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And what is the crown of the whole of life lived faithfully here? It is not a crown of gold or gems in another life; it is simply more life; a broader use of power, a healthier capacity, a larger usefulness. You are faithful unto death, through the misapprehensions and imperfections and absence of appreciation or gratitude in this preparatory world, and then there is offered to you inevitably and legitimately the crown of a larger, more serviceable, more effective life.



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XXXIX

THE HIDDEN MANNA AND THE WHITE STONE

Revelation ii. 12-17.

Both of these are Jewish symbols. One refers to that food which, as Moses commanded, was kept in the sanctuary and eaten by the priest alone; the other apparently refers to a sacred stone worn by the priest, with an inscription on it known only to him. Both symbols mean to teach that the Christian believer has an immediate and personal intimacy with God. There is no sacerdotal intermediation for him. He can go straight to the altar and take of the sacred bread. He wears on his own breast the mark of God's communication. It is the doctrine of the universal priesthood of believers; the highest promise to a faithful church. But on this white stone, the message says, there is a name written which no man knoweth save he that receiveth it. How quickly that goes home to many a faithful life. Hidden from all that can be read by {97} others is the writing which one bears upon his own breast, legible only to himself and to his God. Think how hardly and carelessly people try to judge one's life, to read its characteristics of strength or weakness. Think how we all thus deal in hasty judgment, stamping our neighbors as jovial or moody, generous or selfish, as kind or stern, as sinner or saint; while all the time, deeper than any interpretation of ours can reach, there is the central sanctuary of the man's own soul, where is worn against his breast the real title which to his own consciousness he bears, and which may quite contradict all external judgments. What is written on that interior life? What is that name you bear which no man knoweth save you;—that life of yourself which is hidden with Christ in God? That is the most solemn question which any man can ask himself as he bends to say his silent prayer.

Is it just your own name, the badge of selfishness; or is it some vow of irresponsibility,—Am I my brother's keeper?—or is it just a sheer blank white stone, marking a life without intention or character at all? Or is there perhaps written there the pure {98} demand to be of use?—"For their sakes I sanctify myself;"—or is there written on your heart the name of God, or of his Christ, so that this interior maxim reads: "I live, yet not I, but Christ that liveth in me"?



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XL

THE MORNING STAR

Revelation ii. 18-28.

The morning star is the symbol of promise, the sign that the dawn is not far away. Thyatira was a little place, with a weak church, with small hopes and great discouragements, much troubled by the work of a false prophetess, tempted by "the deep things of Satan," as the message says, and yet to it the promise is committed, that it shall have authority over the nations, and receive "the morning star." It was the same great promise that had been already given to the early Christians: "Fear not, little flock, for it is my Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom." It was the same amazing optimism which made Jesus look about him, as he stood with a dozen humble followers, and say: "Lift up your eyes and look at the fields, they are white already to my harvest."

There is certainly passing over the world in our day a great wave of intellectual and {100} spiritual discouragement and despondency. What with philosophical pessimism and social agitations and literary decadence and political corruption and moral looseness, a great many persons are beginning to feel that the end of the century is an end of faith, and are not able to discern in the darkness of the time any morning star. As one distinguished author has said: "This is not a time of the eclipse of faith, but a time of the collapse of faith." It was much the same in the times of Thyatira. There was the same luxury and self-indulgence in the Roman world, the same social restlessness, the same intellectual despondency. Now, who is it that can view these perturbations of the world with a tranquil and rational hope? I answer, that it is only he who views his own time in the light of the eternal purposes of God. The religious man is bound to be an optimist, not with the foolish optimism which blinks the facts of life; but with the sober optimism which believes that—

"Step by step, since time began, We see the steady gain of man."

It may be dark as pitch in the world of speculative thought, but religion discerns the {101} morning star. It believes in its own time. It believes that somehow "good will be the final goal of ill." Even in the perplexities and disasters of its own experience it is not overwhelmed. It is cast down, but not destroyed. It is saved by hope. It lifts its eyes and beholds through the clouds the gleam of the morning star.



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XLI

LIVING AS DEAD

Revelation iii. 1.

Was there ever a message of sterner irony than this to the Church of Sardis: "Thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead"! We may suppose that it was a church of apparent prosperity, with all the machinery of church life, its ritual, and officers, and committees, all in working order; and yet, when one got at the heart of it, there was no vitality. It was a dead church. It could show—as the passage says—no works fulfilled before God. It was like a tree which seems all vigorous, but which, when one thrusts into the heart of it, proves to be pervaded by dry-rot. There are plenty of such churches still,—churches which have a name that they are living, but are dead. They are counted in the denominational year-book; they go through the motions of life; but where is their quickening, communicating, vitalizing power? What are they but mechanical, formal, institutional things, and how sudden sometimes, like {103} the falling of a dead tree, is the collapse of a dead church!

There is the same story to tell of some people. They have a name that they are living, but they are practically dead. For what is it, according to the New Testament, which makes one live, and when is it that one comes to die? "To be carnally minded," answers St. Paul, "is death, and to be spiritually minded is life." "He that heareth my sayings," answers Jesus, "hath passed from death into life." What a wonderful word is that! It is not a promise that the true Christian shall some day, when his body dies, pass into an eternal life. It is an announcement that when one enters into the spirit of Christ he passes, now, in this present world, from all that can be fairly called death, into all that can be rationally called life. Under this New Testament definition, then, a man may suppose himself to be alive and healthy, when he is really sick, dying, dead. A man may perhaps, as he says, see life, while he may be really seeing nothing but death. Or a man may be, as we say, dying, and be, in the New Testament sense, full of an abundant and transfiguring life.

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And so it becomes an entirely practical question, which one may ask himself any morning, "Am I alive to-day, or am I dead? Is it only that I have the name of living, a sort of directory-existence, a page in the college records, a place in the list of my class, while in fact there is dry-rot in my soul? Or is there any movement of the life of God in me, of quickening and refreshing life, of generous activity and transmissive vitality? Then death is swallowed up in victory, and I am partaking even in this present world of the life that does not die."



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XLII

THE OPEN DOOR

Revelation iii. 8.

A few years ago, at the first service of the college year, one of our preachers took for his text this message to the church at Philadelphia: "Behold, I have set before thee an open door;" and it has always seemed to me to represent with precision the spirit of our worship here. We have abandoned the principle of compulsion. We do not force young men of twenty to come here and say their prayers. We simply set before them an open door. The privilege of worship is permitted to them from day to day, and religion stands among us, not as a part of college discipline, but as the supreme privilege of a manly human soul. Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely. Indeed, this same text represents the spirit of our whole university life. What we call the elective system is a method of invitation and persuasion. It multiplies opportunities. It does not compel the allegiance of the indifferent. He that is lazy, let him be lazy still. {106} The university sets before the mind of youth its open door.

And this, indeed, is what one asks of life. What should a free state in this modern world guarantee to all its citizens? Not that equality of condition for which many in our days plead, the dead level of insured and effortless comfort, but equality of opportunity, a free and fair chance for every man to be and to do his best. That land is best governed where the door of opportunity stands wide open to the humblest of its citizens, so that no man can shut it.

And what is the relation of religion to the life of man, if it be not of this same enlarging and emancipating kind? Here we are, all shut in by our routine of business and study and preoccupation, and religion simply opens the door outward from this narrowness of life into a larger and a purer world. It is as if you were bending some evening over your books in the exhausted air of your little room, and as if you should rise from your task, and pass out into the night, and the open door should deliver you from your weariness and your self-absorption, as you stood in the serene companionship of the infinite heavens and the myriad of stars.



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XLIII

BEHOLD, I STAND AT THE DOOR AND KNOCK

Revelation iii. 20.

To the church at Philadelphia it was promised that the door should be opened; but here was a church at Laodicea which had deliberately shut its door on the higher life. It was a church that was neither cold nor hot, a lukewarm, indifferent, spiritless people, and to such a people, willfully barring out the revelations of God, comes the Christ in this wonderful figure, standing at the door like a weary traveller, asking to be let in. Such a picture just reverses the common view which one is apt to take of the religious life. We commonly think of truth as hiding itself within its closed door and of ourselves as trying to get in to it. We speak of finding Christ, or proving God, or getting religion, as if all these things were mysteries to be explored, hidden behind doors which must be unlocked; as if, in the relation between man and God, man did all the searching, and God was a hidden God.

