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Title: The Stuff of Manhood
Some Needed Notes in American Character
Author: Robert E. Speer
Release Date: February 13, 2022 [eBook #67403]
Language: English
Produced by: Donald Cummings and the Online Distributed Proofreading
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STUFF OF MANHOOD ***
THE STUFF OF MANHOOD
By ROBERT E. SPEER
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_The Merrick Lectures for 1916–17. Delivered at the Ohio
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The Stuff of Manhood
_SOME NEEDED NOTES IN
AMERICAN CHARACTER_
By
ROBERT E. SPEER
[Illustration]
NEW YORK CHICAGO TORONTO
Fleming H. Revell Company
LONDON AND EDINBURGH
Copyright, 1917, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave.
Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street
The Merrick Lectures
By the gift of the late Rev. Frederick Merrick, M. D., D. D., LL. D.,
for fifty-one years a member of the Faculty, and for thirteen of those
years President of Ohio Wesleyan University, a fund was established
providing an annual income for the purpose of securing lectures within
the general field of Experimental and Practical Religion. The following
courses have previously been given on this foundation:
Daniel Curry, D. D.――“Christian Education.”
President James McCosh, D. D., LL. D.――“Tests of the Various Kinds of
Truth.”
Bishop Randolph S. Foster, D. D., LL. D.――“The Philosophy of Christian
Experience.”
Professor James Stalker, D. D.――“The Preacher and His Models.”
John W. Butler, D. D.――“Mission Work in Mexico.”
Professor George Adam Smith, D. D., LL. D.――“Christ in the Old
Testament.”
Bishop James W. Bashford, Ph. D., D. D., LL. D.――“The Science of
Religion.”
James M. Buckley, D. D., LL. D.――“The Natural and Spiritual Orders and
Their Relations.”
John R. Mott, M. A., F. R. G. S.――“The Pastor and Modern Missions.”
Bishop Elijah E. Hoss, D. D., LL. D.; Professor Doremus A. Hayes, Ph.
D., S. T. D., LL. D.; Charles E. Jefferson, D. D., LL. D.; Bishop
William F. McDowell, D. D., LL. D.; President Edwin H. Hughes, D.
D.――“The New Age and Its Creed.”
Robert E. Speer, M. A.――“The Marks of a Man, or The Essentials of
Christian Character.”
Rev. Charles Stelzle, Miss Jane Addams, Commissioner of Labor Charles
P. Neill, Ph. D., Professor Graham Taylor, and Rev. George P. Eckman,
D. D.――“The Social Application of Religion.”
Rev. George Jackson, M. A.――“Some Old Testament Problems.”
Professor Walter Rauschenbusch, D. D.――“Christianizing the Social
Order.”
Professor G. A. Johnston Ross, M. A.――“One Avenue of Faith.”
Introduction
The moral elements of individual character are inevitably social.
And the social obligation immensely strengthens the sanctions which
enjoin them. When a man “has trained himself,” to use the words of
Lord Morley in dealing with Voltaire’s religion, “to look upon every
wrong in thought, every duty omitted from act, each infringement of the
inner spiritual law which humanity is constantly perfecting for its
own guidance and advantage ... as an ungrateful infection, weakening
and corrupting the future of his brothers,” he views each struggle
within his own soul against evil and each firm aspiration after purity
not as a mere incident in his own spiritual biography but as a fight
for social good and for the perfecting of the nation and of humanity.
And the struggle for social good and the perfecting of human life is
fundamentally a struggle for the triumph of ideals in personal wills.
God can take hold of men only in man. He revealed Himself and wrought
redemption less by a social process than by a personal incarnation. And
the only way of which we know to uplift the life of the nation and to
fit it for its mission and its ministry is to reform our own and other
men’s characters, and ourselves to be what manner of man among men we
would have the nation be among nations. It is of some of the elements
of character of which men stand specially in need to-day that we are to
speak in these lectures. What is good in our lives as individuals and
in our life as a nation is not in need of discussion here. And there is
no nobility in analyzing and deriding our weaknesses. Our purpose is
to urge our keeping if we have not lost them, and our regaining if we
feel them slipping from us, some of the elemental moral qualities and
spiritual resources which are vital to the capacity for duty and to the
living of a full and efficient life.
It has seemed best, on the whole, to preserve in the printed volume the
free colloquialism of the lectures as they were delivered.
R. E. S.
_New York._
Contents
I. DISCIPLINE AND AUSTERITY 11
II. THE CONSERVATION AND RELEASE OF MORAL RESOURCES 50
III. AN UNFRIGHTENED HOPE 85
IV. THE JOY OF THE MINORITY 118
V. THE LIFE INVISIBLE 160
LECTURE I
DISCIPLINE AND AUSTERITY
Whether there should be compulsory military training in America is a
question which some people will answer yes or no according to their
general theories and others according to their observation of the
actual effects of such training on moral character. But whatever our
views may be on this familiar question, whether we regard military
service as ethically helpful in its influence or as morally injurious,
we cannot differ as to the need in our national character of those
qualities of self-control, of quick and unquestioning obedience to
duty, of joyful contempt of hardship, and of zest in difficult and
arduous undertakings which, rightly or wrongly, we consider soldierly,
which we attribute in such rich measure to our forefathers, and which
the moral exigencies of our national task to-day as peremptorily
demand. To put these primary and elemental needs as sharply as
possible, let us call them discipline and austerity. Our American
character needs more of both.
I do not know a better starting point than is found in one of those
vivid modern touches upon which we constantly come in the Old
Testament. This one is in the account of the closing year of King
David’s life. The story seems ancient and far away until we suddenly
read: “His father had not displeased him at any time saying, Why hast
thou done so?” If we were to translate the words more directly into
the language of our own day, we should say, “His father had always let
him do exactly as he pleased.” The reference is to David and his son
Adonijah, and to the want of discipline by which the father had ruined
his boy.
It is not hard to reconstruct the story. David was busy about his cares
as king, and his heart was indulgent towards his children. Adonijah
seems to have been his youngest son, and the father let him have his
way, never reining him up or checking him by asking why he had done
thus or so. David pursued, in other words, the modern theory of child
training: that the one principle by which children should be educated
is the principle of letting what is naturally in them come out; that
they must not be crossed or frustrated, or have any external discipline
or control laid upon their lives. This is, of course, the extreme of
it, but in some form we hear the theory and see it applied all about us
every day.
And it is a modern theory of self-education, also. We are told that
life should be left free to follow its native impulses; that it should
not be thwarted and intimidated by the conventions and prohibitions of
society; that men and women should consult their own hearts and then
should move out quite freely in obedience to their promptings; that
their lives and the lives of their children should not be twisted or
deflected by the imposition of any external authority or command.
Well, that was the way Adonijah was brought up. His father was rich.
The boy had his own establishment, his own horses, his own retinue of
attendants, and round about him, as about any oriental king’s son,
there would be the usual crowd of flatterers and sycophants. There was
no will or desire that he had not the means to gratify, and his father
let him have his way.
Further, he was the younger brother of Absalom, and the ancient record
says that they were handsome and popular boys. They had a way that
carried along those who came in touch with them, and as the king’s
sons, and the leading young men of the city, we have no difficulty in
understanding the atmosphere in which they lived and the conditions
within which they grew.
It must be confessed that this was the easy way of going about the
matter. It is far easier to let a child have its own way than to
endeavour by wisdom and patience and strength, to study and decide what
is best for the child and without hurting the child’s will, to guide it
into the better way. It was far less care to David to let Absalom and
Adonijah go than it would have been to take these high-strung sons of
his in hand and endeavour to break them to discipline and truth, and to
send them out into life real men of power. It was much easier never to
call them and to say, “Boys, why did you do this?” Much easier never
to lay any authority or guidance upon them from without, much easier,
especially for a man like David. He had grown up on a farm, with all
the hardship and frugality of farm life, with no privileges as a lad,
and now that he was the king of his nation, he was able to do anything
whatever for his sons. It was difficult to refuse them the things he
had never had. Easily and indulgently――for he was a man of kindly heart
all his days――he found it simpler not to lay hard restraints upon his
boys when he could give them their own way.
And, of course, this is the easier way of self-education too. For a
man to love himself so much that he never thinks of his neighbours, to
blind his eyes so completely to consequences that he can live for the
passing moment,――this is a very easy philosophy, and the man or the
woman who is able to practice it will seem, for a while, to live in
the sunshine, a fine butterfly, smooth-going life. All this is easier
than to say, not, What is my impulse? but, What ought I? not, What do
I like? but, What is best for all the world? not, What is the easy
way? but, What is the hard way over which the feet go that carry the
burdens of mankind, that bear the load of the world?
But, though it is the easy way for a while, there comes a time when
it is no longer the easy way. When in his little room above the gate
the old king bowed his gray head in his hands and with breaking heart
sobbed out: “O my son Absalom! my son, my son Absalom! would God I had
died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!”――it was no longer the easy
way. When Adonijah rose up in insurrection against his old father as he
lay on his dying bed, gathering his little company of sycophants around
him and setting himself up in his father’s place, then it was no longer
the easy way that the old man had pursued.
And to-day still, fathers and mothers who for a little while thought
the easy way was never to ask their children why they had done so, but
to let them go their own way with no imposition of outward authority or
control, find after a while that the easy way has turned bitterly hard.
I have a friend, a leading merchant in one of our large cities. Some
time ago another friend was visiting him, and as they walked down the
street together, suddenly a large car whizzed around the corner, full
of young people, among them the merchant’s son. This was the middle of
the forenoon and the boy was supposed to be at work in his father’s
establishment. The father turned to his friend and said: “I wish I knew
how I could hold my boy in.” But my friend understood why he could not.
He knew that only two or three years before the son had been rewarded
for passing examinations at college, examinations that it ought to have
been taken for granted that he would pass. But his father thought he
should be rewarded for passing them, and he bought a car and sent it
up to him at college. Now he wonders why this son does not know how to
bind himself to arduous duty.
And in our own lives the easy education does not go easily all the way.
There comes a time when, having always indulged ourselves, we can’t
break the habit; when, never having taken our lives in our hands and
reined them to the great ministries of mankind, we discover that we
cannot. We find that we obey our caprices; follow any impulse; cannot
stick to any task; do not know a principle when we see it; have no
iron or steel anywhere in our character; are the riffraff of the world
that the worthy men and women have to bear along as they go. In Mr.
Kipling’s inelegant lines:
“We was rotten ’fore we started――we was never disci_plined_;
We made it out a favour if an order was obeyed;
Yes, every little drummer ’ad ’is rights and wrongs to mind,
So we had to pay for teachin’――an’ we paid!”
Now I suggest that we put all this positively to ourselves, for every
one of us knows that we are treading near some of the moral realities
of weakness and need in our day and nation. Why should restraint,
obedience, the authority of duty and God be let into our lives? In
order that out of all these things self-control may come. And why
should there be this submission and control of our lives by duty, and
truth and God? Well, the reasons are obvious, the moment we begin to
think about them.
There is the indisputable fact that the strongest and best men and
women we know are men and women who were trained in this school, who
some time during their life, and the earlier the better, passed under
the discipline and influence of that chastening spoken about in the
twelfth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, without which we are not
children of a clean God. All around us are these men and women, fathers
and mothers, who indulge their sons and daughters, who never confront
them with moral principle and obligation and duty, and then lament
because their children do not seem to have the old iron grasp of duty,
the old rigid love of truth and righteousness. Well, it is all very
simple. It is because those fathers and mothers are denying to their
children the very education that made themselves what they are. The men
and women, who will not run away from any task, who stand steadfast in
the truth, upon whose every word we can rest our whole soul, grew out
of a certain discipline, a certain education, and it was the kind that
Adonijah did not have. And all men and women who want to be masters of
their lives and to have strength to lay beneath the work of the world
must ask God that such discipline may be given to them.
Not alone is this the only kind of training that can produce this kind
of character, but unless a man learns control from without, he will
never learn self-control. Unless he passes under the discipline of a
wiser and stronger hand at the beginning, he will never come to the
time of deliberate and moral self-discipline, which alone is character.
For this only is character,――the binding of life beneath the firm
sovereignty of the principle that is the heart of God. If nations do
not realize this they will pay heavily for their failure. “Make your
educational laws strict,” said Ruskin, “and your criminal laws may be
gentle; but leave youth its liberty and you will have to dig dungeons
for age.”
And it is this that gives freedom. There is no freedom outside of
character. Liberty, as Montesquieu says, is not freedom to do just as
we please. Liberty is the ability to do as we ought. And the freedom
that we need is not the freedom of caprice and whim and listening to
our impulses. It is the freedom that enables our eyes clearly to see
what right is, and then empowers us to do it. Symonds put it in his
verse:
“Soul, rule thyself. On passion, deed, desire,
Lay thou the law of thy deliberate will.
Stand at thy chosen post, faith’s sentinel.
Learn to endure. Thine the reward
Of those who make living light their Lord.
Clad with celestial steel these stand secure,
Masters, not slaves.”
And if such self-control goes as far even as the self-extinction of
that voluntarily accepted Cross, on the green hill outside Jerusalem,
even so it will bring victory at the last, because it has brought
one long succession of victories over self all the days. I cut this
fugitive bit of verse from a newspaper the other day:
“Pausing a moment ere the day was done,
While yet the earth was scintillant with light,
I backward glanced. From valley, plain and height,
At intervals, where my life path had run,
Rose cross on cross: and nailed upon each one
Was my dead self. And yet that gruesome sight
Lent sudden splendour to the falling night.
Showing the conquests that my soul had won.
“Up to the rising stars I looked and cried,
There is no death! For year on year reborn,
I wake to larger life, to joy more great.
So many times have I been crucified,
So often seen the resurrection morn,
I go triumphant, though new Calvaries wait.”
And this freedom and victory are waiting only for those lives that have
been broken beneath the cross of an absolute restraint of God, and
have so mastered themselves under God’s name by the help of Christ that
control has been given over in trust into their own hands.
And we all know that power is to be won here in this school where men
are trained both to feel and to wield dominion. There is no power in
the world that is not power cabined, power held in some way. Loose
power is imperceptible and utterly useless. The only power we know is
power walled in, shut down, confined and beating against its barriers
and its walls. We know this in the athletic life of our colleges
to-day. No athletic trainer in any college ever followed David’s method
with Adonijah. The trainer is there to say: “Why did you do it that
way?” “Why did you not do it this way? You have no right to waste your
energy in that way. You must do it so.” There is one scene in _Quo
Vadis_ that redeems much else in the book. It is the scene in the
Coliseum, when the giant Gothic slave is shown saving the life of his
mistress, whom he loved. The great bull has come out with the girl’s
form tied to his horns, and there is dead silence as the bull stands
angrily facing the man. You remember the picture. As Ursus lays one
hand on each horn of the auroch the struggle begins. There is not a
sound. The great multitude watches the man’s muscles rise and harden
and the sweat come out and drop from every pore. They see his feet
sinking down in the arena, until the sand is above his ankles. Suddenly
the great head of the bull begins to twist under that awful strength.
Then the neck breaks and the giant lifts the limp form from the beast’s
neck and stands with the burden in his hands before the Emperor. One
likes to read such a picture of power secured by self-discipline. Do we
want to go out limp and beaten and ineffective in our lives against the
great mass of work in the world that waits to be done? Or do we want to
go in the strength of Him Who, having bent beneath His Father’s will,
was able to carry on the Cross the whole burden of human sin?
And we must learn in this school the things we value and desire most:
purity and delicacy and refinement of character, for they cannot be
acquired elsewhere. So much social standing nowadays is uttered in
terms of self-assertion and indulgence and the ability to have any whim
or caprice gratified. This sort of self-assertion, this caprice, is
regarded by many of us as the highest mark of social authority, whereas
we know it is precisely the opposite, that it is self-restraint and
self-control and self-surrender that mark the finest lives.
There is a beautiful story in the life of Goldwin Smith that
illustrates what I mean. In the early sixties, when he was one of the
keenest liberal minds of England, he was associated with Cobden and
Bright in the Manchester School. Again and again he found himself the
mark of the bitterest criticism from Disraeli. Later Goldwin Smith,
resigning his professorship at Oxford, came to Canada. At that time
Disraeli’s novel, “Lothair,” appeared in which he attacked Smith――of
course, without using his name――as a social parasite. It stung Smith
to the depths of his soul, but as it was an anonymous book there was
nothing he could do but sit down and write this note personally to
Disraeli:
“You well know that if you had ventured openly to accuse me
of any social baseness, you would have had to answer for your
words; but when sheltering yourself under the literary forms of
a work of fiction, you seek to traduce with impunity the social
character of a political opponent, your expressions can touch
no man’s honour――they are the stingless insults of a coward.”
That was all he did. And yet, at that very moment, Goldwin Smith had in
his possession letters of Disraeli, with which he could have crushed
him. Openly in Parliament Disraeli had said that he had never asked
Peel for any position. But among Peel’s papers which had been placed
in his hands Smith had a letter in which Disraeli had abjectly begged
Peel to give him office. All that Smith needed to do was to publish
Disraeli’s own letter to Peel and it would have ruined Disraeli’s
career. But to Goldwin Smith that was not a noble thing to do. Peel’s
correspondence had not been given to him to use in self-defense, or
for any personal justification of his own, and he repressed that
letter until Disraeli was dead. Then, years after, all of Peel’s
correspondence was published and the whole world knew what a gentleman
Goldwin Smith had been. Our modern ideals of what constitutes high
social and national standing and character say: “Fight fire with fire.
Dishonour releases honour from itself. He struck you foul; strike him
so in return.” But the man who had learned self-restraint in the school
of God’s loyalty and truth, who understood that power is ours, not to
use for self-seeking, but for the good of men and for God’s honour,
would not stoop to any such disloyalty and shame.
Once more. Whose judgment is of any value? Who would have thought of
going to Adonijah and asking his opinion on anything whatsoever? He
did not know right from wrong. He never thought over the issues of
right or wrong. What would I like to do? What does passion bid me do?
What is my whim or caprice for to-night?――that was as far as Adonijah
had ever thought. No man would ever go to him, as no men will ever
come to you and me if we have not been trained in the school of moral
discrimination, if we have not looked on ethical principle and duty in
deciding the question whether each thing is really right for us and for
the whole world. If we are to be men and women to whom people will come
for comfort and strength and guidance, to whom our own children can
come with assurance that they will get the truth, we must be men and
women who now place ourselves beneath the firm discipline of God.
We see all this put simply in two great things. We see it in our Lord’s
constant appeal, while here in the world, for men and women of fiber
and discipline. One came to Him and said: “Lord, what shall I do to
inherit eternal life?” And Jesus, looking upon him, loved him and
said: “I would not think of counselling anything hard. You must not
sacrifice anything. It is all very easy. The Father above is a Father
of great tenderness and compassion. He would not lay a straw’s weight
upon any child of His. Go; live according to your desires and by the
natural impulses of your heart, and for that you shall have treasure
in heaven.” Oh, no; He did not say that. He said: “Go, sell all that
thou hast, and come and follow me. Except ye love less than duty your
father and mother and brother and sister, yea, and your own life also,
ye cannot enter the kingdom of God.”
We see it, too, in God’s way with men as He laid down His great laws at
the beginning, when His people were but as a race of little children.
Why did He not say to them: “This ye may do. The world is sweet and
fair. This ye may do, and all shall be easy to you”? Why, on the other
hand, did He speak to them in the stern admonitions of the Decalogue:
“Thou shalt. Thou shalt not”? God never hesitates to lay His great
denials upon mankind and at last to stifle us beneath the restraint
of death that He may issue us forth through that restraint into the
infinite liberties of the life immortal.
Now do not brush all this away to-day, or any day, light-heartedly, as
it can be so easily brushed away. “Oh, don’t shadow our lives,” you
will say, “with your denials and your prohibitions and your restraints.
Leave life free and sweet as the summer air and the flowers of the
field”――that last how long? No, my friends, it were well for us that
we should learn this lesson, and learn it now, ere the time comes when
the silver cord is loosed and the wheel is broken at the cistern and
the grinders cease and the long shadows fall. You remember a tragic
incident in New York a few years ago――I do not need to recall the
details of it――when two young lives made shipwreck of themselves just
because they thought that impulse and caprice were the free voices that
they might obey. When it was all over, and the two lives had drawn the
veil of night across their short-lived evil joy, one of the papers
published a letter which the girl had written to a friend:
“My friend,” she wrote, “you and I and Fred, young, heedless,
cynical, living in this reckless town of New York, may laugh
sometimes at the old things like law and religion, when they
say, ‘Thou shalt not.’ We may think that phrase was written for
old fogies, and we may sneer at ‘the wages of sin is death’;
but, my friend, there comes to us some time knowledge that the
law and religion are right. What they say we shall not do, we
cannot do without suffering. Fred and I have learned that. The
wages of sin is death.”
It is worse than death; for what was Hell in that great vision that
John saw? Why, nothing but the removal of all restraint. “He which is
filthy, let him be filthy still.” He is unclean, let him be unclean.
He is unholy, let him be unholy. Take all the restraints away. That is
Hell.
Away from the dark gates that open thither may another voice call us
here to-day, the clear, strong, summoning voice of Him Who said of
Himself: “I came not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent
me. I do always those things that please my Father,” and Who in the
garden of Gethsemane, when the anguish was almost greater than He could
bear, yet found rest when He prayed, “Father, not my will, but thine
be done”; that out of the willfulness and capriciousness and the whim
and mood of our little self-indulgent lives we may pass into the great,
strong, steadfast, sovereign will that waits for us; that we may stand
fast and be strong in the strength and chastening of God!
Now I have put it――this matter of our need of discipline――in the
most personal and individual way, but it is our great national and
corporate need. The body of a nation can only exist through the
ordered discipline of its members and the spirit of a nation like the
spirit of a man needs to be cleansed of all the lusts of willfulness
and self-indulgence. The spirit of our American nation needs such
cleansing. Mr. Kipling has drawn us his picture of it:
“Through many roads, by me possessed,
He shambles forth in cosmic guise;
He is the Jester and the Jest,
And he the Text himself applies.
“His easy unswept hearth he lends
From Labrador to Guadaloupe;
Till, elbowed out by sloven friends,
He camps, at sufferance, on the stoop.
“Calm-eyed he scoffs at sword and crown,
Or panic-blinded stabs and slays:
Blatant he bids the world bow down,
Or cringing begs a crust of praise;
“Or, sombre-drunk, at mine and mart,
He dubs his dreary brethren Kings.
His hands are black with blood――his heart
Leaps, as a babe’s, at little things.
“But, through the shift of mood and mood,
Mine ancient humour saves him whole――
The cynic devil in his blood
That bids him mock his hurrying soul;
“That bids him flout the Law he makes,
That bids him make the Law he flouts,
Till, dazed by many doubts, he wakes
The drumming guns that――have no doubts;
“That checks him foolish-hot and fond,
That chuckles through his deepest ire,
That gilds the slough of his despond
But dims the goal of his desire;
“Inopportune, shrill-accented,
The acrid Asiatic mirth
That leaves him, careless ’mid his dead,
The scandal of the elder earth.”
Doubtless we do not like this picture. We call it a libel or a
caricature. Let it be so. Draw your own picture. If there is any
truth or faithfulness in it, if it is not blind with national vanity
and self-deceit, it will still be a revelation of national need of
discipline and of self-empire.
And how can such discipline and self-empire be won? Well, it will
not be won on any ground of prudential expediency or practical
self-interest. It is well for men and nations to discern their moral
shortcomings and to realize their need of a new character. But there
are no automatic processes of community salvation. The disciplined
nation comes in only one way――by the answers of individuals to the
austere call of the one Person who can remake character and mould
the stuff of manhood and nationality. The austere call! This is the
nation’s need and it is the fundamental summons and the central note
of Christianity. “Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will
come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow
me.”
The appeal of Christ was always addressed to the sacrificial and
the heroic. In every call which He issued to men there is this
unmistakable note of austerity. He never smooths things over for the
sake of pleasing people or of winning followers. There were times when
He seemed almost needlessly to draw in these repelling aspects of
discipleship, and to make the conditions of following Him unnecessarily
hard. It is related that it came to pass that, as they went in the way,
a certain man said unto Him, “Lord, I will follow thee whithersoever
thou goest.” And Jesus said unto him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of
the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.”
And He said unto another, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, suffer me
first to go and bury my father.” Jesus said unto him, “Let the dead
bury their dead; but go thou and preach the kingdom of God.” And
another also said, “Lord, I will follow thee; but let me first go bid
them farewell which are at home at my house.” And Jesus said unto him,
“No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit
for the kingdom of God.”
Christ never concealed His own judgments and convictions as to life’s
values in these matters, and spoke with the greatest scorn of all
indulgence and softness of life. “What went ye out for to see?” He
asked the people, regarding John. “A man clothed in soft raiment?
Behold, they that wear soft clothing are in king’s houses.” He was
looking after men of iron and of austerity. “If any man will come after
me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me.”
The beautiful thing is that this appeal of Christ’s was not futile.
Instead of repelling men it drew them. He actually obtained the men
whom He was hunting for, not by offering them worldly inducements,
not by making such appeals as anybody but Christ would have made, but
by addressing the sacrificial spirit in them, and making an appeal to
their latent capacity for heroism. There is a wonderful tribute in
Jesus’ method to those characteristics in human nature which have never
been destroyed, which can answer to the highest motives, which do not
need to be bought by any low compensations, but which spring into full
life when appealed to on the most heroic and unselfish plane. We know
how, in consequence, this exultation in difficulties, this love of
hardship, this scorn of ease became the characteristic note of early
Christianity. In the best summary description which Saint Paul gives
of Christian character and manhood, in the twelfth chapter of Romans
we find him speaking of “rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation.”
And when he comes to write his conception of the character of the happy
warrior, we find him setting this in the foreground, “Endure hardship,
as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.” The praise of the New Testament is
never given to those who have lived in luxurious, indulgent ease. It is
for that little company of men and women who have loved the difficult
tasks, and who with joy trod the rough ways that transcend the stars.
Every one of the great New Testament leaders is a man who exalts for
us this same love of moral hardship, this same scorn of indulgence and
smooth ease, and this same virtue of steadfastness, “And not only so,”
says Paul, “but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation
worketh stedfastness; and stedfastness, experience; and experience,
hope.” And Peter writes, “Yea, and for this very cause adding on your
part all diligence, in your faith supply virtue; and in your virtue
knowledge; and in your knowledge self-control; and in your self-control
stedfastness; and in your stedfastness godliness.” James joins in,
“My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations;
knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience.” And you
remember the description which John gives of himself in Revelation as
“your brother and partaker with you in the tribulation and kingdom and
stedfastness which are in Jesus.”
Now, we ask ourselves the question why our Lord poured out all this
scorn on what the world counts the desirable condition and atmosphere
of life, why the New Testament has no patience with self-seeking,
indulgence, contentment, or ease as the standard of a human life,
why it speaks contemptuously of smooth ease of every kind, and
exalts, instead, the austere life, the life of strength, and of
self-discipline, why our Lord said to men when He came to call them
into the best thing there was in the world, “If any man will come after
me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow after
me.”
Well, one reason why the whole New Testament pours out such contempt
upon the smooth life and exalts hardness, is because only hardness can
make a great soul, and the end of the Gospel, the end of life, was the
growing of souls. The words of Socrates, understood in the social sense
which he intended and not selfishly, contain the central end. “For I
do nothing,” said he, “but go about persuading you all, old and young
alike, not to take thought for your persons or your properties, but
first and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul.”
It is true, in a sense, that we are here for the work we can do, but it
is also true, in a yet deeper sense, that we are here to become the
best workmen that we can become, and that the work we do has a large
measure of its value in its reflex power of making us capable of doing
better work. Evidently this is not the real workshop where God needs
His best men and women. When He has perfected His workmen and workwomen
and recognizes that they are prepared to do their best work, does He
make use of them here? Never. He takes them elsewhere, where evidently
the real work is to be done. Everything we see in this world would seem
to indicate that it is only the preparatory school, a place where men
and women are equipped for the real thing, that the career that is to
abide lies elsewhere than here. The purpose of these days is to make
us ready for the work God has for us to do in a larger sphere than
this, where we pass on, as Chinese Gordon told Mr. Huxley, to have a
larger government given to us to administer. God pours out His contempt
on smoothness of life because it cannot make greatness of soul, and
greatness of soul is one object of our being here.
The Christian ideal despised, also, this smoothness which seems to many
of us the most desirable thing that life has for us, because there is
such little knowledge given with it. At best it can only play on the
very surface of life. We know no more than springs out of the deep
experience through which we pass. You remember the lines of Father
Tabb:
“‘Where wast thou, little song,
That hast delayed so long
To come to me?’
‘Mute in the mind of God
Till where thy feet had trod
I followed thee.’”
It is only where we have gone that we know the way; it is only the
experience in life that we have passed through that gives us our true
knowledge of life, because the end of life is its relationships, and
wealth of life depends on the breadth of true knowledge and the riches
of true relationship. Smoothness of life is simply deadening because it
keeps us out of what is real life.
And Christianity derided smoothness of life, and scorned it, because
it separates us from fellowship with the noble and suffering life
of God. You know the long controversy in theology as to whether the
idea of suffering is compatible with the idea of a perfect God. There
have been some theologians who insist it could not be possible that
God should suffer. If He could suffer, He could not be God. Well, I
suppose all of us here are prepared without one moment of hesitation
to range ourselves on the other side, and to say that if God cannot
suffer He cannot be our God. He could not be a father if He did not
suffer. Christ could not have been the revelation of Him if He is not
a suffering God; for “He was the man of sorrows, and acquainted with
grief.” What He laid bare was a heart of love sharing the anguish of
others; for we have not a Father who cannot be touched with the feeling
of our infirmities,――We can say that of Him because of what we know
of Him who revealed Him,――We have not a Father who cannot be touched
with the feeling of our infirmities, no impassive God sitting where “no
sound of human sorrow mounts to mar His sacred everlasting calm,” but
a Father who pities His children, who enters into their life, and who
loves them with all His soul. We can have no knowledge of that God, no
fellowship with His life, if what we are living is the smooth, easy,
indulgent life, everything bought for us by others, nothing done by us
for others, no blood of sacrifice colouring our life red with the glow
of God and His incarnate Son. The New Testament despises the smooth
life that makes it impossible for men and women to have any part in the
deepest life of their Father.
And the New Testament scorns the smooth, indulgent life because it
cannot connect men and women with the real springs of strength and of
power. No strong man was ever made against no resistance. We develop no
physical power by putting forth no physical effort. All the strength of
life we have we get by pushing against opposition. We acquire power
as we draw it out of deep experience and effort. And the new Christian
ideal made no place for indulgence and ease because these things leave
men and women weak, with no strength either themselves to bear or to
achieve for others. It is as Mrs. King puts it in Ugo Bassi’s “Sermon
in the Hospital”:
“The Vine from every living limb bleeds wine;
Is it the poorer for the spirit shed?
The drunkard and the wanton drink thereof;
Are they the richer for that gift’s excess?
Measure thy life by loss instead of gain;
Not by the wine drunk, but the wine poured forth
For love’s strength standeth in love’s sacrifice;
And whoso suffers most hath most to give.
* * * * *
God said to Man and Woman, ‘By thy sweat,
And by thy travail, thou shalt conquer earth,’
Not, by thy ease or pleasure:――and no good
Or glory of this life but comes by pain.
How poor were earth if all its martrydoms,
If all its struggling sighs of sacrifice
Were swept away, and all were satiate-smooth,
If this were such a heaven of soul and sense
As some have dreamed of;――and we human still.
Nay, we were fashioned not for perfect peace
In this world, howsoever in the next:
And what we win and hold is through some strife.”
And it was because our Lord knew this that He set over against men’s
wills the strait door of the kingdom of life. He did not betray the
trust that had been given to Him. He did not say, “Come, I will make
life easy for you.” He did not say, “Come, let us indulge ourselves
to heart’s content.” He said, “If any man will come after me, let him
leave all that behind, let him deny himself, and let him take up his
cross daily, and let him come after me.”
Now, I know what many of us will be saying of all this. We will be
saying, “God did not bring us into the world with any cross. All our
life long has been a sheltered life. None of this hardness of which
you speak has ever come to us. Maybe our fathers and mothers knew it
before us, but they have shielded us from its pressure. Are we to go
back to crudeness and asceticism for the good of our souls? Are we who
have no cross deliberately to take our smooth lives and roughen them?”
Yes, that is precisely what I am saying. Those of us who were not born
with a cross must find one, those whose lives have been smooth are
deliberately to find ways of roughening them, so that we may know a
life of power and fellowship with the suffering God, and can go out to
real work, and be prepared for that greater life and greater service
which await us elsewhere than here.
We shall not have any great difficulty in obeying this call of Christ
to roughen our lives. There are many crosses in the world too heavy for
the men and women who are trying to carry them. We can go out and find
one of these crosses and help to bear it. They are not far away. Here
is a clipping from the New York _Sun_:
“A comely young Hungarian woman with a three-months-old baby in
her arms dropped to the sidewalk at Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth
Street late yesterday afternoon and lay half conscious. An
ambulance surgeon who came said the woman was starving and that
her baby had bronchitis.
“The woman recovered enough to tell the surgeon that she was
Mrs. Mary Scheinn, twenty years old, and that her husband had
died recently. She had been living with a friend at 97 Seigel
Street, Brooklyn, she said, but this woman also was very poor
and expected to be evicted to-day, so Mrs. Scheinn had walked
to New York to try to get her sick child into a hospital. She
tramped from hospital to hospital, and everywhere they refused
to take the child, she said. But she kept up the quest until
she gave out. She had had nothing to eat since yesterday and
little then.
“The ambulance took the woman and child to Bellevue Hospital.
Both are in a rather serious condition.”
Being young and comely, doubtless, if she had not had the baby, some
pimp or other American citizen, for a consideration within her power,
might have helped her, but being innocent and carrying a baby there she
stood until she fell down, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth
Street, in the heart of the city, a woman carrying a baby and a cross
that were too heavy for her. There were millions of Christian people
round about her. Thousands of us never knew what a cross was and we
let the woman with her child in her arms fall down under the weight of
hers. This world is black with the shadows of crosses. If we have none
of our own, in the name of the great Cross, let us borrow one.
Here is a note from a girl. She is one of thousands and the note is
real. I had been speaking in one of the New York churches and the next
day came a letter from her asking me, if I really believed what I had
said, to answer some questions for her. I wrote in reply and this was
part of her answer: “The great trouble with me is that I have to fight
continually against despondency. Life to me is a series of sorrows and
troubles, that accumulate and grow larger, and just when I am at the
point of giving up altogether some little word or act deters me.... I
know I would be happy if I were, as you say, truly trustful towards
God, but God to me seems very far off and rather mythical. Your letter,
also the fact that you wrote, was a help to me. The part that perhaps
appealed to me most was the idea that God and God’s love are longing
for us. It is very fine to feel that when one is always lonesome.” I
learned more of her story but it is not for telling here. It was a
cross too heavy for her which she was trying to bear. Women who knew
her lifted its weight for her, taking it over upon themselves.
And not only by taking up crosses, of which the world is full, can we
roughen our lives. Many of us can do it by simply cutting off some of
our waste and extravagance. There are many of us who never ask before
we spend money, “How can I get the greatest return from this money?” We
waste it like water, while Belgium, Serbia, Poland and Armenia call. It
is said that there are thirty million people in India who have only one
meal a day, and who never know what it is to have enough to eat. Some
of them say that if they could have enough to eat for just two days,
they would be willing to lie down and die content. Again and again,
hundreds of thousands of people in China have been the victims of
famine, while we were throwing wealth away. We can roughen life a bit
by denying ourselves, by abridging expenditure and devoting the money
to human need and to some of the services the world is dying for.
Students often reject the ethical and economic arguments against
gambling. These arguments are valid but it is very hard to get a
clutch for them on many minds. You can point out how dishonourable
and essentially immoral it is for a man to have money which he did
not earn, for which he gave no equivalent, which came to him as no
expression of friendship or by no legitimate inheritance. All this
is clear to the healthy and manly moral sense. But the gambler does
not have such a sense. I have often wondered that the case is not
more frequently put from the other side, from the side of the wrong
of spending money in gambling. When a man has won on a bet the moral
question is lulled but when he has lost there is a chastened mood which
can be invited to reflect. What moral warrant did he have for throwing
his money away? What does he have to show for it? A million hungry
hands were outstretched to him, a world of want and suffering called
towards him over land and sea? And he threw his money away――got nothing
for it, did nothing with it. In a world like ours, there are parched
lips waiting for drink; there are hungry mouths in need of bread:――do
we have any right to waste in indulgence in a world like this? Men
should scrutinize every dollar that passes through their hands and ask,
“What is the very best thing that I can do with this?”
And frugality, self-imposed for the sake of service, will come back
to us in rich reward in character and power. Horace Bushnell drew a
noble picture of the fruitage of true parsimony in his address at the
Litchfield County Centennial in 1851, on “The Age of Homespun”:
“It was also a great point, in this homespun mode of life, that
it imparted exactly what many speak of only with contempt, a
closely girded habit of economy. Harnessed, all together, into
the producing process, young and old, male and female, from the
boy that rode the plow-horse, to the grandmother knitting under
her spectacles, they had no conception of squandering lightly
what they all had been at work, thread by thread, and grain by
grain, to produce. They knew too exactly what everything cost,
even small things, not to husband them carefully. Men of
patrimony in the great world, therefore, noticing their small
way in trade, or expenditure, are ready, as we often see, to
charge them with meanness――simply because they knew things only
in the small; or, what is not far different, because they were
too simple and rustic to have any conception of the big
operations by which other men are wont to get their money
without earning it, and lavish the more freely because it was
not earned. Still, this knowing life only in the small, it will
be found, is really anything but meanness.
“Probably enough the man who is heard threshing in his barn of a
winter evening, by the light of a lantern, (I knew such an
example) will be seen driving his team next day, the coldest day
of the year, through the deep snow to a distant wood-lot to draw
a load for a present to his minister. So the housewife that
higgles for a half hour with the merchant over some small trade
is yet one that will keep watch, not unlikely, when the
schoolmaster, boarding round the district, comes to some hard
quarter, and commence asking him to dinner, then to tea, then to
stay over night, and literally boarding him, till the hard
quarter is passed. Who now, in the great world of money, will
do, not to say the same, as much, proportionally as much, in any
of the pure hospitalities of life?
“Besides, what sufficiently disproves any real meanness, it will
be found that children brought up, in this way, to know things
in the small――what they cost and what is their value――have, in
just that fact, one of the best securities of character and most
certain elements of power and success in life; because they
expect to get on by small advances followed up and saved by
others, not by sudden leaps of fortune that despise the slow but
surer methods of industry and merit. When the hard, wiry-looking
patriarch of homespun, for example, sets off for Hartford, or
Bridgeport, to exchange the little surplus of his year’s
production, carrying his provision with him and the fodder for
his team, and taking his boy along to show him the great world,
you may laugh at the simplicity, or pity, if you will, the
sordid look of the picture; but, five or ten years hence, this
boy will probably enough be found in college, digging out the
cent’s worths of his father’s money in hard study; and some
twenty years later he will be returning, in his honours, as the
celebrated Judge, or Governor, or Senator and public orator,
from some one of the great states of the republic, to bless the
sight once more of that venerated pair who shaped his beginnings,
and planted the small seeds of his future success. Small seeds,
you may have thought, of meanness; but now they have grown up
and blossomed into a large-minded life, a generous public
devotion, and a free benevolence to mankind.
“And just here, I am persuaded, is the secret, in no small
degree, of the very peculiar success that has distinguished the
sons of Connecticut, and, not least, those of Litchfield County,
in their migration to other states. It is because they have gone
out in the wise economy of a simple, homespun training,
expecting to get on in the world by merit and patience, and by a
careful husbanding of small advances; secured in their virtue by
just that which makes their perseverance successful. For the men
who see the great in the small, and go on to build the great by
small increments, and so form a character of integrity before
God and men, as solid and massive as the outward successes they
conquer. The great men who think to be great in general, having
yet nothing great in particular, are a much more windy affair.”
Every one ought to roughen life by friendships that will bring into it
those influences which are not naturally in our daily associations and
will carry us into contact with men and women who struggle harder than
we do. A few such friendships will help to keep life from petrification
and to make us aware that the world is under a cross, and that our
hearts must be as open to all its needs as the heart of the Father of
human life is open always.
And we can help to roughen our lives in the very sense in which Christ
meant them to be roughened if we will resist the steadily increasing
tendency of our day to multiply ways in which we are released from
doing things for ourselves. There are none of us who do not have a
hundred things done for us that our fathers and mothers had to do
for themselves. Little by little, we are ridding ourselves of the
responsibility of doing any service for ourselves whatsoever. There is
immense gain in this. It gives freedom for larger living but it can go
too far, and it would be a great thing if we resolved at periods that
we would not let anybody else do for us what we could do for ourselves.
There was a day, perhaps, when men needed the other rule, when it
was a great deal better to get other people to do things for us than
to do them ourselves, but the time has come when the world needs to
reverse that principle. What the world wants is not organizers, but
deorganizers, men and women who will increase the number of personal
services and activities, and who will bring something frugal, simple
and elementary back into life to deliver us from the false heaven of
ease and self-indulgence, which is as bad as any other kind of hell.
Christ came to save us from that.
There is one other way in which we can answer this call, and can
deliver ourselves from the curse of smooth living. Around about us on
every side there are causes waiting for what men and women can do for
them. I do not mean crosses in any great, general, organized sense,
in which we send our five, our twenty-five or our hundred dollars to
some society and think we have, in that way, carried all the cross that
Christ means to have us carry. We cannot fulfill Christ’s command by
paying an organization to carry a cross for us. All the work they do
must be done, and it must be supported. Millions of dollars that are
not being given now ought to be given. But what Christ is waiting for
also and what we have got to do if we are to have the satisfaction of
the enduring life is to find each of us for himself some true cross of
personal service. There are men and women around us who are waiting for
some touch of sympathy, some kindness, some unflinching word of ours to
them that shall mean the awakening of their own discouraged or sleeping
souls, that they may come out to live. “If any man will come after me,
let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me.”
One of the saddest things in the world to-day is the principle under
which those are living who are unwilling to bear these crosses and
to bring home into their lives the wholesome spiritual stimulus that
this roughening of life alone can give to them. We have reacted too far
from the old monastic idea. Men speak with scorn now of those men and
women who went away into monasteries and convents, despising the joys
of the world for the sake of their souls. But these men and women were
infinitely better than the great multitudes who go out into the world
to-day, despising their souls for the sake of the joys of the world. If
a man or woman wants to do any despising it is better to despise the
world than the soul. It were well for us to go back a little to the
spirit of the mediæval time. When that spirit was pure and good the
world’s richest service flowed out from it.
The glory of life for us consists in finding the rough, the morally
austere things in life and then fearlessly and unhesitatingly doing
them. There is no splendour in the easy indulgent way. The splendour
lies in finding the hard thing to be achieved and revelling in it.
Many years ago I clipped this story from the editorials of what was
then our ablest newspaper:
“A young Briton named Felix Oswald became interested a while ago
in the geology of Turkish Armenia. He made long journeys through
that country and finally came home with an important amount of
valuable new material. It was not matter, however, that would
find favour in the eyes of the general publisher and Mr. Oswald
had to undertake its publication himself. He had the type set at
the lowest rates in a small town. There were 516 pages of print
and the author undertook the large task of doing the printing
himself. He hired a hand press and after weeks of hard work he
had produced 101 copies of the book. Feeling certain that this
edition would fill the demand he went about the next large job,
which was the hand colouring of all his maps and profiles. Then
the copies were bound and the book was out.
“Leading geologists say that the work is one of the best of its
kind. The small edition is exhausted and the book will not be
reprinted. The editor of _Petermann’s Mitteilungen_, believing
that a wide circle of geologists would be glad to have the
important results of Oswald’s investigations, has just printed
in his periodical an extended résumé of them together with some
of the maps. The University of London has crowned the work with
its approval by conferring the degree of Doctor of Science upon
the author. Oswald has certainly earned the congratulations of
all who admire the qualities of courage, perseverance and
intelligent devotion to a special task.”
A man does not have to go to Armenia to find the hard thing to do,
although there are harder and nobler tasks waiting there to-day than
Oswald undertook, tasks that are crosses in the divinest sense, scarred
with sorrow and grief. And perhaps there are some among us here now who
are bearing crosses and finding them beyond their strength. But they
are not to be mourned over. They were not of our making, were they? If
they were of our making, perhaps there is some penitence to be felt,
some restitution to be made. If they were not of our making, we may be
sure that they were built just for our shoulder, that One who knew us
made them that we might carry them, and become under them what we could
never become without them. And if we have no such cross, out from our
smooth and easy living, our cozy shelters in which we have been kept
and are kept now, One is calling us to come whose ancient word we hear
to-day: “I came not to send peace, but a sword. Whosoever would be my
disciple must love nothing as much as me, and must be willing to rise
up and follow me.” For men and women who will do this in the full and
joyous spirit of Francis of Assisi but in the forms suitable to our
modern life the summons of God and the world is clear.
LECTURE II
THE CONSERVATION AND RELEASE OF MORAL RESOURCES
One of our most familiar national ideas during recent years has been
the conservation of our natural resources, our mines, our forests, our
water power, the agricultural capacities of our soil. It would have
been a good thing if this idea had occurred to us fifty years earlier.
But it is an idea which always comes late to a young nation. So long
as the population is sparse and the supply of good land unlimited
and it is an easy thing to pick up a living from the surface of the
ground, perhaps it is too much to expect that any people would be
careful and frugal. But when the population has increased and begins
to press against the means of subsistence, when the good public lands
are exhausted and a mere living becomes harder for the masses of the
people to secure, then any nation awakens to wisdom and turns from
recklessness and prodigality.
And, doubtless, the idea would have occurred to us a full generation
earlier if it had not been for the terrible education of our Civil War.
There is a great deal to be set down on the good side of the account
of the Civil War. It took the putty of our national character and
burned it into stone. It ran steel fibres through our national life.
And it brought us for the first time to a sense of national unity. But
alas there is a great deal also on the ledger’s other page. For war
is not conservation, it is destruction. It educates any people not in
frugality but in wastefulness. Military supplies must be bought at once
at any cost. Everything is thrown away with a negligent and wasteful
hand. And so long as any people is pouring out its best possession, the
precious life-blood of its sons, like water on the battle-field, you
cannot expect it to be saving and careful in its material possessions.
The days of waste that followed the Civil War are gone forever. The
nation has begun now to count carefully the amount of its available
wealth. We have seen calculations of how many millions of feet of
lumber we have standing in our forests and how many millions of tons of
coal we have still hid away in our treasure houses underground. And far
and wide over the nation now we are learning to husband the resources
we have left, mindful of our children who are to come after us.
And it is a good thing that the nation in conserving her resources
realizes that there is something more important than a careful
husbanding of her mere material wealth. The vital resources of any
people are of more significance to her than clods of coal, or timber
on her hillsides. Of what use would it be to conserve the material
resources of any nation if we conserve them only for a deteriorating
racial stock? The nation has come to realize that the men and women
who compose it are its largest wealth, and that this treasure must be
guarded more sacredly than our mines, our forests, or our water power.
We have seen, accordingly, a whole new body of legislation growing up,
that would have made our fathers stand aghast, fixing the conditions
of employment, the age of employees, the sanitary condition of homes
and mills, the hours of work and the care of women. The expenditure
of immense sums for the protection of the life and health of factory
labourers is now readily recognized even by “soul-less corporations,”
which formerly fought against all such outlay, as money well invested.
In all the nation to-day we realize that there is a more precious
wealth than our material wealth. I saw an interesting illustration of
this new frame of mind a little while ago in a statement issued by some
leading men in Tennessee dealing with the excessive death rate among
the negroes of the South. They pointed out that among nine millions
of white people the death rate is 160,000, and that among the nine
millions of the negroes the death rate is 266,000. In other words,
among the negroes, 106,000 more people die every year than among a
corresponding number of the whites of our country. In the negro, these
men argued, the South had an invaluable asset, a better type of labour
on the whole, with all its drawbacks, than any other section of the
nation possessed, more docile, more faithful, less troublesome, and
the South could not afford to lose this labour which it needed for
developing its wealth. These men estimated the economic value of each
one of these lives at $350 a year, and the period of that economic
value at ten years, so that each one of these wasted lives was a loss
of $3,500 to the South, or $371,000,000 each year, one million dollars
a day, and they argued that the South could not afford such a waste.
The South, they held, must see that the death rate among the negro
is reduced to the same proportions as the death rate among the white
people, in order that such an enormous economic loss might be averted.
We are realizing all over the nation now that a man is a very costly
product. You can breed an animal in a few months for the market, but
it takes twenty years to grow a man, and no nation can afford to
throw away such costly products as men and women. These are its most
priceless wealth. If it expects to conserve its treasures and to be
prepared for the services of the days to come, it is bound to guard
this wealth more sacredly than any other. And American capital and
industry have come to see this clearly. Here is one typical utterance
by a leading engineer at a meeting of the Immigration Committee of the
Chamber of Commerce of the United States:
“Industrial Americanization is a part of the prevalent
present-day movement towards the humanizing of industry. It
aims to make what is commonly called ‘welfare work’ not an
exercise of the individual employer’s ‘paternalism,’ but a
legitimate kind of business organization everywhere. There are
now innumerable kinds of ‘welfare work.’ One employer does it
from the point of view of ‘good business’; another on the ‘big
brothers’ theory. One man confines himself to playgrounds,
another to safety appliances. In one firm it is under the
employment manager; in another under a Y. M. C. A. director;
and in a number of other firms it is classified in as many
different ways.
“There is no agreement among American employers as to where the
organization of the human side of industry really belongs. And
there are absolutely no standards for it. What we need to do is
to extend scientific methods to the human phases of industrial
organization, and thus give ‘welfare work’ a definite place
and definite standards. The engineer as the ‘consulting mind’
of industry must be the leader in this work. It is he who
determines the site of the plant and its construction. Inside
the plant again, the engineer has much to do with efficiency
methods. No efficiency methods that are unrelated to the men in
the plant can prosper permanently.”
But there is another sort of resource and national treasure greater by
far than these, which most of the nations are passing by. I mean the
latent and undeveloped capacities for ministry and achievement which
lie dormant inside human life. Every life is a reservoir of unawakened
possibilities. There is no one of us that is more than a fraction of
the man he should be. There is not one who is not falling short by
a wide margin of the ideals that he ought to attain, not one who is
making the contribution to the nation or building the share in the
Kingdom of God that God and mankind alike have a right to expect of
him. Not long before his death, an article contributed by Prof. William
James, of Harvard, appeared in the _American Magazine_, entitled “The
Powers of Man,” in which Professor James argued that mankind is living
on a very small fraction of its vitality, and that there are buried
underground strata of possibilities and of power which are never tapped
except in times of great emergency. For a little time then a man draws
on these reserves, and then seals the strata over again and falls back
on the surface levels once more. For illustration he spoke of the
familiar phenomenon of the second wind. Every boy can remember such
experiences. There came a time in the game when he was “all in.” He had
done his best and drawn on his last available power. Suddenly it was as
though something broke. A partition wall fell in. Unsuspected reserves
were released. The second wind came and reservoirs of power that had
been withheld came unexpectedly into play and he did better than he
had done before, what he had never been able to do before. That is an
absolute truth of experience all through life. In our great crises, any
one of many forces may unlock these energies and let them loose. And
the present needed appeal of the world is to men and women that they
should not be content to draw upon these reservoirs in crises alone.
The tragic crises come because these powers are not drawn forth and
used. The great wealth of the nations and of the world that needs now
to be unsealed is just this wealth of moral capacity lying latent and
dormant within.
What I have been saying is certainly true in the realm of our physical
energies. I remember a story of John Lawrence, who went out to India a
raw, uninfluential Irish boy in the service of the East India Company,
resolved to do his work well and make himself a name. Very early in
his career he was assigned to the collectorship of the Jullundur Doab,
on what was then the frontier of India. He made himself perfectly
at home among his people, entering into their life, mastering their
vernaculars, learning their secrets, until at last men came to think of
“Jans Larens” as a demi-god with powers beyond the knowledge of common
men. One day as he was sitting in his house a messenger came in from
one of his districts and reported that a village was burning down and
begged him to come. He hurried out to the village. When he arrived he
asked the headmen if they had all the people out of the houses and was
told that all had been brought out except one old woman who refused to
come. He went to the house where the woman lived and looked in. There
she sat on a bag of grain. Lawrence entreated her to come out but she
refused, explaining that this bag of grain was all her earthly wealth.
If she came out she would starve; she would rather stay and be burned.
When Lawrence found his commands and entreaties unavailing, he rushed
in, with the embers from the burning roof falling on his shoulders,
stooped over and picked up the bag of grain, and left the burning
building, the old woman following obediently behind. The next day as he
was sitting in his house it flashed on his mind that the bag of grain
had been exceedingly heavy and he rode out curiously to the village
again to see how much he had lifted. He had no difficulty in finding
the old woman and her bag of grain. He stooped over to lift it but
could not budge it from the ground. But the day before he had budged
it. He had picked it up and carried it. The power to do it was lying
latent in him all the while. All he needed was just the piercing call
or inspiration adequate to release the buried energy.
And the world is full of evidences that what is true physically is true
morally. In every man lies the power with the grace and help of God to
meet his great crisis and in every woman the power to bear the agony
and pain of her great hour. Only a few years ago, when the _Titanic_
went down and some men who had walked as dogs at the heel of their
passions suddenly became masters of themselves and laughing stood at
attention to death as they waited on the deck, we all wondered what it
was that gave these men who had been slaves their sudden moral mastery.
That mastery was within all the time. It did not come out of the frame
of the _Titanic_. It did not come out of the iceberg. It was lying
buried all the while only waiting the hour and the Voice that was to
summon it to come forth.
Among the nations to-day this is the needed truth as it is the needed
truth here in our own lives. There are boys here to-day who have been
yielding to temptation, to whom God would give energies to withstand
their enemy. In the nation there are even now capacities to conquer all
the evils with which the nation abounds. Some day our children will
look back and ask why we have allowed immorality to dominate the moral
life of the land and why in the world we have endured the saloon so
long. These things will be cleaned away some day and men will wonder
then what their mothers and fathers were about that they surrendered
where that happier generation will not surrender but will achieve. The
needed capacities are buried of God in life, but we are not willing to
believe that they are there or to have faith in Him to energize them.
Let me put the truth in yet a different way.
Last spring, just after Holy Week, I received a very interesting letter
from a friend who is one of the best known and best loved judges in our
country. It was written on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter
Day, and he said in it that he was pursuing the practice which he had
pursued for many years, of trying in the interval between Good Friday
and Easter morning to eliminate Jesus Christ entirely from his thought
of life and of the world in order that he might thus bring home to his
own mind and conscience more deeply the significance of Jesus, and he
said he could hardly wait for Easter morning to come to escape from the
oppressive gloom and depression in which his spirit was as a result of
his enforced practice. And he begged me, as one of his friends, to try
this between the next Good Friday and Easter Day and to see what the
experience would mean.
Oddly enough my own thoughts that same day on which my friend was
writing this letter were exactly the opposite of his. He was thinking
of Jesus Christ as extinguished, he was thinking of all that He had
come to be and to do as gone, and he was trying to bring home to his
own heart what this utter loss of Christ would mean. I was meditating,
on the other hand, on that Saturday morning, on just the contrary idea.
On Good Friday, the day before this Saturday, there had been a great
Personality; now that Personality must be somewhere still. Personality
does not die. The next day, on Easter morning, there was to be a great
outburst of energy. That energy must be somewhere now. It will not be
created to-morrow morning. It must be somewhere to-day waiting to come
forth to-morrow. Where is it? And then I suddenly realized that it was
all there, that all that was to break loose Easter morning was shut
up inside that grave, that all the energies that were to peal across
the world on the new day were there asleep in that tomb that Saturday.
All the great love and power that had been had not been annihilated.
It was there somewhere, only out of sight for a little while. And the
great truth urged itself that all the dormant energies of life, all the
enshrouded and enfolded powers are here now and always just as truly as
they will be to-morrow when they awake, though for the hour they lie
latent and unused.
Then I began to see, as one’s thought ran easily on, that that Saturday
between Good Friday and Easter Day was in reality a sort of symbol of
the whole of history. For history, as we look back upon it, is full of
these repressions and these emergences, and then perhaps repressions
again, of great impulses and outbursts of energy and of power. Now and
then they are for good, as when the Reformation broke across men’s
minds, shattering their shackles, opening old prison doors, allowing
the enslaved human spirit to come out and breathe the air of freedom.
But why had it not come before? All the great energies of God that
burst forth in it must have been here even before that hour. And why
did they have to subside afterwards? They all _were_ still? Why might
they not have gone beating their way onward and not have ceased so soon?
Then also great explosions of evil come. We look out across the world
to-day and see all these dogs of war unleashed. But these dogs of war
were not born the year before last. They had been here all the time,
only they were chained and held in leash. Why were they not kept
chained and in leash? Why were they allowed to break loose and go wild
across the world in their havoc and devastation? We know perfectly well
that after a few months they are going to be chained again, and the
great reconstructive processes will begin to make the world anew. But
why do these reconstructive forces have to wait? They will not exist
any more truly then than they do to-day. Why not release them to-day
to go out and do their creative work in the world now? Why not on
Saturday let loose that which is to burst with creative freedom on the
world on Easter morning?
And I saw that this was a symbol not of history only but also of human
life, that every human life is just the mystery of the infolding of
latent capacities that are there wrapped up, the infolding of great
ends of which no man can foretell. That is why, I suppose, a man feels
such awe every time he holds a very little child in his arms. He does
not know what it is that he has in his arms, what it is that will
some day come bursting forth from that little child. That must have
been Mary’s thrill in those early days when she held her little one,
knowing dimly and far away, if not clearly, that she held in her arms
the mighty Redeemer of men. “When I see a child,” said Pasteur, “he
inspires me with two feelings: tenderness for what he is now, respect
for what he may become hereafter.” Of personal life it is as true as of
history. Vast latent possibilities for good may come breaking forth.
Now and then they do, in some truth-loving, unfearing, plain-speaking,
God-obeying Martin Luther. Or they may issue in some tranquil, patient,
loving-hearted, steady-spirited, immovable Lincoln. Goodness comes
leaping forth, and oftentimes we are tempted to think the surroundings,
the circumstances, produced it. They produced none of it. They gave it
its opportunity and its chance, but it was all somewhere all the time
and it might not have come forth if something inside had not released
the spring of our will to God’s will and let those great energies of
good come pulsing out to do their work.
And the same thing is true of the inwrought and enshrouded capacities
for ill. Jesus Christ laid off His limitations as well as His
activities that Saturday in the grave; and He left His limitations
there when He came out. Out of such Saturday graves in man’s character
it may be only the limitations that emerge. Out of many a man’s life
it is the dog that ought to be chained that is allowed to roam free,
while all the possibilities for good and sacrifice and ministry are
still-born inside. And sometimes, thank God, men discover all this
latent ill within and lay on it the restraining and throttling hand.
As godly old John Newton said when one day he saw a criminal being
led by, “There, but for the grace of God, goes John Newton.” He knew
that everything that had escaped in that brother of his lay latent in
himself, and he thanked God that a hand had been laid on all those
inner capacities for evil and wreckage and that that hand held them in
check and let only the good and the true and the pure go free.
There is something infinitely hopeful and encouraging in the principle
of that Saturday in our Lord’s last week for every man and woman of
us, as we think of life’s work and what we are trying to get done in
the world. So many times a thing seems all vain. The teacher tried to
breed in the boy whom he taught a hate of lies and a love of the truth,
and he wrought with tears and blood at his task, and the boy went out
from him and it seemed to him to have been futile, this that he had
done for him. We put ourselves out in this or that effort of service
in the hope of achieving this or that great end. Every little while it
seems to us to have been all fruitless. But wait. It is only Saturday.
Easter morning is going to break and the seed that was sown in the
ground in darkness and obscurity will come forth then. The life that
was let go for a little while, all that we did not see and therefore
thought had run sheer to waste, we shall discover then will come
pulsating back. “No effort is wasted,” said Pasteur.
It is a great joy of life to believe this, that what Isaiah said is
true through all the ages, by the very principle of the life of God,
that no word of His will come back to Him vain or be void, that it
will accomplish the thing He pleases and prosper in the errand whereon
He sent it. I received a letter the other day from a friend, the Rev.
Adolphus Pieters, who is a missionary in Japan. He had for very many
years been engaged in an interesting work. He published advertisements
of Christianity in the Japanese papers, and then occasionally printed
a brief attractive account of what Christianity was, with the hope
of arousing the curiosity of Japanese readers. At the end he would
add that if any one were interested he might correspond with him. As
a result of this work he came into correspondence with hundreds of
men. In this recent letter he writes: “The total number of people who
applied to us for tracts last year was 959, making the total from
February, 1914, when the work began, to December 31, 1915, 3,590. There
have been seven baptisms since my previous letter, and the total number
to date is forty-five. Number Forty-Five is a most instructive case of
the Lord’s blessing resting upon what was, humanly speaking, a complete
failure. The young man in question is a bright young student in the
Normal School at this place, who was baptized a week ago last Sunday,
after coming to my house off and on for two years, and getting a good
deal of instruction. I did not reckon him among the results of the
newspaper work, but after he was baptized he told me that he originally
got interested in the Gospel when he was attending the primary school
in his home town. Among his teachers was one named Okabe Katsumi, who
had seen our advertisements and secured some tracts, among which were
copies of the Gospels. He did not care for them himself, and had given
them to this boy, who was deeply impressed. In the course of time the
boy graduated from school and went to Oita to attend the Normal, and
he did so with the resolution already formed to look up the man who
advertised in the papers and learn from him more about the Christian
religion.
“When I heard that, I looked up the card index, and found among the
4 ‘dead’ cards one for Okabe Katsumi. It was number 444, and he had
applied for tracts in the spring of 1912, but in August he wrote that
he had found something in our tracts that he did not like, and so had
made up his mind to have nothing more to do with Christianity. So his
card was marked in red ink, ‘Closed August 12, 1913,’ and filed away
among the ‘dead’ ones――a complete failure, so far as any one could see.
But it wasn’t a failure. God knew better. On the fifth of March, 1916,
a young man made public confession of his faith and was baptized as a
sequel to that application of Okabe Katsumi in 1912.
“Such things sometimes make me look with something like awe upon my
card index. What is going on beneath the surface? How is God working
in the hearts of the ‘failures,’ or, if not in their hearts, through
them in the hearts of others? It is one more proof that ‘the foundation
of God standeth sure, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are
his.’”
Looking back across the years it could be seen that bread sown upon
the waters returned again. Absolutely no energy goes to waste in this
world,――no moral energy, no spiritual energy, any more than physical
energy. All that is released goes about its work. Let us thank God,
that there that Saturday morning in the dark of the grave all that
broke free the next day _was_, and was not dead beyond the resurrection
of life.
And the assurance that a man simply cannot do anything in vain is not
only a word of great courage to us in the work that we are trying to
do in the world, it is a word of hope and courage to us also in our
own personal life and struggle for character. All the energy we need
to accomplish anything that ought to be accomplished in us is in our
reach. “All power,” said Christ, “is given to me in heaven and in
earth. I stand within at the centre of your life. Draw on me. Go out
in the faith of that and do whatever your work is in the world. I have
the energy that you need.” All the energy that we require for any task
in life or out of life is there, by token and assurance of the closed
grave and resurrection, in Christ, waiting to be drawn upon by any man
who wants to make use of it.
And all this is not the exaltation of human will, the setting up of a
man’s own resolution and high purpose. It is precisely the opposite of
that. It is saying to a man: “There do not lie in the boastful surface
of your life the power and the resources that you need. Retire upon
God. You must get behind into the unplumbed depths where Christ waits.
You must go back of the Easter morning in the grave, the unopened womb
of the grave, to find it there. All of it is there in the now Risen
Christ Who that Saturday morning awaited resurrection.” This is simply
making faith a living, acting reality by which a man works; so that he
arises in the morning and can say: “O God, I have in Thee in me all
the energy and strength that I shall need this day. No temptation can
come to me to-day that I have not got the power in Thee, that I never
have used yet, to draw upon, that will enable me to meet and conquer.
No work will come to me to-day that is too much for me, no matter how
exacting or unprecedented in my experience. There is power in Thee for
me for this work that is come to me to do.”
That Saturday morning, more vividly than any other day that brings back
the triumph and pain and glory of Easter to us, makes a man assured
that all the energies he needs are near by, that in God’s own presence
there are all the powers he wants, awaiting release by God’s grace for
all the necessities of his life. And if we could not believe this about
the world we are living in to-day, surely a man could not go on living
in it. If we had to surrender to the present order and temper of the
world what would be left to uphold us? It is because we know it is
Saturday night in human history that we can live through it.
We know that as in individuals so in all the races of mankind, God has
planted these great dormant energies and powers. For scores and scores
of years the Chinese had despaired of their power to throw off the
opium curse. They knew it was sapping the very vitality of their land,
and yet they wondered whether the day would ever come when they would
have power enough to break those hateful chains that had been forged
upon them, and get back their freedom. Twenty years ago, as we went
to and fro in China, the most striking odour in the Chinese streets
was the pungent stench of smoking opium. One could scarcely go into a
Chinese city or walk in a Chinese highway without seeing the wretched
shipwrecks who were the products of that vice. Poppy fields bloomed red
over the Empire, and the race had almost come to despair. And what do
we find to-day? There is scarcely a great poppy field in the Republic,
scarcely a fume of opium that you can smell on the public street in any
Chinese city. The bonfires flared across the land as they burned up the
signs of the old bondage. A great race arose in power and in a massive
moral upheaval shook itself free. God had planted the energies there
that needed only the touch of a living faith in Him, a new assurance
of the freedom of man to do His will, and in this matter the whole
nation came out of its bondage into its liberty.
For generations men wondered whether slaves could ever be set free.
We almost feared in our land here that slavery was a permanent
institution. But there came a time at last when from the wrist of every
American slave the chains fell away. It might have been generations
before; it might not have been until generations after; only in that
time appointed the moral energies awoke and came forth, and Saturday
burst into Easter Day for the negro bondmen of America.
Precisely the same principle holds with regard to the things that we
fight to-day. It holds with regard to the war on war. Some day we shall
slay it. The kingdom of heaven, said Jesus, is among you. Well, let it
loose. The kingdom of heaven will have no war in it; the kingdom of
heaven will have no brothers cutting one another’s throats in it; the
kingdom of heaven will have in it no vice and lust dragging its slimy
trail across men’s hearths and hearts. If the kingdom of heaven is
within, why not set it free, that we may live in it as well as have it
buried inside of us! The world that we are living in is calling us to
go back to that principle of Saturday morning and to believe that all
we need to do the will of God is made available for us by God’s grace
now, if we will but obey.
And if some men say that all this is only to put in other words the
theory of development, of historic evolution, why, what of it? Of
course it is, but what is development except the drawing out of what
has been folded in? What is evolution except the letting loose of what
the mind of God Himself at the beginning had planted within,――when in
the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world He poured the blood of
Christ into humanity in order that humanity might be reinforced with
the adequate energies to enable it to accomplish the thing that was
God’s first dream for it? Of course it is, and that is precisely the
ground of Christ’s constant appeal. “Come unto me,” He said to men,
believing that they could. “Unless you hear My call and follow Me, you
cannot be My disciple.” What meaning was there to His summons unless
the power to respond was there in answer to His call? “I stand at the
door of your inner being,” said He, “and knock. I am there waiting.”
And so to us to-day, just as clearly as in those days, His voice
speaks: “Come out of your tomb, out of your chains, out of your
narrowness, out of your limitations, out of your despairs, out of your
dejections, out of your failures,――come out of them. The power of the
endless life is here for you, if only by faith and love you will lay
hold of it to-day.” Is that not, after all, the great central message
and the fundamental principle of Christ’s Gospel to us, which He
symbolized and illustrated in the shadow of the Saturday before the
Easter victory? It is in one of the old hymns:
“Low in the grave He lay――
Jesus, my Saviour!
Waiting the coming day――
Jesus, my Lord!
Death cannot keep his prey――
Jesus, my Saviour!
He tore the bars away――
Jesus, my Lord!
Up from the grave He arose,
With a mighty triumph o’er His foes;
He arose a victor from the dark domain,
And He lives forever with His saints to reign:
He arose! He arose! Hallelujah! Christ arose!”
And He arose once on Easter morning that on the Saturday before and
on every day, every one of us might also rise out of the old, low,
selfish, defeated life into the life through which are beating the
victorious energies and the sufficient strength of God. Shall it be so
with us?
“Rigid I lie in a winding sheet,
Which mine own hands did weave,
And my narrow cell is myself――myself,
Which yet I may not cleave.
“And yet in the dawn of the early morn,
A clear voice seems to say,
‘I am the Lord of the final word,
And ye may not say Me nay.
“‘Unloose your hands that your brother’s need
May ever find them free.
Unbind your feet from their winding sheet;
Henceforth they walk with Me.’
“And lo! I hear! I am blind no more!
I am no longer dumb!
Out from the doom of a self-wrought tomb,
Pulsate with life, I come.”
Yes, I may come if I will, by His life Who will live again in me.
But the trouble is men do not believe this. They do not believe in any
latent capacities adequate to the great task of life. They accept the
principle of surrender and incompetence. They have nothing for God and
God can make no use of them. And I imagine that it is such unbelief,
such misgiving as to whether after all we have any possibilities for
God in us, the undervaluation of God’s need of us and power to make and
use us, that lead many of us to live the futile, unfruitful, negative
lives which we do live. Men do not think their lives worth very much.
They do not deny that there are great men and that great work is to be
done in the world, but they think that God requires only those, that
He builds His kingdom on a few outstanding figures, that the common
men can look after themselves, and that they are not indispensable to
God. If we are to prevent this waste, and if we are to secure the life
without which God is impotent to build His kingdom in the world, we
must somehow bring home to men the recognition of the great truth that
God cannot get along without every man and all of that man, and that
every human life and all its buried powers are essential to God.
One of the great purposes of our Lord’s coming here to earth was that
He might show men the value of a man’s life in the plan and thought
of God. Even the most sacred and time-honoured institution our Lord
weighed over against one man and found him outweighing the institution.
What was His own example but the illustration of the immeasurable value
of man? He did not come to teach the uselessness of human life, but
its pricelessness. He did this by becoming a man Himself. And this
principle of God’s need of men and their latent possibilities is not
mere theological theory. It is the hard historic fact that God has ever
needed men and waited for them and for what they were the men to do for
Him. Look at the great inventions, discoveries, achievements. What is
the whole lesson of the Incarnation but that there are things that God
Himself will not do except as He uses man? God Himself, we must say
reverently, was communicable and a Saviour only as man. And His call
to-day as it has been all through the years is for men who will believe
that the thing God wants done can be done by Him through them. The
Western Hemisphere was here before ever Columbus drew aside the veil
and broadened the horizon of mankind. These great energies which drive
the modern world were here from the beginning. We did not invent any
of them. There is not an ounce of power in the world to-day that was
not here when the world began. All that man has done has been simply to
discover existing secrets. He has created no power. He has only found
out what God has put here for him to find out. It took man a long time
to discover this. But God waited for him. And God needs these finding
men now as much as He has needed them at any time. He needs such men
now to break open what is still concealed. The past has not exhausted
all the heroisms, has not accomplished all the tasks. There are greater
ones yet for the days that are, if God can only find His men.
Think how greatly God needs men to-day just to bring need and supply
together in the world. You remember the incident in the life of our
Lord as He came by the Pool of Bethesda where the sick lay, and spoke
to one poor man lying on his pallet.
“Are you going in?” said He.
“No,” said the man. “I have no friend who will help me in and others
get the benefit before I can come near.”
There was the good, waiting to be gained, and here was the man, but
he had no man to stand for him between the need and the supply. A
few years ago a great famine raged just back from the coast of China.
There were millions of Chinese families who were in want and hundreds
of thousands died of starvation because there was not bread enough to
feed them. Little children lay crying at the breasts of dead mothers
by the roadsides. At that very hour the wheat was piled up at railroad
stations in Argentina as high as church spires. There was grain enough
to feed the starving millions in China. Here was the supply and there
was the need, but where were the men? God had not men enough on whom to
float the supply across to meet the need. What is true of outward need
is true of inward need as well. There is never a want where there is
not an adequate supply. No little child on this earth need go hungry
because God has not put enough in this world to feed it. No human heart
need go starved because there is not enough love to meet its wants.
There is all the food and all the love that humanity needs. But there
are lacking the men who for God will bring the supply to the demand.
The human need in the world can be met by the supply only through men
who will fill up the gap. God can do it only as men lend themselves to
Him. That is why, through all the years, the call of God has been for
volunteers. For every unique, external, individual call that has been
given to men, you can find a million calls that have been just the
answer of men to the great call of God for volunteers. And God surely
values the volunteer above the conscript. Isaiah did not wait for any
special coercive call. “Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying,
Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I;
send me.” That call was enough to cover him, and he answered it. There
is so much work to be done that God cannot go marching through the
world looking for individuals, performing new miracles by which each
individual is to be thaumaturgically led up to his particular work.
God’s general way has been to picture before the eyes of His sons the
work to be done and to wait for their hearts to leap in response, as
Isaiah’s leaped: “Lord, let me have a share in this work ‘Here am I;
send me.’”
Men are indispensable to God to put meaning into the words in which He
tries to tell His message to men. Words have no meaning of their own.
Words mean only as much as one man puts into them, or another man takes
out of them. The meaning of the word does not come from the word; it
comes from some life in which the word gets incarnated, or from some
other life which interprets the word. What would the word “friend”
signify to a man who had never had one? What does “tenderness” mean to
one who has never seen a mother and her child? Or what is “patriotism”
to one who has never seen or felt the contagion? You remember what the
eunuch said when Philip met him in the chariot reading the prophet
Esaias. “Understandest thou what thou readest?” Philip asked. And he
replied, “How can I, except some man should guide me?” Things mean
nothing to men until they are shown to them. Men go to China or Japan
and preach the Gospel. How is it done? Why, they take words that have
old meanings and fill them with new and different meanings by living
new ideas in deeds before the people. In our colleges this year what
meaning will honour, truth and friendship have, except as these words
derive their meaning from the object lessons in some men’s lives? There
are places where honour means dishonour; where purity means impurity;
where truth means falsehood. These noble words are confused with their
very opposites because no man has incarnated their right meaning in his
life. That was one reason why the incarnation was necessary nineteen
hundred years ago. There was no adequate religious or spiritual
vocabulary and never could have been otherwise. If God had not come in
the flesh, men would not have had the ideas that we use to describe
God’s coming in the flesh. To-day, as then, God is dependent upon men
in whom He can put meaning into His message to the world.
Men are indispensable in enabling God to get His other men. He gives
men guidance for their lives. But how? I appeal to your own hearts.
How do we get the guidance of our lives? There are many who are sure
of having divine guidance in their lives, surer of that than they are
of any material thing, and yet, as we look back upon this supernatural
guidance, we realize that it has all been mediated through men. We can
name man after man who did for our lives, in smaller measure, just what
that man of Macedonia did for Paul. We get our guidance through men.
Saint Paul got his through a man. Through what man was it? Sir William
Ramsay has no doubt whatever that the man whom Saint Paul saw in his
dreams was none other than his friend Luke. A real man and a friend,
and no ghost figure, was the man of Macedonia through whom God gave
Paul his great missionary call.
It would be easy to recall the lives of great missionaries and point
out how they received their divine guidance through other men――not
even through a dream, far less through some miraculous vision, but
through a brother man who came to talk with them, reasoned with them,
and showed them the best way in which a man could use his life. Men
are indispensable to God in order to guide other men into the work
which God has for them to do. And one reason why there is such an
awful waste of life to-day, why so many men, going out of the colleges,
miss the highest work of their lives, is simply because there are not
enough other men who recognize that they are indispensable to God in
order that, through them, God may guide men to their highest and most
efficient places.
Men are indispensable to God in bringing men to Jesus Christ. As
men were brought to Christ by other men in the beginning, so has it
been during all the succeeding years. The angels are willing to do
what they can, but none of us have had any visible object lessons of
what they do. Men have been brought to Christ always by other men.
Imperfect lives are to be brought up to the Perfect Life, and to do
this service Christ uses common men, just such as we are. That is what
Paul conceived as the glory of his life, that he had the privilege of
being the bond――no other beings in the universe being able to take that
place――between men who had not found Christ and Christ hunting for His
own.
Then God requires men now as He never required them in all the days
gone by to bear testimony to the Deity of Jesus Christ. We know how
little value our Lord attached to any accrediting evidences that did
not come right out of pure, human personality. He discredited the
advantages of bringing back Abraham from the dead, for example, to
bear testimony to the truth. If men were not willing to accept adequate
moral evidence, valid human testimony, they would not believe by
miracle, He said. That is why He was so pleased with the confession of
Simon Peter. “Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona; for flesh and blood
hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.”
It rejoiced Him to get such testimony from a man who, in turn, had
drawn it out of his own experience of God. There is no greater need
in the world to-day than for a great body of men who know Christ to
be God more surely than they know themselves to be men, and are able
to go out and testify to what Christ can do with a definiteness and
certainty greater than that of any other testimony they can bear, who
can say what John said, “That which we have seen and heard declare we
unto you.” If there ever was a day when God was calling men to a great
undertaking, He is calling them now to be His witnesses, unimpeachable,
unflinching, to the unique personality, to the supreme divine character
and power of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ.
And it is not only for great men that God is calling to do these
indispensable tasks for Him. He wants the great men, no doubt, but He
wants, more than that, the great mass of the common men. After all,
the great man is only one man, and every little man counts just as
many as one great man. Since God has to have all, one little man is
as indispensable to the all as one great man can be. And until He has
all, He cannot do what He purposes to do. It is only when we _all_ come
“unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” that any
one of us can come. It is only when we “comprehend with _all_ saints,
what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height” of the love
of Christ, that any one of us can comprehend it. It is only when we
_all_ reflect as in a mirror the character of Christ that any one of
us shall be “changed ... from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of
the Lord.” And the little men, as a matter of fact, are doing as much
as the great. The night that Gough stood alone, with all hope gone, a
drunkard in the gutter, an almost forgotten man laid his hand on his
shoulder and said, “Man, there is a better life than this for you.”
The name of that man is remembered by a few, but forgotten by the
multitudes who will never forget the name of John B. Gough, or cease to
feel the glow of the fires which he kindled to blaze until the Judgment
Day. Even a little man may fill such an indispensable place as that of
helping God lay hold of a great man who will be one of the unmistakable
forces of God.
And it is not only every man that is indispensable to God, but also
every bit of every man. We cannot take some sections of our lives and
eliminate them as though they were not indispensable to God. There can
be no schism between a man’s public and his private life. His hands
and what he does with them, his imaginings and where they go when
he is alone by himself without any coercing, these are just as much
indispensable to God as a man’s public worship or any of his activities
in the open ministry of Christ’s kingdom. It is every bit of the
man――body, soul, and spirit――that is indispensable to God.
And if we are indispensable to God, we may be very sure that we are
indispensable to the world also. If God needs us, the world needs us
even more. It is waiting for the rising up of men who know that God
needs them, and who hand themselves over completely to His uses. “The
mightiest of civilizing agencies are persons,” said Dr. Fairbairn,
“and the mightiest civilizing persons are Christian men.” Those men
are doing most for the world who are doing most to make men aware of
how necessary they are to God, and who are going up and down the lands
allying men’s lives to the eternal life and power of God. This is the
greatest of all works――getting God His men. I heard Dr. J. Campbell
Gibson tell the Chamber of Commerce in Glasgow of a visit which he made
to a temple which had been turned into a modern school in inland China.
Over the gate of the school were these words in Chinese: “If you are
planting for ten years, plant trees; if you are planting for a hundred
years, plant men.” Men are God’s great interest and want.
What an opportunity this opens for every man of us! We have thought of
our lives as little, insignificant, trivial, of no consequence. There
is One walking in the midst of us Who was speaking to Ezekiel. “I am
hunting for a man,” He is saying, “I am hunting for a man,” and it is
open to every one of us to rise up and say, “Lord, I am that man you
are hunting for. Seek no further. Here am I. Have me for your man.” Is
that the answer that He is getting from us?
LECTURE III
AN UNFRIGHTENED HOPE
If we were asked what we considered to be the supremest motive in
life, the motive which does actually exercise the largest control
over human conduct, what would our answer be? A generation ago men
would have answered glibly enough: “The desire for happiness.” That
was then supposed to be the one commanding motive of mankind. But it
was not long before the answer seemed unsatisfactory and indefinite,
because what brings happiness to one man brings misery to another, or
what a man thinks will delight him in the end disappoints and such
experiences issue in confusion. It was ethically indiscriminate also.
The same motive covered moral contradictions, and men wanted some more
consistent answer to the question. Nowadays those who look despondently
at life often say in reply: “Avarice,――the desire for wealth.” Or,
those who look a little more deeply say it is not money, but the power
that money represents that men desire, and that their real motive is
to acquire sources of influence and control. Some who look at life
more hopefully are likely to reply: “Love or friendship.” That is
the thesis of one of the noblest books of our generation, written by
the late Dr. Henry Clay Trumbull, entitled “Friendship, the Master
Passion.” Doctor Trumbull told me once that when he first began the
work on this theme he spoke about it to his friend Charles Dudley
Warner, who said: “Trumbull, you cannot prove that thesis.” After the
book was done, Doctor Trumbull took the book to him and asked if he
would read it. He read it, gave it back, saying: “Well, Trumbull, you
have shown that it is true, after all.” And that is a lovely view to
take of life: that the motive that lies deeper than any other, and that
really in the actual conduct of men and women is the most controlling,
is the motive of unselfish friendship, of love.
But what would you say if instead of any one of these three or other
answers that may suggest themselves, some one were to reply: “Not a bit
of it. The motive that really controls human life, that does actually
and not theoretically play the largest part in determining the conduct
of men and women, is――_fear_.” And before we pass that contention by it
may be worth our while to look at it and ask whether, or how far, it is
true.
Take it in the matter of dress, for example. Does not fear play a large
part there,――either the fear of being unlike everybody else, or the
fear of being too much like everybody else? In every land, more even
in civilized lands than in uncivilized, the element of fear enters into
the small external characteristics of our daily living.
And in the matter of opinion. We speak of public opinion as though it
were a free and stable and trustworthy thing. But the public opinion of
one generation contradicts the public opinion of another generation.
The public opinion of one section of the land denies the public opinion
of another section, in the same way in which two sections of society
in one community think in opposite ways. Why? Not because all the
individuals of these particular generations, or sections, or portions
of the community really and independently have thought the thing out
for themselves, but because, held under the atmospheric constraint of
fear, they are unwilling to break away from what is determined for them
by the opinions in the midst of which they live. There is a good deal
of pacifist opinion and a great deal more of militarist which is not
free and personal at all, but simply herd intimidation. And a great
deal of race prejudice and international suspicion is nothing but the
miasma arising from cowardice or that bullying selfishness which is
essentially cowardly.
And a great deal of religion is of the same character. The predominant
element in many of the non-Christian religions is fear. It is so in
all of the earlier or animistic religions, where men live in constant
terror of the spirits that haunt the air or the world, and where a
large element of their worship is shaped by that dominant principle of
their religion, the dread of the unseen and the unexperienced. Even
among us is there not a great deal, both of religious orthodoxy and of
religious heresy, that is only the child of fear? There is a coercion
of sound doctrine and there is a coercion of false doctrine, and a
great many men and women belong to their school of religious opinion
simply because they are afraid to break away from the companionship in
which they have always been or to disagree with the associations which
condition them.
Much religious conduct, too, springs only from the fear of one’s
environment. One of the saddest things which one meets in going out
across the world is the great multitude, especially of young men, who,
when they have left Christian lands and the environment and support of
Christian surroundings, have simply collapsed in all their religious
conviction and character. Asia is strewn from one end of it to the
other with the wrecks of men who, while they were at home, supposedly
were men of religious character and conviction, but who showed when
they went away from home that it was not a matter of their own real
selves at all. It was just a matter of their timid servility and
acceptance of the conditions imposed upon them from without, so that
once they were away from home and free to do as they pleased and had no
longer the help and uplift of their surroundings, their environmental
religion collapsed and they went in an entirely different way.
And I think if only we would go deep enough in our own lives, and be
honest enough with ourselves to gain a clear insight into our motives
and impulses, we would discover how large a part fear has played in
us,――fear, of course, in all the wide range of its aspects, that shades
off on the one side into arrant cowardice and on the other side into
a mere hesitancy of character and timidity, but fear nevertheless.
Some of us are even now cloaking the things that lie deepest in our
hearts, because we are afraid to give expression to them. We go into
communities, into circles, into conditions where what has been natural
and real to us is unnatural and abnormal, and we hide our colours and
conceal our principles. And we do things we ought not to do or we do
not do the thing we know we ought to do simply because of fear.
I had an experience a little while ago when this diagnosis was
confirmed to me. In a visit to one of our colleges, among the boys who
came around to talk quietly was one whom I knew as one of the leading
men in the life of the institution. He played on the eleven; he was
president of his class. He was very timid about talking lest somebody
should overhear, but when assured that we had the whole house to
ourselves he took a letter out of his pocket and handed it to me.
He said: “Mr. Speer, I wish you would read this.”
I looked at it and saw that it was written in a girl’s handwriting, and
said: “No, tell me about it.”
“No,” he said, “please read it. It will tell you a great deal better
than I can.”
So I opened his letter and began to read, substantially as follows:
“DEAR ――――:
“I know all about your life at ―――― College, and I want to tell
you what I think about you. You and I have known one another
all our lives, and we have been good friends; but I think you
are a coward and I think that I ought to tell you so.”
I closed his letter and handed it back to him. His lips were quivering
and his eyes were moist as he said:
“You can believe that when I got that letter it cut me all up, and the
worst of it is that what she says is true.”
His father was a minister; his mother was of the salt of the earth.
He had grown up under the best influences of a clean and wholesome
Christian home, and he had slipped those strings. He had thought that
it was manly to surrender to the current ideals of the college; that
in cutting loose from the influence of his home he was doing a brave
and courageous thing. But the girl knew he was doing it because he was
a coward and she had the courage to tell him so. And he had come to
see it in that light for himself. In his college fraternity and in his
own class, men were praising him because he had broken from the old
enslavements of home and was living his own life like a man. But he
knew that he was nothing but a coward, who
“Held that hope was all a lie
And faith a form of bigotry
And love a snare that caught him.
Then thought to comfort human tears
With sundry ill-considered sneers
At things his mother taught him.”
And he had thought he was doing it because he was courageous, whereas
the real motive was that of fear. He was a coward, without courage
enough to fly his own flag unflinchingly, to be and do the thing which
in his heart, in the very fibres of his being, flesh of his mother’s
flesh, he knew was the thing he should be and do.
And if we would really look into our lives we should discover that
fear plays a far larger part with us than we ever dreamed. Men and
women lie. Why? Simply because they are afraid of telling the truth
and taking the consequences. Nine out of every ten falsehoods――perhaps
ninety-nine out of every hundred――are the spawn of fear. And the same
thing is true of sin, and of no small measure of unbelief, as well as
of no small measure of pretended belief.
Our great need is the discovering of something that will cast fear out
of our lives, that will enable us to walk unafraid in the open sunlight
of His pathway Who bade men to be afraid of nothing. Think how greatly
we need this emancipation from fear in the simple matter of loyalty to
principle. There is so much of expediency and compromise and adaptation
among us, so great reluctance to ruffle the smooth conventionalities
of life, whereas what the world needs is men and women who can see
right principle as principle, unconfused and undistorted, and then who,
unafraid, will abide in that right principle.
How greatly, too, this is needed in the plain, commonplace matter of
duty-doing! All around us much simple work waits to be done by men and
women who, first of all, can see it, and then have the courage to do
it. The obscure tasks that, after all, are the really great and worthy
ones, how few there are to do them! There is a fine passage in Morley’s
essay on Rousseau in which he describes what real history is, and how
much we make of history that really is not history at all, but simply
the spectacular doings of men who for the time being were deemed great
and who usually were engaged in war, whereas the great bulk of life
was not the life of warfare at all. It was the life of peace,――of the
quiet agricultural people, of the tradespeople, of the homes, which is
not written up in any history at all,――that was the real history of the
world. The men and the women who were doing earth’s work were not those
who went out to battle or on great expeditions, but those who, day by
day, heroically, unflinchingly, and without fear of oblivion, did the
real business of the world. There are some familiar lines of Lowell’s
in “Under the Old Elm” that put the principle for us:
“The longer on this earth we live
And weigh the various qualities of men,
Seeing how most are fugitive,
Or fitful gifts, at best, of now and then,
Wind-wavered, corpse-lights, daughters of the fen,
The more we feel the high stern-featured beauty
Of plain devotedness to duty, steadfast and still,
Not fed with mortal praise,
But finding amplest recompense
For life’s ungarlanded expense
In work done squarely and unwasted days.”
And take this matter of Christian service that lies before the thought
of every earnest young life. Why are so many of us going to be, in the
cities and homes from which we came, the same useless driftwood that
we have been? Why? Simply because of our want of courage to face the
work that needs to be done there, and to undertake that work without
fear that we cannot do it, without fear that God will desert us in
attempting to do it, without fear of the irregularity and uniqueness of
our being seen engaged in it. Throughout the world Christ waits for men
and women to-day, as He waited for them――and so often in vain――while
He was here on earth. Who will hear His call now? “Lay aside your fear
and trust Me to be with you and to enable you to do the thing. Come and
take up My task after Me.”
Some of us would dread to go out to live among the Chinese or
Mohammedan peoples, so far away. But we would not dread going out to
live in the legation, nor would we dread it much if we were to be
employed in some great commercial enterprise. Yet the geography would
be precisely the same, and our dangers and friendlessness would be
far greater. But we would not fear all that, because others would
think it natural and appropriate for us. But this other thing――the
missionary call――would be so exceptional, so unusual, so fantastic,
even fanatical, that we would fear to do any such dreadful thing! But
which life of us is worth mentioning in the same breath with the life
of God’s Son Who came into a carpenter’s home in a wretched little
Jewish village amid an outcast race, in a bare remote corner of the
earth, and lived there among peasant folk and farmers, pent up in the
charnel house of humanity, and Who was willing to count His equality
with God not a prize jealously to be retained, Who emptied Himself and
took on Him the form of a servant and became obedient unto death, even
the death of the Cross? The contrast between our life, with all its
privileges, to-day and the most squalid African village is invisible
over against the contrast between what Christ laid down and what Christ
took up for the love He bore us and His world.
And we need greatly this fearlessness in our confession of Him,――that,
without concealing Whom we follow and Whose servants we are, we should
go out now, openly to avow our discipleship and the vow we have taken
of loyalty to our Lord Jesus Christ! Think how many betrayals of Him
there have been, and how much of putting afresh to shame the Son of God
and crucifying Him anew by men and women who had said they were going
to follow Him faithfully, just as Simon said he was resolved to do on
that very night in which before the cock crew he denied his Lord. Shall
we not go out into the coming days with something in us that casts out
this fear?
We look with longing and admiration upon such deliverance from fear
when we find it in other lives. I was in Edinburgh during the South
African war, just after the battle of Maegersfontein, and was staying
in the house of friends. There was one little boy in the family
named after Prof. Henry Drummond. I had been in the library all
the afternoon, the very room in which Sir James Simpson discovered
chloroform, and then had gone into the drawing-room for afternoon tea.
The boy and his governess were the only other members of the household
who came down. He and I fell to talking about the war. I asked him:
“What do you think about the war in South Africa?”
“Well,” he said, “I did not think much about it at the beginning; I did
not think about it much until a friend of mine was killed.”
“Yes,” I said, “who was the friend?”
“General Wauchope.”
He was, as you know, the commander of the Black Watch, and the Black
Watch had been recruited from Edinburgh. The boy told me about the
regiment and its fate, and shortly after his story was filled up by an
Oxford man who had been in Edinburgh when the tidings of the battle
came. He said every shop was closed, and along the streets little knots
of men were gathered, and you could see the sobbing of strong men
everywhere. There was scarcely a great family in Edinburgh that had not
been touched. And yet, at the same time, all through the city there was
a subdued sense of moral elevation, as though something had lifted the
character and temper of the city. They sorrowed in what had gone out
from them; but they rejoiced in the way that it had gone. That regiment
had been organized as a Scotch kirk. The chaplain was the minister of
the kirk. The officers constituted the kirk’s session. I believe almost
every man in the regiment was a member of the kirk, and I was told
that as they went down through the streets of Cork to embark for South
Africa, although not under orders or restraint, the men walked with
arms on one another’s shoulders, singing:
“I’m not ashamed to own my Lord,
Or to defend His cause,
Maintain the honour of His Word,
The glory of His laws.”
And when they were disembarked at Cape Town and were taking their train
to go to the front, they went on board singing the old Gospel soldier’s
hymn:
“When the roll is called up yonder,
I’ll be there.”
They were sent right up and almost at once into that fateful battle.
General Wauchope knew somebody had blundered, and he said to the men:
“Men, do not blame me for this.” And without any fear they went into
the ending from which no soldier such as they would draw back, unafraid
of anything that might come to them because unashamed to own their
Lord and unfearing to follow Him.
Of such as those are we to be? Or will temptation intimidate us, and
the tone of the conversation of the men and women with whom we mingle
pull us down and cause us to fold our colours up and lay them away, as
the man did whom the sneer of a serving maid caused to deny the Lord
Who was dying for him?
Where are we to find that which will drive out this fear? “Perfect love
casteth out fear.... He that feareth is not made perfect in love.”
From how many of our hearts to-day will the perfect love of Him Whom
we call Master and Lord expel all fear? Let it be so now. Not years
afterwards, when other things shall have palled upon us, years that
shall have brought their dulling influence with them, but now, in all
the full strength and richness and glory and eagerness of our lives,
let us admit the perfect love that shall cast out fear and send us out
the kind of men and women Christ would have us be, to join the great
company of men and women and girls and boys who, unfearing,
“... climbed the steep ascent of Heaven,
Through peril, toil and pain.
O God, to us may grace be given
To follow in their train!”
Christian character needs this conquest of fear and it needs the love
which is one of the deep springs of such conquest. It needs also in
our day an immensely more practical use of the principle of hope, a
principle almost totally neglected in theology and made nothing of in
our codes of conduct or in our creeds. Paul had a far deeper insight
into the human heart and a vastly richer grasp on life. “Now abideth
faith, hope, love, these three,” said he.
Paul rendered a large service when he condensed the central ideals and
principles of Christianity in this way. The human mind is very fond
of formulas. If it had not been for some authoritative, simplifying
word like this, we might have gone on to construct all sorts of
prescriptions like the threes and sixes and tens and fifteens with
which we are so familiar in Buddhism. And yet the service which Paul
rendered is not without its dangers, for men are prone to simplify
further and to see whether the three cannot be reduced to one, or to
arrange the order and proportions of the three, or to contend alone
for that which some one of them signifies at the expense of the other
two. Paul’s own words should have saved us from such folly, for he
said quite clearly that one of these three was the greatest, “And now
abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is
love.” And yet his own doctrine elsewhere has been used to correct and
to counteract his expressed judgment here, and through the years we
have had our theologies constructed in disregard of the domination of
that one of these three principles which Saint Paul exalts. It has been
in terms of faith, and faith given a very definitive construction, that
our theological thinking with regard to Christianity has been chiefly
done. Little by little however the proportions have changed, and now
love, as one of the three great fundamental principles of Christianity,
is coming to its own, not as a principle of action only but as a
regulative principle also of our thought.
But it is a strange thing that no one has ever arisen, apparently,
to say of hope what the intellect of the Church, over against Paul’s
judgment, has been prepared to say of faith. He declared that of these
three, love is the greatest. The current opinion of Christian thought
through the Christian centuries has contended that faith was the
greatest. What would men say if some one should arise now to restore
the proportions, who would make bold to declare, “Now abideth faith,
hope, and love; and the greatest of these is hope”? Surely the day will
come some time when hope will come to its own, when the Christian heart
and mind will no longer be content to construe its interpretation of
Christianity in terms either of love or of faith, or of love and faith
together, but will insist that these three abide――faith and love and
hope.
And when a man stops for a moment to think, to disengage himself
from the unscrutinized conventions, he begins to realize immediately
that he has no faith and love unless he makes larger room for hope
in his thinking and feeling than has been allowed to us. For there
cannot be any faith detached from hope. You can conceive of faith in
three different ways. You may think of it in its primary form, in its
primary form in the New Testament at least, as personal trust, as the
confidence that exists between two personal spirits. But even so, can
you think of it without hope? If I have no hope of seeing Him in Whom
I trust, of consulting with Him, or serving Him, of entering into a
deeper and enlarged fellowship with Him, will not my personal trust
soon empty itself of reality? Or, secondly, you may think of faith as
the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews does, as the “substance of
things hoped for”; in which without any flinching, he binds faith up
with hope in terms that cannot be severed. And, thirdly, if you go on
to the rest of his definition, “the substance of things hoped for, the
evidence of things not seen,” still faith is undetachable from hope;
for, as Paul says in another passage, “We are saved by hope: but hope
that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope
for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait
for it.” And you cannot detach love from hope or have anything that
is real in the experience of love unless it inevitably leads a man on
into those things that clearly were in Paul’s mind when he spoke not
of faith and love only but also of hope. I ask any man’s heart if it
is possible to divorce hope from love. I suppose in one sense it may
be, and that you can speak of a hopeless love. Henry Martyn’s heroic
and tragic life was the unfolding of a hopeless love. But how different
that is from love that is undershot with hope. One looks towards
evening to see the children waiting as he comes home. The workman lives
in the hope of all that is there of joy and confidence and perfect
trust inside his home. Love would be a sorry thing to-day if it were
stripped of the hopes that give it its sweetness and its joy.
And it is not only faith and love that root themselves inseparably in
hope, and that lose their fragrance and meaning if they do not continue
to draw both out of hope, but regarding almost everything else that
is dearest and most precious to us in life, does it not spring from
this same great treasury? In one of the chapters of the Epistle to
the Romans we find Paul again and again, in his efforts to bring his
message out to those to whom he writes, describing God in different
terms of speech. He begins by speaking of Him as the God of comfort,
the God of patience, and then he goes on to speak of Him as the God
of hope. “Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in
believing, that ye may abound in hope.” And then he closes by speaking
of the God of peace who is to order all hearts. Quite evidently in
his thought these things all run together, as again he writes: “Be ye
sober. Walk as children of light. Put on the breastplate of faith and
love, and for an helmet the hope of salvation.” Joy and gladness and
confidence and trust and hope,――all are rooted each in the other in his
own mind and experience. The best that we have got in life springs from
the fountains of hope.
