by Henry Drummond
AN APPEAL TO THE OUTSIDER: OR, THE CLAIMS OF CHRISTIANITY
THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND YOUR PART IN IT
THE THREE ELEMENTS OF A COMPLETE LIFE
Any one who had read "The
Greatest Thing in the World" could not help but desire to see and
hear its author; and, when Professor Drummond visited Boston in the spring
of 1893, the capacity of lecture halls was taxed to the utmost. To accommodate
thousands turned away, he repeated some of his lectures in the Lowell Institute
Course, Boston. It was a crowded Boylston Hall or Appleton Chapel that
invariably faced him when he addressed the students of Harvard University.
He drew young men as few men can. He loved life and nature. He studied
and knew men. He had read much. He had travelled in Europe, America, Africa,
Australia and the New Hebrides, with eyes and ears wide open. With a charming
personality and a rare grace of manner, he was a most attractive speaker
and character, whether on the platform or in the quiet hour.
* * * * * *
The student, the evangelist and pastor, the
professor and lecturer, the traveller and writer, has passed away; but
his words, his writing and his influence cannot. He willingly gave his
life to help others. Many a soul was brought into a higher life. Many a
life was led into the top flat. Many a one was shown his part in the Kingdom
of God. Many a man who was down was set upon his feet. Many a stone of
difficulty was rolled away.
The addresses here given to the public in
permanent form for the first time, as they have already helped some, may
yet help many more.
The first four were delivered to students
of Harvard University, in April, 1893. The remaining three addresses were
delivered at the World's Bible Students' Conference, Northfield, Mass.,
in July, 1893.
LUTHER HESS WARING.
Scranton, Penna.
Gentlemen, I am very much
astonished at this spectacle. I told you last night it was against our
principles in Scotland to have religious meetings on a week night. It seems
to me that if you come to a meeting of this kind you mean business, and
you may just as well own it. If a man comes to a shorthand class, it means
that he wants to learn shorthand; and, if a man turns up at what I suppose
I must call a religious meeting, it means that he is less or more interested
in the subject.
Now I should say that I think a man has to
give himself the benefit of that desire, and he should not be ashamed of
it. The facts of religion are real; and, as mere students of life, you
and I are bound to take cognizance of them. Of course, many very fair minded
men are kept away from going into this subject as they would like by a
number of exceedingly surface reasons. I cannot help calling them surface
reasons. For instance, you meet a man who tells you that he doesn't like
Christians, that they always put his back up.
Now, Christians often put my back up. There
are many of them I find, with whom it takes all my time to get along. But
that is not peculiar with Christians. It is only peculiar to peculiar Christians,
and there are just as many of the other sort. A man might just as well
say, I don't like sinners. A man might just as well keep out of the world
because he doesn't like some people in the world, as to keep out of Christian
circles because there are some objectionable creatures in it. We cannot
be too fastidious. We cannot join any sect without having the weaker brethren
in it. We cannot get on in this world entirely by ourselves. We must join
this thing and that if we are going to be of any service at all, so that
I think the difficulty of having to join ourselves with objectionable men
applies pretty much all around.
Other men are kept away from Christianity
by what I might call its phrases. A great many people, not so much in your
country as in ours, talk in a dialect. The older people especially, our
grandmothers, have a set of phrases in which all their religion is imbedded,
and they can't talk to us about religion without using those phrases; and
when we talk to them, if we do not use those phrases, we are put out of
the synagogue. Now what we can do in this case is to translate their dialect
into our own language, and then translate into their dialect when we speak
back. It is a different dialect. We would put it upon a different basis;
but after all we mean pretty much the same thing, and if we can once get
into this habit of translating our more modern way of putting things into
this antique language that those worthy people use to us we will find ourselves
more at one with them than we think.
I meet another set of men who tell me that
they don't like churches, that they find sermons stale, flat and unprofitable.
Now, if any man here hates a dull sermon, I am with him. I have intense
sympathy with any man who hates dullness. I think the world is far too
dull, and that is one of the greatest reasons why the brightest men should
throw themselves into Christianity to give it a broader phase to other
people. One must confess that some church work, at all events, is not of
a very cheerful or lively order. But of course that is not an argument
why one should abstain from religious service. There are many reasons why
we should even sacrifice ourselves and submit to a little dullness now
and again if it is going to gain for us a greater good. After all, we live
by institutions, and by fixed institutions. There are very few men who
are able to get along without steady institutions of one kind and another.
Some men are so tremendously free that they hate to be tied down to hours,
to places and to seasons; but there are very few men big enough to stand
that for a long time. If we look about for it, we will find some place
that we can go and get some good. When a man goes to church really hungry
and goes because he is hungry, he will pick up something, no matter where
it is. Christ himself went to church, and even if we know something more
than the minister knows, the fellowship, the sense of the solidarity of
the Christian church throughout the whole world, the prayer and the inspiration
of the hymn and the reading will at least do us some good. I do not say
that a man cannot be very religious without that. There are tens of thousands
of Christians who never go to church; and there are tens of thousands who
go to church who are not Christians. But, as with substantial meals taken
at intervals, man is no worse and may be much better for it.
The religious life needs keeping up just
as the other parts of our life need keeping up. There is nothing more impossible
than for a man to live a religious life on an hour's work or an hour's
thought a week. A man could not learn French, German or Latin by giving
an hour per week to it; and how can we expect a man to get in this great
world of the spirit, this great moral world, this great ideal region, and
learn anything about it by merely dabbling in it now and again? We must
make it a regular business, and, if the religious part is a vital part
of the whole nature, we may as well attend to it.
You may remember a passage in Mr. Darwin's
life. He says: "In one respect my mind has changed during the last
twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, the poetry
of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Coleridge and
Shelley, gave me great pleasure; and even as a school boy I took intense
delight in Shakespeare, and especially in the historical plays. I have
always said that pictures gave me considerable, and music very great, delight.
But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry. I have
tried lately to read Shakespeare, but found it so intolerably dull that
it nauseated me. I have also lost my taste for pictures and music. My mind
seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of
large collections of facts. But why this should have caused the atrophy
of that part of the brain, I cannot conceive. If I had my life to live
over again" (this is the point) "I would have made the rule to
read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week."
There is the greatest authority on degeneration confessing to his own personal
degeneration, and in the same paragraph telling us how we may avoid it.
He says by leaving these things out of his life for so many years, although
he had a real liking for them, his nature at these points began to atrophy,
and when he went back to them he found that they disgusted him; and then
he says that, if he had his life to live again, he would have made it a
rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week,
and that would have kept the thing up. There is nothing magical about religion.
If a man is to keep it up, he must use the means, just as he would use
the means to keep up the violin, or his interest in art of any kind.
I find another set of men who have never
got beyond this difficulty, that they find the Bible a somewhat arid and
slow book. Now, in the first place, I want to say that I have, again, great
sympathy with that objector because, as a matter of fact, there are whole
tracts of the Bible which are distinctly dull, which are written in an
archaic language, and about departments of history in the past which haven't
any great living interest for us now. One must remember that the Bible
is not a book, but a library consisting of a large number of books. By
an accident, we have these books bound up in one as if they were one book;
and to say that all the books of the Bible are dull is simply to pass a
literary judgment which is incorrect. It is not true, as a matter of fact,
that all these books of the Bible are dull. Of course a sailing directory
is very flat on the shore; but when a man is at sea and wants to steer
his way through difficult and dangerous wastes, where the currents are
strong and the passages narrow, he wants the best chart he can get, and
he wants to use it as carefully as he can; and when a man wakens up to
the difficulty of life and the reality of its temptations, he wants some
such chart as he gets in that book to help him through.
As a mere literary work, there are books
there that are unsurpassed in the English tongue, and for their teaching,
for their beauty and for their truth they have never been surpassed. Christ's
words, of course, are beyond comparison; but even Paul had a far greater
brain than almost any writer of history.
John's writing is far deeper and more beautiful
than Emerson's, for instance. Let the man who is in love with Emerson,
as I am happy to say I am, take up the book of John just as he would take
up Emerson, and see if he doesn't get in it a great deal that Emerson has,
and a great deal more. If a man doesn't like the Bible, it is because he
has never struck the best parts of it, or because he has never felt any
great need in his own life for its teaching. As a matter of fact, however,
reading the Bible is a new thing. There were Christians for hundreds and
hundreds of years before there was any people's Bible; so that it is not
even essential, if you can't overcome this matter of taste, that you should
read the Bible. There are hundreds of Christians at this moment who cannot
read the Bible. There are Christians in heathen lands in whose language
there is as yet no Bible; so that you see there is no absolute connection
between these two things. Besides that, the Bible has now become diffused
through literature to such an extent that you can often get the heart of
the Bible in a very bright and living and practical form through other
forms of literature. If you don't care to get it direct from the book itself,
you can get it from our modern poetry, even from our modern novel; and
Christianity has now been so long in the world and is diffused over so
many things that it reflects itself in almost everything in life. Some
one was once trying to convince a certain lady of that point as they were
sitting at dinner; and he said to her that in the pudding which they had
just eaten there was an egg, and that that morning at breakfast he had
also eaten an egg. He saw the egg at breakfast, but he did not see the
egg in the pudding; yet he had no doubt the egg in the pudding would nourish
him just as much as the one he had for breakfast.
A man may get his nourishment straight out
of the Bible. He may see it there, shell and all; but he may also get his
nourishment mixed up with other ingredients, and it will do him just as
much good.
There is another class of men, however, whom
none of these minor difficulties touch--men who have come up to college,
and who have got upset on almost all the main doctrines of Christianity.
Now, I want to confess to you that, so far as I know my old friends, they
have all passed through that stage. Every man who is worth a button passes
through that stage. He loses all the forms of truth which he got in the
Sunday School; and, if he is true to himself, gains them all back again
in a richer and larger and more permanent form. But, between the loss and
the gain, there is sometimes a very painful and dismal interlude, during
which the man thinks that he is never going to believe again, when everything
lies in ruin, and he doesn't see where any reconstruction is to come in.
These are dark days and dark years in a man's life, and they are inevitable
to every man who thinks. They are inevitable, because we are all born doubters.
We came into the world asking questions. The world itself is a sphinx and
tempts us to keep on asking questions. There are no great truths in the
world which are not to some extent doubtable; and the instrument with which
we look at truth is largely impaired, and has to be corrected by long years
of experience for its early aberration. So that when we look at truth we
only see part of it, and we see that part of it distorted. The result is
a certain amount of twilight where we expected full day. One consolation
to give that man is to tell him that we have all been through that. We
take it like the measles. It lasts a certain number of months or years,
and then we come out with our constitutions better than ever. There is
a real rationale for that. Everything in the world passes through these
stages, provided it be growing. You remember how the philosophers describe
it. They describe the three great stages as position, opposition and composition.
Position: Somebody lays down a truth, you look at it and say, "Yes,
that is truth." I heard a clergyman say that when I was a boy, and
I believed it. Then, one day, you read a book or hear some one else talk,
and he put a query on it; and then there came the revolt against it, and
for a long time your mind was seething with opposition to this original
thing which was positive. And then you went on and put all these contradictory
things together and composed them into a unity again. You reached the third
stage--that of composition.
It is the same with everything. You begin
to learn the piano, and after you have played about a year you think you
know all about it; and you tackle the most difficult pieces, dash away
at them, and think you can do it as well as anybody. Then you go into Boston
and hear some great pianist, and come home a sad man. You see you know
nothing about it. For the next six months you do not touch a single piece.
You play scales day after day and practice finger exercises. Then, after
six months, you say: "What is the use of playing scales? Music does
not exist for scales;" and you turn to your old pieces and play them
over again in an entirely different way. You have got it all back again.
There are men here going through the scale period with regard to religious
questions. What is the use of all this opposition? Is it not time to go
back again, you ask, and put all this experience into something, and get
at some truth at the other side? You see the same truth in a novel. Volume
I., they will. Volume II., they won't. Volume III., they do.
We see the same thing in art. A man paints
a picture. He thinks he has painted a grand one. After a few months, some
one comes along and says: "Look here! Look at that boat! You don't
call that a boat? And look at that leaf! That is not a leaf." And
you discover that you have never looked at a boat and never seen a leaf.
You are disheartened and do nothing the next six months but draw boats
and leaves; and, after you have drawn boats and leaves until you are sick,
you say: "What is the use of drawing boats and leaves?" and try
again and produce your first landscape. But it is altogether a different
thing from the picture you painted before. Now, when a man is working over
the details of the Christian religion and struggling to get one thing adjusted
and another, he will very soon find out that that does not amount to much.
It is a useful thing, and he has to go through it, but he has to come out
the other side also and put these things together.
The best advice, I think, that can be given
to a man who is in this difficulty is, in the first place, to read the
best authorities on the subject; not to put himself off with cheap tracts
and popular sermons, but to go to the scientific authorities. There are
as great scientific authorities in Germany, in England and in America on
all the subject matter of theology as there are on the subject matter of
chemistry or geology. Go to the authorities. You may not agree with them
when you have read them. But if a man reads all the books on the opposition
side he will very naturally get a distorted view of it. So, for every book
he reads on the one side, he should, in justice, read a book on the other
side.
Next, let a man remember that the great thing
is not to think about religion, but to do it. We do not live in a "think"
world. It is a real world. You do not believe that botany lies in the pages
of Sachs. Botany lies out there in the flowers and in the trees, and it
is living. And religion does not live in the pages of the doctrinal books,
but in human life--in conflict with our own temptations, and in the conduct
and character of our fellow beings. When we abandon this "think-world"
of ours and get out into the real world, we will find that, after all,
these doubts are not of such immense importance, and that we can do a great
deal of good in the world.
For my part, I have as many doubts on all
the great subjects connected with theology as probably any one here; but
they do not interfere in the very slightest with my trying, in what humble
way I can, to follow out the religion of Christ. They do not even touch
that region; and I don't want to lose these doubts. I don't want any man
to rob me of my problem. I have no liking and little respect for the cock-sure
Christian--a man who can demonstrate some of the most tremendous verities
of the faith, as he can the Fifth Book of Euclid. I want a religion and
theology with some of the infinite about it, and some of the shadow as
well as some of the light; and if, by reading up one of the great doctrines
for five or six years, I get some little light upon it, it is only to find
there are a hundred upon which I could spend another hundred lives. And
if I should try to meet some specific point upon which you are at sea to-night,
it would not do you much good. To-morrow a new difficulty would start in
your mind, and you would be simply where you were. I would be stopping
up only one of your wells. You would open another out of the first book
you read. Try to separate theological doctrine from practical religion.
Believe me that you can follow Christ in this University without having
solved any of these problems. Why, there was a skeptic among the first
twelve disciples, and one of the best of them, and one of the most loyal
of them. That man sat down at the first Lord's table, and Christ never
said any hard words against him. He tried to teach him. That is the only
attitude, it seems to me, we can take to Christ still. We can enter His
school as scholars, and sit at His feet and learn what we can; and by doing
His will in the practical things of life, we shall know of this and that
doctrine, whether it be of God. The only use of truth is that it can do
somebody some good. The only use of truth is in its sanctifying power;
and that is the peculiarity of the truth of Christianity, that it has this
sanctifying power and makes men better.
Now you say: "What am I to do? If I
am to block up this avenue and am not to expect very much along the line
of mere belief, in what direction am I to shape my Christian life?"
Well, I cannot in the least answer that. Every man must shape his Christian
life for himself, according as his own talents may lead him; but the great
thing to do is simply to become a follower of Christ. That is to become
a Christian. There is nothing difficult or mysterious about it. A Darwinian
is a man who follows Darwin, studies his books, accepts his views and says,
"I am a Darwinian." You look into Christ's life, into His influence;
you look at the needs of the world; you see how the one meets the other;
you look into your own life and see how Christ's life meets your life;
and you say, "I shall follow this teacher and leader until I get a
better." From the time you do that, you are a Christian. You may be
a very poor one. A man who enlists is a very poor soldier for the first
few years, but he is a soldier from the moment he enlists; and the moment
a man takes Christ to be the center of his life that man becomes a Christian.
Of course that makes a great change in his life. His friends will know
it to-morrow. On the steam engine you have seen the apparatus at the side
called the eccentric. It has a different center from all the other wheels.
Now, the Christian man is to some extent an eccentric. His life revolves
around a different center from many people round about him. Of course,
it is the other people who are eccentric because the true center of life
is the most perfect life, the most perfect man, the most perfect ideal;
and the man who is circulating around that is living the most perfect.
At the same time, that man's life will to some extent be different from
the lives round about him, and to some extent he will be a marked man.
But what difference will it make to a man
himself? For one thing, it will keep you straight. I fancy most of the
men here are living straight lives as it is; but it is impossible that
every man here is. Well, I will tell you how to keep your life straight
from this time--how your hunger after righteousness can be met. If you
become a Christian, you will lead a straight life. That is not all. If
you become a Christian, you will help other men to lead straight lives.
Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. The only chance that
this world has of becoming a righteous world is by the contagion of the
Christian men in it. I do not know any country with the splendid pretensions
and achievements of America where there is so much unrighteousness in politics
and to some extent in commerce, and where shady things are not only winked
at, but admired. That is acknowledged and deplored by every right thinking
man in the country. I get it, not from observation, but from yourselves.
There is not a day passes that I do not find men deploring political corruption
and the want of commercial integrity, in some districts of this country,
at all events. Now nothing can change that state of affairs unless such
men as yourselves throw your influence on to the side of righteousness
and determine that you will live to make this country a little straighter
than you found it.
There is a career in Christianity as well
as an individual life. How do you test the greatness of a career? You test
it by its influence. Well, can you point me to any influence in the world
in the past which has had anything like the influence of the name to which
I have asked you to give your life's adherence? That life started without
a chance of succeeding in anything, according to the received theories
of a successful life. Christ was born in a manger. If you and I had been
born in a manger, the shame of it would have accompanied us through our
whole lives; and yet there is not one of us born to-day who is not baptized
in the name of Christ and who has not a Christian name. Christ went to
no university, and had no education; and there is not a university in Europe
or in America which is not founded in the name of Christ. This university
was founded in the name of Christ. Aye, and the very money which has gone
to build the universities of the world has come from the followers of Christ.
The education of the world, gentlemen, has been done by the followers of
Jesus Christ. Christ had no political influence, and sought none; yet there
is not a President placed in the White House, there is not a sovereign
in Europe placed upon a throne, but acknowledges, in the doing of it and
in public, that the power to do it has come from Christ, and that the object
in doing it is to secure the coming of Christ's kingdom. Take it in any
direction, and you will find that this influence, judged from mere worldly
standards of success, has been supreme.
Napoleon said, "I do not understand
that man. He must have been more than human. I used to be able," he
said on St. Helena, "to get people to die for me. I got hundreds of
thousands of them, but I had to be there. Now that I am here on this island,
I can't get a man. But He," said he, "gets hundreds of thousands
of the best men in the world to lay down their whole lives for Him every
day." Judged as mere influence from the standpoint of an ambitious
man like Napoleon, you see that that Life was supreme.
You remember the dinner that Charles Lamb
gave to some literary men, and how they were discussing after dinner what
their attitude would be if certain great figures of the past were to come
into their dining room. After they had all spoken, Lamb said:
"Well, it looks to me like this, that
if Shakespeare entered the room I should rise up to greet him; but if Christ
entered the room, I should kneel down and keep silent."
And so I ask you if you have feelings of
that kind about any figure in history compared to the feelings that spring
into your mind when you try to contemplate that Life. Some of you have
never read Christ's life. You have picked up a parable here and a miracle
there, and a scrap of history between; but you have never read that biography
as you have read the biography of Washington, Webster, or the life of Columbus.
Read it. Go home and read one of the four little books which tell you about
His life. Take Matthew, for instance; and if you don't run aground in the
5th chapter and find yourself compelled to spend a week over it, you haven't
much moral nature left. I have known men who have tried that experiment,
who have begun to read the gospel of Matthew, and by the time they had
finished reading the 5th chapter, they had thrown in their lot with the
Person who forms the subject of that book. There is no other way of getting
to know about Christ unless you read His life, at least as a beginning.
If you want to become a Christian you must read up, and that is the thing
to read. If you like, after that you can read the other lives of Christ.
How do men get to know one another? They simply take to one another. Two
men meet here to-night. They go downstairs and exchange greetings. To-morrow
night they meet in each other's rooms. By the end of a month they have
got to know each other a little, and after another year of college life
they have become sworn friends.
A man becomes a little attracted to Christ.
That grows and grows, into a brighter friendship, and that grows into a
great passion, and the man gives his life to Christ's interest. He counts
it the highest ambition he can have to become a man such as Christ was.
You see there is nothing profound about a religion of that kind. It is
a religion that lies in the line of the ideals a young man forms, and that
all the reading that he meets with from day to day fashions. In fact, it
is a man's ideal turning up, and the man who turns his back upon that is
simply turning his back upon his one chance of happiness in life and of
making anything off life. Every life that is not lived in that time is
out of the true current of history, to say nothing else. It is out of the
stream --the main stream that is running through the ages, and that is
going to sweep everything before it. A man who does not live that life
may not be a bad man. The Bible does not say that everybody who is not
a Christian is a notorious sinner; but it says that the man who lives outside
that is wasting his life. He may not be doing wrong, but his life is lost.
"He that loveth his life," Christ said, "shall lose it;
and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal."
I am not ashamed to quote that to you; and I ask you to regard it with
the same validity, and more, that you will give to any other quotation.
You will not accuse me of cant because I
have used sacred words in this talk. There are technical terms in religion
just as in science and philosophy. Just as in science I should speak of
protoplasm, of oxygen or carbonic acid gas, so in talking of religion I
must talk about faith and Jesus Christ. Just as I should quote authorities
in speaking of chemistry or political economy, so I must use authorities
in speaking about Christ. You will not take the words that I have said
tonight as a mere expression of phraseology of a cant description, because
it is not that; and I would ask those of you who are very much frightened
to use such words to consider whether it is not a rational thing and a
necessary thing, if you speak at all on this subject, to use these words.
We must not be too fastidious, or thin-skinned, or particular on a point
like that. While we are not in any degree to advertise our Christianity
by our language, there are occasions, and this is one, when these things
are necessary.
I want to say, in closing, that I hear almost
extraordinary accounts of you Harvard men. Robert Browning once came to
the Edinburgh students to talk to them; and he said, after he had gone
away, that he had never in his life seen such a body of young men. Now
I have no acquaintance with you whatever; but I have been asking up and
down this district what sort of men the Harvard men are, and I want to
let you know that you have a fairly good character. So far as I can learn,
you have a character such as none of our Scotch universities have. Now
live up to it. Let this university in the years to come be famous over
America not only for its education, but for its sense of honor and manliness,
and purity and Christianity. Seek first the kingdom of God. You know the
whole truth. Live it. Want of interest in religion does not acquit you
of taking your share in it. Why should I be here to talk to you? A Scotchman
hates talking. I believe an American is dying to talk all the time. Well,
I say want of religion does not absolve you from taking your share of it.
The fact that you do not care about Christ does not alter the fact that
Christ cares about you, that He wants you men, and that His kingdom cannot
go on unless He gets such men as you. Are we to leave the greatest scheme
that has ever been propounded to be carried out by duffers? It is easier,
somebody says, to criticise the greatest scheme superbly than to do the
smallest thing possible. The man who is looking on from the outside sees
things in the game that the players do not see. He sees this bit of bad
play and that. Well, stop criticising the game. Take off your coat, and
come and help us. Our side is strong, and it is getting stronger; but we
want the best men. Christianity ought to have the superlative men here
in every department--in classics, in poetry, in literature, in humor, in
everything that goes to the making of a man. The best gifts should be given
to Christ. We are apt to despise Christianity and keep away from it because
there are many weak-minded people in it. That is one reason why we ought
to take off our coats and throw ourselves into it, heart and soul. And
I leave you with that appeal. I appeal to the strong men here to consider
their position and see if they can do anything better with their life than
to help on this great cause.
To-night I want to talk
to the man who is down, to the man who has his back to the wall, and who
is being embattled by his own temptations. It is, perhaps, not an academic
subject, but it is the greatest of all subjects on which one can speak
to young men. There are men here who are lost in the abyss; but there are
more men who are on the brink of the precipice. Temptation is a universal
experience--the one thing that makes every man his brother, and creates
within any one who thinks about it a grave sense of tenderness as he thinks
of those around him, when he remembers that every man he meets has the
same black spot in his nature that he has, and the same terrible fight
going on from day to day. But, gentlemen, temptation is more than a universal
experience. It is an individual thing. Just as you have your own handwriting,
your own face, or your own walk, you have your own temptation-- different
in every case, but generally some one temptation which means everything
to you, which sums up the whole battle of life, and which, if you could
conquer, you would conquer the world. That temptation follows you wherever
you go like your shadow. I have gone into the heart of Africa. When I opened
the curtains of my tent in the morning, the first face I saw was the hideous
face of my own temptation. Go where you like, you cannot avoid that. It
will follow you wherever you go, and lie with you in the grave. Temptation
is not only a universal experience and a personal experience, but you have
doubtless noticed this about it, that it is very lonely. It cuts a man
off in a moment from all his fellowmen; and in the silence of his own heart
he finds himself fighting out that battle on which the issues of life hang.
Christ trod the wine press alone, and so do you and I. That is one of the
things that makes it harder, because there is no one to blame us when we
go wrong, and there is no one to applaud us when we do right.
More than that, temptation is a pitiless
thing. It goes into the church and picks off the man in the pulpit. It
goes into the university and picks off the flower of the class. It goes
into the Senate and picks off the great man. Let him that thinketh he standeth,
however high up, however sheltered, take heed lest he fall. Why is it that
we have to run the gauntlet of temptation all our lives, and what does
it mean? Can we analyze it? We have seen its strength. Can we find out
whence it comes and how to meet it? There are many theories as to how it
came into our nature. Some think there is a virus in human nature somewhere,
a bias towards wrong; but I don't think we need to look very far for the
origin at least of a great many of our temptations. We have in our bodies
the residua of the animal creation. We have bones and muscles and organs
which are now mere curiosities, but which once played a great part in the
life of our progenitor; and I suppose it is now accepted as a scientific
fact, at all events so far as the body is concerned, that it has come down
the long ladder from the invertebrate world. That is to say, we have in
our nature a part of the animal; and if we have an animal's body in us,
we have to a certain extent the residua of an animal's mind, of an animal's
proclivities and passions. Whether that is the origin of them or not, it
is certain every man among us has a certain residuum of the animal in him.
After passing through the animal stage, it is believed that man passed
through a long, long discipline in the savage state; so that, in addition
to the animal, relics of the savage are still left in our nature.
There are two great classes of sins--sins
of the body and sins of the disposition. The prodigal son is a typical
instance of sins of the body; and the elder brother a typical illustration
of sins of the disposition. He was just as bad as the prodigal, probably
worse. The one set of temptations comes from the animal and the other from
the savage. What are the characteristics of the savage? Laziness for one
thing, and selfishness for another. The savage does nothing but lie in
the sun all day and allow the fruits to drop into his mouth. He has no
struggle for life. Nature has been so kind as to supply all his wants;
and he is, above all, characteristic of selfishness. He has no one to think
about or care for, nor has he any capacity. A great preacher said not long
ago to his congregation that he would tell them the mark of the beast,
and that he also knew its number. He said the mark of the beast was selfishness,
and its number was No. 1. Now the mark of the beast, selfishness, is in
every man's breast, less or more. We are built in three stories --the bottom,
the animal; a little higher up, the savage; and on the top, the man. That
is the old Pauline trichotomy--body, soul, spirit. Paul spoke of this body
of death. Science speaks of it in almost precisely the same language. Whatever
the origin, that is the construction of a man. He is built in those three
layers. With this analysis, it is perhaps easier to see how temptation
may be met.
Many a man goes through life hanging his
head with shame and living without his self-respect because he has never
discovered the distinction between temptation and sin. It is only when
a man sees temptation coming and goes out to meet it, welcomes it, plays
with it and invites it to be his guest that it passes from temptation into
sin; but, until he has opened the door of his own accord and let it in,
he has done no wrong. He has been a tempted man--not a sinful man. The
proof, of course, that temptation is no sin is that Christ was tempted
in all points like as we are, yet without sin. Many a man is thrown back
in his attempts to live a new life by the clinging to him of this residua
of his past; and he does not discover until perhaps too late that there
is nothing wrong in these things until they have passed a certain point.
If he sees them coming and turns his back upon them, he has not sinned.
Indeed, temptation is not only not sin, but it is the most valuable ingredient
in human nature. Who was it that said, "The greatest of all temptations
is to be without any"? The man who has no temptation has no chance
of becoming a man at all. The only way to get character is to have temptation.
If a man never exercises his muscle, he will get no muscle. If a man never
exercises his moral nature in opposing temptation, he will get no muscle
in his character. Temptation is an opportunity of virtue. What makes a
good picture? Practice. What makes a good oarsman? Practice. What makes
a good cricketer? Practice. Temptation is the practice of the soul; and
the man who has most temptations has most practice. I fancy we all imagine
we have more temptations than anybody else. That is a universal delusion.
But, instead of praying to be delivered from our temptations, we ought
to try to understand their essential place in the moral world. Taken from
us, these would leave us without a chance of becoming strong men. We should
be insipid characters, flaxen and useless. That is why the New Testament
says the almost astonishing thing: "Count it all joy when ye fall
into divers temptations." We are apt to call it hard lines because
we are tempted. James says, count it joy; congratulate yourself because
of your own temptation. It is the struggle for life almost solely which
has helped on the evolution of the animal kingdom, passing on into the
moral region and giving you practice in growth.
Now, then, granting that this discipline
is to be ours, that every day of our lives we have to face temptation,
how are we to set about it? We have seen that temptation lies in the projection
on the human area of our life of the animal and of the savage. I think
the first thing we have to do is to deal decisively with those two parts
of our nature. The animal body was finished thousands and thousands of
years ago. Nature took a long time to work it out, then stopped and went
on to develop the mind. Let us recognize the development of the body as
a fact in the past, and have no more to do with it. The body is finished.
The hand of creation is done working at it. That is what Paul meant very
largely when he gave it as his advice to men to get over temptation, "Reckon
ye yourselves dead." Reckon that all beneath. It is not only wrong
to allow the body to prevail in a man's life, but it is a denial of his
development. It is unnatural and irrational. It is contrary to the teachings
of science, borrowed altogether from the teachings of religion. Therefore,
the first thing a man must do is to make up his mind that the body which
is prompting him is a dead thing and is to be taken as a dead thing. If
we can give our animal nature its true place, we will soon learn to rise
above it. What did Cato do when he was buffeted? Ask Seneca. He did not
strike back, fly into a passion: he did not resent it, but denied that
it had been done. That is to say, the body being nothing, nothing had happened.
But that is not enough. We cannot live negatively.
It is not enough to forsake the old life, the old habit; but we must take
another piece of advice which I think the New Testament also sums up for
us in language of exceeding simplicity and yet of absolute scientific accuracy.
Paul says: "Walk in the spirit." Live in the top flat. You find
yourself living in the animal part of your being. Escape and get into the
upper story, where the roof is open to God, and where you can move amongst
beautiful things, and amongst holy memories and amongst high ideals. Walk
in the spirit and ye shall not fulfill the lusts of the flesh. A man can't
do it. That is to say, he has to evolve the past, the animal and the savage,
and develop the new nature. The new nature is renewed from day to day,
little by little. Just as the body is built up, microscopic cell by microscopic
cell, so the new nature is built up by a long series of crucifixions of
the old nature, by taking in food from the higher world and getting those
things built into our nature which work for righteousness and truth and
beauty and purity.
Now, the man who encourages the higher part
of his nature continuously will get an absolute victory over the lower
parts of his being. He will come to live in those higher parts of his being.
It will become as habitual to live there as it was to live in the lower;
and, while this building up is going on within, there will be the degeneration
of the old nature. How has man evolved past the animal and the savage,
and how has so much that is in them passed away from him? By mere disuse.
And so, by the mere disuse of the propensities of the body and the discouragement
of selfish and petty interests, by merely giving up the animal ways and
the animal passions, and the savage tempers and the savage laziness, the
impulse, the function which makes these things, will wither--atrophy. As
the one goes on, the other inevitably follows. As the old man passes away,
the new man is renewed in righteousness. That can be explained not only
in the language of development but in the language of psychology as a perfectly
rational principle. A man cannot have two things in consciousness at the
same moment. Suppose a man has been lost out in the West and wandered away
from the railway depot where he had put up at a hotel. Perhaps he has been
four or five days on the prairie. One day he staggers back, almost dropping
with hunger and calls out for food; but finds lying upon his table, while
waiting for food, a telegram reporting the sudden death of his wife. The
hunger is gone, completely gone. The man who was perishing a few moments
ago is now absolutely above it; and if I could keep up the emotion of sorrow,
I could keep down forever the appetite of hunger. If you want to get over
an appetite on philosophical principles, not to speak of religion, the
thing to do is to pass into another region, and let your mind be preoccupied
with something higher. Unless you take in the higher, it is tremendously
difficult to crush out the lower. The new man can only be put on as the
old man is put off.
You remember Augustine's history of temptation
in four words--cogitatio, imaginatio, delectatio and assensio:
a thought, a picture, a fascination, and a fall. You can cut off the
series between the first and second. Between the second and third, it is
almost impossible. Between the third and fourth, it is absolutely impossible.
When the image is thrown upon the screen and you are delighting in it and
it is just beginning to enthrall you, you can still do one thing. You can
suddenly throw another image on the screen and look at that. If you look
for two seconds at the first image you are lost; but if you look one second
you are not yet lost, and there is still a chance to be saved. You can
throw another image over it and let the first dissolve away; and, by the
mere possession of consciousness, you have got over that temptation.
You see, then, how, upon merely natural principles,
it is possible to fight temptation. If we simply walk in the spirit, we
shall not fulfill the lusts of the flesh. We must evolve past them, in
plain words. By cultivating ideals of all kinds and by strengthening our
moral nature by all the opportunities we can get in society, in literature
and in the church, we will gradually accumulate a body, a higher body,
of life and mind and truth, in which we can live; and the old tenements
in which we lived will not only be uninhabited but uninhabitable. Hence
the value of everything that is beautiful and pure and lovely and wholesome
in the world; and not only their use as auxiliaries to the religious life,
but as indispensable to it; because all these are things in the higher
nature, and the man who cultivates them is building up a region in which
he can live. A man must live. He must live in the body, in the savage or
in the man. At every moment he must live, and so at every moment he must
make his choice. He cannot suppress it. If you take this subject in terms
of energy, you will find that the energy which leads to sin must not be
suppressed, but must be transformed into an energy which leads to virtue;
so that when the desire to do something wrong comes in, instead of trying
to suppress that desire, we have simply to turn the helm in the right direction;
and in the new channel it will not only save us from a fall which we would
have had, if we had allowed it to go the other way, but it will carry us
higher towards the new life.
Now I have tried to explain the way in which
any man here can rise above himself and be a man. I care not how far he
has dropped. It is an historical fact that a man can be saved to the uttermost.
You say to me, is there no religion in all this? It is all religion. You
say, do I not need to put more religion into it? The more the better. I
have spoken of walking in the spirit. I have spoken of ideals. I know no
ideal that will act so promptly as the ideal of the perfect Man. I know
no picture that you can throw upon the screen which will fascinate more
immediately than the picture of the character of Christ. You may throw
people upon the screen, a line of poetry, an epigram from a moralist, a
memory of your mother, a warning of some one you love, and all these are
reflections in some form of Christ; and they will all be effective up to
a point. But most of all effective is the power of Christ Himself; and,
unless a man has a moral environment which is full of these things, he
cannot live. There is no hope for his new life, unless he has that. No
man can live without these things morally. Take that gas which gives us
light. The light is not in the gas. It is half in the air and half in the
gas. Take away the half from the air, and the gas goes out. "Without
me, ye can do nothing." Your life will go out. Without Me, whether
as the Light of the world itself, or as diffused through books, and through
men and through churches, without that your life will come to nothing;
but, if you take that and all the reflections of it, and let these constitute
a spiritual atmosphere about you, your redemption from this hour is a certainty.
There is no haphazard about Christianity. It is based upon the laws of
nature and the laws of the human mind.
The man who lives in Christ cannot go wrong.
He will be kept. In the nature of things, he must be kept. He cannot sin.
You remember John said: "Whosoever sinneth hath not seen Him, neither
known Him." John's Friend was such, so inspiring and so influential,
that it was inconceivable to John that anybody could ever have met Him
without forevermore trying to live like Him. Sin is abashed in the presence
of the purity of Jesus Christ. There are many heroes in life. They will
all help a man; but we will get on better and quicker by giving ourselves
to Christ.
I have just two things to add. The first
is: if any man here to-night takes this seriously and means business; if
he means for the future not to keep up the sham fight that he has been
pretending to wage, and means to get to the bottom of things, let me ask
him for a few days from this time to treat himself as a man who has been
very ill and dare not do anything. Let him consider himself as a convalescent
for a few weeks and take care where he goes, what he reads, what he looks
at, and the people he speaks to. He is not strong enough for the outer
air. When he first begins the new life, he is young and tender. Therefore,
let him beware of the first few days. Mortality is greatest amongst children
for the first few hours: then it is greater for the first few days; then
it is great for the next few months, and lessens as the children grow older.
If you are careful not to catch cold for the first few weeks after you
begin to lead a new life, you will succeed; but, if you do to-morrow what
you did to-day, you will go wrong, because you are not strong enough to
resist. You will have to build up this new body cell by cell, day by day,
just as the old body of temptation has been built up. If any man here knows
any other man who is in that convalescent condition, let him take care,
and neither by jest, or word, or temptation, throw that man back. Stand
by him, if you know such a man. If you are such a man, do not be ashamed
to get somebody else to back you and go along with you. Very few men can
live a solitary Christian life. You will find it a great source of strength
to get another man's life wound about you. You can help each other.
The other thing I want to say is this: Do
not imagine that you can get deliverance from sin alone--I mean without
getting other things, and without doing other things. Deliverance from
sin is only a part of the Christian life--by no means the whole. It is
only one wing of the new nature; but no man can get on with one wing. Deliverance
from temptation is only one function of the new nature. Therefore, you
must consecrate your whole life to Christianity, and go into it wholly
and with a whole heart, if you expect to get deliverance in this one direction;
and the best way you can do that is to make up your mind that you will
give much of your life to Christianity, to purify the air of the world,
so that other men will feel less temptation than you do. Sin is a kind
of bacillus, and it cannot take root in the world unless there is a soil,
and it is our business to make the world's soil pure and sanitarily sweet,
so that the disease of sin cannot exist.
I am very much pleased to
find the Boys' Brigade receiving University recognition. I am not aware
that it has had this honor before in its history.
The idea of the Brigade is this. It is a
new movement for turning out boys, instead of savages. The average boy,
as you know, is a pure animal. He is not evolved; and, unless he is taken
in hand by somebody who cares for him and who understands him, he will
be very apt to make a mess of his life--not to speak of the lives of other
people. We endeavor to get hold of this animal. You do not have the article
here, and do not quite understand the boy I mean. The large cities of the
old world are infested by hundreds and thousands of these ragamuffins,
as we call them--young roughs who have nobody to look after them. The Sunday-school
cannot handle these boys. The old method was for somebody to form them
into a class and try to get even attention from them. Half the time was
spent in securing order.
The new method is simply this: You get a
dozen boys together, and, instead of forming them into a class, you get
them into some little hall and put upon every boy's head a little military
cap that costs in our country something like twenty cents, and you put
around his waist a belt that costs about the same sum, and you call him
a soldier. You tell him, "Now, Private Hopkins, stand up. Hold up
your head. Put your feet together." And you can order that boy about
till he is black in the face, just because he has a cap on his head and
a belt around his waist. The week before you could do nothing with him.
If he likes it, you are coming next Thursday night. He is not doing any
favor by coming. You are doing him a favor; and if he does not turn up
at eight o'clock, to the second, the door will be locked. If his hair is
not brushed and his face washed, he cannot enter. Military discipline is
established from the first moment. You give the boys three-fourths of an
hour's drill again, and in a short time you have introduced quite a number
of virtues into that boy's character. You have taught him instant obedience.
If he is not obedient, you put him into the guard house, or tell him he
will be drummed out of the regiment; and he will never again disobey. If
he is punctual and does his drill thoroughly, tell him that at the end
of the year he will get a stripe. He will get a cent's worth of braid.
You have his obedience, punctuality, intelligence and attention for a year
for one cent. Then you have taught him courtesy. He salutes you and feels
a head taller. Everything is done as if you were a real captain and he
a real private. He calls you "Captain." Each boy has a rifle
that costs a dollar; but there is no firing. There is a bayonet drill without
a bayonet. The first year they have military drill, and the second year
bayonet exercises--an absolute copy of the army drill. The Brigade inculcates
a martial, but not a warlike, spirit. The only inducement to bring the
boys together at first is the drill. You might think it is a very poor
one; but it is about the strongest inducement you could offer.
That is the outward machinery; but it is
a mere take-in. The boy doesn't know it. The real object of the Brigade
is to win that boy for Christianity--to put it quite plainly. It does not
make the slightest secret of its aims.
On all its literature is: "The object
of the Brigade shall be the advancement of Christ's Kingdom among boys,
and the promotion of habits of reverence, discipline, self-respect, and
all that tends toward a true Christian manhood."
After you have your boy and are sure of him,
every drill is opened with a couple of minutes of prayer. The boys stand
in line at "attention," with caps off, while a sort of blessing
is asked. Then drill for three-fourths of an hour. After that the Captain
gives them a little talk about anything--business prosperity, courtesy,
courage, temptation, or anything. After that, all repeat the Lord's Prayer
and dismiss. Then on Sunday almost all the companies have Bible class,
with the same punctuality, interest and attention as during the week day.
The boy treats his Captain as before. They sit like statues during the
Bible lesson; and, if they are not there to the minute, they are shut out.
Having influence over them, the Captain maintains it, and how much more
apt the boys will be to pick up what he says. The thorough-going Captain
will of course do a great deal more than in the Bible class; and very few
stop at that. Some men get up football clubs and get fields, give up their
own Saturday afternoons --which are a great holiday with us--to act as
umpire for the boys' matches. Our captains are just one remove from the
boys whom they teach, so that the boys are not at all afraid of them. The
presence of the captain on the athletic field means, in the first place,
that there will be no foul language and no foul play. And he, of course,
thus increases his influence over them tenfold. Then in many cases they
start a boys' club where they have a room open every night, where they
have debates, newspapers and books. Then the captain gets to know the boys
personally. He has them up to tea now and then, and gets to know their
people.
In addition to that general work, there are
one or two additions which are thrown in by special companies according
to their own inclination. A great many have started military bands. Ambulance
classes are becoming exceedingly popular. After drilling two or three winters
the work gets flat; so they invent new things. Boys cannot join this Brigade
until they are twelve years of age, and cannot clear out until they are
seventeen. The boys hate to clear out; and the fact that they will have
to leave induces them to make better use of their time. Of course they
are not turned adrift. The captain sees that they get into good hands.
Then every year, in a city of the size of Boston, for instance, all the
boys belonging to the Brigade would be gathered together for a church service.
If too many for one church, two would be secured, and the boys would assemble
and march to the service and get a boys' sermon. At Christmas, every boy
in the Brigade gets from his officer a little two-cent book. And there
are a number of other little things that link the captain and the boys
together and the different companies together.
This organization was started within a mile
of where I live in Glasgow in 1883, by a Mr. Smith, who was a soldier,
and who was not making much of a Sunday-school class he taught, and who
conceived the idea of giving them military discipline. In our country we
have grown to such an extent that already there are, I think, 22,000 boys
belonging to the Brigade, and I think between 1,100 and 1,200 officers--captains
and lieutenants. This Brigade has been worth starting for the sake of the
officers alone.
Perhaps one thousand of these officers would
have belonged to the unemployed rich and educated, if they had not struck
this particular line of work. There are multitudes of young men who do
not go to prayer meeting or see their way to teach in Sunday-school. Many
are extremely fastidious as to what particular work they will do, and many
are not cut out for these recognized fields. But here is a work that does
not make any particular strain on any part of his nature. He simply gives
himself and his muscular Christianity. So we think this has been worth
pushing for the sake of the officers alone. We know a great many men have
been made for life simply by a year or two of contact with these boys.
If they develop the boys, the boys develop them.
Now, you have this movement started in America.
I find the most crass ignorance on this subject here; but in some respects
you are ahead of us. One of the first things you do with the boys is to
start a newspaper. The conflagration has broken out in a somewhat remarkable
way in California, and they must have a great many companies. As usual,
when you take up anything in this country from anywhere else, you improve
upon it or carry it to development in other directions.
Now, you do some things here we do not do,
and of which I am not perfectly sure we would wholly approve. They strike
us as being slightly against some of the fundamental principles for which
we work. For instance, I notice that the boys here have a uniform, and
that the officers have a uniform. We can make a boy for about fifty cents,
not including the brass in his face; but here in America the uniform costs
as follows
(See Boys' Brigade Manual, U. S. of A.)
Fatigue blouses (I suppose they have paid
duty on these blouses) $3.35
Pants 3.35
Fatigue caps, first quality 0.75
Belts 0.75
Plain bugles 0.25
Signal service 1.20
U. S. Army bunting flags 9.50
Silk cord for same 3.50
Bugler's stripes for pants 1.50
Extra fine officers' fatigue blouses 6.75
Pants with stripes 6.50
U. S. Army officers' overcoats with hoods
$27 to 32.00
Well, you see that means business at any
rate. But what we dislike about it is that it emphasizes the military side
too much. We have refused to admit any company into the Brigade that wears
a uniform. There are one or two in the country, but we don't have them.
We don't want the boys to feel soldiers beyond the point that we need them
to feel soldiers. We don't want them to thirst for blood and come over
here and fight you or anybody else. We simply want to get them disciplined.
I suppose there must be in this country quite a number of companies equipped
at very considerable expense. These boys cannot afford to buy these uniforms
for themselves, and they are very frequently bought by subscription.
This organization in America is almost always
organized within the church. In the old country every organization must
be associated, not necessarily with the church, but with some stable body
that will be back of it and be a sponsor for it. It is usually the church--sometimes
the Y. M. C. A. In this country the initiatory is frequently taken by the
minister. I find the ministers here preserve the dew of their youth and
the freshness of their manhood, and they are not at all the starchy kind
of people one meets in some other countries. It is not because they are
not fit for this, but the ministers must not have all the plums. They have
enough to do. Here and there we have some keen ministers at this work,
but, as a rule, we try to keep it among the laity.
In this country you make the boys promise
that as long as they are members of the Boys' Brigade they will not use
liquor and tobacco, will obey the rules and set an example of good conduct.
The question is whether pledges are right fair to a boy at all. I very
much question whether it is wise to put a strong pledge like that upon
anybody. We exact no pledge whatever. It seems to me to be the difference
between compulsory chapel attendance and optional, as it is here, to make
a boy not smoke by compulsion. If he can be made moral by the influences
that are brought to bear upon him, it is more apt to last.
Now I suppose I was asked to present this
subject to you in behalf of enlisting one or two of you in the service.
I do not know myself of any bit of work to which I would rather give what
spare time I have than this. The boy is open to receive impressions in
a way that is marked. It is possible to get hold of him. There are thousands
of these boys who have been turned outside in. I have watched them. I remember
the annual inspection of one of the first companies. When the prizes were
given, it was my duty to pin the medals on the two leading boys' breasts.
When the first boy came up, there was scarcely a place on his coat strong
enough to bear the pin. His coat was one mass of patches that could scarcely
hold together. He was clean. The next year I noticed he had on a much better
coat, and I am sure he is now on his way to turn out to be a good man.
I do not know anything that would pay any of you better than this. It lies
near a young man's nature to take up such work. I do not think there is
anything easier than to win a boy. You get him wound about you, and he
lives through your spectacles and tries to please you. Adapt it any way
you please; but I should like very much if after to-night some of you would
write for some of this literature and take the trouble to spread it.
We gave the boys books each Christmas. Two
years ago I wrote a book and offered fifty-three prizes. The boys competing
were to write a letter addressed to "My Dear Baxter," and answer
the question, "What are a Boy's Temptations, and How is He to Meet
Them?" Well, I got about 450 dissections of the boys in answer to
that offer. One of the thirty prizes went to California. I never saw such
a revelation of the interior of a boy as I saw after reading those letters.
Every boy, almost, out of the lot, pleaded guilty to four sins. Every boy,
apparently, is a liar and a thief. These were the first two things that
they all confessed. The third confession was that they all swore; and the
fourth great temptation or sin to a boy was smoking--which is not a sin
at all. It showed me that the boys were very badly taught, and that they
have no definite conception of sin.
Every one of these Brigades, almost without
an exception, is connected with the church. The Bible class is held in
the church; and the drill is usually there, too. It is thoroughly under
the wing of the church. The movement is so religious that there is never
any religious opposition to it, and it is entirely undenominational.
I am asked to talk specially
to what we call in Scotland "the outsider"--the man who has not
seen his way to throw in his lot with Christian men. We have made a specialty
of the outsider in our university work in the old country. We have laid
all our plans to interest him. He is generally the best man in the university;
and for some years we have arranged all our Christian work and worship
with a view to that type of man. We have laid down one or two principles.
The first one is that none of us in any shape or form shall encourage cant.
By that I mean sanctimoniousness, anything that is falsetto, any unreal
expression of emotion or exaggeration of feeling. A second principle we
have had to lay down is that no religious man shall interfere in any shape
or form with the university amusements. Time after time I have seen at
our religious meetings twelve out of the fifteen university football team;
and we have always had amongst our foremost men the best athletes in the
university. We have also laid it down as a principle that we shall not
interfere with any university work. We have tried to get hold of the busiest
men and interest them in whatever is going on, believing that a man may
do his university work thoroughly and yet do something in the way of helping
on the Christian life of his fellow students. In the Medical Faculty, where
we have from 1,800 to 2,000 students, and which is our largest faculty
in Edinburgh University, at the end of the four years' course we have the
"Blue Ribbon Medical Course" scholarship. It is given to the
man who has stood first all along the line for four years. Now the man
who for the last four years has taken this scholarship has been not only
one of the most active workers in the Christian community, but actually
the secretary of the movement. I do not mean that one man has done that
for four years; but the last four men have been not only the leading men
in the scientific and professional studies, but the leading men in the
Christian life of the place. With such a record as that you can understand
that Christianity is, at all events, respected.
We never have any religious meetings on week
days. We do not want the professors to say we are taking up the time the
men ought to give other things. We believe a man's business at a college,
and his religion, too, is to do his work. The meetings we have had, therefore,
were on Sundays.
Another rule that we have had to make is
never to interfere with a man's views. We want a man's life. We do not
want his opinion. We do not start a man with a creed. We believe that the
man arrives at a creed; and we take into our ranks any man who has any
desire to seek the Kingdom of God. That, of course, had widened the door
to a very large number of men who would have kept out, if we had been exclusive.
But while we do not underrate a creed, while we believe that theological
doctrines are just as scientific doctrines; yet religion is an art, and
we can get men to practice the art who will arrive, we hope, in their future
life, at something of the scientific principles which underlie it; but
we make it a barrier to no man at the start that he knows little. In fact,
a man enters the school of Christ as he enters a university. That is to
say, he enters, not as a professor, but as a student. He comes to learn;
and we believe the best way to learn is to let the man matriculate and
begin.
If you ask me what obstacles we find specially
in the way, I think the chief obstacle we meet is the revolt in thinking
men's minds against popular and spurious and weak forms of Christianity.
Men come to the institution who have been very strictly brought up, and
they are not able, after a few months' college discipline, to believe the
things they used to believe. A gentleman in Boston said to me a few days
ago that he had a son at Harvard and that the young man had the audacity
to come to him not long ago and tell him that he didn't believe so and
so. I said to him: "Sir, what a splendid fellow your son must be."
He preferred truth to comfort. A man is to be encouraged to think about
religious matters. If Christianity cannot bear thinking about, it is not
worth going in for.
One other thing that one finds is the idea
many men have that it is a dull thing to go in for Christianity. Now, of
course, that is simply not true. It is not true in fact, and it is not
true in theory. It has, doubtless, more concern for a man's temperament
and body than his creed; but if there is anything that can put sunniness
or brightness into a man's life, it is Christianity. Christianity professes
to cure dullness. Some of the greatest words in the Bible are "joy,"
"rest," "comfort." Christianity cures depression and
gloom by removing the causes of it. What makes men depressed? Self-concentration,
as a rule. When a man is wrapped up in himself, seeking only his own, he
finds he is seeking a very shallow object, and very soon gets to the end
of it; hence all the springs of life have nothing to act upon, and depression
follows. Now, Christianity cures that by trying to take a man out of himself,
and by showing him that his true life is in living out of himself.
Another source of dullness is the thwarting
of the ambitions that we have. We get down in spirits because we do not
get the recognition we think we deserve, because we are snubbed and slighted,
because we are not at the top. Christianity cures that by a single sentence.
It says: "The meek shall inherit the earth." There is no connection
between Christianity and a dull life. It is the want of Christianity that
makes any life dull. Christianity offers a young man, or an old man, or
any man, a more abundant life than the life he is living--more life as
life goes, more happiness in life, more intensity in life, more worthiness
in life.
That, however, is perhaps not so great an
obstacle, comparatively a trifling one, as the thought many men have that
it is an unscientific thing in these days to endorse Christianity. Now
it may be unscientific to endorse some forms in which Christianity is presented,
but Christianity itself is a thoroughly scientific thing. There is nothing
the least narrow about anything that Christ ever said. On the contrary,
Christ said the broadest things that have ever been said; and he never
rebuked breadth, but constantly rebuked narrowness. In His day there were
three great philosophical, theological schools. There were the Pharisees,
who were so narrow that they could not see spirit for form. There were
the Sadducees, who were so narrow that they could not see spirit for matter.
And there were the Essenes, who could not see matter for spirit. Christ
was always rebuking these sects simply on account of their narrowness.
His own view of life was as broad as the heavens. He took in every man
and every part of every man. His religion was not kept back by any geographical
or ethnographical limits. It was the religion of humanity.
You say, "But it is well known that
many scientific men are opposed to Christianity." I ask you to give
me their names. If you run over the names of the large figures in science
at this moment, you will find that the majority are not only in favor of
Christianity, but have expressed themselves in favor of it.
Mr. Huxley has never said anything against
Christianity. He has defined the position of science. He says, "Science
is not Christianity, nor is it anti-Christianity. It is extra-Christianity."
He has thrown an arrow, with a little poison on it, perhaps, at some of
the outworks of Christianity; but he has never said one word against Christ
or the words or spirit of Christ. And it matters little what a man does
to the outworks so long as he respects and is compelled to respect Christ;
and Christianity is always respected, however humbly it is lived, by the
wisest men.
The other day I came upon a statement by
a Fellow of the Royal Society with regard to this subject, a sentence of
which I should like to read to you. The Royal Society of London, as you
know, is probably one of the first scientific bodies in the world. This
man says: "I have known the British Association for the Advancement
of Science under forty-one different presidents--all leading men of science.
On looking over these forty-one names, I count twenty, who, judged by their
public utterances or private communications, are men of Christian belief
and character; while, judged by the same test, only four disbelieve in
direct divine revelation."
You point to Mr. Darwin. Mr. Darwin never
had, and never gave himself, a chance. He was brought up on Paley's Natural
Theology--a great book in its day, but a book which Darwin himself made
it impossible to read to-day; and he was bombarded with that book, and
with religion along that line; and we have no evidence that he ever studied
Christianity in any other form. But wherever he saw it, he respected it.
When he was on the Island of Terra del Fuego, he saw the lowest subjects
in the world. He told the missionaries they might go home. It was an impossibility,
from the point of view of science, that these men could ever be elevated.
A very few years after, Mr. Darwin wrote a letter to the secretary of that
missionary society saying that he had found out what a great change had
come over these islands--a certain amount of civilization had been introduced,
and morality had been established; and he would like to withdraw what he
had said. He enclosed a check for twenty five dollars for the work of the
society; and he continued sending in his annual contribution to the end
of his life.
Perhaps the greatest name known to you in
the old country is that of Sir William Thompson, now Lord Kelvin, Professor
of Physics in Glasgow University. If you go into his class room any day
you like, you will hear him open his lecture with prayer.
It is not true that the scientific men have
given up Christianity. Many of them have given up imitations of Christianity,
spurious forms of it; but the thing itself stands untouched.
You ask me, "What, then, do you retain?
Do you dilute Christianity until it means little or nothing--so little
that anybody can call himself a Christian?" On the contrary, we make
it the most severe thing, the most definite thing, that a man could choose
for his object in life. We make it a necessity that a man shall be turning,
that he shall seek first the Kingdom of God. He may choose his own way
of doing it; but he must put that before him as an ambition and as his
career to seek first the Kingdom of God. We say nothing to those men about
saving their souls. We say to them: "Gentlemen, save your lives. Do
something with your life. Let that energy, that talent, go out to some
purpose. The world needs the knowledge you have, the impulses you can give;
aye, and the criticisms that you can offer upon the religious forms round
about. It needs all these things. Save your lives. Do something with them."
The Kingdom of God, according to Christ's own definition, is leaven; it
is salt; it is light. Can you tell me what is going to raise this country,
for instance, if it is not to be Christianity? If you take the Christianity
out of Boston, weak as some of it may be, and inconsistent as some of it
may be, in fifty years it will be uninhabitable by a respectable man or
woman. Was it Mr. Lowell who said: "Show me ten square miles in any
part of the world, outside of Christianity, where the life of man and the
purity of woman are safe, and I will give up Christianity"? There
are no such ten square miles in any part of the world. Many things can
lift society a little; but, as a matter of fact and history, the thing
that has lifted the nations of the world to their present level has been,
in some form or other, direct or diffused, the Christianity of Christ.
Christian men are to be not only the leaven of the world, but they are
to be the salt of the earth. The world is not only sunken, needing to be
raised, but it is rotten, and needing to be purified. Salt is that which
saves from corruption. Christianity is the salt of the earth. It is the
great antiseptic of society. Christian men are the light of the world.
The light of Christ was the light of men; and other men are to catch that
light and radiate it upon the world.
You point me to other teachers, many of them
very great, many of them with great messages for the world--Socrates, Plato--a
long list of names; but, allowing all their goodness, can one of them be
put beside Christ as a mere teacher? Socrates went about the world asking
questions. Christ went about the world answering questions. That was the
difference. Socrates was looking for truth. Christ said truth is in living.
I am the truth; and the man who lives like Me will live true, and all the
wrong in the mind will be corrected. You cannot help seeing truth.
Now, gentlemen, what do you think of that
for a life, for a career? You do not know what to do with yourself. What
do you think of being a crystal of salt in a community such as this city,
or a little cell of leaven which cannot help, by the mere contagion of
its presence, passing on influence and life to things round about it, or
being a light to the dark people, perhaps the dark Christians, if you like,
round about, too?
Do the workingmen of this country not need
light? What is to alter the critical condition of the working classes in
this country, if it is not to be the teaching of Christianity in some form?
What is to guide these labor movements and to work upon the minds in all
directions, to make this country continuously prosperous? Men who have
looked deepest into these problems have either given them up or seen only
one solution, and that is in the teaching of Christ and the application
of His principles to common life. These principles are not in the air.
They are justified by every fact and law of nature.
I believe in Christianity, first of all,
not because I believe in this book. I believe in this book because I believe
in Christianity. Religion does not come out of the Bible. The Bible comes
out of religion. I believe in Christianity because I believe in evolution.
Christianity is to me further evolution. I know no better definition of
it than that. The forces of nature carry a man up to a certain point and
there they stop. Then the psychic forces carry him up another point to
the evolution of mind. Then the moral forces come in and carry him up a
little further. Then the vis a tergo, the struggle for life that
pushes him on, is reinforced by a vis a fronto; and he sees ideals
before him, and is drawn up higher and higher, from strength to strength,
until he reaches the fullness of the stature of the perfect man. That is
pure evolution, the evolution of the man toward the ideal, toward the perfect
man Jesus Christ. This principle of which I have been speaking, of a man
giving his life to other people, to help on his country, is in the very,
heart of nature. There are two great principles in nature by which all
things work and by which all things are moved. The one is the struggle
for life. Every plant and animal starts out to nourish itself. That struggle
goes on along the line of the function of nutrition. There is the struggle
for the life of others--the function of reproduction. These two functions
make up life. Now, most of us live along the line of the first. All our
lives, nearly, are centered in that; but that is only one half of the life
appointed by nature. There is the struggle for the life of others, the
function of reproduction, and in its higher forms everything that is high
lies. All the happiness in life, in reality, has come along the second
of these two lines, and not along the first. All the life of the world,
in reality, lies on the side of reproduction. A plant takes a little bit
of itself and gives it away. It lives by death. It dies; the life goes
on. This chapel is built upon death. That book is death. Those pillars
are the death of men. Those clothes are the death of animals. Every part
of life and everything in life is kept alive by death. The animal gives
off a part of itself and dies. Its life goes on--has passed on; and I say
all the comfort and happiness and beauty and luxury of life come along
that line. Three-fourths of the world at this moment live upon rice. What
is rice? It is a seed --a fruit, therefore, of reproduction. The world
lives upon this altruistic principle. All the fruits of the world are the
gifts of reproduction. All the drinks of the world are the fruits of reproduction
--the milk of the cow, the sprouting grain, the malted liquor, the withered
hop, the fruit of the vine, wine itself. All the beauty of the world comes
along the line of reproduction--the feathers of the bird, the fire of the
glow-worm, the face of a woman. All the music of the world is love music--the
chorus of the insect, the song of the nightingale, the serenade of the
lover. We live by what the function of reproduction has done for us; and
the man who gives his life for what is going on in that line is living
for the highest end in nature.
The struggle for life is waning every century,
and by and by it will give place entirely to this other. Therefore, when
Christ said, "Seek first the Kingdom of God," he propounded a
perfectly scientific doctrine. He was offering man a life which would include
all other lives, to which all other things would be heir.
Let me give you an illustration of what I
mean. You are here at the university. You can't yet begin to do anything
for your country, as you might. What you can do now is to leaven this university.
What you can do is to get hold of some one man, whose life is of no account,
and which is apparently not going to be of any account, and save that man,
not for his own sake only, but because that is a piece of energy which
has gone off but can be brought in and reclaimed and utilized for the good
of man.
There was a medical student in Edinburgh
University in his second year (our course is four years), who saw that
he had been living there eighteen months entirely for himself. He had never
done a hand's turn to be of any good or use to any one, and it hurt him.
One day he determined that he would do something to help another man, and
he remembered another undergraduate, who had come from the same country
town as himself, and who had gone to pieces. He hunted him up. He found
him half drunk in a very poor and shabby lodging. He told him that he would
like him to come and live in his rooms; that he had nice rooms, and it
was snugger than where he was. The other man stated he was in debt and
could not leave. No. 1 went out of the room, paid the man's bill, sent
for a carriage, bundled up his friend's things--and a newspaper held them
all--and took him off to his own lodgings. The next morning he said: "Now,
you and I are going to live together. Let us make a contract and both sign
it."
There were four articles in it.
"First, neither one of us is to go out
alone, unless absolutely necessary.
"Second, twenty minutes to be allowed
to go from room to college for recitations. Overtime to be accounted for.
"Third, one hour to be given every night
to recreation.
"Fourth, bygones to be bygones."
They both signed it. Everything went on well.
They had lived together for six weeks when one night No. 2 sprang up, shut
his book with a bang and said: "I can't stand this slow life. I must
have a bust." "Very well," said No. 1, "you shall bust
here. What do you want?" "I want some drink." "Well,
you shall have it," said No. 1, and he got him something to drink
and brought it to the room. No. 2 took it. Do you say it was a risk? His
thirst was allayed and the wild beast was calmed. He settled down to his
books for six weeks again, when the wild beast once more asserted itself.
No. 1 gave it a meal to satisfy it, as before. No. 2 worked faithfully
this time for three months before another outbreak. And so the thing went
on. A year afterward No. 2 said to No. 1: "You never tell me what
you are reading at the recreation hour. I think I see you read the Bible
sometimes. You never talked to me on that subject." Talked to him
about it! What was the use of talking to a man about Christianity when
he was living it every hour of his life? He had done his work without ever
having said a word. No. 2 was dying to learn his secret. I need not detail
the rest. These two men passed out of the University at the end of their
course. No. 1 passed a fairly good examination. No. 2, the man who was
lost, graduated with honors and took the medal for his thesis. The last
time I heard of No. 1 he was filling an important appointment in London,
and No. 2 is known as "the Christian Doctor" of a village in
Wales. Now that seems to me to be a thing worth living for; something to
look back upon after one's college life is over.
No one knew anything about this. No. 1 was
never known as a specially religious man, and yet, in his quiet way, he
was living Christ in every direction; and he left more fragrance behind
him when he was gone than a dozen of the noisier men.
I ask you, gentlemen, to save your lives,
to save your college days, and I appeal to the generous side of you and
ask you to remember your fellow men. Remember the man who is going to pieces;
remember the man who is down, the man who is tempted. Perhaps if you would
stand by him you could help him through. You need not make any great profession
of religion. But, if you do that, you will make a great practice of it.
It will amount to little, after the college course is over, that you have
merely done your work and passed. What is the use of your passing, what
is the use of your getting any degree, unless it is going to be of some
use to somebody else? There is no particular reason why nine-tenths of
us should be alive at all; but the man who begins to live for the Kingdom
of God, who sees a chance to do a good turn here and a little one there,
and shed a little light here and a little sunniness there, has something
to live for. That man's life will never be lost. He lives a more abundant
life. There is no other joy or light in the world except that.
And if you gentlemen are going to seek the
Kingdom of God, I want to ask you to seek it first. Do not touch it unless
you promise to seek it first. I promise you a miserable life and influence
and a poor, broken, lost career, if you seek it second. Seek it first,
or let it alone. Do not be an amphibian; no man can serve two masters,
and, if you only knew it, it is a thousand times easier to seek first the
Kingdom of God than to seek it second. I have not the slightest doubt there
are many men who are seeking second the Kingdom of God, and their religion
is a nuisance to them. It is hard to keep up, and they would get rid of
it if they could. The cure is to seek it first, to make it the helm of
life. Then only can a man's life go straight, and then only can he fulfill
the destiny for which God has put him into the world.
You have had a great time
on the mountains, but remember the mountain is not a place to live on.
The Mount of Transfiguration is an episode, coming to a man from time to
time; but it is not in the ordinary course of nature that a man should
always live on the top of the mountain. The mountain is of use to send
streams into the valley of our ordinary life, to fertilize and nourish
what is there. Perhaps it is not possible that we shall all be living at
the same pitch at which you have lived during the days of this week. Before
the sacramental wine was dry on the lips of Peter he was untrue to his
Saviour. A breakdown to the moral life is just as natural, and just as
much a matter of law as the breakdown of an engine. It is important to
get to the bottom of these causes. One of the most important things for
us to study is the anatomy of the soul, the anatomy of temptation, and
the physiology of sin.
You will not agree with me, perhaps, but
I have a strong suspicion that the evolutionists are on the right track
when they tell us that man's body has come up through the animal creation.
Bone for bone, muscle for muscle and nerve for nerve, you and I are exactly
the same as the higher vertebrae of the animal kingdom; and after we passed
through the animal kingdom, it is supposed by the theorists, we underwent
a long probation in which we were somewhat in the condition of the red
Indian; and, just as we had the bodies of animals, we had to some extent
the minds of animals and the dispositions of savages. If the animal has
left me as its legacy a vertebral column and certain nerves, why should
it not leave me a legacy of its modes and passions? And if I have once
had as my ancestors a long race of savages, why should not the modes and
predilections of the savage nature be still in my blood? If I have the
blood of the tiger, shall I not have to some extent the spirit of a tiger?
If I have the blood of a shark, shall I not be inclined sometimes to play
the shark? If I have the blood of a fox, shall I not be inclined sometimes
to be foxy? Well, it doesn't matter in the least whether that is true or
not, but I appeal to you if it is not a fact that you find in yourselves
the residuum of many animals and the disposition of many savages. If there
is a man who has nothing of the animal in him, I should like you to introduce
me to him. It doesn't matter where it came from. It is there, as a matter
of fact. That is to say, man is built in three stories. He is a three-storied
structure. On the ground floor there dwells the animal. Above that, on
the second story, there is the savage. And on the third floor there is
the man. Now, my brother, when you go wrong, it is not you who goes wrong,
it is the man who lives in the bottom story. And when you collapse, when
you imagine that it is impossible for you to recover again, remember that
the true man in you is still there; and that although temptations may come
to you from these lower parts of your nature, it is not essential that
you should live in idle acquiescence to them. By taking to pieces the moral
nature, one sees very clearly what temptation really is. It is the appeal
of the animal to the man; and it is no sin for man to hear that appeal.
It is no sin for a man to be tempted. In virtue of his nature, man must
be tempted. It is when a man leaves the top story and deliberately walks
down and spends an hour in the cellar that temptation passes from temptation
into sin.
In the same way, one sees very clearly from
that little piece of anatomy, how it is possible to overcome temptation.
The remedy, of course, is simply to decline ever to move in the lower regions
of one's being at all, to regard that as a thing evolved past, and to live
constantly in the higher regions. When a man does that, it is impossible
for him to break down. Put it in this way. An image is thrown upon the
screen of your mind and you look at it. How can you dismiss it? You can
only dismiss it by throwing another image on the screen which will be more
beautiful, more pure and more attractive, and which, above all, will pre-occupy
your mind so that the other image will fade away. It is impossible, I think,
in most cases, for the man to deliberately fight the temptation when it
comes in certain forms. The only thing he can do is to replace that form
by another form. You can do something with temptation at its first stage.
You can do everything with it. You can do a little with it at the second
stage, but you can do nothing with it after it passes to the third stage.
If you let it pass that, you are over Niagara. You must fight it, not by
direct fight, but by flight to the higher regions. Paul summed it up in
a single sentence, where he said: "Walk in the spirit, and ye shall
not fulfill the lusts of the flesh." In plain English, walk in the
fourth flat, and you will not do the things that people do in the cellar.
You cannot be in two places at once. If you make up your mind to live continuously
in the spirit, ye shall not fulfill the lusts of the flesh. Spirit is there
contrasted with flesh. It does not mean primarily the Holy Spirit, although
it includes that. It is here contrasted primarily with the flesh. Either
live a cellar or a top-story life, a dog life or a man life. Walk among
spiritual things, among high people--not necessarily religious things,
but spiritual things. Look not on the things which are seen, but the things
which are unseen. Be in the company of good books, beautiful pictures,
and charming, delightful and inspiring music; and let all that one hears,
sees, reads and thinks lift and inspire the higher. The man who does that
is kept above the lower nature. Many and many a thing which is not directly
religious, therefore, comes in to make up a part of the nourishment of
the spiritual life.
We can always live a high life. We can always
have before us beautiful, divine ideals, and the sudden attempt to get
from the lower to the higher is the transition between the life of the
flesh and the life of the spirit, and the passing from the one region into
the other is done by a sudden act, by a sudden mental movement, by a transference
of one's interests from one region to another. That mental movement, I
think, may be dignified with the name of prayer. That sudden appeal to
the purer image which is to displace the other and let it fade away is
the spasmodic act of prayer, which instantly places one in the spiritual
region; and that is one of the highest uses of prayer, not to get something
directly from heaven, but to switch everything up, and not down. If you
could keep a Christian and a God-like spirit, it would be impossible for
you to have the lower appetites again.
If you want to get a man on his feet again,
the thing to do is not to preach or read the Bible to him, but to get him
out of the cellar in which he lives. Take him by the hand, and he will
be led away from his former life. Those are psychological principles founded
upon the fact that the attention cannot be directed to two things at the
same moment. You see that, upon merely psychological principles, the man
who understands his nature and applies that remedy for his case when he
finds himself becoming a lower man than he ought to, is bound to get the
victory. It is not by magic that men are able to succeed in living a high
and Christian life. It is by living according to nature and according to
the revelation of our higher nature. It is by living along the line of
the laws under which this system of our human nature is founded. That is
put in other words by Christ, where he says, "Abide in me"--the
same thing on a still higher plane. The man who lives with Christ cannot
sin. "If any man sin," John says, "he hath not known Christ."
Sin is abashed in the presence of Christ. The man who lives in Christ as
his ideal finds in Him a continuous living Saviour, drawing him away from
himself and making it impossible for him to live for himself.
Let no man here to-night think or say that
he can get victory over sin alone. He cannot get that out of religion unless
he gets a great many other things as well, and is compelled to accept them.
Deliverance from sin is only one of the functions of the new nature; and
a man is not a new man if he has got only one arm. The one arm is to fight
sin. He must be a full, perfect man; and the man who has simply got the
muscle in his spiritual nature which is to deal with sin is not a Christian
man at all necessarily. The man who attempts to live in one function alone
will find it impossible. Religion is not a blue ribbon to wear against
a single set of things. It is not an inoculation against a single disease.
A man must accept Christ all around, not only as his Deliverer from sin,
but as his friend and guide, his ideal and Saviour. He must walk his whole
life, and every day of his life, in the spirit, not merely rushing into
the top story when temptations are at his heels, but dwelling there, in
that place where the air is always sweet, where the company is always pure,
and where there is nothing to hinder the soul from communing with God and
with the stars. If a man can continuously live in that region, he is bound
to grow better and better. That is the picture of temptation chasing a
man who walks in the Spirit. He hears its bark and feels its bite, like
a dog's; but if he is off its ground it cannot touch him. Just in proportion
as we live in the higher regions are we able to evade temptations.
In dealing with others, it is not enough
to preach to them, to give them tracts, texts or prayers: but we must give
them a new environment, in which the new nature can bud and flower and
grow into perfection. Gentlemen, it is not such an easy business to save
a man as some people think. It is not to be done by a few earnest words.
That is why so many college men have been passed over untouched by our
college Y. M. C. A.'s. It is not because we do not have meetings enough,
not because we do not know the Bible well enough, not because we are not
earnest enough; but it is because we do not proceed rationally enough.
It is because we do not sow seeds for individuals and live so that they
may be compelled to live this higher life with us. We do not do our work
half thoroughly enough. Unless we lay down our lives to save men, we are
not following the Master as we ought. It is good business to devote our
lives to individuals. It may not be so picturesque, but individual work,
where every man singles out his individual to help and save, and stands
by him, if multiplied through the universities, would soon win our universities
for Christ.
Make a continuous effort by will power and
prayer power and the power of the Spirit of God to walk in the spiritual
region; for nature abhors a vacuum. If we allow any pause to occur in our
high living, if we leave this place, the enemy will come upon us, and we
will be worse off after this Conference than we were before it.
"The futility of saving
men by speech" is not a whole truth, but it is the large part of a
truth. Imagine a life-saving crew trying to save wrecked mariners simply
by calling to them, and not throwing out a life line or putting off in
a boat after them! It is a case of life for life--a man laying down his
own life for others, as Christ did.
In talking to a man you want to win, talk
to him in his own language. If you want to get hold of an agnostic, try
to translate what you have to say into simple words--words that will not
be in every case the words in which you got it. It is not cant. Religion
has its technical terms just as science, but it can be overdone; and, besides,
it is an exceedingly valuable discipline for one's self. Take a text and
say, "What does that mean in 19th century English ;" and in doing
that you will learn the lesson that it is the spirit of truth that does
one good, and not the form of words. The form does not matter, if it does
you good and draws you nearer to God. Do not be suspicious of it, if it
is God's truth, in whatever form it may be.
One has to do a great deal more than display
his Christianity. He must not only talk it, but live it. What is the secret
of Christianity? It is not picking out a man here and a man there and making
them fit to go to heaven. Christ came to this world, as He Himself said,
to found a society. Have you ever thought of that conception of Christianity?