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But the fundamental fact of the religious life is this,—that the power and love of God are seeking man; that before we love Him, He loves us; that before we know Him, He knows us; that antecedent to our recognition of Him must be our receptivity of Him. Coleridge said that he believed in the Bible because it found him. It is for the same reason that man believes in God. God finds him. It is not the sheep which go looking for the shepherd, it is the shepherd who finds the sheep, and when they hear his voice, they follow him.

This is not contrary to nature. The same principle is to be noticed in regard to all truth. Take, for instance, any scientific discovery of a physical force, like that which we call the force of electricity. There is nothing new about this wonderful power. It has always been about us, playing through the sky, and inviting the mind of man. Then, some day, a few men open their minds to the significance of this force, and appreciate how it may be applied to the common uses of life. That is what we call a discovery; it is the opening of the door of the mind; and one of the most impressive things about science to-day is to {109} consider how many other secrets of the universe are at this moment knocking at our doors, and waiting to be let in; and to perceive how senseless and unreceptive we must seem to an omniscient mind, when so much truth, standing near us, is beaten back from our closed minds and wills. It is the same with religious truth. Here are our lives, shut in, limited, self-absorbed; and here are the messages of God, knocking at our door; and between the two only one barrier, the barrier of our own wills. Religious education is simply the opening of the door of the heart. A Christian discipleship is simply that alertness and receptivity which hears the knocking and welcomes the Spirit which says: "If any man will but open the door, I will come in to him, and sup with him, and he with me."



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XLIV

HE THAT OVERCOMETH

Revelation xxi. 7.

In each one of these letters to the churches there is repeated like a refrain, a sort of motif which announces the character of all,—this final phrase: "He that overcometh." He is to receive the promise, he is to inherit these things, he is to be the stone in the temple of God. The reward and blessing are to be not for the shirks or runaways or easy-going of the world, but for those who, taking life just as it is with all its hardness, overcome it. It is the manly summons from the soft theory of life to the principle which one may call that of progress through overcoming resistance.

A great many lives are spoiled by the soft theory of life. They expect to get out of life a comfort which is not in it to give. They go about looking, so to speak, for a "soft course" in the curriculum of life, hoping to enroll in it and be free from trouble. They ask of their religion that it shall make life easy and safe and clear. But the trouble is {111} that the elective pamphlet of life does not announce a single soft course. The people who try thus to live are simply courting disaster and despair. Some day, perhaps in some tragic moment, every man has to learn that life is not an easy thing, but that it is at times fearfully and solemnly hard. Nothing is more plainly written on the facts of life than this,—that life was meant to be hard. Trouble and disaster, and the inevitable blows of experience, are absolutely certain to teach this truth sooner or later, and the sooner one learns it the better for his soul. And if life was not meant to be easy, what was it meant for? It was meant to be overcome. It stands before one like the friction of the world of nature, which is always seeming to retard one's motion, but which makes really the only condition under which we move at all. If there is to be any motion through life, then it must be by overcoming its friction. If life was meant just to stand still, then it might stagnate in a soft place; but life was meant to move, and the only way of motion is by overcoming friction, and the hardness of the world becomes the very condition of spiritual progress. What we call the rub of life is {112} then what makes living possible. What we call the burdens of life are the discipline of its power. Not to him who meets no resistance, nor to him whose shoulder is chafed by no cross, but to him who overcometh is the promise given that God will be his God, and that he shall be God's son.



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XLV

THE PRODIGALITY OF PROVIDENCE

Matthew xiii. 1-9.

I wish to dwell for several mornings on this parable of the sower, and for to-day I call attention to the air of prodigality which pervades this story. There seems to be an immense amount of seed wasted. Some of it falls on the roadway; some of it is snatched away by the birds; some of it is caught among the bushes. Yet the sower proceeds in no niggardly fashion. He strides away across the field scattering the seed broadcast, far beyond the border where he expects a crop, for he knows that, though much shall be wasted, whatever seed may fall on good ground will have miraculous increase. There may be prodigality of waste, but there shall be prodigality of reproduction. If but one seed in thirty takes root in good soil it may produce thirty or sixty or a hundred fold.

Such is the prodigality of Providence. And it comes close to many experiences, and {114} interprets many perplexities of life. A man goes his way through life scattering his efforts, distributing his energy, doing his work as broadly and generously as he can, and some day he notices what a very large proportion of all that he does comes to nothing. Much of the soil where he sows seems hard and barren, and he might as well be trying to raise wheat on a stone pavement. It seems to be simply effort thrown away. But then some other day this man makes this other discovery,—that some very slight effort or endeavor or sacrifice or word has been infinitely more fruitful than he could have dreamed. It was an insignificant thing which he did, but it happened to fall at the right time in the right place, and he is almost startled at its productiveness.

And so he takes his lesson from the prodigality of Providence. Of course it will happen that the great proportion of his efforts will come to nothing. Of course he is to be misjudged and ineffective and barren of results; but if only one word in a hundred falls in the right soil, if only one effort in a hundred touches the right soul, the hundred-fold fruitage brings with it ample {115} compensation. Thus he strides cheerfully over the fields of life with the broad swing of an unthrifty mind, expecting that much of his seed will fall among the thorns and rocks, but with faith that the harvest—even if he is not himself permitted to reap it—is yet made safe through his fidelity to that prodigal Providence which miraculously multiplies the little he can do, and makes it bear fruit, sometimes a hundredfold.



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XLVI

THE HARD LIFE

Matthew xiii. 1-9.

Let us look still further at this parable of the sower. There are described in it various kinds of lives on which God's influences fall, and fall in vain. The first of these is the hard life,—hard, like a road, so that the seed lies there as if fallen on a pavement, and gets no root, and the pigeons come and pick it up. We usually think of the hard life as if it were a life of sin. We speak of a hardened sinner, of a hard man, as of persons whom good influences cannot penetrate. But the hard soil of the parable is not that of sin. It is that of a roadway, hardened simply by the passing to and fro. It is the hardening effect of habit. Sometimes, the passage says, your life gets so worn by the coming and going of your daily routine, that you become impenetrable to the subtle suggestions of God, as if your life were paved. Some people are thus hardened even to good. They lose capacity for impressions. {117} Some people are even gospel-hardened. They have heard so much talk about religion that it runs off the pavement of their lives into the gutter. Thus the first demand of the sower is for receptivity, for openness of mind, for responsiveness. Give God a chance, says the parable. His seed gets no fair opportunity in a life which is like a trafficking high-road. Keep the soil of life soft, its sympathy tender, its imagination free, or else you lose the elementary quality of receptiveness, and all the influences of God may be scattered over you in vain.



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XLVII

THE THIN LIFE

Matthew xiii. 1-9.

The first thing which hinders God's seed from taking root is, as we have seen, hardness,—the life which is trodden down like a road; an impenetrability of nature, which is not a trait of sinners only, but of many privileged souls. The second sort of unfruitful soil is just the opposite of this. It is not the unreceptive, but the impulsively receptive life. It is not too hard, or too soft, but it is too thin. It is a superficial soil which has no depth of earth, and so with joy it receives the word; but the seed has no depth of earth and quickly withers away. This sort of soil receives quickly and as quickly lets go. It is like that unstable man of whom St. James writes and who is like the wave of the sea, driven with the wind and tossed. We see the wave come flashing up out of the general level, catching the sunshine as it leaps and crowned with its spray, and then we look again for it, and where is {119} it? It has sunk again into the undistinguishable level of the sea.

Thus the parable turns to this instability and says: "It is bad to be hard, but it is bad also to be thin." When tribulation or persecution arises, something more than impulsiveness is needed to give a root to life. How strongly and serenely Newman writes of this:—

"Prune thou thy words, the thoughts control That o'er thee swell and throng; They will condense within thy soul And turn to purpose strong. But he who lets his feelings run In soft luxurious flow, Faints when hard service must be done, And shrinks at every blow."



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XLVIII

THE CROWDED LIFE

Matthew xiii. 1-9.