We do not wonder, accordingly, that the old religious experience and
the richer Christian experience, when it came, conceived and spoke of
God as the God of love and the God of hope. They never spoke of Him as
the God of faith. The old Hebrew idea of Him was as the ground-rock of
their hope. “O hope of Israel,” was their cry. The lovely thing is that
that burst from the lips of the man who mourned for his nation: “O the
hope of Israel, the saviour thereof in time of trouble.” “Hope thou in
God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance,
and my God.” God Himself when He comes to let Himself be richly known
to men makes on them the impression of a great and joyous and glad and
eager and boundless hope.
And when we turn away from such clews as these and look right into
the face of life to ask what the powers and services and functionings
of hope in the actual life of man and in the life of the world are,
we realize that all this exultant hope has its deep grounding in
the actual living needs of men. It is by hope――the New Testament is
unequivocal about it, and our own experience answers to that word――it
is by hope that we are saved. Not in one passage in the New Testament
can you find the declaration that we are saved by faith. We are saved
“by grace through faith,” but Paul is flat-footed in his declaration
that we are saved by hope. And the moment a man looks life square
in the face he sees why it should be so. Were it not for hope there
could not be any saving that were worth a man’s while. There might
be a clearing up of the past; we might secure something like a clean
conscience; but there could not be any confidence, any ease, any rest,
as over against the tragic problem of life, if a man could not look
out into the future――which is really the thing he now has to deal
with――with boundless hope. Salvation is just that thing. It is not
cleaning up our lives from the point of view of the past, just for the
sake of cleaning up our lives; but it is the hope that for the sake of
our future God is going to live in us a saving life.
All this is true whether we think of salvation as it comes penetrating
our lives and dealing with such problems as in shame and self-distrust
we think of in our hours of recollection and penitence, or whether we
think of it as something reaching out into the expanding experience
of the future. Either way, salvation is a matter of hope. There is a
lovely touch in one of Paul’s epistles where he says: “Having therefore
these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all
filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear
of God.” What do you think of that motive? He does not say, “Seeing
that our sin is so black and abhorrent as it is, seeing that the past
is so shameful and unworthy as it is, let us cleanse ourselves.” “My
brothers,” he said, “seeing we have such promises”――that is, “that the
hope is so bright, that there is no ground for despair, that we can
believe victory can actually be achieved by us, seeing that we have
these hopes, let us cleanse ourselves in growing holiness.”
And then when those first Christian men came to look not only at
this present purging of life which should leave it rich and fragrant
and glorious but out upon the wide ranges of the untried and the
unforeseeable, they still construed salvation in terms of hope. “Now
are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be:
but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we
shall see him as he is. And he that hath this hope in him purifieth
himself, even as he is pure.” It is so because there is in front of us
the dear voice calling, the voice that says to every one of us: “Man,
let that old past go now. It is done and gone beyond recall. Come out
with Me. There is a new road for your feet and Mine, a new tale that is
to be unfolded now, a new story, the contradiction of the old. Let the
past go now, and come and walk with Me in the limitless hope of the new
ways.”
And it is not only by hope, as a simple downright matter of fact, that
men are saved and held fast to the Saviour; it is by hope also that
men are nerved and empowered. In the hour of darkness, it is what
lights all the darkness and makes it possible for men to bear. “Yes,”
we say to ourselves in the hour of pain, “I know; but I can stand it,
for after this comes something that is different from this.” That is
what the honest doctor says to us when he deals with us. “Now hold
steady for a moment. I am going to cut and it will hurt dreadfully.
But just wait. Beyond the pain lies freedom from pain.” And we say,
“Yes, doctor, cut. I can stand it.” In a moment the anguish is over. We
endure in that hope. Has it not always been so? For a little while the
mother bears her anguish and her pain for the joy and hope that a child
is born into the world. For a little while Jesus bore the loneliness
and the anguish of His grief and the shadow and the pain and the
disgrace of His Cross, because, looking over it, He saw the glory that
awaited Him and the world, and He endured all this, this anguish of
the Cross, for the joy that was set beyond. “Therefore,” says Paul,
“we rejoice in tribulation, in being flailed, in being pressed down as
grapes in the wine-press, in being put through discipline and strain,
we rejoice in all that, because we know that tribulation worketh
steadfastness, steadfastness experience, and experience hope, and hope
maketh not ashamed.”
And you know the paradox, and the glory of it, is that the darker
you make the shadows the more triumphantly hope laughs in the midst
of them. The more difficult you make the night, the more hopeful and
enticing is the sure confidence of the dawn that is not far away. Our
word, “Cheer up! The worst is yet to come,” is as deep a Christian
word as was ever yet spoken. Be glad, because darker things lie just
ahead and then light beyond. Thank God that you are counted worthy for
tribulations like these; for these are what wash white a man’s robes
and make him fit to walk after the Lamb whithersoever He goes, in
company with the men whose lips have never known a lie.
All this is put finely for us in “The Ballad of the White Horse,” the
best piece of work Chesterton has done. They were as dark days as ever
had been in English history. Tide after tide of invasion from Norse and
Dane had come pouring in. Again and again Alfred had called his men
and gone out and fought, and each time in vain. Now, as he sits on his
little island in the Thames among the reeds, the news comes to him that
the Danes are on their way for a fresh invasion of his land. He kneels
in prayer and asks the Virgin Mother whether he ought to go out yet
once more. Again and again, he tells her, he has gone out in hope, and
each time in the confidence that victory would be his, and each time he
has come back defeated, his men killed, and his people to sink lower
after each despair than the time before. And yet, as he prays to her he
says that if she will give him one word of assurance, he will go again.
But only this, as she stands by his side, will she say,
“I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet,
And the sea rises higher.”
And there that day among the reeds under the promise only that the
night was going to be blacker than he had ever known, that storms
fiercer than he had ever breasted were coming, Alfred rises up to do
what he had never done under the old assurance of easy victory,
“Up over windy wastes and up
Went Alfred over the shaws,
Shaken of the joy of giants,
The joy without a cause.”
And as his men saw him coming, they thought it was with the old vain
word of a sure victory, and they were about to tell him in advance that
if he came with such a message they would follow him no more. But not
now was Alfred’s word the easy word. No, but――
“This is the word of Mary,
The word of the world’s desire;
‘No more of comfort shall you get
Save that the sky grows darker yet,
And the sea rises higher.’”
And in front of that darkening sky and that rising sea his men rose up
to go with him, and this time, from the darkest night they had ever
known, came the bright morning of their lasting victory. Thank God, we
are not called out on any soft errand under the incitement of bright
choices, but challenged by great difficulties, black nights and rising
storms, to work in the hope of that which is invisible and which lies
beyond. It is by hope, and hope that lies behind impenetrable clouds,
that men are nerved and empowered. It is because the world is so black
and dark to-day that we walk out into it smiling in its face, knowing
that behind all this the morning the more surely waits, the morning in
which the men believe who have faith and love and hope.
And it is by hope that our comforts are drawn down into our lives when
the darkest of all days come, and everything is quiet about the house
and the little feet that had run to and fro are still. We say, “Yes, a
little while and then those angel faces will smile, that I have loved
and lost and love.” What would we do in those hours if it were not for
the sure hope? Saint Paul lays his own heart open to all his friends
in one of his epistles: “But I would not have you to be ignorant,
brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even
as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and
rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with
him. For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which
are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them
which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a
shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and
the dead in Christ shall rise first: then we which are alive and remain
shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord
in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort
one another with these words.”
And as for us who are in the full flush and possession of all that
we have, it is by hope that we draw our comfort for our struggle. As
against the background of our defeats and failures, we say to our own
hearts: “Well, wait, just wait; my time will come. No matter how much
of this there has been, some day my hope will be fulfilled. It is sure
that something else than this there will yet be.” William Henry Green
became the outstanding Hebrew scholar in America. He was plucked when
he entered college in Latin and Greek. At Lafayette College for months
and months he found himself beaten on the very battle-field where
he stood at last the first man in the land. At Lexington, Virginia,
several years ago, I went to the grave of General Lee in the chancel
of the chapel of his college and then I went out to the grave of
Stonewall Jackson on that little hill. One of his townsmen was telling
me the story of Jackson and how by hope he wrested triumph out of his
uttermost failure. He had been teaching in the military academy, and
had just been about to give up his work because he had no gift of
discipline. He could not maintain order in his own classroom, my friend
said, and was about to surrender his career as a teacher, because he
thought he was incapable there. Then the war broke out, and within
twelve months Stonewall Jackson was the most famous disciplinarian on
earth. On the very field where the man’s failure had been most clear,
there he achieved his richest and greatest victory, by hope. And so we
comfort our hearts here to-day. “Yes,” we say to memories of which we
are reminded in our searching hours, “the evil and unworthy imaginings
and desires cling to us still, but it will not be forever. Some day, no
matter how often I have failed, if I live in hope, it will come to me,
the clean thing that the Lord said should be mine.”
And last of all, there is nothing adequate for us in the way of
actually moulding men and doing that with life which we were set here
to do unless we can go to the work in the spirit in which our Lord and
Saint Paul entered it. If I have no hope for another man, I cannot
awaken any hope in him for himself. Unless I believe in him, how can he
believe? The glory of Christ was that, though He knew just what was in
man, and saw all the weaknesses and the slavery and the impurity and
the unwholesomeness, though He saw all this in man, He shut His eyes to
it deliberately and believed in the better capacities and possibilities
that were there and that He by His grace and His power could plant and
nurture and bring out until all that old baseness that had been the man
was not the man any more, and all this new purity that had not been the
man was the man, and Simon was turned at last out of his putty into
rock and stone.
I do not know whether the apostles were conscious or not of what was
happening to them. Maybe they did not appreciate their Master, but
one likes to think that they must have done so, and that often they
would go off by themselves and one would say: “Andrew, is He not just
great? Did you ever meet any one like that before? Did you see what He
did this morning? He just shut His eyes completely to that meanness
that He saw in me, and that I saw the moment I let it out, too, and
He pretended that He never saw it at all, and He believed in me when
He knew and I knew there was nothing there to believe in. Is He not
wonderful? He will make a man of me yet.” And to this day He is still
doing just what He was doing then. In this place now He is doing just
that thing. He is shutting His eyes to what we do not want Him to see
and opening them to what only He can see in us. And His law must be our
law.
I can put it in a little story that a friend of some of us, George
Truett, told to a little group some years ago in a western city. “I am
fond,” he said, “of recalling the first soul it was ever given me to
win to Jesus. I was a lad barely grown and a teacher in the mountains
of Carolina. One morning, as we were ready for prayers in the chapel,
there hobbled down the aisle to the front seat a boy of about sixteen
years old. He was an eager, lonely-looking lad. I read the Scriptures
and prayed and then sent the teachers to their classes. But my little
cripple lad stayed. I supposed that he was a beggar. And I said to
myself, ‘Surely this boy deserves alms. His condition betokens his
need.’ So I went to him at recess and said, ‘My lad, what do you want?’
He looked me eagerly in the face and said: ‘Mr. Truett, I want to go to
school. Oh, sir, I want to be somebody in the world. I will always be
a cripple. The doctors have told me that, but,’ he said, ‘I want to be
somebody.’
“He had won me. He told me of their poverty, and that was taken care
of. I watched that lad for weeks and weeks. How bright his mind was!
How eager he was to know! One day I called him into my office and said
to him: ‘My boy, I want you to tell me something more about yourself.’
He told me how, a few months before, his father had been killed in the
great cotton mill where he worked, and the few dollars he had saved up
were soon gone. They tried to do their best in the county where they
were, but found it difficult; so his mother said one day: ‘Let us move
to the next county, where they do not know us. Perhaps we can do better
where we are not known.’ So they moved and now he had come into my
school. He said, ‘I want to help mother, and I want to be somebody in
the world; so I made my appeal to you to come to your school.’ It was
time in a moment for the bell to ring for books. I laid my hand on the
head of the little fellow and said to him: ‘Jim, I am for you, my boy.
I believe in you thoroughly, and I want you to know that I love you, my
boy.’ And when I said that last word, the little pinched face looked
up into my face almost in a lightning flash, and he said: ‘Mr. Truett,
did you say you loved me? Did you say that?’ I said, ‘I said that,
Jim.’ And then with a great sob he said: ‘I did not know anybody loved
me but mother and the two little girls. Mr. Truett, if you love me, I
am going to be a man yet, by the help of God.’ And when a few Friday
nights afterwards I was leading the boys in their chapel meeting, as
was the custom, I heard the boy’s crutches over in the corner. There
Jim sat, in a chair away from the other boys to protect his leg. And
a little later he got up, sobbing and laughing at the same time, and
said, ‘Mr. Truett, I have found the Saviour, and that time you told
me you loved me started me towards Him.’” And then our friend added,
“Brothers, working men in the shops and everywhere are dying for love.
Your grammar may be broken, your plans may be imperfect, your machinery
may be crude, your organization may be rough; but if you love men and
pour your hearts out to them honestly and directly, there will be a
response that will fill your hearts with joy and heaven with praises.”
And the need and functions of hope should be viewed in no narrow
personal way. We want to-day men who have a large and courageous
faith in God for the nation and the world. Of recent years a mood of
pessimism has spread through America. In one sense it represents a
wholesome reaction from the spirit of braggadocio and spreadeagleism of
an earlier day. So far it is wholesome. We need to be sobered and made
modest and quiet in our national spirit. But it is a bad thing when a
nation loses the zest of a great consciousness and a brave patriotism,
and thinks meanly of what God can do with it. Our nation needs now
not a timid and fearful sense of its impotence and incapacity, but a
realization that, whatever its difficulties and defects, God has a
mission for us which only we can fulfill for Him. For this mission
those men must be the nation’s soul of hope and expectation who know
that our greatest duty and service lie ahead of us and are waiting to
be grasped by men whose hearts face the untried without fear.
And now shall we have this hope that nothing can slay? Do we want it?
Well, it is so near to us that we do not need to reach out after it.
You know where it is, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” “The Lord
Jesus Christ,” as Saint Paul says in the opening words of his first
Epistle to Timothy, “The Lord Jesus Christ, our hope.” This hope is not
something that we work up out of the fragments of moral ideals that we
find lying around in our lives or our nation. Jesus Christ is the hope
for a man and a people. If we want it, why not now take Him? Genuinely,
I mean, in a deep, living, religious way, take Him in His fullness of
life? God and the nation want the men who are filled with His courage
and hope:
“God’s trumpet wakes the slumbering world,
Now each man to his post.
The red cross banner is unfurl’d,
Who joins the glorious host? Who joins the glorious host?
He who in fealty to the truth
And counting all the cost
Doth consecrate his gen’rous youth,
He joins the noble host! He joins the noble host!
“He who, no anger on his tongue
Nor any idle boast,
Bears steadfast witness ’gainst the wrong,
He joins the sacred host! He joins the sacred host!
He who with calm, undaunted will
Ne’er counts the battle lost
But though defeated battles still,
He joins the faithful host! He joins the faithful host!
“He who is ready for the cross,
The cause despised loves most,
And shows not pain or shame or loss,
He joins the martyr host! He joins the martyr host!
God’s trumpet wakes the slumbering world.
Now each man to his post.
The red cross banner is unfurled.
We join the glorious host! We join the glorious host!”
LECTURE IV
THE JOY OF THE MINORITY
There are two forms of disloyalty. One is flinching, the other is
compromise. Of course, the compromiser will never allow that he is
disloyal. He is a practical man who realizes that theories and ideals
have to be adapted to a practical world, and he gives up a part, and
as unimportant a part as possible, in order that he may gain the rest.
He feels himself quite capable of judging how much to give up and what
part may rightly be given up. He will simply abate the unreason of
a God who demands all righteousness, and to Whom the whole truth is
truth. Let us set up against such men the uncompromising principle of
the duty of non-compromise. It is a principle from which the wisest
and best of men are sometimes won away in the supposed interest of
the great ends which they seek, and for which they feel that they may
rightly sacrifice subordinate issues. There is what some regard as a
striking incident of this character in the life of that uncompromising
man, Saint Paul. It is an exciting and instructive story. This is the
way it is told in the twenty-first chapter of Acts (vs. 17–30):
“And when we were come to Jerusalem, the brethren received
us gladly. And the day following Paul went in with us unto
James; and all the elders were present. And when he had saluted
them, he rehearsed one by one the things which God had wrought
among the Gentiles through his ministry. And they, when they
heard it, glorified God; and they said unto him, Thou seest,
brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews of them
that have believed; and they are all zealous for the law: and
they have been informed concerning thee, that thou teachest all
the Jews who are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling
them not to circumcise their children, neither to walk after
the customs. What is it therefore? they will certainly hear
that thou art come. Do therefore this that we say to thee: We
have four men that have a vow on them; these take, and purify
thyself with them, and be at charges for them, that they may
shave their heads: and all shall know that there is no truth
in the things whereof they have been informed concerning
thee; but that thou thyself also walkest orderly, keeping
the law. But as touching the Gentiles that have believed, we
wrote, giving judgment that they should keep themselves from
things sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what is
strangled, and from fornication. Then Paul took the men, and
the next day purifying himself with them went into the temple,
declaring the fulfillment of the days of purification, until
the offering was offered for every one of them.
“And when the seven days were almost completed, the Jews from
Asia, when they saw him in the temple, stirred up all the
multitude and laid hands on him, crying out, Men of Israel,
help: This is the man that teacheth all men everywhere against
the people, and the law, and this place; and moreover he
brought Greeks also into the temple, and hath defiled this holy
place. For they had before seen with him in the city Trophimus
the Ephesian, whom they supposed that Paul had brought into
the temple. And all the city was moved, and the people ran
together; and they laid hold on Paul, and dragged him out of
the temple: and straightway the doors were shut.”
And that was the disastrous end of this conscientious experiment. Paul
never tried another like it. Perhaps there is a construction of the
story which forbids the idea that it was compromise but it suffices
at any rate to raise the whole question of the wisdom of compromise
as a principle of action. It is the one incident in Paul’s life
where he might be thought even for a moment to have embarked on that
course. Wherever else we see him, he is a man of firm and unflinching
principles, who made no concealment of what he believed, and did not
try to adjust his convictions and practices to other convictions and
practices that were at variance with them.
In the second chapter of Galatians, you will remember, Paul is telling
of a visit he made to Jerusalem some time before with Barnabas and
Titus, in which they went up to consider these very questions. Some
of the brethren in Jerusalem had endeavoured to persuade Paul to have
Titus, who was a Gentile, circumcised, and Paul says, “To whom we
gave place ... no, not for an hour.” And then he tells of the time
when Peter came to Antioch and he withstood him to his face because he
had been a trimmer and compromiser; for Peter, acting on the generous
impulse of his own heart as to what was right, had indeed bravely eaten
with the converted Gentiles, but when some men came down from Jerusalem
who were close to James, he withdrew himself from the Gentiles,
fearing, no doubt, that it might injure him in Jerusalem.
Paul does not say anything in any letter about this particular
incident in Jerusalem, in which, for the one time in his life, he
was overpersuaded by his friends and put in a position where he was
very much misunderstood, and where he appeared to be compromising the
great principles in which he earnestly believed. We know what the
far-reaching consequences were. A great deal of trouble was brought
into his life by this act. It was out of it that all those succeeding
events came which took him at last to Rome to be tried before Cæsar.
Some may say that these results were good. Undoubtedly God led Paul’s
course on, but we may believe that God might have had even greater
things for him to do if only he had in this incident pursued his
customary course.
But we want to go far beyond the question as to whether the consequences
may ever appear to justify acts of compromise. A course of action is
right or wrong, not according to the consequences, but according to its
conformity or unconformity to the character of God. And the point now
raised is whether it is ever right for us to compromise our own firm
convictions of truth and principle.
Now, the world tells us that such compromise is to-day absolutely
unavoidable. Men and women, we are assured, cannot get along in a world
like this without adaptations. If it is meant by this only that we are
often obliged to adapt ourselves to that with which we do not agree,
why, of course, we have to assent, because we are in a world of give
and take of which we have to be a part, and it is necessary for us
to live our life and do our work in this world. Here in many of our
communities, for example, the saloons flourish. There is not one of
us here in this audience who believes that it is wise that the saloon
should exist under the protection of the government, but we have to
live in a land where the principle with which we disagree prevails,
and the only way we can escape is to go to some other land, and we
would only find there some other principle with which we could not
agree. We cannot live at all unless we are willing to adjust ourselves
to an actual world. “Compromise” when used as the principle of such
adjustment means simply that we must of necessity find room for
ourselves among the crossing strands of life. “All government,” says
Burke, “indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every vital and every
prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.” “It cannot be too
emphatically asserted,” says Spencer, “that this policy of compromise
alike in institution, in action and in belief which especially
characterizes English life is a policy essential to a society going
through the transition caused by continuous growth and development.”
And Emerson remarks, “Almost all people descend to meet. All
association must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the very flower
and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as
they approach each other.”
If it is meant by compromise that we have to live under conditions
with which we do not agree and to which we must adjust ourselves,
why, of course, we must assent to that――it is perfectly obvious; but
we do not need to live under those conditions assenting to them. We
can bear our testimony against whatever we morally disapprove. We
can assert our conviction by word or by the silent protest of life
that those conditions are not right, and so to live in the midst of
conditions in which we do not believe, but from which we cannot escape,
is not compromise. It is compromise when we surrender our principles
so that others do not understand what those principles are, or when
we hold back something that is vital, or cover over deceptively or
misleadingly something essential. When we take before men a position
that is inconsistent with the position that in our hearts we are taking
before God, that is compromise, and that is wrong. Regarding the truth
in which we believe, the principles by which we know life ought to be
lived, regarding these things there cannot be compromise, in our lives
or in the Christian Church.
There is a noble essay by Mr. John Morley, as he once was, on this
subject of compromise, its nature and limits, of which Scott Holland
says in “Lux Mundi” that “no one can read that book without being
either the better or the worse for it.” In it Morley takes up three
different spheres of life. First, the formation of opinion; second,
the expression of opinion when it is called out from us; and, third,
the propagation of opinion; and then he pursues this line of argument:
In the matter of the formation of opinion there cannot be any
compromise at all. Every one of us is bound to hunt for the truth, no
matter what the truth may be, and when we have found it, to give our
lives absolutely to it. In the realm of the expression of opinion,
nobody has any right to deceive any one regarding his principles and
convictions when they are called forth. But in the third place, he
admits room for compromise when it comes to the aggressive propagation
of our convictions. He says that every man is not bound to propagate
what he believes, and he takes for example his own case,――that of
a man who does not believe in the Bible, who has abandoned the old
religious views of his people, but who does not regard it as his duty
aggressively to propagate his dissentient convictions.
In his own words his thesis is this:
“In the positive endeavour to realize an opinion, to convert
a theory into practice, it may be, and very often is, highly
expedient to defer to the prejudices of the majority, to
move very slowly, to bow to the conditions of the status
quo, to practice the very utmost sobriety, self-restraint,
and conciliatoriness. The mere expression of opinion, in the
next place, the avowal of dissent from received notions, the
refusal to conform to language which implies the acceptance
of such notions――this rests on a different footing. Here
the reasons for respecting the wishes and sentiments of the
majority are far less strong, though, as we shall presently
see, such reasons certainly exist, and will weigh with all
well-considering men. Finally, in the formation of an opinion
as to the abstract preferableness of one course of action
over another, or as to the truth or falsehood or right
significance of a proposition, the fact that the majority of
one’s contemporaries lean in the other direction is naught,
and no more than dust in the balance. In making up our minds
as to what would be the wisest line of policy if it were
practicable, we have nothing to do with the circumstance that
it is not practicable. And in settling with ourselves whether
propositions purporting to state matters of fact are true or
not, we have to consider how far they are conformable to the
evidence. We have nothing to do with the comfort and solace
which they would be likely to bring to others or ourselves, if
they were taken as true.”
