that glove puts the hide of a kid between the palm of your hand and the palm of his hand, and that animal’92s hide is a non-conductor of this Gospel electricity. Do not grip the bone of the forefinger and the bone of the little finger with a crushing power that puts one into a severe suffering which many of us have experienced from those who are more brutes than men. Take the hand gently, reasonably, heartily, and know that God ordered that form of salutation. That is one important thing that the hand was made for. You can see the indications in its shape and equipment’97the four fingers to take your neighbor’92s hand on the one side, and the thumb to take it on the other, and the forearm so swung that you can easily draw it toward you.

Of course, there is a wicked shaking of hands, and Solomon refers to it when he says: ’93Though hand join in hand, the wicked shall not be unpunished.’94 Shake hands in conspiracy to damage individual or community or nation; shake hands to defraud; shake hands to stand by each other in wrongdoing’97you help me stuff this ballot-box, and I will see that when I am in power you shall have promotion; you help me in my infamy and I will help you in your infamy. Oh, that is profanation of a holy rite; that is sacrilege against a divine arrangement; that is gripping your own destruction! Pilate and Herod, though antagonists before, shook hands over Christ’92s projected assassination.

But shake hands the way William Penn shook hands with the Indians for their civilization. Shake hands the way Missionary Carey shook hands with the Hindus, for whose salvation he became a lifetime exile. Shake hands the way Havelock shook hands with the besieged women at Lucknow whom he had come to save from massacre. Shake hands as David Brainerd did with the American Indians, to whom he offered a glorious heaven through the Gospel. Shake hands as Lincoln shook hands with the agitated mother to whom he gave back the boy who had fallen asleep from overfatigue as a sentinel. Shake hands as during the Civil War Anna Ross shook hands with the wounded soldier in Cooper Shop Hospital, Philadelphia. Shake hands as Van Meter, the city evangelist, shook hands with the waif of the street coming penitent into the midnight mission. Shake hands as heaven shook hands with earth that night when a doxology in the gallery of clouds woke the Bethlehem shepherds.

But it is not always in such glad greeting that we can employ our right hand. Alas, that so often we have to employ the hand in farewell salutation. If your right hand retained some impress of all such uses, it would be a volume of bereavements. Oh, the goodbies in your right hand has participated! Good-by at the rail-train window Good-by before the opening of the battle. Good-by at the dying pillow. We all needed grace for such handshaking, though our hand was strong and their hand was weak and we will need grace for the coming goodbies, and that grace we had better seek while amid the felicities of health and homes unbroken. Thank God, there will be no good-by in heaven.

Again, the hand is the chief executive of the soul when employed in benediction. No gesture of the human hand means more than that outstretched gesture. In many of our religious denominations we are not permitted to pronounce an apostolic benediction until we have been regularly ordained as ministers of the Gospel; but there are kinds of benediction that you may all pronounce without especial permission from the Presbytery or Conference or Convention. You have a right to spread abroad both right hand and left hand in bestowing a blessing of kindness and good-will upon all you meet. With both hands bless the children. Take them in your arms and kiss their fair cheek. Take with them a round of merriment in the room before you leave it; and by prayer put them in the arms of that Christ, to go to whom in olden time they struggled to get out of the arms of their mothers. God bless the cradles and high-chairs and nurseries all ’91round the world.

Extend your hands in benediction for the aged. Take their counsel and ask their prayers, and smooth the path down the declivities. By neglect and unfilial demeanor add no wrinkles to their brow, no more stoop to their shoulders. They have their hand on the latch of the door through which they will soon go out of sight of your homes and churches. May the mantles of the Elijahs fall upon the Elishas! Spread your hand for the benediction upon all the men and women in the tug-of-life, many of them tired and buffeted and disheartened. Never go out of a store or a shop or office or field without pronouncing a benediction.

And what better use can I make of my hands, which are the chief executive officer of my soul, than now to spread them abroad in the apostolic benediction which has been pronounced for centuries, and over hundreds of thousands of assemblages at coronations and obsequies, at harvest-homes and on fast-days, by all the ministers of the Gospel in the past as it will be by all the ministers of the Gospel until the church militant reaches up its right hand to take the right hand of the Church triumphant; a benediction which, when it has full sway, will leave nothing for our world to want, or heaven to bestow: ’93May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all forever. Amen.’94

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage