Spiritually, you have been attacked, you have been robbed. You have lost your character; you have lost your peace, you have lost your happiness, and you are half dead. Who is there in this world who can help you? It's no good going to priests; it's no good going to ritualistic religion. It will be indifferent to the real needs of the soul, as these two members of the religious establishment were with this wounded man on the road. What can priestcraft and ritualism do for a half dead man? The whole irony of the situation is shown up. Here is a man half dead by the roadside, and here comes the priest. Unless he actually tends to him and offers some real practical help, what can he do? Can he scuttle back to the temple in Jerusalem and wave a candle about perform some ceremony? Can he rattle through a few of his set-piece prayers? No, that would be entirely irrelevant. His priestcraft is useless to him now. None of that would make any difference to this half dead man.
Some years ago, I used to know a man who was an expert and a leading geneticist. Tragic figure. He was one of these short, rotund men right at the front of his field. And somehow you would have never known that he was an eminent academic. He was such a jolly fellow, always full of fun. People used to say that he seemed much more like a successful restaurant manager than an eminent scientist, and this is how everybody knew him. Then something happened. Suddenly the bottom dropped out of his life. He grew starving for meaning and purpose, and the thing which hurt him more than anything was this: when he lost his jolly ways and suddenly his soul was sick and in need, nobody wanted to know him. None of his academic friends could say a sensible word to him. Nobody could give him any strength, any philosophy, any ideology that would help him and gird him up. He was tiresome to them. The late Professor Ian Eyre, the famous surgeon, the separator of so many Siamese twins, had the same experience towards the end of his life. He began to search, began to feel a need for something deeper in life, began to realize that life was meaningless, and his eminent colleagues didn't want to know. They didn't want to talk to him about it. He had become a bore. If you begin to realize that you are in deep spiritual need, you won't get any help from men of this world. Don't go to your friends in this world, because they scorn God. They are trying to succeed without him. They are running away from God, just as you have been doing for years. They will certainly pass by on the other side, when you begin to get a need in your soul for life and understanding.