In the parable of the sower the third kind of soil is one which is very common in modern life. The first soil was too hard, and the second too thin, and now the third is too full. It is overgrown and preoccupied. Other things choke the seed. There is not room for the harvest. The influences of God are simply crowded out. And of what is life thus so full? Of two things, answers the parable. For some it is full of the cares of this world, and for some it is full of the deceitfulness of riches. Care is the weed that chokes plain people, and money is the weed that chokes rich people. Sometimes a poor man wonders how a rich man feels. Well, he feels about his money just as a poor man does about his cares. His wealth preoccupies him. It is a great responsibility. It takes a great deal of time. It crowds out many things he would like to do. The poor man says that {121} money would free him from care, but the rich man finds that money itself increases care. Thus they are both choked by lack of leisure, one by the demands of routine, and one by the burdens of responsibility. And this parable says to both these types of life: "Keep room for God." It comes to the scholar and says: "In this busy place reserve time to think and feel; do not let your cares choke your soul." And then it goes out to the great scrambling, money-getting world, and sees many a man hard at work in what he calls his field, watching for things grow in his life, and finding some day that he has been deceived in his crop. He thought it was to come up grain and it turns out to be weeds. He sowed money and expected a harvest of peace; and behold! he only reaps more money. That is the deceitfulness of riches.



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XLIX

THE PATIENCE OF NATURE

Matthew xiii.; Mark iv. 27.

The parable of the sower, which begins with its solemn warnings against the hard life, the thin life, and the crowded life, ends with a note of wholesome hope. Who are they who bring forth fruit in abundance? They are, the parable says, not great and exceptional people. The conditions are such as any life can fulfil. It is an honest and good heart which hears the word and keeps it and is fruitful. Nothing but sincerity and receptivity is demanded. A plain soil is productive enough. God only needs a fair chance. He only asks that life shall not be too hard, or too thin, or too crowded.

This is a saying of great comfort to plain people. And yet, even for these, one last demand is added,—the demand for patience. If fruit is to be brought forth it must be "with patience." The autumn comes, but not all at once. Jesus is always recalling to us the gradualness of nature; first the blade, {123} then the ear, then the full corn. Nothing in nature is in a hurry. It is not a movement of catastrophes, it is a movement of evolution. And so the last word of the parable is to the impetuous. What a hurry we are in for our results. We look about us among the social agitations of the day and demand a panacea; but God is not in a hurry. Delay, uncertainty, doubt, are a part of Christian experience. It brings forth its fruit with patience. It is like these lingering days of spring, when one can discern no intimation of the quickening life; and yet one knows that through the brown branches the sap is running, and slowly with hesitating advance the world is moving to the miracle of the spring.



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L

THE DISTRIBUTION OF TALENTS

Matthew xxv. 14-30.

The parable of the talents takes up the side of life which is not emphasized in the parable of the sower. In the story of the sower God is doing the work and man is receptive of his influence. In the story of the talents God is a master who leaves his servants to do his work, and the parable is one of activity. These men are responsible agents. Life is a trust. That is the natural teaching of the parable. All these men are accountable; there has been given to them that which is not their own, a trust from God, to be used in his service. But then enters the extraordinary teaching of this parable as to the fact of diversity. We talk of men as created free and equal. The cry of the time is for equality of condition, for leveling down the rich, and leveling up the poor; for paying the genius and the hod-carrier alike; time for time, and man for man. But this parable stands for no such definition of {125} equality. It recognizes diversity. Some have many talents and some have few. To each is given "according to his several ability." Diversity of condition is accepted as a natural feature of human life, just as the hills and valleys make up the landscape. The parable does not make of life a prairie.

Where then, in this diversified life, is justice, the social justice which men in our time so eagerly and so reasonably claim? There is no justice, answers the parable, if the end of life is to be found in getting the prizes of this world; for some are sure to get more than others. The justice of this diversity is found only in its relation to God. It is in the proportional responsibility of these holders of different gifts. Of those to whom much has been entrusted much will be required; of those who are slightly gifted the judgment will be according to the gift. There is no absolute standard. The judgment is proportional. One man may accomplish less than another, and yet be more highly rewarded, for he may do the less conspicuous duty laid on him better than the man with the larger trust does his. The parable humbles the privileged and encourages the disheartened. {126} There is no distinction of reward between the five-talent man and the two-talent man. Each has done his own duty with his own gifts, and to each precisely the same language of commendation is addressed. They have had proportional responsibility, and they have identical reward. Both have been faithful, and both enter into the same joy of their Lord.



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LI

THE LAW OF INCREASING RETURNS

Matthew xxv. 14-30.

The parable of the talents adds to its doctrine of responsibility a second teaching. It is its doctrine of interest; the return to be looked for from investment in the spiritual life. The economists have a law which they call the law of diminishing returns; but Jesus calls attention to the converse of that principle,—the law of increasing and accelerated returns. We see this principle on a great scale in the world of money. Money has a self-propagating quality. It breeds money. If you should ask a very rich man how he accumulated his fortune he would tell you that the first savings involved great thrift and wisdom or great good luck, but that after a while his wealth flowed in upon him almost in spite of himself. He began to get money, and the more he got the more easily he got more. Now this law, says Jesus, which is so obvious in the business world, is true in a much deeper way of the {128} spiritual life. Knowledge, power, faith, all grow by investment. Use of the little makes it much; hoarding what you have leaves it unfruitful. Do you want to know more? Well, put what you now know to use. Invest it, and as you seem to spend it, it increases, and you have found the way to the riches of wisdom. Do you want faith? Well, use what faith you have. Try the working hypothesis of living by faith. Our ancestors in New England trading used to send out on their ships what they called a "venture." They took the risks of business. There is a similar venture of faith, which says: "Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief." He who sends the venture of his faith over the ocean of his life may look for a rich cargo in return. To the faithful in the few things the many things are revealed. That is the law of increasing returns.



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LII

THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF WEALTH

Matthew xxv. 14-30.

In the parable of the talents the use of money is of course only an illustration of spiritual truth. Yet the story has its obvious lessons about the uses of money itself. The five-talent man is the rich man; and his way of service makes the Christian doctrine of wealth. And, first of all, the parable evidently permits wealth to exist. It does not prohibit accumulation. Jesus is not a social leveler. His words are full of tenderness to the poor, but when a certain rich young man came to him, Jesus loved him also; and when one man asked him, saying: "Master, speak to my brother that he divide the inheritance with me," Jesus disclaimed the office of a social agitator, saying: "Man, who made me a judge or a divider over you." Thus Jesus cannot be claimed for any pet scheme which one may have of the distribution of wealth. But let not the Christian {130} think that on this account the Christian theory of wealth is less sweeping or radical than some modern programme. The fact is that it asks more of a man, be he rich or poor, than any modern agitator dares to propose. For it demands not a part of one's possessions as the property of others, but the whole of them. The Christian holds all his talents as a trust. There is in the Christian belief no absolute ownership of property. A man has no justification in saying: "May I not do what I will with mine own?" He does not own his wealth; he owes it. The Christian principle does not divide the rich from the poor; it divides the faithful use of whatever one has from its unfaithful use. Wealth is a fund of five talents of which one is the trusted agent; and to some five-talent men who have been faithful in their grave responsibilities, the word of Jesus would be given to-day as gladly as to any poor man: "Well done, faithful servant, enter into the joy of thy Lord."



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LIII

THE AVERAGE MAN[1]

Matthew xxv. 22.

In the parable of the talents the man that gets least general attention is the man that stands in the middle. The five-talent man gets distinction, and the one-talent man gets rebuke, but the two-talent man, the man with ordinary gifts and ordinary returns from them, seems to be an unexciting character. And yet this is the man of the majority, the average man, the man most like ourselves,—not very bad, and not very remarkable. As has been said: "God must have a special fondness for average people, for He has made so many of them." Now, the average man stands in special need of encouragement. One of the most serious moments of life is when a man discovers that he is this sort of man. It comes over most of us some day that we are not going {132} to do anything extraordinary; that we are never likely to shine; that we are simply people of the crowd. Nothing seems to take the ambition and enthusiasm out of one more than this recognition of oneself as an average man. Then comes Jesus with his word of courage. "Your work," he says, "is just as significant, and rewarded with precisely the same commendation as the work of the five-talent man." The same "Well done" is spoken to both, and it may be that the more heroic qualities are in the man with fewer gifts. To make great gifts effective may be easy, but to take common gifts and make them yield their best returns—that is what helps us all. There is not a more inspiring sight in life than to see a man start with ordinary capacity and to see his power grow out of his consecration. Looking back on life from middle age, that would be the story one would tell of many a success. One sees five-talent men fail and two-talent men take their place; average gifts persistently used yielding rich returns, and the promise of usefulness lying, not in abundant endowments of nature, but in the using to the utmost what moderate capacities one has soberly accepted as trusts from God.



[1] Read also, on this and the following subject, the kindling sermons of Phillips Brooks: "The Man with Two Talents," vol. iv. p. 192; "The Man with One Talent," vol. i. p. 138.



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LIV

THE OVERCOMING OF INSIGNIFICANCE

Matthew xxv. 24.

The parable of the talents was specially given to teach Christians not to be discouraged because Christ's kingdom was delayed. The one-talent man is its real object, and the lessons of larger endowment are only by the way. The one-talent man is not the bad man, for to him also God gives a trust, but this man is given so little to do that he thinks it not worth while to do anything. He is not the many-gifted five-talent man, or even the average two-talent man, but he is simply the man of no account. The risk of the five-talent man is his conceit; the risk of the two-talent man is his envy; the risk of the one-talent man is his hopelessness. Why should this insignificant bubble on the great stream of life inflate itself with self-importance? Why should it not just drift along with the current and be lost in the first rapids of the stream? Now Christ's first appeal to this sense of insignificance is {134} this,—that in the sight of God there is no such thing as an insignificant life. Taken by itself, looked at in its own independent personality, many a life is insignificant enough. But when we look at life religiously and recognize that it is a trusted agent of God, then the doctrine of the trust redeems it from insignificance. You have not much, but what you have is essential to the whole. The lighthouse-keeper on his rock sits in his solitude and watches his little flame. Why does he not let it die away as other lights in the distance die when the night comes on? Because it is not his light. He is its keeper, not its owner. The great Power that watches that stormy coast has set him there, and he must be true. The insignificant service becomes full of dignity and importance when it is accepted as a post of honor and trust. So the unimportant life gets its significance not by its own dimensions, but by its place in God's great order, and the most wretched moment of one's life must be when he discovers that he has been trusted by God to do even a little part and has thrown his chance away. The one-talent man thought his trust not worth investing, and behold, the account of it was called for with the rest. He {135} had in his hands a trust from God and had wasted it, and there was nothing left for him but the weeping of regret and the gnashing of teeth of indignant self-reproach.



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LV

CAPACITY EXTIRPATED BY DISUSE

Matthew xxv. 29.

The parable of the talents begins with its splendid encouragement to those who have done their best, but it ends with a solemn warning and with the stern announcement of a universal law. It is this,—that from him who does not use his powers there is taken away even the power that he has. The gift is lost by the lack of exercise, or as Horace Bushnell stated the principle, the "capacity is extirpated by disuse."

This principle has manifold illustrations. The hand or muscle disused withers in power. The fishes of the Mammoth Cave, having no use for their eyes, lose them. Mr. Darwin in an impressive passage of his biography testifies that he began life with a taste for poetry and music, but that by disuse this aesthetic taste grew atrophied so that at last he did not care to read a poem or to hear a musical note. So it is, says Jesus, with spiritual insight and power. Sometimes we see a man of intellectual {137} gifts lose his grasp on spiritual realities, and we ask: "How is it that so learned a man can find little in these things? Does not he testify that these things are illusions?" Not at all. It is simply that he has not kept his life trained on that side. His capacity has been extirpated by disuse. He may know much of science or language, but he has lost his ideals. We hear a young man sometimes say that he has grown soft by lack of exercise. Well, if you live a few years you will see people who have grown soft in soul, and you will see some great blow of fate smite them and crush them because their spiritual muscle is flabby and weak. Ignatius Loyola laid down for his followers certain methods of prayer which he called "Spiritual Exercises." So in one sense they were. They kept souls in training. The exercise of the religious nature is the gymnastics of the soul, and the disuse of the religious nature extirpates its capacity. That is the solemn ending of the parable of the talents. From him who does not use his power there is taken away even the power that he hath.



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LVI

THE PARABLE OF THE VACUUM

Matthew xii. 38-45.

It is easy to see where the emphasis of this parable lies. It is on the impossible emptiness of this man's house. A man casts out the devil of his life and turns the key on his empty soul and feels safe. But he cannot thus find safety. That is not the way to deal with evil spirits. Back they come, crowding into his life through the windows if not through the doors, and the last state of that man is worse than the first. If the parable had been told in modern times it might have been called the parable of the vacuum. A man's life is a space which refuses to be empty. If it is not tenanted by good the evil knocks and enters it. There is no such thing as an unoccupied life. Nature abhors a vacuum.

Here is one of the most common mistakes of human experience. A man often thinks that the less occupied his life is the safer it is. He casts out his passions, he denies his {139} desires, he abandons his ambitions, and so seeks safety. But his life is attacked by new perils. The lusts and conceits of life cannot be barred out of life; they must be crowded out. The old passion must be supplanted by a new and better one. The very same qualities which go to make a great sinner are needed to make a true saint. A man's soul is not safe when the vigor and force are taken out of it. It is safe only when the same passion which once threatened ruin is converted to generous service; and the same physical life that seemed an enemy of the soul has become the instrument of the soul. The saved life is not the empty life, but the full life. Jesus comes not to destroy men's natures, but to fill their capacities full of better aims. The only way to overcome evil is to have the life preoccupied by good.



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LVII

CHRISTIANITY AND BUSINESS

Luke xvi. 1-12.

This is a difficult parable. There is a quality of daring about it which at first sight perplexes many people. It is the story of a steward who cheats his master, and of debtors who are in collusion with the fraud, and of a master praising his servant even while he punishes him, as though he said: "Well, at least you are a shrewd and clever fellow." It uses, that is to say, the bad people to teach a lesson to the good, and one might fancy that it praises the bad people at the expense of the good. But this is not its intention. It simply goes its way into the midst of a group of people who are cheating and defrauding each other and says: "Even such people as these have something to teach to the children of light."

I once heard of a father whose son was sentenced to the Concord Reformatory for burglary. The father stood by the bars of the cell and heard the boy's story, and then {141} with tears in his eyes he turned to the jailer and said: "It is a terrible sorrow to have one's boy thus disgraced, but"—and his face brightened a little—"after all he was monstrous plucky." So Jesus, out of the heart of this petty group of persons snatches a lesson for Christians. It is this: "Why should not the children of light be as sagacious as these rascals were? Why should pious people be so stupid?" Jesus looks on to the needs that must occur in his religion for sagacity, prudence, discretion, and the perils that will come to it from sentimentalism, mysticism, silliness, and he asks: "Why is it that the children of this world are so much shrewder than the children of light?"

How closely his question comes to the needs of our own time! Why is it that in our moral agitations and reforms the bad people seem so much cleverer than the good ones; that political self-seeking gets the better of unselfish statesmanship; that the liquor dealers defeat the temperance people; that competition in business is so often cleverer than cooeperation in business? What does Christianity need to-day so much as wisdom? It has soft-heartedness, but it lacks {142} hard-headedness. It has sweetness, but it lacks light. It has sentiment, but it needs sense. How often a man of affairs is tempted to feel a certain contempt for the Church of Christ, when he turns from the intensely real issues of his week-day world to the abstractness and unreality of religious questions! How fictitious, how unbusiness-like, how preposterous in the sight of God is this internecine sectarianism and impotent sentimentalism where there might be the triumphant march of one army under one flag! Let us learn the lesson which even the grasping, unscrupulous world has to teach,—the lesson of an absorbed and disciplined mind giving its entire sagacity to the chief business of life.



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LVIII

MAKING FRIENDS OF MAMMON

Luke xvi. 1-10.

Mammon means money, and the purpose of this parable is to teach Christians their relations to that world of which Mammon is the centre,—the world of business interests and cares. Jesus says that this world is neither very good nor very bad. It is simply unrighteous. It has no specific moral quality about it. He says further that you cannot serve this world of Mammon and serve God also. You must choose. What then can you do in your relation to Mammon? You can do one of three things. You may, first, make an enemy of Mammon; or secondly, make a master of Mammon, or thirdly, make a friend of Mammon. Many people in Christian history have made an enemy of Mammon. They have regarded the world of business as a godless world which should be shunned. They have run away from it to the ascetic, unworldly life. That is the spirit of the whole monastic retreat from the battle of {144} practical life,—a reaction full of the beauty of self-denial, but still a retreat. The battle of life has to go on, and the best troops have run away. On the other hand, a great many persons have made a master of Mammon. They are simply the slaves of money. That is the vulgar materialism of the modern world. But Jesus says that neither of these attitudes towards Mammon is the Christian relation. The Christian is to make a friend of Mammon; to welcome it, and to use it, to discover the good in it and learn its lessons; to mould it into the higher uses of life. Here is a potter working in his clay. It is a coarse material which he uses and his hands grow soiled as he works; but it is not for him to reject it because it is not clean, but for him to work out through it the shapes of beauty which are possible within the limits of the clay. Just such a material is the modern world. It is not very clean and not very beautiful; but the problem of life is to mould out of its uncleanness the shapes of beauty which it contains. To run away from life—that is easy enough; to yield to its evil—that is still easier; but to be in the world and to mould it—that is the {145} real problem of the Christian life. And here is the real test of Christian character. The saints of the past have been for the most part men who fled from the world, but the saint of to-day is the man who can use the world. He is the man of business who amid looseness of standards keeps himself clean. He is the youth in college who without the least retreat from its influences moulds them to good. He is not the runaway from the world of Mammon, nor yet its slave; he makes a friend of Mammon for the service of God.



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LIX

COMING TO ONE'S SELF

Luke xv. 17.

When he came to himself he said: "I will arise and go to my father." This is one of those gospel sentences which contains within itself a whole system of theology, a doctrine of man and of God and of the relation of the one to the other. He came to himself. It was not then himself that had gone away into a far country. It was an unreal, fictitious self. He had been insane, beside himself, and now, as his better life starts up in him, he comes to himself. As his father said of him, he had been dead and was alive again. The renewal of the good self in him was the resurrection of his true personality.

How deep that goes into one's doctrine of human nature! Never believe that the sinning self is the true self. Your real personality is the potential good in you. The moment that good springs into life you have a right to say: "Now I know what I was {147} made for. I have come to life. I have discovered myself." And then there is the religious aspect of this same self-discovery. No sooner does this boy come to himself than he says, "I will arise and go to my father." The religious need follows at once from the self-awakening. Nay, was not the religious need the source of the self-awakening? What was it that brought him to himself but just the homesickness of the child for his father's house? His self-discovery was but the answer of his soul to the continuous love of God. Before he ever came to himself the father was waiting for him. Antecedent to the ethical return was the religious quickening. That is the relation of religion to conduct. You make your resolutions, but it is God that prompts them. Your self-discovery is the drawing of the Father. Your true self is his son. How natural it all is,—an infinite law of love at the heart of the universe—that is the centre of theology; a world that permits moral alienation through the free will of man,—that is the problem of philosophy; he came to himself,—that is the heart of ethics; I will go to my Father,—that is the soul of religion.



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LX

POPULARITY

Luke xix. 37-43; Matthew xxi. 17-23.

(PASSION WEEK—MONDAY)

The ministry of Jesus is as a whole not easy to arrange in any fixed chronology. The order of events seems often to vary in the different gospels, and sometimes these unstudied narratives seem in positive conflict. But as the story draws to its close the paths of narrative begin to converge, and as we approach the last days and enter on the last week the incidents of each day become perfectly distinct, and one can trace the life of Jesus as it moves on from his triumph of Palm Sunday to his tragedy of the cross. As we enter then to-day on the anniversary of the last week of the life of Jesus, the week before Easter Sunday, let us glance at some of the hurrying events. And for today consider the contrast which presents itself between the entrance of Jesus at Jerusalem on Sunday morning, and his return to the city by the same road on this Monday {149} morning of his last week. Yesterday he came over the brow of the Mount of Olives, surrounded by an enthusiastic throng, the centre of their popularity. To-day he comes along the same road, unattended and alone, the crowd slinking away from him, his popularity gone. And how does he bear himself through these shillings of opinion? He simply does not manifest any consciousness of change. He is as undisturbed by neglect as he was yesterday by success. On Sunday, while the people were spreading their branches beneath his feet, he looked across the valley to the city and wept as he looked; and to-day, coming with no popular applause, he enters straight into the city and asserts to its leaders his supreme authority. In the midst of popularity he seems saddened, and in the midst of neglect he seems stirred to a defiant boldness. In short, he is unscathed alike by what seems to be success and what seems to be failure. He goes his way through it all with his eye on that great end which gives him peace amid the throng, and courage amid the solitude.

That is the only way in which one can maintain himself among the shifting currents {150} of popularity. It comes and goes like a tide. The man who tries to lean on it is simply swept by the rising tide into self-conceit, and then stranded by the ebb of that same tide on the flats of despair. Popularity is as fickle as the April winds, and one can trust it as little as he dare trust the New England climate. It is only he who can be wholly self-controlled amid the triumphs of his Palm Sunday who can move on with equal self-control to the bearing of the cross with which that same week may close.



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LXI

TWO QUESTIONS ABOUT CHRISTIANITY

Luke xx. 19-38.

(PASSION WEEK—TUESDAY)

The Sunday of the last week of Jesus was all triumph, the Monday was all neglect, the Tuesday was all controversy. He returns once more from Bethany to the city, and he finds the opposition at its height. At once he is set upon by two kinds of people and asked two kinds of questions as to his mission and aim. One question was political, or as we now are saying sociological. What did he think about taxation? What was his attitude toward the government? Was he encouraging social revolt? Was he an anarchist or a socialist? The other question was theological. What did he think about the future life? How would marriage be arranged in heaven? Was his theology orthodox? All this must have seemed to Jesus malicious enough, but I think that the deepest impression he had of such questions {152} must have been of their stupidity. How was it possible that after months of public teaching any one could suppose that such problems were in the line of his intention. Here he was, trying to bring spiritual life among his people,—the life of God to the souls of men,—and here were people still trying to find in him a political schemer or a metaphysical theologian.

Yet there are questions of much this nature still being asked of Jesus. Some honest persons are still insisting that Christ's religion is a system of theology, and some are trying to make of it a course in social science, and neither of them seem to notice that the last day of general teaching which was permitted to him on earth was largely devoted to demonstrating that he was neither a social agitator nor a theological professor. Christianity is not a scheme or arrangement, social or theological, like a railway which men might build either to accelerate the business of life or to take one straight to heaven. Christianity provides that which all such mechanism needs. It is a power, like that electric force which makes the equipment of a railway move. A church is a power-house for the {153} development and the transmission of the power that makes things go. Cut off the power, and the theological creeds and social programmes of the day stand there paralyzed or dead. Communicate to them the dynamic of the Christian life, and the power goes singing over all the wires of life and sets its mechanism in motion, as though it sang upon its way: "I am come that these may have my life, and may have it abundantly."



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LXII

AN UNRECORDED DAY

(PASSION WEEK—WEDNESDAY)

We have traced from day to day the life of Jesus through the earlier days of its last week, its triumph of Sunday, its solitude of Monday, its controversies of Tuesday. On each of these days Jesus has come over the hill from Bethany into the city, and has returned to the village at night. And now we come to the last day before the Passover and the betrayal; the last chance to meet his enemies and to enforce his cause. What then does Jesus do on this last Wednesday of his life? So far as we know, he does nothing at all. It is a day without record. There is no New Testament passage from which I can read about it. He appears to have stayed at Bethany, perhaps with his friends, perhaps for a part of the day alone. His work was done, and he used this last day for quiet withdrawal.

What self-control and reserve are here! How would one of us have been inclined to conduct himself, if he found himself with just {155} one more day for active service? "One more day," he would have said; "then fill it with the best works and the best words; let me stamp my message on my time; let me fulfil the work which was given me to do." But Jesus has no such lust of finishing. He simply commits his spirit to his Father, and awaits the trial and the cross. And perhaps on that unrecorded day his real agony was met, and his real cross borne. Perhaps as he went up on that hillside, which still overlooks the little village of Bethany, and looked at his past and at his future, the real spiritual conquest was attained; for he comes back again to Jerusalem on Thursday morning, not with the demeanor of a martyr but with the air of a conqueror; and when Pilate asks him if he is a king he answers him: "Thou hast said it."

So it is with many a life. It has its great days,—its Palm Sundays of triumphs, its Good Fridays of cross-bearing, and these seem the epochs of its experience; but when one searches for the sources of its strength, they lie—do they not?—in some unrecorded day, as the sources of an abundant river lie hidden in some nook among the hills.



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LXIII

THE ANSWER TO PRAYER

Luke xxii. 39-48.

(PASSION WEEK—THURSDAY)

On Thursday morning of his last week Jesus sends two of his friends before him into Jerusalem to prepare the Passover meal, while he does not himself enter the city until the afternoon. There he meets his friends, and after the supper he takes the bread and wine and with entire naturalness asks them, as they eat and drink, to remember him. Then he talks with them and prays with them, and they go out again on the road toward Bethany; and coming to a little garden at the foot of the hill called the Mount of Olives he bids his companions wait while he goes, as his custom was, to pray.