For hundreds of years it has been utterly lost sight of. It is only lately
that men are getting to see the great Christian doctrine of the Kingdom
of God. This great phrase was never off Christ's lips. "The Kingdom
of God" is by far the commonest phrase in His speech. Have you ever
given a month of your life to find out what Christ meant by "the Kingdom
of God?" Every day as we pray, "Thy Kingdom come," has our
Christian consciousness taken in the tremendous sweep of that prayer, and
seen how it covers the length and breadth of this great world and every
human being? Christ was continually telling what it was. The Kingdom of
heaven is like unto this. The kingdom of heaven is like unto that. If there
is one thing more prominent than another in Christ's language it is in
explaining what the kingdom of heaven is, and in what the subjects of that
kingdom are to busy themselves. The kingdom of God is a society for the
best men working for the best end, with the highest motive according to
the best principle. The Kingdom of God was to come without observation.
Christ likened it to leaven, and one cannot get a better understanding
of the meaning of His phrase than by taking His own metaphors. The world
is sunken, Christ said, and it must be raised. Leaven comes from the same
word as lever. It is that which lifts, elevates, or raises. Christ founded
a society of men for the purpose of raising men. This leaven was not to
disturb the form of or overturn any institution. When you put leaven into
a vessel with anything that is to be leavened, it does not affect the outward
form of it; but it changes its spirit.
The Kingdom of God is like leaven. It is
to act, raising men by contagion, by the contact of one life with another.
Did you ever put a little leaven under a microscope? If you did, you found
it was a minute plant, perhaps one six-thousandth of an inch in diameter,
with such an amazing power of propagation that, simply in contact with
the dough, it has the effect of lifting it by means of the life that is
in it. And so the virtue of the Christian's life, not by tempting it in
the way of forcing it, but by its spontaneous, natural and beautiful goodness,
reacts upon others. When men observe the fragrance of Christ and are reminded
of Him, a longing comes over them to live like Him and breathe that air
and have that calm, that beauty of character, and all that unconscious
influence going out as a contagion to others. By these men the world is
raised.
But that is not all. The world is not only
sunken, it is sinful. Those of you who know life even an inch below the
surface, know that even in this Christian country, in our great cities,
the world is rotten. Have you ever thought of the sin of the world? Think
of the sin in your own being. Think that the man in the next house has
the same amount of sin in him, and all the people in your street are like
that. Multiply that by the number of all the streets in your city, and
that by the number of cities in your country, and that by the number of
countries in the world, and you have a ghastly spectre under which your
imagination staggers.
That, however, is only a single glimpse of
this sinful world, for the sin can be taken away: "Behold the Lamb
of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." How does He do it?
By forgiving the sin of the world, and by taking it away, through you and
me and other subjects of His kingdom.
Christians, the followers of Christ, He said,
are the salt of the earth, and it is that salt that takes away the rottenness
of the world. He takes away the guilt and the power of it, and you help
Him to remove it by being salt in the society in which you live. Salt is
that which keeps society from becoming rotten. You put salt upon fish or
meat to prevent it from becoming rotten; and it is the Christian men and
women in this country who prevent it from becoming absolutely rotten. Christianity
is the great antiseptic of society. If you were to take Christianity out
of New York, Chicago, Berlin, or Paris, those cities, in a few generations,
would go to pieces, even physically, and be swept off the earth. Now, we
are to be the salt of Chicago, New York and the great cities of the world.
It is our business to make cities and to keep those cities sweet--not only
to scavenge away the rottenness after it has grown there, but to prevent
the new generation that is growing up from becoming rotten. The work of
salt is to prevent this, as well as to cure it. Keep those children pure
to the end of their lives. We do not emphasize half enough the prevention
side of Christian society. We do not emphasize half enough the making of
Christian environment in which a Christ-like life shall be possible--new
houses, pure air and water, good schools, bringing the influences of sweetest
life and purity to keep those young lives from succumbing to the influences
which surround them. The world which you and I have to lift is not only
the world of the poor; but we have to lift up our country.
One thing, gentlemen, strikes the stranger
in coming to this country. He goes to a city like Boston, and finds the
merchants of that city with their heads buried in their ledgers, wholly
occupied with their private business, while a few Irishmen, holding the
city offices, are carrying on their municipal government. Some one has
defined dirt as matter in the wrong place; and it is matter in the wrong
place for a company of Irishmen to regulate the affairs of the city of
Boston. Therefore, gentlemen, if you are the subjects of the Kingdom of
God, you must give to the world and to your country a reformed Boston,
a reformed Chicago, above all a reformed New York. You have been taught
in your schools of your duties as citizens; but you are taught in this
Book just as plainly your duties as Christian citizens. These cities are
making the people that are living in them. People will not be righteous.
In this country there is not only little honesty and honorableness in municipal
life; but, what is a thousand times worse, there is little in its possibility.
In my country I have never known or heard of a member of the government,
either municipal or state, proving false to his trust. It is your duty
to restore righteousness in the high places of this government. Let the
people see examples which will help them in their Christian life. I cannot
speak too strongly about that, because I know that the thing in process
of time can be done. We have had rotten municipal government, and the Christian
men of the place have taken the thing up and said, we have determined this
shall not be. In the old cities, they have put man after man into the municipal
chair simply because they were Christian men, because they would deal with
the people righteously, and carry out the programme of Christianity for
the city. Let me tell you of the work of some university men in the city
of London. They went to a district in the East End--a God-forsaken and
sunken place, occupied for miles entirely by working people. They rented
a house and became known as settlers in that poor district. They gave themselves
no airs of superiority. They did not tell the people they had come to do
them good. They went in there and made friends with the people. The leaven
went in among the dough. The salt went in beside that which was corrupt.
We keep the grains of salt all together, and the other things all together;
but the very place where the salt ought not to be is beside the salt. It
ought to be scattered over the meat. Well, these men were not in a great
hurry. They waited some months and got to know a number of the workmen,
and got to understand one another. They had studied the city, and the workingmen
were astonished at how much the young fellows knew about city government,
city life and education, and sanitation, cleansing and purity in all directions.
One day there came a great war of labor. The working men put their heads
together and said, "These young fellows have heads. Let us go and
talk the matter over with them." In a few months those young men were
the arbiters of a strike, and at a single word from them three or four
thousand families were saved from being thrown out of work on a great strike.
Is that not a Christian thing to do? If you understand the conception of
the Kingdom of God as a society of the best men working for the best ends
for the amelioration of human life, you will agree with me. One of these
young men at the next election was elected a member of one of the municipal
boards, and in a few months he was the head of the Board. Another got into
the School Board, and in a short time was the head of it. These men did
not claim to be superior. They were elected kings by the people because
the people felt their kingship. By and by the time came when a member of
Parliament was to be returned. The workingmen came again to their university
friends and said, ``Whom shall we put in?" Those men told them, and
they put him in. And so those men have taken possession of that city in
the name of Jesus Christ, and have been gradually working, leavening and
salting. First, the blade; then, the ear; and then, the full corn in the
ear.
It is coming without observation. It is not
the work of a day. Christians are the only agents God has for carrying
out His purposes. Think of that. He could Himself, with a single breath,
cleanse the whole of London or New York, but he does not do it. It is by
the members of His body that he carries on His work. We all have different
parts of that work to do. Some of us are thumbs, some of us are fingers,
and some of us are only a little bit of the little finger. Some, again,
are limbs.
Now, that conception of Christianity as a
kingdom is beginning to grow throughout Christendom at this hour. Every
age has had its peculiar side of Christianity emphasized; and the side
that is being emphasized now is the social side, that large conception
of what Christ came to do, how He came to save men in the bulk, as it were
--by the city and by the country; and many of the movements that are going
on just now in society, in education, in sanitation, in university extension
and philanthropy, are all working together for good in that direction.
Let not us, who believe in the salvation of the individual soul as the
supreme thing, shut our eyes to the Christianity of Christ, to His great
conception of the Kingdom of God.
All the activities of Christianity may be
classed under one or the other of these two heads--entering the kingdom
of God ourselves, and spreading it to the lives of others. The individual
life has been at this Conference. How is it to help on this movement for
the bringing of the world to Christ? I know many of you are puzzled to
know in what direction you can start off to help Christ. Let me simply
say this to you. Once in my own life I came to crossroads. I did not know
in which direction God wanted me to help His kingdom, and I started to
read this Book to find out what the ideal life was. I knew I had only one
life, and didn't want to miss it; and I found out that the only thing worth
doing in the world was to do the will of God. Whether that was done in
the pulpit or in the slums, whether done in the college class room or in
the street, didn't matter at all. "My meat and my drink," Christ
said, "is to do the will of Him that sent me;" and if you make
up your mind to do the will of God, it matters little in what direction.
There are more posts waiting for men than there are men waiting for posts.
Christ needs men in every community and in every land. It makes little
difference whether we go to foreign lands or stay at home, so it is where
Gods puts us. I am not jealous of the great missionary movement which has
swept this country. In my own college, at least one third of the men are
going to the foreign mission field. I am not jealous of that movement.
I rejoice in it. But I should like also to bid for men, both for my country
and for yours, men who will give their lives to the Kingdom of God at home.
You will say, "How am I to know whether
to go abroad or stay at home, be a lawyer or a Christian doctor?"
The first thing is, course. The second thing is, think. Think over
all the different lines of work--over all your own pray, of qualifications.
If you are called to the missionary field, think of all the different kinds
of missionary fields. There are some that do not need you at all; and there
are others for which you are the very man. It is a great mistake to suppose
that missionary fields are all alike, and that they are the same in Africa
as in India or China. They are not the same at all. Study the field. The
third thing is, regard his decision as final. Nobody can plan your life
for you. Do take the advice of a wise friend, but do not not imagine
that the most disagreeable of two or three alternative things before you
is necessarily the will of God.
God's will does not always lie in the line
of the disagreeable. God likes to see His children happy just as earthly
fathers like to see their children happy, and there may be plums waiting
for you as well as stones. Do not sacrifice to a thing that is disagreeable
unless you are quite sure it is God's will.
The next thing is, when the time of decision
comes, what light you have. We do not manufacture a act, go ahead
with decision out of all these elements. We arrive at a decision. Some
day, in a turn of the road, we find we are led. We do not know how. The
subject just took shape in our minds somehow, and we arrived at a decision.
Having once decided, the next thing is, never
reconsider your decision. The day after a man makes a great life's decision,
if he reconsiders it, he reverses it. Never reconsider such a decision.
You will never know for months or years whether you have done the right
thing; but then, you will see that God has led every step of your way.
One good general rule is to go in the direction of least resistance, if
you find objections in every line and there is no one line positively drawing
you out.
I want to return to the immediate purpose
of those of you who are not yet out in the mission field, but who have
a year or two at college before you. I ask you to study what Christianity
is, and to spread the knowledge of that through your university. There
are many men in the universities who do not know in the least what Christianity
is. When I was in the university I thought Christianity was a thing you
might put on the point of a needle, and that Jesus Christ was a being so
small that you had to search closely for Him before you found Him; and
now I know the whole earth is full of His glory. Study the Kingdom of God.
See what Christ said was life, and how the members of that kingdom are
to pass it on to others, to the lawyer and the doctor, until we have the
professions Christianized, and the whole country will follow. It begins
with you. Give your life for a life.
I will close with a specific case of one
of your own countrymen. One night I got a letter from one of the students
in the University of Edinburgh, with page after page of agnosticism and
atheism. I went to see him, and spent a whole afternoon with him, but did
not make the slightest impression. At Edinburgh University we have a students'
evangelistic meeting Sunday nights, with an attendance of 800 or 1,000
men. A few nights after my conversation with this young man I saw him at
one of these meetings. Beside him sat a man I had seen occasionally at
the meetings, but whose name I did not know. After the meeting I spoke
to the latter student and asked him if he knew the man sitting next to
him. He said: "I am a graduate. After I finished my regular course
of study, I wanted to take a post-graduate course; and last year I came
to Edinburgh, where, in the dissecting room, I happened to be placed near
this man. I took a singular liking to him. I found out he was not a religious
man. A year passed without any change in him. I went to pack my trunks
to go home at the end of my one year's post-graduate work; but I was uncertain
whether I should go and take up my profession in America, or stay in Edinburgh
and try to win that one man for Christ. I decided I would stay." "Well,"
I said, "my young fellow, it will pay you. You will get your man."
Two or three months passed. It came to the night for our students' farewell
meeting--a service some of you might well imitate. We have men in Edinburgh
University from every part of the world. Every year five or six hundred
of them go out never to meet again. In our religious work we get very close
to one another; and on the last night of the university year we sit down
together in our common hall to the Lord's Supper. This is entirely a students'
meeting; but that night the members of the Theological Faculty participate,
so that things may be done decently and in order. There you see hundreds
of men--the cream and the youth of the world--sitting down to the Lord's
table, many of them not members of the church, there for the first time
pledging themselves to become members of the Kingdom of God. I saw one,
sitting down, passing the communion cup to his American friend. The American
had won the agnostic for Christ. A week after, he was back to his own country.