Now, we cannot but be rather grateful that men, who if they spoke would
have to oppose Christianity, take this view and remain silent, and
yet that is not our principle. Believing in Christianity, we believe
that it would be wrong and unworthy compromise to conceal it and to
refrain from propagating it. Mr. Morley prefixed to his essay Whately’s
saying, “It makes all the difference in the world whether we put truth
in the first place or in the second place.” We hold to another word of
Whately’s also: “If our religion is false, we must change it. If it is
true, we must propagate it.” Notice that Morley is speaking not of his
doubts, but of his convictions. There is no obligation of a propaganda
of insecurity. There is an obligation to propagate positive truth. It
must, of course, be the truth that I believe. When I am asked what I
believe I must, of course, tell the truth. But we believe something
far more than that. The religious truth that one believes he must give
his life to propagate throughout the world, and it would not make any
difference if he were the only man in the world who held that truth,
it would still be his duty, if he believed it was the truth and the
great and necessary truth of life, to go out single-handed to defend
and propagate it. Athanasius is regarded as an impracticable and
troublesome type but the progress of the world is often lifted forward
a sheer and discernible stage by such uncompromisingness.
Let us set forth some of the reasons why we may believe that there
dare not be, in our Christian life and our Christian service, any
compromise whatever, either in our searching for the truth, in our
utterance of the truth, or in our aggressive and active propagation of
the truth throughout the world. This is to put the matter, of course,
very broadly and sweepingly. There is a great deal to be said for some
of Morley’s nice discriminations. But actual life is a very rough and
imperative and elemental thing. The difficulty of acting on any body of
wary and wavery casuistical principles is enormous. The really workable
principle of actual living must be very simple and uncomplicated and
direct. The only safe ethical law is “No lie,” no lie whatever or under
any justification. So also, however crude and blunt the rule may be,
“No compromise” is the only practicable right rule. Mr. Morley closed
his essay with such a plain word: “It is better to bear the burden of
impracticableness, than to stifle conviction and to pare away principle
until it becomes mere hollowness and triviality.” And in the beginning
he wrote: “Our day of small calculations and petty utilities must first
pass away; our vision of the true expediencies must reach further and
deeper; our resolution to search for the highest verities, to give up
all and follow them, must first become the supreme part of ourselves.”
The loss by compromise to ourselves and others is certain, while its
gain is uncertain and problematical.
In the first place, one believes this because compromise makes no
contribution to the settlement of the real issue over truth. It is
true that all the boundaries between truth and error are not clear and
sharply drawn lines. Often there is a gray and misty region between.
And much truth is only slowly and gradually won. But the ideal of truth
is clearer than the sun and as pure as the character of God. And we
have a far richer chance of winning it and all that it brings with it,
if we both think and live it uncompromisingly. “The political spirit,”
says Mr. Morley in noble words, “is the great force in throwing love
of truth and accurate reasoning into a secondary place. The evil
does not stop here. This achievement has indirectly countenanced the
postponement of intellectual methods, and the diminution of the sense
of intellectual responsibility, by a school that is anything rather
than political. Theology has borrowed, and coloured for her own use,
the principles which were first brought into vogue in politics. If in
the one field it is the fashion to consider convenience first and truth
second, in the other there is a corresponding fashion of placing truth
second and emotional comfort first. If there are some who compromise
their real opinions, or the chance of reaching truth, for the sake of
gain, there are far more who shrink from giving their intelligence free
play, for the sake of keeping undisturbed certain luxurious spiritual
sensibilities....
“The intelligence is not free in the presence of a mortal fear lest
its conclusions should trouble soft tranquillity of spirit. There is
always hope of a man so long as he dwells in the region of the direct
categorical proposition and the unambiguous term; so long as he does
not deny the rightly drawn conclusions after accepting the major and
minor premises. This may seem a scanty virtue and very easy grace. Yet
experience shows it to be too hard of attainment for those who tamper
with disinterestedness of conviction, for the sake of luxuriating
in the softness of spiritual transport without interruption from a
syllogism. It is true that there are now and then in life as in history
noble and fair natures, that by the silent teaching and unconscious
example of their inborn purity, star-like constancy, and great
devotion, do carry the world about them to further heights of living
than can be attained by ratiocination. But these, the blameless and
loved saints of the earth, rise too rarely on our dull horizons to
make a rule for the world. The law of things is that they who tamper
with veracity, from whatever motive, are tampering with the vital
force of human progress. Our comfort and the delight of the religious
imagination are no better than forms of self-indulgence, when they
are secured at the cost of that love of truth on which, more than on
anything else, the increase of light and happiness among men must
depend. We have to fight and do lifelong battle against the forces of
darkness, and anything that turns the edge of reason blunts the surest
and most potent of our weapons.” We do not believe in compromising,
because it makes no contribution to the larger discerning of truth or
the triumphing of that truth over error.
In the second place, we do not believe in it because it creates a great
many more difficulties than it removes. Now, Paul was invited to this
compromising course in Jerusalem by his misguided friends because they
thought it would avoid trouble. They wanted to set Paul right with the
Jewish Christians in the city, and maybe with the Jews who were not
Christians; they wanted to remove an impression which they thought
prevailed regarding Paul’s attitude towards the Mosaic customs in the
Gentile world.
Now, as a matter of fact, the principle of that impression was true,
for although, as Dr. McGiffert says, Paul
“recognized the legitimacy of Jewish Christianity, and the
right of Peter and other apostles to preach to the Jews the
Gospel of circumcision, and though there is no evidence that he
ever undertook to lead the Jews as a people to cease observing
their ancestral law, he had certainly been in the habit of
insisting that his Jewish converts should associate on equal
terms with their Gentile brethren, and that they should not
allow their law to act in any way as a barrier to the freest
and most intimate association with them. But this, of course,
meant, in so far, their violation of the law’s commands. It
is certain also that Paul had preached for years the doctrine
that not the Gentile Christian alone but the Jewish Christian
as well is absolutely free from all obligation to keep the law
of Moses, and though such teaching might not always result in
a disregard of that law by his Jewish converts, it must have
a tendency to produce that effect and doubtless did in many
cases. It is clear therefore that both accusations had much
truth in them, and it is difficult to suppose that Paul can
have deliberately attempted in Jerusalem to prove them wholly
false.
“And yet, though as an honourable man and a man of principle
he can hardly have undertaken to demonstrate that there was
no truth in the reports which were circulated concerning
him, it may well be that he tried to show that they were not
wholly true. It was evidently assumed by those who accused
him of ‘teaching all the Jews which are among the Gentiles to
forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children,
neither to walk after the customs,’ that he hated the Jewish
law and that he was doing all that lay in his power to destroy
it; that he believed and that he taught everywhere that its
observance was under any and all circumstances a positive
sin. But this assumption was not true. Paul was certainly not
hostile to the law in any such sense. He believed that it had
no binding authority over a Christian, and he opposed with
all his might the idea that its observance had any value as a
means of salvation, or that it contributed in any way to the
believer’s righteousness or growth in grace; but he held no
such view of the law as made its observance necessarily sinful,
and rendered it impossible for him ever to observe it himself
in any respect. And it was not at all unnatural that he should
desire to convince the Christians of Jerusalem of the fact;
especially when he had come thither with the express purpose
of conciliating them and winning their favour for himself and
for his Gentile converts. He would have been very foolish under
these circumstances to allow such a false impression touching
his attitude towards the law to go uncontradicted.”[1]
[1] “The Apostolic Age,” p. 341.
This is a satisfactory defense if one were needed of Paul’s course,
but no one would question his motive. That was right enough and he
evidently acted in all good conscience, but the procedure, instead of
getting him out of his trouble, got him into worse trouble. It always
does that. I do not believe any man was ever permanently helped by
compromise. Every man who has begun to play with it has been drawn into
worse difficulties and troubles, or has gone down, perhaps without
conscious difficulty but with real moral loss, to a lower level of
life. For one thing, compromise blurs the line of cleavage between
truth and error, and that is exactly what no one of us can afford to
have done. We do not want the lines of distinction between what is
true and what is false slurred over for us. We want them sharpened
so that we shall make as little mistake as possible as to where they
lie. Furthermore compromise gets us into more difficulty than it
removes, because it throws together things that are not congruous or
reconcilable. This is its very nature. It brings into one bed things
that cannot sleep together, into one union things that cannot be
tied. And it postpones real settlements in the interest of spurious
arrangements, sacrificing some
“greater good for the less, on no more creditable ground than
that the less is nearer. It is better to wait, and to defer
the realization of our ideas until we can realize them fully,
than to defraud the future by truncating them, if truncate
them we must, in order to secure a partial triumph for them
in the immediate present.... What is the sense, and what is
the morality, of postponing the wider utility to the narrower?
Nothing is so sure to impoverish an epoch, to deprive conduct
of nobleness, and character of elevation.”
These are Mr. Morley’s closing words. This is the second reason why we
believe there can be no room for compromise in our Christian life or
service.
In the third place, it encourages evil by making it think that having
got so much it can get the rest, and so it prolongs the life of evil.
That is exactly what compromise did in the old days of slavery. Every
one of those early compromises prolonged the life of evil which at
last the nation had to pour out its blood to destroy. That is what
compromise always does. It persuades evil that, after all, maybe evil
can win the victory, that having gotten so much from us it can get the
rest if only it will be patient, and we simply increase the courage of
our foe in proportion as we make any compromise with him instead of
standing up face to face against him from the very beginning. And so it
destroys the power and might of right causes by mixing in the taint of
wrong. You do not make a good man better by putting a dash of bad in
him. You do not make a good cause stronger by letting the evil come in;
you only weaken its strength and power. Compromise plays into the hands
of the very evil which we are here to overcome and destroy.
In the fourth place, compromise breaks down the strength of rigid
consistency, and by letting in one qualification prepares the way for
others. That is the reason why it is so much harder for a man to be a
moderate drinker than to be a total abstainer. As was said of Samuel
Johnson, “He could practice abstinence but not temperance.” When a man
has made up his mind that he will never do a thing, it is a great deal
easier for him to refuse to do it in any given instance than if he has
made up his mind that he will do it moderately, because he never knows
when he ceases to be moderate. There is a sharp line between moderate
drinking and total abstinence. That boundary line no one can ever
mistake, but the boundary line between intemperance and moderation is
not located anywhere. There is no definite border between those two
countries. As a matter of fact, every man starts in by being a moderate
drinker. He never intended to become anything else but a moderate
drinker when he began. But there is a boundary line so clear that a
blind man can see it between yes and no, between not doing a thing at
all and doing that thing only moderately. We believe in the principle
of absolutely no compromise in moral habit and principle, and we
believe in the same principle in our clear and evangelical convictions
regarding the Christian faith.
In the fifth place, we ought to shun all such compromise because
it undermines our confidence in men, and the solid unity of their
coöperative action. We know where truth is, but we never know where
calculating compromise may be. In the language of the deaf and dumb
this is the sign for truth――a straight line right away from your
mouth――for the simple reason that between two points there is only
one straight line, but there may be many crooked lines. The truth is
always a single thing, but the error,――no man knows what it may be. No
compromise makes possible unity of accord by giving people one standard
on which they can rely, and by supplying confidence in the stability of
men and their convictions. But we cannot follow the compromising man,
for as soon as he gets out of our sight we do not know where he will be.
It is the man who makes no compromise, who stands fast by truth, that
we know we can locate. It was that which gave Stonewall Jackson his
huge power as a leader of men in the Civil War. He was a man of the
most unflinching Christian convictions. He was one who never moved the
breadth of a hair from his loyalty to his Lord or to truth as he saw
truth in the presence of his Lord. Colonel Henderson draws for us a
rich picture of the great soldier’s character and it is full of genial
and kindly touches, but it is faithful also in its account of the man’s
rigid and inflexible righteousness.
“Jackson’s religion entered into every action of his life. No
duty, however trivial, was begun without asking a blessing, or
ended without returning thanks. ‘He had long cultivated,’ he
said, ‘the habit of connecting the most trivial and customary
acts of life with a silent prayer.’ He took the Bible as his
guide, and it is possible that his literal interpretation
of its precepts caused many to regard him as a fanatic. His
observance of the Sabbath was hardly in accordance with
ordinary usage. He never read a letter on that day, nor
posted one; he believed that the Government in carrying the
mails was violating a divine law, and he considered the
suppression of such traffic one of the most important duties
of the legislature. Such opinions were uncommon, even among
the Presbyterians, and his rigid respect for truth served to
strengthen the impression that he was morbidly scrupulous.
If he unintentionally made a misstatement――even about some
trifling matter――as soon as he discovered his mistake he would
lose no time and spare no trouble in hastening to correct it.
‘Why, in the name of reason,’ he was asked, ‘do you walk a mile
in the rain for a perfectly unimportant thing?’ ‘Simply because
I have discovered that it was a misstatement, I could not sleep
comfortably unless I put it right.’
“He had occasion to censure a cadet who had given, as Jackson
believed, the wrong solution of a problem. On thinking the
matter over at home, he found that the pupil was right and
the teacher wrong. It was late at night and in the depth of
winter, but he immediately started off to the Institute,
some distance from his quarters, and sent for the cadet. The
delinquent, answering with much trepidation the untimely
summons, found himself to his astonishment the recipient
of a frank apology. Jackson’s scruples carried him even
further. Persons who interlarded their conversation with the
unmeaning phrase ‘you know’ were often astonished by the blunt
interruption that he did _not_ know; and when he was entreated
at parties or receptions to break through his dietary rules,
and for courtesy’s sake to seem to accept some delicacy, he
would always refuse with the reply that he had ‘no genius for
seeming.’ But if he carried his conscientiousness to extremes,
if he laid down stringent rules for his own governance, he
neither set himself up for a model nor did he attempt to
force his convictions upon others. He was always tolerant; he
knew his own faults, and his own temptations, and if he could
say nothing good of a man he would not speak of him at all.
But he was by no means disposed to overlook conduct of which
he disapproved, and undue leniency was a weakness to which
he never yielded. If he once lost confidence or discovered
deception on the part of one he trusted, he withdrew himself as
far as possible from any further dealings with him; and whether
with the cadets or with his brother-officers, if an offense
had been committed of which he was called upon to take notice,
he was absolutely inflexible. Punishment or report inevitably
followed. No excuses, no personal feelings, no appeals to
the suffering which might be brought upon the innocent, were
permitted to interfere with the execution of his duty.”
“As exact as the multiplication table,” some one said of him, “and as
full of things military as an arsenal.” Those of us who are looking for
the secret of Christian influence over others may be sure that we will
find it here. Men are not going to follow the shifting man. They will
follow the man who makes no compromise, who has his firm convictions
and who stands by those convictions, no matter what the cost of his
loyalty may be. Recent American politics are rather eloquent and
convincing on this point.
In the sixth place, compromise in principle substitutes reliance upon
majorities for reliance upon the truth, and the majorities never have
been right and we may doubt whether, until our Lord Jesus Christ comes
again, they ever will be right. God never has relied upon the majority.
He never has waited to do His work until it was ready to side with Him.
In all ages God has done His work by the few. In Old Testament times He
did it by the few. The one principle prevailed always――not by might,
nor by power. It was ever only “the Sword of the Lord and of Gideon.”
When our Lord came He did His work with the few. Through all the ages
God has been working so, and we simply depart from His whole method
in history when by compromise we try to get the force of the majority
on our side. The force of the majority does not amount to anything in
comparison with the force of truth. “The history of success,” says
Mr. Morley, “as we can never too often repeat to ourselves, is the
history of minorities.” And we do not believe in compromise because
it substitutes our reliance upon the majority for our reliance upon
the truth of God, and upon the strength of God to enable the few with
the truth to triumph against the error of the crowd. This passes for
foolish idealism and some of our most popular political leaders and
reformers have poured scorn upon the idealists and dreamers, who are
not to be numbered among the practical men.
“One would like to ask them what purpose is served by an ideal,
if it is not to make a guide for practice and a landmark
in dealing with the real. A man’s loftiest and most ideal
notions must be of a singularly ethereal and, shall we not
say, senseless kind, if he can never see how to take a single
step that may tend in the slightest degree towards making
them more real. If an ideal has no point of contact with what
exists, it is probably not much more than the vapid outcome
of intellectual or spiritual self-indulgence. If it has such
a point of contact, then there is sure to be something which
a man can do towards the fulfillment of his hopes. He cannot
substitute a new national religion for the old, but he can
at least do something to prevent people from supposing that
the adherents of the old are more numerous than they really
are, and something to show them that good ideas are not all
exhausted by the ancient forms. He cannot transform a monarchy
into a republic, but he can make sure that one citizen at least
shall aim at republican virtues, and abstain from the debasing
complaisance of the crowd.”[2]
[2] Morley, “Compromise,” p. 226.
And we might add, “he cannot instantly make truth the life of the
nation, but he can be loyal to its commandments. He cannot make
political leaders honest and patriotic, but he can refuse to profit by
their dishonesty or to regard them as honest men if they will but wear
his badge and seek their own ends by promoting his. He can form his own
ideals of honour and glory and live by them whatever way others may go.”
In the seventh place, compromise increases in peril as we draw near the
highest. If you take a man who is down on the lower levels, compromise
does not mean as much to him as it does to men who have been climbing
up. The nearer we come to Christ and the highest truth, the more
perilous does compromise become. As Edward Thring said: “In proportion
to excellence, compromise is impossible. A single leak sinks a great
ship, a raft that is all leaks floats.” That is just the deep lesson
that men and women need to learn; that the higher and cleaner and
more morally lofty or exacting the life, the more perilous compromise
becomes to it. One has heard Christian men say sometimes that they
thought they were safe in doing what this or that man, not as strong
or experienced or mature, could do. It is a great mistake. The clearer
and stronger a man’s life, the more careful must the man be, the more
solicitous, the more anxious, lest thinking he stands he falls. One
of the greatest things about the life of Paul was the humility and
self-distrust in which he walked, fearing lest when he had preached
to others he himself might be a castaway. We have to learn that here
lies power and duty, and that the cleaner Christ makes any human life,
the more careful must that life be to keep all its habits pure and
unsullied, and its convictions of truth unflinching and firm.
It was this principle that made our friend, S. H. Hadley, and that
makes so many men who have escaped from the slavery of drink, go to
extremes in cutting off physical indulgences. Mr. Hadley not only
dropped once and forever the use of alcohol, but he stopped tobacco
too, and he tried to get every drunkard whom he was seeking to save to
discontinue the use of nicotine. He held that men should be clean every
whit and his strong conviction was that while he would not for a moment
class such indulgences together, nevertheless the man who wanted to be
free from the one would find his deliverance far easier if he sloughed
off the other also. It is safer and easier to be thoroughgoing and
indiscriminate, if you will, than to be always calculating how great
risks can be safely run.
And, lastly, we believe in no compromise because the truth is bound
to prevail, and it will triumph the soonest when it is least hampered
and tied up with error or with qualification. One might stop here to
make a defense on this ground of the fanatics and devotees, but it
is enough to say that the truth is going to prevail because it is
God’s truth, and hell and all hell’s power in the world cannot stand
against it. What is the use in delaying the day of that triumph by
compromising with error? The right will prevail all the faster if we
make no compromise with error, if we go out and preach unflinchingly
and courageously with no compromise, with no surrender or economy or
adaptations, the hard, plain truth of God as we see it. If what we
think is truth is really error, it will be the sooner beaten down for
being made to stand up for itself. But if it is indeed the truth we
know it will prevail the more in the world as we keep it free from all
connection with anything that will weaken or becloud it.
I know how much danger there is in such an attitude as this if we take
it up towards the truth that we hold. It lies in our human nature to go
to violence or extremes with everything. Martin Luther used to say that
human nature is like a drunken man trying to ride a horse, you prop him
up on one side and he topples over on the other. It is that way with
us. We try to be firm and we become hard-hearted. We pride ourselves
on uncompromising loyalty to the truth and we lack the tenderness
and sympathy. Moreover, as Bushnell said in his essay on “Christian
Comprehensiveness”:
“It is the common infirmity of mere human reformers that, when
they rise up to cast out an error, it is generally not till
they have kindled their passions against it. If they begin with
reason, they are commonly moved, in the last degree, by their
animosities instead of reason. And as animosities are blind,
they, of course, see nothing to respect, nothing to spare.
The question whether possibly there may not be some truth or
good in the error assailed, which is needed to qualify and
save the equilibrium of their own opposing truth, is not once
entertained. Hence it is that men, in expelling one error, are
perpetually thrusting themselves into another, as if unwilling
or unable to hold more than half the truth at once.”
And yet these dangers are lesser dangers than the danger of
surrendering the truth. And we can be guarded from them by the great
and unselfish love that guarded Paul. The man who loves others more
than he loves himself, who holds human lives sacred and free from
invasion, who is seeking not his own glory, but the glory of God and
the good of men, is in little danger from an absolutely uncompromising
loyalty to the truth.
And if ever men have any doubts or misgivings regarding this, or if
the time of discouragements and fears comes to them, and they look
with longing to the multitudes who act together, while they think of
themselves as just a few, bearing testimony for the truth against
error and sin, they may encourage themselves with Mr. Matthew Arnold’s
doctrine of the remnant, or better yet, by remembering the great
Solitary, Jesus Christ. How lonesomely He walked His way; seeing what
no other soul was seeing; standing alone for the great truth which He
uttered, and at last meeting death upon the cross alone; one of His
disciples having betrayed Him, another having three times denied that
he ever knew Him, and all the others having left Him and gone away!
And yet as we look back, we see that lonely cross ruling the whole
world, and that forsaken figure men are clothing now with the crown
of everlasting light, and His name is above every name. All that we
are asked to do is simply to follow in His train, to take up the truth
which He opened, and for that truth to be willing to live, and, which
is far easier, if need be, to die. Our lives are ours for this one
thing, that through them, without compromise with error or with sin,
God may bear testimony to Himself, and whether He does that through
many years or through few, through peaceful personal service or through
storm and tragedy, is of no consequence. The one thing that is of
consequence is that we should know and be true to God.
But there is a better way to set forth and commend this principle
as a law of life than by arguing it in these general terms. Let the
principle put on flesh and live before us in a man:
“And Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the sojourners of Gilead, said
unto Ahab, As the Lord, the God of Israel, liveth, before whom I stand,
there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.”
The old man who spoke these words was one of the four great characters
of the Old Testament. He and Moses and Samuel and David stood apart in
the thought of the Hebrew people. Indeed, there was a sense in which
he and Moses were in a class by themselves. The appearance of those
two with our Lord on the Mountain of Transfiguration was only an
illustration of the place which they held in the imagination of Israel.
These were the first words he spoke as he bursts on our view. What
lay behind them we can only surmise. He was a Tishbite, one “of the
sojourners of Gilead,” dwelling beyond the Jordan, a man brought up
in the desert. There on the level sands, with the eye of God looking
down upon him, he had come to a deep feeling of the soul’s lonely stand
before God, and convinced of God and the righteousness of God he came
over the Jordan to speak his message and do his work in the organized
national life of his people. He was a clean-limbed, frugal-lived man,
who gathered up his skirts about him, we are told, and ran straight
away sixteen miles before the chariot of Ahab, from Carmel to the
entering in of Jezreel; a calm, quiet, courageous, firm-principled man;
bred so in the desert with God.
We do not have any very elaborate story of his life. He appears on the
stage and then he vanishes. There are long periods of time covering
years when he disappears entirely from the record. We can condense what
we know about his life into six brief chapters, between each two of
which there is an interval, in some cases, a long interval of time.
He appears first of all in connection with the great drought which he
prophesied and which lasted for the three years he had foretold. We
see him by the little brook Cherith, fed of the ravens, until through
the long cessation of the rain the brook itself disappeared. Then we
see him in the house of the widow of Sarepta, feeding with her on her
little supply of meal, and in her hour of depthless sorrow raising her
son from death to life. And then, in the second chapter, he breaks
forth once more upon the national stage. Ahab and Obadiah, his chief
man, had sought for him up and down the land, having divided the
country between them, partly that they might seek water for their fast
diminishing herds, partly that they might meet again and punish this
troubler of Israel. At last, on one of the highways, the man of God
appeared to the prime minister and told him that he had no fear to meet
the king and would do so if he would carry word to Ahab. True to his
word, he met the king, confronted him with his disloyalty to Jehovah,
and challenged him to produce the prophets of Baal for the great test
on Mount Carmel; and then, after his triumph, Elijah again disappears.
In the third chapter we have the only account of the man’s inner life.
If it were not for that chapter with its story of his subjective
struggle, Elijah would be no example for us men of this day. In all the
other chapters of the story he appears absolutely undaunted, unafraid
of the face of man, clearly convinced of what God would have him do,
and absolutely fearless in the doing of it. But here we are shown the
man in his own inward wavering, in doubt in some measure about the
reality or power of his mission, afraid to carry forward that which he
had set out to do with such daring spirit; and in the wilderness alone,
first beneath the juniper tree and then on Mount Horeb, Elijah had
to face again his life and settle himself once more in that faith in
the living God which had brought him out of the desert. And God stood
out and spoke to him, and Elijah rose up on his feet once more a man
unafraid to resume his mission. God bade him return and anoint a new
king over Syria and a new king over Israel, and to go to Abel-meholah
and find his own successor, the young man Elisha, plowing behind his
oxen. And the prophet went out from his hour of discouragement to find
at once the young man who was to take up his work after him and to be
an even mightier prophet than he.