We hear much discussion about prayer and its possibilities,—what we can pray for and what God can do in return, and what is the true answer to prayer. But what a silence comes over all such questionings when one notices that this prayer of Jesus uttered thus {157} in this most solemn hour was not, in the sense of these discussions, answered by his God. It was the moment of the supreme agony of Christ. The falseness of friends, the blindness of his people, the malice of their leaders,—all these things seem more than he can bear. "Let this cup pass from me," he prays, and, behold, his prayer is not accepted, and what he asks is denied, and the cup is to be drunk. And yet in a far deeper sense his, prayer is answered. "Thy will be done," he prays,—not in spite of me, or over me, but through me. Make me, my Father, the instrument of thy will; and so praying he rises with absolute composure and kingly authority, and goes out with his prayer answered to do that will.

What should we pray for? Why, we should pray for what we most deeply want. There is no sincerity in praying for things which are fictitious or abstract or mere theological blessings. Open to God the realities of your heart and seek the blessings which you sincerely desire. But in all prayers desire most to know the will of God toward you, and to do it. Prayer is not offered to deflect God's will to yours, but to adjust your will to His. When a ship's captain is setting out on a {158} voyage he first of all adjusts his compasses, corrects their divergence, and counteracts the influences which draw the needle from the pole. Well, that is prayer. It is the adjustment of the compass of the soul, it is its restoration from deflection, it is the pointing of it to the will of God. And the soul which thus sails forth into the sea of life finds itself—not indeed freed from all storms of the spirit, but at least sure of its direction through them all.



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LXIV

AN IMPOSSIBLE NEUTRALITY

John xviii. 28-38.

(PASSION DAY—FRIDAY)

The story of Friday in this last week of Jesus begins with this meeting with the Roman governor, and certainly few persons in history would be more surprised than Pilate at the judgment of the world concerning him. If Pilate felt sure of anything it was that he did not commit himself in the case of Jesus. He undertook to be absolutely neutral. See how nicely he poises his judgment. On the one hand he says: "I find no fault in him," and then on the other hand he says: "Take him away and crucify him;" First he washes his hands to show that he is innocent of the blood of this just person, and then he delivers Jesus to the Jews to take him away. It was a fine balancing of a judicial mind, and I suppose he withdrew from the judgment hall saying to himself: "Whatever may happen in this case, at least I am not responsible." But what does history think {160} of this judicial Pilate? It holds him to be a responsible agent in the death of Jesus. He was attempting a neutrality which was impossible. The great wind was blowing across the threshing floor of the nation, and the people were separated into two distinct heaps, and must be counted forever as chaff or as wheat. He that was not with Christ was against him, and Pilate's place, even in spite of himself, was determined as among those who brought Jesus to his cross that afternoon.

I was once talking with a cultivated gentleman who volunteered to tell me his attitude toward religion. He wished me to understand that he was in sympathy with the purposes and the administration of worship. He desired that it should prevail. He welcomed its usefulness in the university. But as for himself it appeared better that he should hold a position of neutrality. His responsibility seemed to him better met by standing neither for religion nor against it, but in a perfectly judicial frame of mind. He did not take account, however, of the fact that this neutrality was impossible; that it was just what Pilate attempted, and just wherein he failed. If he {161} was not to be counted among those who would by their presence encourage worship, then he must be counted among those who by their absence hinder its effect. On one side or other in these great issues of life every man's weight is to be thrown, and the Pilates of to-day—as of that earlier time—in their impossible neutrality are often the most insidious, although most unconscious opponents of a generous cause.

And so to-day on this most solemn anniversary of religious history, while it is, as the passage says of this interview with Pilate, "yet early," let us set before ourselves, the issue just as it is now and just as it was then. This morning demands of any honest-minded man an answer to the question: "On which side do I propose to stand?" It is not a demand for absoluteness of conviction or unwavering loyalty, but it is a summons to recognize that Jesus Christ died on this day largely at the hands of intellectual dilettanteism and indifferentism,—the peculiar and besetting sin of the cultivated and academic life. On which side, then, do I propose to stand; with the cultivated neutral and his skillful {162} questioning: What is truth? or with the prisoner who in this early morning says: "Every one who is of the truth heareth my voice;" with Pilate in his neutrality or with Jesus on his cross?



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LXV

THE FINISHED LIFE

John xix. 30.

(PASSION WEEK—SATURDAY)

The last word of Jesus as he gives up his spirit is: "It is finished." But was it what could be called a finished life? Was it not, on the contrary, a terribly unfinished life, prematurely cut short, without any visible effect of his work, and with everything left to live for? Surely, if some sympathetic friend of Jesus had been telling of his death, one of the first things he would be tempted to say would be this: "What a fearful pity it was that he died so soon! What a loss it was to us all that he left his life unfinished. Think what might have happened if he could only have lived to sixty and had had thirty years for his ministry instead of three!" And yet, as Jesus said, it was a finished life; for completeness in life is not a thing of quantity, but of quality. What seems to be a fragment may be in reality the most perfect thing on earth. You stand in {164} some museum before a Greek statue, imperfect, mutilated, a fragment of what it was meant to be. And yet, as you look at it, you say: "Here is perfect art. It is absolutely right; the ideal which modern art may imitate, but which it never hopes to attain." Or, what again shall we say of those young men of our civil war, dying at twenty-five at the head of their troops, pouring out all the promise of their life in one splendid instant? Did they then die prematurely? Was not their life a finished life? What more could they ever have done with it? Why do we write their names on our monuments so that our young men may read of these heroes, except that they may say to us that life may be completed, if one will, even at twenty? All of life that is worth living is sometimes offered to a man not in a lifetime, but in a day.

And that is what any man must set before him as the test and the plan of his own life. You cannot say to yourself: "I will live until I am seventy, I will accomplish certain things, and will attain a certain position;" for the greatest and oldest of men when they look back on their lives see in them only a fragment of what they once dreamed that they {165} might do or be. But you can design your life, not according to quantitative completeness, but according to qualitative completeness. It may be long or short, but in either case it may be of the right stuff. It may be carved out of pure marble with an artist's hand, and then, whether the whole of it remains to be a thing of beauty or whether it is broken off, like a fragment of its full design, it is a finished life. You give back your life to God who gave it, perhaps in ripe old age, perhaps, as your Master did, at thirty-three, and you say: "I have accomplished, not what I should like to have done, but what Thou hast given me to do. I have done my best. It is finished. Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit."



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LXVI

ATTAINING TO THE RESURRECTION

Philippians iii. 11.

(MONDAY AFTER EASTER)

This is certainly a very extraordinary saying of St. Paul—that he hopes to attain unto the resurrection from the dead. We are so apt to think of the resurrection as a remote truth, to be realized in some distant future, when some day we shall die and live again, that the very idea of attaining to such a resurrection now is not easy to grasp. But here we have a resurrection which can be attained any day. "I have not already attained," says St. Paul, "but I press on." It is possible, that is to say, for a man to-day, who seems perfectly healthy, to be dying or dead, and for a man to rise from the dead to-day and attain to the resurrection.

And thus the fundamental question of the Easter season is not: "Do I believe that people when they die shall rise again from the dead?" but it is "Have I risen from the dead {167} myself?" "Am I alive to-day, with any touch of the eternal life?" Mr. Ruskin describes a grim Scythian custom where, when the king died, he was set on his throne at the head of his table, and his vassals, instead of mourning for him, bowed before his corpse and feasted in his presence. That same ghastly scene is sometimes repeated now, and young men think they are sitting at a feast, when they are really sitting at a funeral, and believe themselves to be, as they say, "seeing life," when they are in reality looking upon the death of all that is true and fair. And on the other hand the most beautiful thing which is permitted for any one to see is the resurrection of a human soul from the dead, its deliverance from shame and sin, its passing from death into life. As the father of the prodigal said of his boy, he was dead and is alive again, and in that coming to his true self he attains, as surely as he ever can in any future world, unto the resurrection from the dead.



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LXVII

SIMON OF CYRENE

Luke xxiii. 20-26.

This Simon, the Cyrenian, was just a plain man, coming into town on his own business, and meeting at the gate this turbulent group surging out toward the place of crucifixion, with the malefactor in their midst. Suddenly Simon finds himself turned about in his own journey, swept back by the crowd with the cross of another man on his shoulder, and the humiliation forced upon him which there seemed no reason for him to bear.