I do not know his name, but he was a subject of Christ's Kingdom doing
his Master's work. A few weeks passed, and the friend he rescued from agnosticism
came to see me and said: "I want to tell you that I am going to be
a medical missionary."
Before you leave here, make up your mind
that, with God's help, you will try to land your man. Let us ask God to
use us in His work.
Students are very often
recommended to invest in certain books. I am going to take the liberty
of suggesting to some of you to buy a certain picture which you can get
for a very few cents. Most of you have already seen it. It is "The
Angelus." It is an illuminated text. God speaks through you. He also
speaks through art. I want to hang up this picture as an illuminated text.
There are three things in the picture--a potato field, a country lad and
a country girl standing on the ground, and on the far horizon the spire
of the village church. That is the whole thing. There is no great scenery,
no picturesque scenery; just a country lad and a country girl. In those
Roman Catholic countries, at the hour of evening, the church bell rings
out to summon the people to pray. Some go into the church to pray; and
those that are caught in the fields when the Angelus rings bow their
heads to engage for a few moments in silent prayer.
Now, that picture is a perfect picture of
Christian life; and what is interesting about it is that it picks out the
three great pedestals of life. Moody said it was not enough to have the
root of the matter, we must have the whole thing.
I
The first element in life is work Three-fourths
of our life is probably spent in work. Is that religious, or is it not?
What is the meaning of it? It means, of course, that our work is just as
religious as our worship; and unless we can make our work religious, three-fourths
of our life remains unsanctified. The proof that work is religious is that
the most of Christ's life was spent in work. It was not the Bible that
was in His hands during these first thirty years of His life. It was the
hammer and the plane. He was making chairs and tables and plows and yokes.
That is to say, the highest conceivable life is in doing work. Christ's
public ministry occupied only two and a half years. The great bulk of His
time, He was simply at work; and from that moment work has had a new meaning
given to it. When Christ came into the world He came to men at their work.
He appealed to the shepherds, the working classes of those days. He also
appealed to the wise men, the students of those days. Three deputations
of the world went out to welcome him--first, the shepherds; second, the
wise men; third, two old people, Simeon and Anna, in the temple. That is
to say, Christ comes to men at their work, as the shepherds. He comes to
men at their books--the wise men. He comes to men at their worship--Simeon
and Anna. We find Christ, therefore, at our work, our books and our worship.
But you will notice that it was the old people who found Christ at their
worship, and, as we get older, we will cease to find Christ so much at
our work and our books. We will then spend more of our time in worship
than we are able to now, and as we get old we will repair to the prayer
meeting and the House of God and meet Christ and worship Him as Simeon
and Anna. We must try, until the time comes when much of our time shall
be given to direct business, to find Christ in our books and at our common
work.
Why should God have arranged that so many
hours of every day should be occupied with work? It is because work makes
men. A university is not a place for making scholars. It is a place for
making Christians. A farm is not a place for growing grain. It is a place
for growing character, and a man has no character except what is built
up through the medium of the things he does from day to day. God's Spirit
aids it through the actions which he performs during his life-work. The
student turns up every word in his Latin, instead of consulting the translation.
The result is that honesty is translated into the student's being. If he
gets up his mathematics thoroughly he not only becomes a mathematician
and a learned man, but he becomes a thorough man. If he attends to the
instructions that are given to him in class intelligently and conscientiously
he becomes a conscientious man, and it is just by such means that thoroughness,
conscientiousness and honorableness are imbedded in our being. We do not
get perfect character in our sleep. It comes to us as muscle comes, through
doing things. It is the muscle of the soul, and it comes by exercising
it upon actual things. Hence the meaning of our work is that it is the
making of us, and it is only by and through our work that the great Christian
graces are communicated to our souls. That is the means God requires for
the growing of the Christian principles. We cannot have Christian character
unless we use these means. Hence, gentlemen, the necessity of a student
being true, first of all, to his work, and letting his Christianity show
itself to his fellow students and his professors by the integrity and the
thoroughness of his academic work. Unless he is faithful in that which
is least, it is impossible for him to be faithful in that which is much.
The world judges a student by the conscientiousness and faithfulness with
which he does his college work. I know men who were led to pass their examinations
simply because they had become Christians--men who struggled for years
to pass their examinations, but who, when they became Christians, got to
work and succeeded where they had previously failed. Christianity comes
out in a man as much in his work as in his worship. Our work is not only
to be done thoroughly, but it is to be done honestly. In dealing with that
august thing called truth a man must be square with himself, fair to his
own mind and to the principles and spirit of truth. We are students, and
it is our business to get to the bottom of difficulties. Perhaps some truths
which are revealed to us have deeper bottoms than we now know. We will
get down to nuggets if we go below the surface, as our chairman said this
morning. Christianity is the most important thing in the world, and the
student ought to sound it in every direction and see if there is deep water
and a safe place through which to steer his life. If there are shoals,
he ought to know them. Therefore, when we come to difficulties, let us
not be guilty of intellectual sin, jumping lightly over them. Let us be
honest seekers after truth. We do not ask the public to sift doctrines,
but it is the business of the student to exercise the intellect which God
has given him. Faith is never opposed to reason in the New Testament. It
is often supposed to be so, but it is not. Faith is opposed to sight, but
never to reason. It is only by reason that we can sift and examine and
criticise, and be sure of the forms of truth which are given us as Christians.
Hence a great field of work has opened to the student even apart from his
academic work. Let him be sure that in seeking after truth he is drawing
very near Christ. "I am the way, the truth and the life." We
talk a great deal about Christ as the way and about Christ as the life;
but there is a side of Christ especially for the student, "I am the
truth." Every student ought to be a truth-learner and a truth-seeker
for Christ's sake.
II
The second element in life after work--and
it ought to be put first in importance--is God. The Angelus is perhaps
the most religious picture painted in this century. You cannot look at
it and see that young man standing in the field with his hat off, and the
girl opposite him with her hands clasped and her head bowed on her breast,
without feeling a sense of God. Gentlemen, do we carry about with us wherever
we go a sense of God? If not, we have missed the greatest part of life.
Do we have that feeling and conviction of God's abiding presence wherever
we are? Does He beset us behind and before? There is nothing more needed
in this generation than a larger and more scriptural idea of God. A great
American writer has told us that the conception of God that he got, in
books and from sermons, when he was a boy, was that of a wise and very
strict lawyer sitting in his office. I remember very well the awful conception
I got when I was a boy. I was given a book of Watts' hymns, which was illustrated,
and, amongst other hymns, there was one about God, and it represented a
great black, scowling thunder cloud, and in the midst of that cloud there
was a piercing eye. That was placed before my young imagination as God,
and I got the idea that God was a great detective, playing the spy upon
my actions, and, as the hymn says, writing now the story of what little
children do. That was a bad lesson. It has taken years to obliterate it.
We think of God as "up there." You know there is no such thing
as "up there." What would be "up there" tonight will
be "down there" twelve hours from this time. Do not think of
God as "up there," because there is no such place. Science has
been "up there," and it has not seen God. You say God made the
world six thousand years ago and then He retired. That is the last that
was seen of Him. He made the world and then went away into space somewhere
to look on and keep things going. Geology has been away back there, and
God has gone further and further back. These six thousand years have extended
back into ages and ages of long, long years. Where is God, if He is not
back there in time or up there in space? Where is He? God is in you. The
Kingdom of God is within you and God Himself is within men. He is not "up
there." When are we to exchange the terrible God of our childhood,
the far-away God of our childhood, for the everywhere-present God of the
Bible?
The God of theology has been largely taken
from the old classical Christian-Roman writers, such as Augustine, who,
great as they were, had nothing better to fling their conception of God
upon than that of the greatest man. The greatest man was the Roman emperor,
and therefore God became a kind of emperor. The Greeks had a far grander
conception--the conception of Clement of Alexandria, which is coming again
into modern theology. The Greek God is the God of this Book; the Spirit
which moved upon the water; the God in whom we live and move and have our
being; the God of whom Jesus spake to the woman at the well; the God who
is a spirit. God is a spirit. Let us gather the conception of the immanent
God. That is the theological word for it, and it is a splendid word. Immanuel,
God with us, the inside God, the immanent God. You have had singular experiences
since you have been here. What is it? It is God working in you. Have we
really realized that God is in us and is working in us? God must be working
in us. Long, long ago God made matter. Then He made flowers, trees and
animals. Then he made man. Did He stop? Is God dead? If He lives, if He
acts, what is He doing? He is making better men. He is carrying on the
development of man. "It is God which worketh in you." The buds
of our nature are not all out yet. The sap to make them come out comes
from God, from the indwelling immanent Christ. Our bodies, therefore, are
the temples of the Holy Ghost. We must bear Christ with us wherever we
go, because the sense of God is not kept up by logic but by experience.
Most of you have heard of Hellen Kellar,
the Boston girl who is deaf and dumb and blind. Until she was seven years
of age her mind was an absolute blank. Nothing could get into that blank,
because all the avenues to the other world were closed. Then, by that great
process which Boston has discovered, by which the blind see, the deaf hear
and the mute speak, that girl's soul was opened. Bit by bit they began
to build up a mind --to give her a certain amount of information and to
educate her. But no one liked to tell her about religion. They reserved
that for Phillips Brooks. After some years had passed they took her to
him and he began to talk to her, through the young lady who had been the
means of opening her senses, and was able to communicate with her by the
delicate process of touch. Phillips Brooks began to tell her about God,
who God was, what He had done, how He loved men and what He was to us.
The child listened very intently. Then she looked up and said: "Mr.
Brooks, I knew all that before, but I didn't know His name." There
was some mysterious pressure, some impelling power, some guide, some elevating
impulse, within her soul. "It is GOD," said Phillips Brooks,
"which worketh in you. God is with us and in us."
I wonder if you have heard the story of the
two Americans who were once crossing the Atlantic and met in the cabin
on Sunday night to sing hymns. As they sang the last hymn, "Jesus,
Lover of my Soul," one of them heard an exceedingly rich and beautiful
voice behind him. He looked around, and, although he did not know the face,
he thought that he knew the voice. So, when the music ceased, he turned
and asked the man if he had been in the Civil War.
The man replied that he had been a Confederate
soldier.
"Were you at such a place at such a
night?" asked the first.
"Yes," he replied, "and a
curious thing happened that night which this hymn has recalled to my mind.
I was posted on sentry duty near the edge of a wood. It was a dark night
and very cold, and I was a little frightened because the enemy were supposed
to be very near. About midnight, when everything was very still and I was
feeling homesick and miserable and weary, I thought that I would comfort
myself by praying and singing a hymn. I remember singing this hymn:
" `All my trust on Thee is stayed,
All my help from Thee I bring;
Cover my defenseless head
With the shadow of Thy wing.'
"After singing that a strange peace
came down upon me, and through the long night I felt no more fear."
"Now," said the other, "listen
to my story. I was a Union soldier and was in the wood that night with
a party of scouts. I saw you standing, although I did not see your face.
My men had their rifles focused upon you, waiting the word to fire, but
when you sang out:
" `Cover my defenseless head
With the shadow of Thy wing'
I said: `Boys, lower your rifles; we will
go home.' It was God working in each of them. Just by such means, by this
everywhere-acting, mysterious spirit, God keeps His Spirit moving. Hence
that second great element in life, GOD, without Whom life is a living death.
III
A moment or two about the third element in
life. The first is "work," the second is "God," the
third is "love." You have noticed in that picture the sense of
companionship, brought out by the young man and the young woman. It matters
not whether they are brother and sister or lover and lover. There you have
the idea of friendship, the final ingredient in our lives. If the man had
been standing in that field alone, the scene would be almost weary. If
the woman had been standing alone it would have been sentimental. You can
carry much away from this Conference; but we can all carry away with us
some enrichment of our human friendship, and that will complete our life,
because no life is complete unless it has that additional element in it.
That, after all, is the divine element in life, because God is love and
because he that loveth is born of God. Therefore, gentlemen, after we leave
one another, let us keep our friendships in repair, as some one says. They
are worth while spending time on and keeping them up, because they constitute
a large part of our life. I need not say that we must cultivate this spirit
of friendship and let it grow into a great love not only for our friends,
but for all humanity. Some of you are going into the mission field. Your
mission field will be a failure unless you cultivate this element. Two
years ago I was wandering about the coral islands of the Pacific, and I
came to one island far remote from human gaze, inhabited solely by cannibals.
At one end of the island was a missionary and his wife. At the other end
of the island was another missionary and his wife. They never heard from
other parts of the world for six months. You would suppose they would see
each other every day, but they were not on loving terms. They were not
on speaking terms. They were on war terms. One had actually assaulted the
other. What was the trouble about? It was a quarrel over the word in the
native language they should use for "God" in their translation
of the New Testament. They needed and lacked charity, tenderness, tolerance,
patience.
So these three things--work, God, love--form
a complete life. If your life is not comfortable, if you are ill at ease,
ask yourself if you are not lacking in one or other of these three things,
and pray for them and work for them.