Then for a long time Elijah disappears again, only to reappear when he
confronts Ahab once more, in Naboth’s vineyard, shows him how little
he fears him, and pronounces upon him the judgment of Jehovah. Then he
vanishes from the stage for three years at least of solitary meditation
in the wilderness, vanishes so long that the common people apparently
forgot him, so that when one day he met a little party of the servants
of the new king Ahaziah on the highway bound to Ekron to consult
Baal-zebub, they did not know who the prophet was and brought back his
message to the king, able only to say of him that he was a hairy man,
with a leather girdle about his loins. But the king well knew that the
Tishbite had broken once more upon the stage of the nation’s life,
and he bowed beneath the judgments of God that the man from Gilead
denounced.
Then in the concluding chapter we see Elijah and his young man coming
down from Gilgal to Bethel and then to Jericho and then back to the
wilderness out of which he had come, that from his own deserts where
he had come to know God he might go back to God again. And there in
the chariot of fire the man who was himself “the chariots of Israel,
and the horsemen thereof,” went up to the Lord God of Israel, Who was
alive, to meet Him before Whom he had always stood.
One does not wonder that the old man impressed as he did the
imagination of his people, and that when centuries later John the
Baptist emerged upon the stage challenging the attention of the nation,
almost the first question addressed to him was, “Art thou Elijah?”
And we have the secret of Elijah’s life given to us in these words
with which he is introduced to us, “As the LORD God of Israel liveth,
before whom I stand.” Out there in the barrenness of the desert beyond
the Jordan, Elijah had come to believe in a God Who was alive, and
before Whom he lived his life. The deserts have never bred polytheism.
The great polytheistic systems have sprung from the lush jungles of the
tropics. The great monotheisms have been born in the deserts. And out
on the lonely sands beyond the Jordan, beyond the hills and amid the
great level places where there was no one but God, Elijah came to know
that He was and to know that his life stood in Him.
This was the principle of the man’s life――the consuming conviction of a
living God and of the commission of His uncompromising service. Indeed
we are not sure that we know Elijah’s name. It is possible that the
name by which we think we know him is only a pseudonym――Elijah, “My God
is Jehovah.” It may be that from the very repetition of this phrase to
which he was addicted, “The LORD God of Israel, before whom I stand,”
men came at last to call him by the opening note of his message, “the
man of the living God.”
Now what that message meant to Elijah was just this: that the Lord God
was no dead force, no unknown cause of things, that the Lord God was
alive, and that a man was to have dealings with Him; that a man’s life
was not his own personal and irresponsible experiment, but a work to be
done in front of God; and that a man must reckon in all his thoughts,
in all his ways, with One Who lives, and go out and do his work in the
world in the consciousness of his relationship and his subjection to an
active, working, personal God Who would stand by him in the fire, would
uphold him before kings, and carry him through to the end of each of
his appointed tasks. If there is one thing that we need to get clearly
fixed in our own lives it is the matter of our attitude towards this
infinite and unseen God Who is alive.
This faith in a God Who is alive, before Whose face a man is to live
his life, is no mere theory. You cannot find any conviction that will
more really mould and transform all our conduct and put uncompromising
stiffness in it than the conviction that we are living our lives
thus before the eyes of a God Who observes. In the life of Thring of
Uppingham we are told of an incident that pleased him greatly. It is
a story that came to him regarding a little group of boys who were
spending the summer in France. A visitor saw these English schoolboys
and overheard their conversation as to what they should do on Sunday.
Some of the boys were proposing a certain course of action, and all
seemed to agree until one fellow spoke up and said: “No, I do not
agree. I will not do it.” And when the other lads urged him to come
along, he still insisted that he would not. They asked him his reasons.
He said: “Well, Thring would not like it, and what Thring would not
like I do not intend to do.” “Well, but Thring isn’t here,” they said;
“he’s back at Uppingham.” “I do not care,” said the boy; “Thring would
not like it.” He believed that he was living in a real sense――I mean in
the most real sense of all, in the life of his personal will――before
the standards of his master, and by those standards as in the light of
his master’s countenance he insisted that he would uncompromisingly
live. Before the eyes of God a man will beware how he lives his life.
If he knows that this life of his can find no darkness where he can
hide himself from God, if he knows that all of his days are to be spent
before His face, that all his deeds are to be done beneath the gaze of
God, assuredly that will govern and control a man’s decisions about his
practical ways. The consciousness of a living God will give direction
to a man’s moral life.
And it will not only give direction. There is many a man among us who
knows that the consciousness of a God Who is alive not only gives
determination and direction to his ways, but puts a new power and
inspiration in them.
A friend in New York tells a lovely story about a boy in one of the
great English schools. He was an only child, and his mother died when
he was but a little fellow. Between him and his father there grew up
relations of the most delicate and sensitive intimacy. The father was
blind, so that the little boy had to be his father’s eyes, and until
the day came when the lad had to go away to school there was scarcely
an hour when the two were separated. But at last the time came and
the boy went. He became the best athlete in his school. One spring,
just before the final game in which the boy was to bowl for his own
school, tidings came that his father was seriously ill and he must
come home. The news sent the whole school into lamentation, for they
were afraid that he might not recover and that if he did not the boy
could not play in the concluding and critical game. And indeed, as it
turned out, the father died. The day before the game was to be played
the boy came back to school, and, to the amazement of all, let it be
known that he intended to play. The next day he took his place and
played as he had never played in his life before. When at last the game
was over and the school had won its triumph, one of the masters came
to the boy and expressed to him the delighted surprise of the school
at what he had done and their amazement both that he had played at
all and at the way he had played. “Why,” said the boy, “didn’t you
understand? I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. That was the first
game my father ever saw me play.” Beneath the consciousness that for
the first time his father’s eyes were open and watching him the boy had
discovered capacities of power that he hardly knew he possessed before.
Beneath the eye of our Father, Who is looking upon the game that we are
playing, where is the man that cannot play a better game, who cannot
draw on the reservoirs of power untouched before, who cannot come out
and do his work in the world and live his life with larger inspiration
and strength, with more dominion and sovereignty, because he is living
it before a God Who is alive? To such a man will compromise not seem a
filial insult impossible except by a base degradation of the soul?
And not only did Elijah’s principle determine his conduct and pour
inspiration into it; it was this principle of a God Who is alive that
made him absolutely fearless. He was not only unafraid of physical
harm, but he had none of that subtler fear that every man knows――the
fear that he himself will fail, the fear that he cannot carry himself
safely through. What you and I are afraid of is not the things that are
without; our enemy is inside. Treachery within the walls is all that we
need to dread, and our deepest fear is of our own failure. That was the
great thing in Elijah’s life, that he dared to stand on Mount Carmel,
before all that crowd of priests, confident and fearless. He knew he
would prevail, that he had not promised in vain that God would answer.
The man who knows that he is living his life before a God Who is alive
and doing his work in the name of a God Who is alive is not afraid
either of what men can do to him or of the failure that he may make
himself.
There is a story in the life of Dr. Schauffler that illustrates how
to-day too men can rise into just such fearlessness. The missionaries
were being bothered a great deal in Constantinople by Russian
machinations against the Protestant missions in the empire, and Dr.
Schauffler went to see the Russian ambassador. “I might as well tell
you now, Mr. Schauffler,” said the ambassador, “that the Emperor of
Russia, who is my master, will never allow Protestantism to set its
foot in Turkey.” The old missionary looked at him for a moment and then
replied: “Your Excellency, the kingdom of Christ, who is my Master,
will never ask the Emperor of all the Russias where it may set its
foot.” And he went on with his mission unintimidated by any agencies
working in the dark against him, because he was confident that the
living God Whose work he was doing would achieve for him His own
victory.
And we see in this story of Elijah another thing that this great
conviction will do for a man: it will make a troubler of him. “Art thou
he,” said Ahab when he met Elijah in the midst of the great famine,
“art thou he that troubleth Israel?” “No,” said Elijah; “thou art he
who troubles Israel.” And yet they were both troubling Israel, the one
with the iniquities into which he was leading the people, the other
because the principle of the living God dominating his life drove him
as a great moral force against the evils of his time. A man cannot live
in a college or university with a faith that God is living and that
he himself is living in front of God, and be quiet before the moral
iniquities and evils he will find. It is not enough for a man to say,
“I will simply be myself, live my own clean life, and let my silent
influence count.” If his silent influence does not count, no other
influence of his will count. But the silence is not enough. A little
while ago I copied from one of the letters of Mandel Creighton, late
Bishop of London, written to his boys who were away at school, this
bit of advice. “You will see, then,” he writes to one son, who had
just been made a monitor in his school, “you will see, then, that the
chief influence of a monitor is in his example. But this is the point
on which I have seen many people deceive themselves. They trust to what
they call the force of silent example. That is most pernicious. If you
content yourself with merely keeping school rules and doing what is
right yourself and keeping out of the way of any fellows who you know
are doing wrong, or if you stand by and listen to them saying what they
ought not, without reproof, you are doing wrong. No, that won’t do. It
is part of the essence of good to fight against evil. You must set your
face strongly against all that is bad, and must put down not only all
that you find in the course of your walk, but you must go out of your
walk to find it in order to put it down.”
There has been much complaint these last years because in high places
in this land there have been men who were troublers of the nation.
The great need of the nation has been men who were prepared to make
trouble in order that, at last, righteousness might come. Things that
have thought themselves secure will be shaken; long vested interests
that have believed themselves to be sacred will have their sanctity
scrutinized; and men will come at last into their rights and their
righteousness, if we are prepared, following the old Tishbite, to live
our lives before the God Who is alive.
And this same principle brings peace and quiet and tranquillity to
men. Elijah shook once, we know, but only once. Every time we see him
on the public stage, no matter whom he is confronting――Jezebel, Ahab,
Obadiah, Ahaziah――he is standing with confident soul, quiet and still.
We can be sure that if on that day at Mount Carmel we could have first
mingled with those four hundred and fifty priests of Baal who knew that
their day of doom had come, and then have gone over and stood by the
side of the old man, we should have found the old man the most quiet
and placid person on the mountainside and his heart beat the calmest.
And we may be sure that we can go in the same tranquillity and calm and
steadfastness in which the old Tishbite lived, if we will believe as
deeply as he did in a Lord God Who is alive, and will live our lives
before His face with as little compromise and fear.
And it is a great conviction like this of Elijah’s that steadies men in
the hour of their trial and that when they fall redeems them again. The
old prophet fell down. He ran from a woman’s threats, and beneath the
juniper tree and then on Horeb, he shook and was afraid. But God, Who
was alive before, was alive still, and He came to Mount Horeb, where
the man lay in his spiritual petulance and fear, and He was not in the
great wind, and He was not in the great earthquake, and He was not in
the great fire, but at last in the still small voice of life He spoke
to Elijah, and Elijah rose up on his feet once more and went out to
complete his work in unfaltering triumph.
It works that way still. There is a letter of Abraham Lincoln, the
original of which is preserved in the state capitol at Albany. It is a
letter Lincoln wrote granting a pardon to a deserter.
EXECUTIVE MANSION,
WASHINGTON, October 4, 1864.
Upon condition that Roswell McIntyre of Company E, Sixth
Regiment of New York Cavalry, returns to his regiment and
faithfully serves out his term, making up for lost time, or
until otherwise lawfully discharged, he is fully pardoned for
any supposed desertion heretofore committed; and this paper is
his pass to go to his regiment.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
On the side of it is indorsed: “Quartermaster’s Office, New York City,
October 22, 1864. Transportation furnished to Baltimore, Maryland. H.
Brownson”; and at the bottom in a different hand is this indorsement:
“Taken from the body of R. McIntyre at the Battle of Five Forks,
Virginia, 1865.” So he went back and died like a man, with his pardon
on his person. And to-day, to the coward and the deserter and the
traitor, the man who has compromised and the man who has run away, the
same Lord God Who set Elijah on his feet is speaking, and He is able to
send him back to be faithful, even unto death. Thanks be to a God Who
does not compromise and Who is still alive.
LECTURE V
THE LIFE INVISIBLE
It is interesting to note two contrary tendencies in the current
appraisal of spiritual values in America. On the one hand there is
what has been called, not altogether happily, the tendency of ethical
materialism. In its best form it is simply a demand for reality, the
renewal of the old words, “By their fruits ye shall know them.” “Show
me thy faith by thy works.” In its less worthy forms it is the effort
to eliminate spiritual expression and formal religion from areas of
life where these have been most familiar. Illustrations in extreme
forms abound.
We are told now that in charity love has nothing to do with the matter,
that the introduction of religious sentiment is only mischievous and
misleading, that the issue is one purely of proper economic principle
and organization. It is a question of employment for the unemployed,
or of calculating accurately the amount of need, counting the hungry
mouths and fixing the quantity of bread, and then determining
scientifically how much of the bread the hungry should earn, and how
much society through appropriate and unsentimental machinery should
supply.
In medical philanthropy the new idea is that ideas have nothing to do
with it. The good Samaritan, we are told, did not give the wounded man
a tract or say anything to him about the religious views or motives of
his benefactor. He was satisfied to heal his skin and stop at that. Let
the chaplains depart from the hospitals.
And so also in social service. The legitimate work is to improve the
culinary methods of the neighbourhood, to provide innocent games and
sports, to secure more adequate food supplies for living bodies and to
assist in the burial of dead ones; but Christ must not be mentioned,
and religious issues must not be raised.
These are extreme illustrations, but they are perfectly familiar, and
the tendency they represent is indisputable. In this view our Lord,
of course, was far astray when He talked to His disciples by Jacob’s
well about having meat to eat which they knew not. “Meat!” say our
modern ethical materialists. “Meat is meat――beef or bread. It is not a
metaphor. Meat that is a metaphor is a mockery.” Well, it would be if
it were offered for food to a hungry man, but it is not a mockery to
the man who would go hungry to feed the hungry. And the whole modern
question is not between those who would give real meat to the hungry
and those who would give only metaphorical meat. It is between those
who want to deal with people’s skins only and those who mean to deal
both with their skins and with their souls, between those who conceive
of man as mainly belly and back and those to whom our real life is the
life invisible.
It is a very curious phenomenon, this exclusion of Christian ideas from
the very area which they created. For all this charity and philanthropy
and social service were produced by the ideas of Christianity. And now
the fruit says to the vine and to the inward life, “I have no need of
thee.” Of course not all the fruit says this. Some of it only says,
“Vine and inward life, there is a prejudice against you. You would do
well to conceal yourself. I will pretend to be the real thing.” But
some of the fruit has gone further. “I am the real thing,” it says. “I
know more than James. Faith must not only show works: works are faith.
There is no need of metaphysics or creeds. Deeds are religion. The
only wealth is tangible wealth, things handled, works seen, bread out
of the ground, not down from heaven. Meat that the disciples could not
see is too pallid for this earth. Man is his skin and the bag which it
contains, and religion must understand this.”
At the same time that this suicidal tendency is operating in the
field of man’s highest values seeking to destroy his standards and to
discredit the title-deeds of all his greatest treasures, a precisely
contrary tendency is acting in commerce and politics, in the field of
man’s lower values. While men are busy on the one hand in the effort to
materialize the spiritual wealth which Christianity has produced, other
men are seeking with a new earnestness to spiritualize our material
wealth. As education, science, philanthropy, surrenders the spiritual
vision and ideal, trade and politics clutch after it. Never before
in the history of the world has there been such an effort as there
is to-day to idealize nationalism, to build up spiritual conceptions
behind the State, to make racial feeling a religion. If some men think
that religious values and spiritual ideas and so-called “metaphysical”
notions can be spared from charity and social service, other men are
striving with all their might to secure all this rejected mass of
vitality and power for patriotism and the national life.
And the same spiritualizing and idealizing tendency is even more
evident in commerce and finance. Wealth becomes less and less material.
In primitive times riches consisted in flocks and herds and land and
in actual gold and silver bullion or coins which their owner put in
a crock and buried in his house. Now wealth consists in credit and
securities, in figures written on a ledger in a bank, or in scraps
of paper in a tin box. The world’s work is done with little visible
wealth. Our new banking system is meant for this very purpose,
to provide immaterial instrumentalities. Millions of dollars are
transported invisibly. By a cable message or a message through the air
untold wealth that was in London can be made to appear in New York. And
all these intangible forms of wealth are exceeded in the judgment of
the late Mr. J. P. Morgan by the credit of character, something still
more “metaphysical.” The spiritualization of the material keeps pace on
one side with the materialization of the spiritual on the other.
However clear or foggy our ideas on these issues may be now, viewing
them as present issues, we cannot fail to see sharply the indisputable
facts of the past. Looking backward we simply do not discern and cannot
remember the visible and outward values or possessors of values at all.
Where is the actual material wealth of earlier days, the flocks, the
gold and silver, the palaces? The amazing thing is that it is all gone.
The gold and silver which Rome gathered from the world, which went home
to Spain in the days of the Conquistadores, where is it all now? Where
are those who boasted it and built their fame or power on it? Shelley
tells us in his sonnet, “Ozymandias,”
“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said, ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on those lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings,
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’”
And what befell Ozymandias’ image has befallen almost all the works of
the ancients’ hands. A few of their temples remain, and the arches of
their viaducts and some of the images of their public worship and of
their national ideals. But their wealth and the treasure houses which
they kept it in and the palaces of their pleasure and the cities of
their pride are gone. I never felt more keenly the tragedy and the
truth of this utter transitoriness and insecurity of all national glory
than looking over the massive ruins of the palace of the Chosroes kings
at Kasr-i-Shirin. All of Browning’s “Love Among the Ruins” seemed to be
there in mute evidence before one’s eyes:
“Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles
Miles and miles
On the solitary pastures where our sheep
Half-asleep
Tinkle homeward through the twilight, stray or stop
As they crop――
Was the site once of a city great and gay,
(So they say)
Of our country’s very capital, its prince
Ages since
Held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far
Peace or war.
“Now,――the country does not even boast a tree,
As you see,
To distinguish slopes of verdure, certain rills
From the hills
Intersect and give a name to, (else they run
Into one,)
Where the domed and daring palace shot its spires
Up like fires
O’er the hundred-gated circuit of a wall
Bounding all,
Made of marble, men might march on nor be pressed,
Twelve abreast.
“And such plenty and perfection, see, of grass
Never was!
Such a carpet as, this summer-time, o’erspreads
And embeds
Every vestige of the city, guessed alone,
Stock or stone――
Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe
Long ago;
Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame
Struck them tame;
And that glory and that shame alike, the gold
Bought and sold.
“Now,――the single little turret that remains
On the plains,
By the caper overrooted, by the gourd
Overscored,
While the patching houseleek’s head of blossom winks
Through the chinks――
Marks the basement whence a tower in ancient time
Sprang sublime.
And a burning ring, all round, the chariots traced
As they raced,
And the monarch and his minions and his dames
Viewed the games.”
All this is gone. The only wealth of the past which has survived is
such as Christ referred to. “I have meat to eat that ye know not of.”
The ideas and the literature which enshrined them alone remain. Not the
manuscripts. They are gone, as though God would show in the most vivid
way His scorn of the visible and earth’s “real.” Not one original page
of Plato exists. But Plato’s mind is here still. The kings are gone.
But Isaiah and Jeremiah, the men of the inward resources, spokesmen and
ministers of the invisible life, abide.
“The tumult and the shouting dies
The captains and the kings depart
Still stands Thine against sacrifice
A humble and a contrite heart.”
And the issue is clear enough when we look at it concretely to-day
and contrast the men who have the inward resources with those who
have not, the movements which are fed from deep ideal springs with
those which deal skin-deep only with humanity. In one of our American
cities the president of a large institution was shelved in the prime
of life by younger and less conservative men who acquired control of
the business. They treated the older man well, gave him the nominal
headship with his former salary, but really transferred all the power
to other men. It was the chance of a lifetime for the older man. He had
his strength and his time for any service or ministry or pleasure he
might choose. But the only meat which he had to eat was the management
of the business, and accordingly he starved to death in a fine home
and with a large salary. All that the bag of his body needed he had,
but man cannot live by bread alone without a word from God. The Tinker
of Bedford Jail heard the key turn in the lock behind him. And did
he famish alone? He opened the gate of his house within and out they
came――Christian and Great-Heart and Hopeful and Evangelist and Mercy
and Dare-to-Die――and the loneliness of John Bunyan’s cell became the
greatest society on earth, and the immortals who marched out of the
wealth of his soul are the companions of millions who could not name
one human being who was Bunyan’s contemporary. The rich men who have
transmitted real wealth have been the lovers, the dreamers, the servers
who ate bread at God’s hands and who knew and taught men that the life
is more than meat and the body than raiment. “She was not daily bread,”
wrote her niece of Emily Dickinson. “She was star dust.”
This above all was characteristic of Christ. Part of our Lord’s
preëminence of nature and of achievement was the untold wealth of His
inward resources. No philanthropist or social worker ever lived who
was His equal in all that our ethical materialists admire and praise.
But behind all this and as explaining all this He had meat to eat that
men knew not, thoughts of God, ideas of origin and destiny, of whence
He came and whither He was going, fellowship, purposes, a spiritual
program. His wealth was an inward, a communicable and eternal treasure.
It nourished Him and was for all men.
“I have meat to eat,” said He. “Who brought it to Him?” asked they. “A
primrose by the river’s brim a yellow primrose” was to them; and it was
nothing more. Meat was meat, mutton or beef to His disciples. But to
Him the primrose was a volume of revelation. Meat was very life of God
within His soul. Language to Christ was windows into the wealth of the
eternities and the infinites. To men it was words. His discernment of
latent values in men made Him a rich man wherever He found a fellow.
He had cargoes of redeemable character afloat on the wide waters of
mankind, and these He was forever drawing home. Men brought Him a
sinner, flotsam of Galilee; and Jesus saw Himself rich with the latent
life of Peter of Pentecost, victor of the gates of hell. The stained
hand of the Samaritan concubine became under His faith purified to bear
the chalice of the life of God. He had more wealth latent in human
character than Crœsus ever dreamed of. His universalism, also, made
Him rich with all the wealth of humanity. All around Him men choked and
died in the stifling air of racial exclusion and prejudice. He lived in
the whole free world. Thinking in terms of all mankind and all the ages
makes the thinker rich beyond all the dreams of any racial avarice or
national pride.
But above all His meat was simply this: to walk with God, to do the
will of God and to accomplish His work. His life was in God’s will, His
strength in God’s companionship. He lived powerfully among men because
He dwelt deeply in God. His wealth was not herds and gold, nor bonds
and credits, nor deeds; but the power to do deeds in the might and pity
of God.
And the inward resources of Christ which are true wealth are accessible
also to us; and not accessible only, but indispensable. We need not set
much store by what the world calls wealth. Its one worthy use is as
capital for human service; and Christ who had none of it here still did
and inspired more service than all the world’s capital has performed.
Louis Pasteur was living on a salary of a few hundred francs. All
that he did was to examine with a microscope things infinitesimally
small and to reflect upon them, and then in his laboratory to write
down and send forth some new ideas. The practical men derided his
“pure science,”――a mere student of theories, spinner of silk dreams
thinner than the filaments of the silkworms of southern France. But
Pasteur’s thoughts were the richest source of wealth in France.
“Pasteur’s discoveries alone,” said Huxley, “would suffice to cover the
war indemnity paid by France to Germany in 1870.”[3] True wealth is
inward resources, the love of God’s world, of truth and holy thoughts,
friendship with the living and the dead, the possession of the Son of
God and His words which are spirit and life, and of His Spirit “whom
the world cannot receive; for it beholdeth Him not, neither knoweth
Him; ye know Him; for He abideth with you, and shall be in you.”
[3] Vallery-Radot, “Life of Pasteur,” popular edition, p. 374.
And all this wealth may be ours without going anywhere for it. No man
brought it to Him. “I have meat,” He said. So He calls us to be rich.
We do not need to go anywhere for it. No man needs to bring it to us.
It is here. It is Himself――the Bread of Life. Can we also say, “I have
it――meat to eat, of the world unknown, within my soul, within my soul”?
To be able to say that is our great American need. I will not say
that it is a greater need now than it has ever been because we have
deteriorated and need to recover the element of spiritual idealism in
our national character. We have not deteriorated. Doubtless we have
lost many things that it would have been well for us to have kept,
and have kept much that it would have been better to lose. But we have
gained in our perception of the higher values and we seek them more
and not less than ever before. We are far from being what we ought to
be, but the past was farther, and we only think otherwise because we
clothe the past in mists of idealization. That very error is proof of
our deeper spiritual discerning. Evils are challenged now which passed
uncondemned a half generation ago. But though we have gained, we need
to gain more, and what we need to gain is not something æsthetic or
intellectual only, not broader philosophies or wider social programs,
not anything external or merely ethical, but something biological and
dynamic. We need the push and power of what One and One only offers.