How often that happens in many a life! You are going your own way, carrying your own load, and suddenly you are called on to take up some one else's burden,—a strange cross, a home responsibility, a business duty; and you find yourself turned square round in the road you meant to go. Your plan of life is interrupted by no fault of your own, and you are summoned to bear an undeserved and unexpected cross.

{169}

And yet, how certain it is that this man of Cyrene came to look back on this interruption of his journey as the one thing he would not have missed? When others were remembering the wonderful career of Jesus, how often he must have said: "Yes, but I once had the unapproached privilege of bearing his cross for him. On one golden morning of my life I was permitted to share his suffering. I was called from all my own hopes and plans to take up this burden of another, and I did not let it drop. It seemed a grievous burden, but it has become my crowning joy. I did not know then, but I know now, that my day of humiliation was my day of highest blessedness.

"I think of the Cyrenian Who crossed the city-gate, When forth the stream was pouring That bore thy cruel fate.

* * * *

"I ponder what within him The thoughts that woke that day As his unchosen burden He bore that unsought way.

* * * *

"Yet, tempted he as we are! O Lord, was thy cross mine? Am I, like Simon, bearing A burden that is thine?

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"Thou must have looked on Simon; Turn, Lord, and look on me Till I shall see and follow And bear thy cross for Thee." [1]



[1] Harriet Ware Hall, A Book for Friends, p. 90. (Privately printed.) 1888.



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LXVIII

POWER AND TEMPTATION

Matthew iv. 1-11.

All these temptations of Jesus came to him through the very sense of power of which he could not but be aware. Here was this great consciousness of capacity in him to do wonders, to display himself, to get glory. How should he use his gifts? Should it be for himself, for honor, for praise, or should it be for service, for sacrifice, for God? The devil's temptation was that Jesus should take the gifts of which he was conscious and make them serve his own ends of ambition or success. The first great decision in the work of Jesus Christ was the decision of the end to which his powers should be dedicated; the use to which his powers should be put.

The same fundamental decision comes to every young man in his own degree. Here are your gifts and capacities, great or small. What are you to do with them? Are they for glory or for use? Are they for ambition {172} or for service? The sooner that decision is made the better. Some people have never quite done with that temptation of the devil. They go on trying to direct their gifts to the end of reputation, or wealth, or dominion; and they attain that end only to find that it is no end, and that their lives, which should have grown broader and richer, have grown shrunken, and meagre, and unsatisfied. Such a life is like a fish swimming into the labyrinth of a weir. It follows along the line of its vocation until the liberty to return grows less and less; and, at last, in the very element where it seems most free, it is in fact a helpless captive. The man's occupation has become his prison. He is the slave of his own powers. The devil has withered that life with his touch.

And then, on the other hand, you turn to lives which have given themselves to the life of service, and what do you see? You see their capacity enlarged through use, you see small gifts multiplied into great powers. Few things are more remarkable in one's experience of life than to see men who by nature are not extraordinarily endowed achieve the highest success by sheer dedication of their {173} moderate gifts. Their capacities expand through their self-surrender, as leaves unfold under the touch of the sun. They lose themselves and then they find themselves. The devil tempts these men, not with a sense of their greatness, but with their self-distrust; yet he tempts them in vain. Their weakness issues into strength; their temptation develops their power. The angels of God have come and ministered unto them.



{174}

LXIX

LOVING WITH THE MIND

Mark xii. 30.

In the great law of love to God and love to man which Jesus repeats as the law of his own teaching, there is one phrase that seems not wholly clear. You can love God with your heart and your soul; you can even increase your strength by love; but how can you love with the mind? Is it not the very quality of a trained mind to be unmoved by love or hate, dispassionate and unemotional? Is not this the scientific spirit, this attitude of criticism, with no prejudice or affection to color its results?

Of course one must answer that there is much truth which can be discovered by a loveless mind. Yet there is, on the other hand, much truth which cannot be discerned without love. There are many secrets of literature, of art, of music, and of the higher traits of character as well, into which you cannot enter unless you give your mind to these things with sympathy and affection and responsiveness; loving them, as Jesus says, with the mind. One {175} of our preachers has lately called attention to the new word in literature which illustrates this attitude of the mind.[1] When people wrote in earlier days of other people and their works they wrote biographies or criticisms or studies, but now we have what are called "appreciations;" the attempt, that is to say, to enter into a character and appreciate its traits or its art, and to love it with the mind. Perhaps that is what this ancient law asks of you in your relation to God, to come not as a critic, but as a lover, to the rational appreciation of the ways of God. Here is the noblest capacity with which human life is endowed. It is a great thing to love God with the heart and soul, to let the emotions of gratitude to Him or of joy in his world run free; but to rise into sympathetic interpretation of his laws, to think God's thoughts after Him, and to be moved by the high emotions which are stirred by exalted ideas,—to love God, that is to say, with the mind,—that, I suppose, is the highest function of human life, and the quality which most endows a man with insight and power.



[1] Rev. Leighton Parks, D. D., in a sermon at the Diocesan Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church, Boston, May, 1895.



{176}

LXX

AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER?

Genesis iv. 9.

Cain was the first philosophical individualist; the first "laissez-faire" economist. When God asked: "Where is Abel?" Cain answered: "What responsibility have I for him? My business is to take care of myself. Am I my brother's keeper?" But the interesting fact is that Cain had been his brother's keeper though he declined responsibility for him. He refused to be responsible for his brother's life, but he certainly was responsible for his brother's death. He refused to be his brother's keeper, but he was willing to be his brother's slayer. There are plenty of people to-day who are trying to maintain this same impossible theory of social irresponsibility. They affirm that they have no social duty except to mind their own business; but that very denial of responsibility is what makes them among the most responsible agents of social disaster. They deal with their affairs on the principle that they are nobody's {177} keeper, and so they are stirring every day the fires of industrial revolt. We are passing through dark days in the business world, and there are many causes for the trouble, but the deepest cause is Cain's theory of life. "Where is thy brother?" says God to the business man to-day,—"thy brother, the wage-earner, the victim of the cut-down and the lockout?" "Where is thy brother?" says God again to the unscrupulous agitator, bringing distress into many a workman's home for the satisfactions of ambition and power. And to any man who answers: "I know not. Am I my brother's keeper?" the rebuke of God is spoken again: "Cursed art thou! The voice of thy brother crieth against thee from the ground."



{178}

LXXI

PROFESSIONALISM AND PERSONALITY

1 Corinthians xii. 31.

The wonderful chapter which follows this verse becomes still more interesting when one considers its connection with the preceding passage. Paul has been looking over the life of his Christian brethren, and he sees in it a great variety of callings. Some of his friends are preachers,—apostles and prophets, as he calls them. Some are teachers, some are doctors, with gifts of healing; some are politicians, with gifts of government. The apostle speaks to them as though he were advising young men as to the choice of their profession, and he says: "Among all these professional opportunities covet the best; take that which most fills out and satisfies your life." But then he turns from these professional capacities and adds: "Be sure that these gifts do not crowd out of your life the higher capacity for sympathy. For you may understand all knowledge and speak with all tongues, and if you have lost thereby {179} the personal, human, sympathetic relation with people which we call love you are not really to be counted as a man. You are nothing more than an instrument of sound, a wind instrument like a trumpet, or a clanging instrument like a cymbal." That is the apostolic warning to the successful professional man,—the warning against the narrowing, self-contented result which sometimes taints even great attainments and professional distinction. Covet the best. Be satisfied with nothing less than the highest professional work of doctor, politician, or teacher. But beware of the imprisoning effect which sometimes comes of this very success in professional life, the atrophy of sensibility, the increasing incapacity for sympathy, for public spirit, for charity,—an incapacity which makes some men of the highest endowments among the least serviceable, least loving, and least loved of a community. "If," says the apostle, "in the gain of professional success you lose the higher gift of love, you are no longer a great man; you are not even to be described as a small man. You are 'nothing.'"



{180}

LXXII

THE CENTRAL SOLITUDE

John xvi. 32.

