All this lies on the face of these illuminating words spoken from the mind of Christ. But there is more to be learnt about them and from them. We are thrown back upon the mystery of the fundamental relation between matter and spirit. And if we cannot do more, we can at least consider what experience shows us every day concerning that relation and what we find when we reflect upon it. There is that tower now. Towers may be built to stand for centuries, perhaps thousands of years. There is no indication that the fall of this particular tower was due to an earthquake, against which its strength would have been useless. We may reasonably suppose that it was not strong, that there were faults in its design, or building or material, or all three or any two. A tower well designed, well built and of good materials may, perhaps, outlast mankind upon this earth. And at least it will not fall; it will only wear away and crumble. This tower fell through the fault of sinners. Was the fault moral, or was it, as we say, merely intellectual? Was there anything of the spirit about it? And we must answer that as it was fault in a human being, a spiritual and moral person, there certainly must have been moral fault. The intellectual element is not separate from the moral.
Think—if all the men concerned in building that tower had been disinterested seekers after goodness and truth and beauty, would it have fallen as it did? What, you may say (but I am assured that you will not, if you have read thus far), what is the connexion between a love of goodness, truth and beauty, and the building of a tower? What, in fact (and this you may well ask), is the true relation between spirit and life on the one hand, and the successful use of material things on the other? Does a man use them better, that is, more successfully, because he is as God would have him be, morally and spiritually?
The narrow outlook of some religious men, and their abstraction of religion from the wide range of its concerns into the narrowness of theirs, blinds them to the wide range of goodness, of beauty, and of truth. The man who is as God would have him be (according to the mind of Christ), if he had to build a tower, would seek as he seeks salvation to find out the truth of towers, of their materials, of their design and of their building. He would not only know that this was his duty, but he would know or feel that it was his heart's desire. He would throw himself into the pursuit of this truth because he was a lover of truth. And in loving truth he would show his love of God. Therefore he would use good materials, not bad, good stone, good mortar, and he would put these together with due regard to their characters, their truth. And his love of beauty would conspire with his love of truth to bring about the strength and stability of his tower. Beauty in these things is a guarantee of truth, or rather its evidence. So closely are the three linked in the love of them and the realization of them, that we may know them to be one. They are to be distinguished, but they cannot be separated, one from another. And so those builders of our tower who should be disinterested in their worship of the three in one, would (we may well say) have set up at Siloam a tower very different from that which fell. It might have endured, like the Tower of David, to this day.