“The thief cometh not,” said Christ, “but that he may steal, and
kill, and destroy: I came that they may have life, and may have it
abundantly.”
Not long before his death, as all remember, the late Mr. Morgan was
summoned to testify before a congressional committee which was seeking
to locate the seat of the money power. The object of those examining
Mr. Morgan was to bring out the extent of his own influence and
control, and to show, if possible, that in the hands of a few men was
concentrated the real domination of the financial life of America.
The popular impression, after the examination was over, was that Mr.
Morgan’s modest disavowals were justified by all the testimony, and
that there was no one person, or any group of individuals, in this
country who possessed so much power as was supposed to reside in the
hands of a little company of men.
Now, at the best, there was no question of creating or producing
anything. Nobody thought of asking Mr. Morgan whether he could create
a grain of wheat, or heal a disease, or bring into existence anything
that was not already here. The main question was how much of something
that was here already was he, or any other man, able to control. As one
read the testimony, the one dominant impression it made on his mind was
how small and weak and ineffectual even the strongest human life was,
and how little was the effect that it could produce in what it was able
to do in behalf of others.
How weak does even the strongest personality appear when contrasted
with One Who can say such words as these I have just quoted! Suppose
some great man now living were to say to us: “Come unto me, all ye
that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. If any man
thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. I am come that they may have
life, and may have it abundantly,” how startled we should be! But
we have become familiar with the claim on the lips of Christ and do
not realize what we are really confronted with in that single great
Personality standing among men and offering to meet the ultimate human
need, to give us the deepest, richest, most priceless thing in the
world, which no one of us can give another. “I am come that ye may have
life, and that ye may have it abundantly.”
And notice that here is not a claim only. There is a strange and
startling contrast. “The thief cometh to steal, and to kill, and to
destroy: I am come that ye may have life.” On the one side is our Lord.
Him we know. But who is this thief on the other side who has come, not
to give life, but to reduce it, contract it, dilute it――destroy it
altogether? Well, we know well enough that sin is such a thief, that
wherever sin is allowed to come into our lives it abridges those lives,
draws in the walls of their expansion, cuts down and impoverishes their
joys. And there are many things short of sin, less coarse and evil,
which, nevertheless, draw in the boundaries of life, narrow and stifle
it, and do the work of the thief who came to kill, and to destroy, and
to steal. Over against all these He stands Who said: “I came to give
life, to give it abundantly.”
Now we know very well what men and women say when you bring them this
offer of Christ’s about His life. “Oh,” they say, “it all depends upon
what you mean by life. I have my own idea of life. The life I am living
is rich and satisfying to me, and I am not drawn to this life that
your tepid religion offers me in exchange.” But are those who answer
so fully satisfied? Are they really satisfied at all with any part of
their life except such of it as consists of the kind of life that Jesus
Christ our Lord Himself came to bring, with which alone the hearts of
men can be content?
What do we mean when we speak of life that really satisfies us? I
asked some boys a little while ago what they meant when they spoke
about life, real life that would satisfy men. Four were boys at the
Hill School, Pottstown, Pa. They sat down and collaborated for a while
as to what real life meant to them, and when they got through it
came to this: Purity, integrity, the principle of Christian service,
unselfishness, and the desire to be perfect. I asked another man at
Princeton what life meant to him, real life. He was one of the best
athletes in the college, and this was the answer he gave: Humility,
charitableness, bravery, strength of conviction, honesty, sincerity,
truthfulness and the power to forgive. I asked a man at Yale what he
thought life was. He was the most popular man in the senior class at
that time. This was what he wrote down: “Service after the manner of
Jesus, honesty carried all the way through, sympathy, capacity for
work, patience in holding to principle, as well as fidelity in actual
duty.”
Now if we were to define life better than these boys, and yet in the
way they were feeling after, not in any concrete expressions, but in
its central principle, we should borrow the words which Professor
Drummond borrowed from Herbert Spencer. Spencer said that the perfect
correspondence of any organism with its environment would be perfect
life. Professor Drummond modified this by adding just one word: the
perfect correspondence of any organism with a perfect environment would
be perfect life. Or, to put it as it is stated in one of our best
dictionaries: life is that state in any animal or plant in which its
different functions are all occupied in active healthy expression. Now
that is just what those boys were feeling after. Life is the free and
fearless completion of ourselves. Life is our utter unfolding in the
direction of that of which we are capable. Life is the pushing out of
the rim of our world into the great and boundless riches of God. Life
is the opening up of the gates of our prison house that we may go after
Him Whose word to men was: “If ye abide in my word, then are ye truly
my disciples; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make
you free.” Life is what Jesus Christ came to give, for His mission was
this: “The thief came to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I am come
that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.”
One great purpose of the Incarnation was to show what we are in our
deepest being in the purpose of God, and what we are capable of. Our
Lord did not come to parade before men the exceptional life to which
they could never attain. He came, as He Himself said, to show them
what it had been His Father’s will that they should all be. “As my
Father hath sent me, even so send I you.” “I go unto my Father, and
your Father; and to my God, and your God.” What Jesus Christ was in the
fullness of His unlimited life was the revealing of what God has in
His will for every one of us. The amplitudes that we see in Him, the
subsidence of all the petty boundaries, the unhampered outgoing of His
free spirit in the area of His Father, God,――all that is just a picture
of what God meant the life of each one of us to be. That is why they
called Him the Son of Man, because He was the picture of what God had
meant that His son, man, might be.
And Christ came, not only to show the possibilities of such being, of
what men could do and what they could be made, but to be Himself that
expression of power in them competent to effect such a result, the tide
of the boundless life flowing through all the channels that they could
offer to Him. He came to be in mankind the deep, flowing stream of a
new life. One regrets to find in some churches to-day in the repetition
of the Apostles’ Creed the omission of the sentence: “He descended
into hell.” There is no word in the Creed which expresses more fully
the uttermost reach of the purpose of our Lord and the scope and
boundlessness of His love. Down even into hell He went in the utterance
of His love for mankind. How much this means! But to say no more, it
means this, that deep into the dark of our human life He came, that
there, below all sight, below all thought, He might release the vital
streams that have been flowing from the fountain of Calvary ever since,
and which have no other fountain.
We know what would happen in our bodies, to put it simply, if some
great artery that fed our life were tied. Atrophy and palsy would
creep at once over our unnourished frames. Precisely the same thing is
true in the deeper life of our souls, if the arteries, those channels
through which Christ would pour His energy and strength and power, are
tied. To put the same thing still more simply: Suppose the Mississippi
River instead of running into the Gulf ran out of the Gulf deep into
the land. Suppose all of the rivers poured into the land instead of
into the seas. As a matter of fact, that is in one sense what they do.
We have got long past looking at rivers as drains for the land. We
know that they are arteries through which the life-blood of the seas
flows upon the land by way of the skies. And suppose there were no
Mississippi River. Suppose it were stopped at the gate. What a chill
and death would fall upon the land! And how often that life of Christ
which comes up to the gates of men’s lives is stifled, the stream that
would pour in kept out, the power that would control and remake blocked
at the door through which it would enter. “The thief is come,” He says,
“and you let him in, to kill, and to steal, and to destroy; I am come,
and you keep Me out. And I am come that you may have life, and that you
may have it in all the abundance of God.”
And we know that this life of Christ is real and abundant life because
it fulfills the tests of life. It is a life of fullness in all its
correspondences and relationships. It completes life to the uttermost
of its possibilities, setting it in all those ties with that which
is outside of it, which constitute life. For, after all, there is no
separable life. All the life that we know is relationship. Our Lord
defined it in such terms in His great prayer: “This is life eternal,
that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom
thou hast sent.” Life can only be construed in terms of correspondence.
We know that the life Christ came to give, and does give, is the
satisfying and real life, because it meets these testings. It gives us
this wealth of correspondence of relationship.
“Oh, the pure delight of a single hour,
That before Thy Cross I spend,
When I kneel in prayer, and with Thee, my God,
I commune as friend with friend.”
We know that the life Christ brings is complete and full, because it
reëstablishes the tie and union between ourselves and God, and He
becomes to us again our Father and our Friend. We know it, because it
is the root of all deep and true and satisfying human relationships.
How can there be a real and full union of one man and one woman that is
not a union in Christ? And for the highest friendship and its ideals
we find sanction and nourishment best in Him and the groundwork of His
life.
And Christ’s is the real and satisfying life, because it is creative and
energizing. It is not like the influence of that thief――selfishness, low
desire, sin and small ambition――who kills and steals and destroys. But
the life that Christ is teems with vitalizing power; it is strength and
energy and new service in men. I have never seen it more beautifully put
than in a letter of Stanley to David Livingstone. It was found by Lady
Stanley in a little pocketbook which her husband had carried on the
expedition for the relief of Livingstone. It was written in lead pencil.
It was a copy of the letter that Stanley had written to the great
explorer the very day after he left him. It has sometimes been
questioned whether Livingstone really made on Stanley the impression
which Stanley describes in his autobiography. There have been those who
said that that picture was but the reading back over the intervening
years of a growing hero worship. But here is the letter which Stanley
wrote as he came fresh from the old missionary’s companionship and the
inspiration of his personality:
“MY DEAR DOCTOR:
“I have parted from you all too soon; I feel it deeply; I am
entirely conscious of it from being so depressed.... In writing
to you, I am not writing to an idea now, but to an embodiment
of warm, good fellowship, of everything that is noble and
right, of sound common sense, of everything practical and
right-minded.
“I have talked with you; your presence is almost palpable,
though you are absent....
“It seems as if I had left a community of friends and
relations. The utter loneliness of myself, the void that has
been created, the pang at parting, the bleak aspect of the
future, is the same as I have felt before, when parting from
dear friends.
“Why should people be subjected to these partings, with the
several sorrows and pangs that surely follow them?――It is a
consolation, however, after tearing myself away, that I am
about to do you a service, for then I have not quite parted
from you; you and I are not quite separate. Though I am not
present to you bodily, you must think of me daily until your
caravan arrives. Though you are not before me visibly, I
shall think of you constantly, until your least wish has been
attended to. In this way the chain of remembrance will not be
severed.
“‘Not yet,’ I say to myself, ‘are we apart,’ and this to me,
dear Doctor, is consoling, believe me. Had I a series of
services to perform for you, why then! we should never have to
part.
“Do not fear then, I beg, to ask, nay, to command, whatever
lies in my power. And do not, I beg of you, attribute these
professions to interested motives, but accept them, or believe
them, in the spirit in which they are made, in that true David
Livingstone spirit I have happily become acquainted with.”
And out from that lonely spot in eastern Africa, the younger man came
to begin a new career; all the old aimlessness and shiftlessness and
drifting gone forever from his life, to pass on now to lift up the
mission which, beneath the dripping eaves of the hut in which he died,
David Livingstone laid down. The tide of a new life and a new service
was in him. “I came that ye may have life, and that ye may have it
abundantly.” He had seen Christ and felt the contagion of the life of
Christ in Livingstone, and Christ’s word, articulate or inarticulate,
had come to live in him. And that life is life in the power and desire
to serve.
This life that Christ came to give is the only real and satisfying
life, because it alone endures. We gather at Northfield each summer
and always go up to read afresh the brief inscription on Mr. Moody’s
grave on Round Top, “The world passeth away, and the lust thereof; but
he that doeth the will of God abideth forever.” We sing the same great
truth constantly in George Matheson’s hymn:
“I lay in dust life’s glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be.”
I wrote the other day to a friend about her sister-in-law’s death, and
this was the last sentence of the letter which she wrote in reply:
“I do not know if he”――that was her brother――“told you how
beautiful it was at the last; how S――――’s face lighted up with
such an expression of surprise and adoration, with her eyes
open to their fullest extent, and then it was all over. Only a
glimpse into the life that was not to end could have brought
such a look to a human face.”
“And that life,” said He Who was the life, “I brought with Me and will
give to you.”
Let us lift our hearts to the life that shall endless be, to the
liberty on which there never lay a chain, to the light of the land that
hath no need of any sun, because the “Lamb is the light thereof,” the
land of the new morning and the tearless life. The thief cometh――let
him not come in!――only to kill, and to steal, and to destroy. “I am
come, and I stand at the door and ask you now to let Me in, that you
may have life abundantly.”
As these lectures close I would press all this in the most earnest and
personal terms upon each one individually. The processes of social and
moral progress in humanity are retarded or broken down because they
are not carried on a volume of adequate spiritual life in men. There
ought to be a Kingdom of Living Love and Brotherly Will on the earth.
And some day there will be, but there is not now and there cannot be
until the anemia of man is healed, and it can be healed in only one
way――by more life in man, by life abounding in men. The commercial and
materialistic solution of the world’s problem has been fully tried.
For a generation it has been preached and practiced as the one saving
gospel and out of the depths to which it brought us we begin to turn
heavenward again. The day for a new creed has dawned――the old creed of
truth and hope and freedom and life, of the wealth and glory of a city
unseen as yet, hid in the heavens and only possible on the earth as
drawn down by men to whom the invisible things are the surest of all
realities and who live and are strong in God.
_Printed in the United States of America_
* * * * *
INSPIRATION FOR MEN
_ROBERT W. BOLWELL_
After College――What?
12mo, cloth, net 75c.
A protest, in the form of autobiographical chapters, against dawdling
through college. The author is sprightly and readable,――anything but
preachy――but does put some very wholesome and helpful facts in such
form as to grip the reader.
_HALFORD E. LUCCOCK_
Five-Minute Shop-Talks
12mo, cloth, net $1.00.
One of the best things of its kind yet issued. In each of these thirty
or more brief addresses, Mr. Luccock employs terse, epigrammatic
language and contrives to compress into a five-minute talk the wisdom
and counsel of a fifty-minute sermon. Every word is made to tell――to
tell something worth hearing and heeding.
_CHARLES CARROLL ALBERTSON_
Chapel Talks
A Collection of Sermons to College Students. 12mo, cloth, net $1.00.
Practical discourses on essential subjects delivered in various
colleges and universities, including Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth,
Princeton, Yale, and Virginia. No one of these sermons required more
than twenty-five minutes to deliver. They are characterized by earnest
argument, familiar illustrations and forceful appeal.
_CORTLANDT MYERS, D. D._
_Author of “Real Prayer,” “The Real Holy Spirit,” etc._
The Man Inside
A Study of One’s Self. By Minister at Tremont Temple, Boston. 12mo,
cloth, net 50c.
A four-fold study of the inner life of a man, in which the popular
pastor of Tremont Temple, discusses the forces that make him, lift him,
save him, and move him. The book is prepared in bright, interesting
fashion, and abundantly furnished with suitable and forceful
illustration.
_JOHN T. FARIS_
_Popular-Price Editions_
The “Success Books”
Three Vols. each, formerly $1.25 net. Now each 60c. net (postage extra).
=Seeking Success=
=Men Who Made Good=
=Making Good=
_Dr. J. R. Miller_ says: “Bright and short and full of illustrations
from actual life, they are just the sort that will help young men in
the home in school among associates and in business.”
BIOGRAPHY
_CHARLES G. TRUMBULL_
Anthony Comstock, Fighter
Illustrated, 12mo, cloth, net $1.25.
An authorized biography of this great fighter for purity. The story
is one of life-and-death adventure, moral and physical heroism, and
incomparable achievement. During the thirty years in which Mr. Comstock
has been working for the suppression of vice he has destroyed over 43
tons of vile books, 28,425 pounds of stereotype plates, two and a half
million obscene pictures and 12,945 negatives. The detailed account of
how all this was done is a most thrilling and remarkable story.
_FRANK J. CANNON――DR. GEORGE L. KNAPP_
Brigham Young and His Mormon Empire
Illustrated, 8vo, cloth, net $1.50.
Ex-Senator Cannon’s personal acquaintance with this apostle of the
Mormon Church and his knowledge of the religion and the people gained
by having been born and brought up in the heart of Mormondom, give more
than usual authority and interest to this biography. This life story
of the man who founded a Mohammedan kingdom in a puritan republic sets
forth in true perspective, in impartial and unbiased manner, the facts
about one of the most romantic and interesting characters in American
history.
_FRANCES WILLARD_
Frances Willard: Her Life and Her Work
By Ray Strachey. With an Introduction by Lady Henry Somerset.
Illustrated, 8vo, cloth, net $1.50.
A notable new life of the great temperance advocate written by an
English woman from an entirely new standpoint. Mrs. Strachey, the
granddaughter of the author of “A Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life,”
had immediate access to Miss Willard’s letters, journals and papers,
and the benefit of her grandmother’s advice and knowledge.
Israel Zangwill says of the book, “A masterpiece of condensation, an
adequate biography of perhaps the greatest woman America has produced.
Nobody can read this book without becoming braver, better, wiser.”
_MRS. S. MOORE SITES_
Nathan Sites:
Introduction by Bishop W. F. McDowell. Oriental Hand-Painted
Illustrations, gilt top, net $1.50.
This is one of the notable books of the year. China looms large in
current political and religious interest, so that this life story of
one who for nearly half a century has been closely identified with
social and religious reform in that country must have a large place in
current literature.
QUESTIONS OF THE FAITH
_JAMES H. SNOWDEN, D.D._
The Psychology of Religion
8vo, cloth, net $1.50.
Psychology is one of the most rapidly advancing of modern sciences,
and Dr. Snowden’s book will find a ready welcome. While especially
adapted for the use of ministers and teachers, it is not in any sense
an ultra-academic work. This is evidenced by the fact that the material
forming it has been delivered not only as a successful Summer School
course, but in the form of popular lectures, open to the general public.
_WILLIAM HALLOCK JOHNSON, Ph.D., D.D._
_Professor of Greek and New Testament Literature in Lincoln University,
Pa._
The Christian Faith under Modern Searchlight
The L. P. Stone Lectures, Princeton. Introduction by Francis L. Patton,
D.D. Cloth, net $1.25.
The faith which is to survive must not only be a traditional but an
intelligent faith which has its roots in reason and experience and
its blossom and fruit in character and good works. To this end, the
author examines the fundamentals of the Christian belief in the light
of to-day and reaches the conclusion that every advance in knowledge
establishes its sovereign claim to be from heaven and not from men.
_ANDREW W. ARCHIBALD, D.D._
_Author of “The Bible Verified,” “The Trend of the Centuries,” etc._
The Modern Man Facing the Old Problems
12mo, cloth, net $1.00.
A thoughtful, ably-conducted study in which those problems of human
life, experience and destiny, which, in one form or another, seem
recurrent in every age, are examined from what may be called a Biblical
viewpoint. That is to say, the author by its illuminating rays,
endeavors to find elucidation and solution for the difficulties, which
in more or less degree, perplex believer and unbeliever alike.
_NOLAN RICE BEST_
_Editor of “The Continent”_
Applied Religion for Everyman
12mo, cloth, net $1.00.
“Nolan Rice Best has earned a well-deserved reputation in the
religious press of America, as a writer of virile, trenchantly-phrased
editorials. The selection here brought together represent his best
efforts, and contains an experienced editor’s suggestions for the
ever-recurrent problems confronting Church members as a body, and as
individual Christians. Mr. Best wields a facile pen, and a sudden gleam
of beauty, a difficult thought set in a perfect phrase, or an old idea
invested with new meaning and grace, meets one at every turn of the
page.”――_The Record Herald._
BIBLE STUDY
_JOHN W. LIGON_
_Pastor Christian Church, Barboursville, Ky._
Paul the Apostle
12mo, cloth, net $1.15.
A life of the Apostle to the Gentiles, which, while fuller than the
brief outlines usually followed in class instruction, is sufficiently
condensed to admit of its being specially adapted to the use of busy
men and women and the young people of the Church. The events and
incidents of Paul’s career are woven into a continuous narrative,
furnishing a living picture of his wonderful life as far as that life
can be known.
_DWIGHT GODDARD_
Jesus
And the Problems of Human Life. Cloth, net 50c.
These discourses show the value and usefulness of the Good News of
a Spiritual Realm and the Way of Salvation to anyone who has felt a
desire to make that supreme adventure in faith. They set the “Good
News” into its right relation with present-day thought.
The Good News
Of a Spiritual Realm. Paraphrased by Dwight Goddard. _Second Edition._
12mo, cloth, net $1.00.
An interweaving and paraphrasing of the Four Gospels, bringing out
clearly the unity and reasonableness of Jesus’ Life and Teachings.
Appropriate for devotional reading, study classes, and as a gift book
to those we would like to become interested in our Lord.
_B. H. CARROLL, D.D._
An Interpretation of the English Bible
_NEW VOLUMES ADDED TO THIS SERIES_
=The Pastoral Epistles= of Paul and 1 and 2 Peter, Jude and 1, 2 and 3
John. 8vo, cloth, net $1.75.
=The Book of Daniel= and the Inter-Biblical Period. 8vo, cloth, net
$1.75.
=The Four Gospels. Vol. I.= 8vo, cloth, net $2.50.
=The Four Gospels. Vol. II.= 8vo, cloth, net $2.50.
=The Acts.= 8vo, cloth, net $2.25.
=James I–II=, =Thessalonians I= and =II Corinthians=. Net $1.75.
“These works are designed especially for class use in the Seminary,
Christian Colleges and Bible Schools, as well as the Sunday School.
That they will make the greatest commentary on the English Bible ever
published, is our sincere conviction.”――_Baptist and Reflector._
_EDWARD AUGUSTUS GEORGE_
The Twelve: Apostolic Types of Christian Men
12mo, cloth, net $1.15.
“Under his living touch the apostles seem very much like the men we know
and their problems not dissimilar to our own.”――_Congregationalist._
_PROF. W. G. MOOREHEAD_
_OUTLINE STUDIES in the NEW TESTAMENT SERIES_
The Catholic Epistles and Revelation
In One Volume. _New Edition._ 12mo, net $1.20
Containing James, I and II Peter, I, II and III John, and Jude, and the
Book of Revelation.
_ALEXANDER CRUDEN_
Complete Concordance
Large 8vo, cloth, net $1.25.
_New Unabridged Edition_, with the Table of Proper Names entirely
revised and mistranslations in the meanings corrected, many suggestive
notes.
_WILLIAM SMITH, LL.D._
A Dictionary of the Bible
Its Antiquities, Biography, Geography and Natural History, with
Numerous Illustrations and Maps.
_A New Worker’s Edition._ 776 pages. Net $1.25.
_NEW THIN PAPER EDITION_
The Boy Scouts’ Twentieth Century New Testament
Officially authorized by the Boy Scouts’ of America. New Thin Paper
Edition.
181. 16mo, khaki cloth, net 85c.
182. 16mo, ooze leather, khaki color, net $1.50.
Contains an introduction by the Executive Board, the Scouts’ Oath, and
the Scouts’ Law.
_HENRY T. SELL, D.D. (Editor)_
_Author of Sell’s Bible Studies_
XX Century Story of the Christ
12mo, cloth, net 60c.
From the text of The Twentieth Century New Testament, Dr. Sell has
completed a Harmony of The Gospels which, while studiously avoiding
repetition omits no important word in the fourfold record of the
earthly life and teaching of our Lord. He has done his work well, and
the result is a compilation specially designed and adapted for the use
of the average reader.
CHRIST’S LIFE AND MESSAGE
_ALBERT L. VAIL_
Portraiture of Jesus in the Gospels
12mo, cloth, net 75c.
A fourfold portrait of Jesus as He stands out on the canvas of each
of the Four Gospels. The varying and distinctive shadings of the four
pictures, are not, Mr. Vail contends, a matter of accident but of
Divine arrangement and design. Our Lord is thus presented in a fourfold
aspect in order that His appeal to various classes of mankind might be
the more manifold.
_FRANK E. WILSON, B.D._
Contrasts in the Character of Christ
12mo, cloth, net $1.00.
Jesus Christ is still the key to the modern situation. No matter
what “up-to-date” methods, of reform and reclamation spring to life,
the message of Christ is the one great solution of the problems
confronting humanity. From this position Dr. Wilson leads his readers
to a contemplation of an abiding Jesus, and to a consideration of many
modern points of contact contained in His all-sufficient Gospel.
_WILLIAM BRUCE DOYLE_
The Holy Family
As Viewed and Viewing in His Unfolding Ministry. 12mo, cloth, net 75c.
This book covers new ground; for although separate sketches of
individual members of Joseph’s family abound, a study of the family
group as a whole,――one marked with satisfactory detail remained to be
furnished. This has been ably supplied. The author’s work is everywhere
suffused with reverence, as becometh one writing of some of the most
endeared traditions cherished by the human race.
BOOKLETS
_DAVID DE FOREST BURRELL_
_Author of “The Gift”_
The Lost Star
An Idyll of the Desert. 16mo, net 35c.
An appealing story of a Shepherd’s search for the Star. It is so
tender, so sweet, so Christ-like, it is sure to captivate everyone.
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_); text in
bold by “equal” signs (=bold=).
――Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.
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