In one of Frederick Robertson's sermons he speaks of the conduct of life as like the conduct of atoms, which have a certain attraction for each other, but at a certain point of approach are repelled and do not touch. There is in every large life a certain central solitude of this kind into which no other soul can enter. Some persons fear this solitude, some rejoice in it, but the use of it is the test of a man's life. A very near friend of Dr. Brooks's once heard of a man who said that he knew Dr. Brooks intimately; and this friend said: "No man ought to say that. Not one of us knew Dr. Brooks intimately. There was a central Holy of Holies in his life, into which none of us ever entered." So it was. And this preservation of an inner privacy for the deeper experiences of life is what proves a soul to be peaceful and strong. Guard your soul's individual life. In the midst of the social world keep a place for the {181} nurture of the isolated life, for the reading and for the thoughts which deal with the interior relations of the single soul to the immanent God.

"Thyself amid the silence clear, The world far off and dim, His presence close, the bright ones near, Thyself alone with Him."

That is what makes a man strong under the tests of life. He is not a parasitic plant deriving its life from some other life; he is rooted deep in the soil of the Eternal. As was said of John Henry Newman, such a man is never less alone than when alone. "He is not alone, because the Father is with him."



{182}

LXXIII

IF THOU KNEWEST THE GIFT OF GOD

John iv. 10.

We usually notice in this story the great words of Jesus—perhaps the deepest and richest series of utterances that have ever fallen from human lips. Yet it is almost as striking to notice the attitude of mind in which the woman remained throughout these wonderful scenes. She seems to have been entirely oblivious of the situation, and unaware that anything great was going on.

Jesus speaks to her of the living water, and she thinks it must be some device which shall save her coming with her pitcher to the well. Then Jesus looks on her with infinite pathos and says: "If you only knew the gift of God, and who it is that is now speaking to you!" But she does not know, and shoulders her pitcher and trudges home again, reporting only that she has seen some one who appeared a wonderful fortune-teller, and never dreaming that the greatest words of human history had been spoken to her, and her alone.

{183}

If thou knewest the gift of God!—to have had one's opportunity in one's hands and to have let it slip; to have had the Messiah sitting by you and not to have recognized Him; to have thought it just a commonplace day when the most sacred revelations of God were occurring,—that is about the saddest confession that any one can make. And yet, that is what might happen to any one any day. No one can be sure when the great exigencies of life are likely to occur. He looks forward to great things to be done in some more favoring future, and, behold, the insignificant incidents of to-day are the greater things which he does not discern. He looks forward to the discovery of God in some difficult intellectual achievement, and meantime the daily task is full of revelation, and as he wakes to the morning the new day stands by him and says: "If you only knew the gift of God, and who it is that speaks to you today." And at last perhaps he begins to realize that the ordinary ways of daily life are the channels of God's revelation, and then there

"Comes to soul and sense The feeling which is evidence

{184}

That very near about us lies The realm of spiritual mysteries. With smile of trust and folded hands, The passive soul in waiting stands, To feel, as flowers the sun and dew. The one true life its own renew."



{185}

LXXIV

THE WEDDING GARMENT

Matthew xxii. 11-14.

Here is a man who has the feast offered to him, but is not clothed to meet it. He is unprepared and is therefore cast out. He does not wear the wedding garment and therefore is not fit for the wedding feast. This seems at first sight harsh treatment; but one soon remembers that it was the custom of an Oriental feast to offer the guest at his entrance a robe fit for the occasion. "Bring forth the best robe," says the father of the prodigal, "and put it on him." This man had had offered to him the opportunity of personal preparation and had refused it. He wanted to share the feast, but he wanted to share it on his own terms. He pressed into the happiness without the personal preparedness which made that happiness possible.

Every man in this way makes his own world. The habit of his life clothes him like a garment, and only he who wears the wedding garment {186} is at home at the wedding feast. The same circumstances are to one man beautiful and to another, at his side, demoralizing. You may have prosperity and it may be a source of happiness, or the same prosperity and it may be a source of peril. You may be at a college and it may be either regenerating to you, or pernicious in its influence, according as you are clothed or unclothed with the right habit of mind. God first asks for your heart and then offers you his world. The wedding feast is for him alone who has accepted the wedding garment.



{187}

LXXV

THE ESCAPE FROM DESPONDENCY

1 Kings xix. 1-13.

This is God's word to man's despondency; and when we strip this man's story of its Orientalism, it is really the story of many a discouraged, despondent man of to-day. Elijah has been doing his best, but has come to a point where he is ready to give up. His enemies are too many for him. "Lord," he says, "it is enough. I have had as much as I can bear. I am alone and Baal's prophets are four hundred and fifty men." So he goes away into solitude, and looks about him for some clear sign that God has not deserted him. But nothing happens. The great signs of nature pass before him, the storm, the lightning, and the earthquake, but they only reflect his own stormy mood. The Lord is not in them. Then, within his heart, there speaks that voice which is at once speech and silence, and it says to him: "What doest thou here, Elijah," and behold, the man is convicted. For when he {188} reflects on it he is doing nothing at all. He is sitting under a tree, requesting that he may die. He has fled from his duty and is hiding in a cave. Then the voice says to him: "Get up and go and do your duty. You might sit here forever and get no light on your lot. The problem of life is solved through the work of life. The way out of your despondency is in going straight on with the work now ready to your hand. Answers to great problems are not so likely to come to people in caves, as along the dusty road of duty-doing. Not to the dreamer, but to the doer come the interpretations of life. Elijah, Elijah, what doest thou here?"



{189}

LXXVI

THE DIFFICULTIES OF UNBELIEF

Matthew xxiii. 24.

We are often very much impressed by the difficulties of religious belief. It seems hard to attain any absolute, convinced faith. There are doubts and obscurities which every one feels, and these questionings are often stirred into activity by the mistaken efforts of the defenders of the faith. There is even a special department in theological teaching known as Apologetics, or the defense of faith; as though religion had to be always on the defensive, and as if the easiest attitude of mind, even of the least philosophical, were the attitude of denial. But did you ever consider the alternative position and the difficulties which present themselves when one undertakes absolutely and continuously to deny himself the relations of the religious life? Did you ever fairly face the conception of a logically completed unbelief, a world stripped of its ideals, with no region of spiritual hopes or of worship, a {190} world absolutely without God, a permanently faithless world? What is the difficulty here? The difficulty is that these aspects of life, though they are often hard to maintain, are harder still to abandon. Faith has its perplexities, but no sooner do you eliminate the spiritual world than you are confronted with a series of experiences, emotions, and intimations which are simply inexplicable. That was perhaps partly what Jesus had in mind when he met the Pharisees. "You find it hard to believe in me," he said. "Ah, yes, but is it not still harder altogether to refuse me? You are quite alive to the smaller difficulties of my position, but you seem to be quite unaware of the difficulties of your own position. You busy yourself with straining out the gnat which floats on the surface of your glass, but you do not seem to observe the residuary camel."

So with his splendid satire Jesus turns the critical temper back upon itself. Difficulties enough, God knows, there are in every intellectual position, and intellectual certainty usually means the abnegation of the thinking faculty.

But many persons strain out the little difficulties and swallow the great ones. What is, {191} on the whole, the best working theory of life?—that is the only practical question. Under which view of life do the facts, on the whole, best fall? Especially, what conception of life holds the highest facts, the great irresistible spring-tides, which sometimes rise within the soul, of hope and love and desire? So Browning's Bishop, turning on his critic, says:—

"And now what are we? unbelievers both, Calm and complete, determinately fixed To-day, to-morrow, and forever, pray? You'll guarantee me that? Not so, I think. In nowise! All we've gained is, that belief, As unbelief before, shakes us by fits, Confounds us like its predecessor. Where's The gain? How can we guard our unbelief, Make it bear fruit to us? The problem's here. Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch, A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, A chorus-ending from Euripides,— And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears As old and new at once as nature's self, To rap and knock and enter in our soul, Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring, Round the ancient idol, on his base again,— * * * * * * * What have we gained then by our unbelief But a life of doubt diversified by faith, For one of faith diversified by doubt. We called the chessboard white,—we call it black."



{192}

LXXVII

KNOWING GOD, AND BEING KNOWN OF HIM

Galatians iv. 9.

It is very interesting to come so close to a great man as we do in this passage, for the Apostle seems to be discovered here, correcting himself. It is as if he had written one teaching to the Galatians, and then crossed it out and written another. "You know God," he says, "or rather you are known of Him." He is asking himself why the Galatians should in a given case do their duty, and he answers: "Because they know God; they are aware of His purposes and laws, and having this rational understanding of Him they know how to act as His servants." "But no," he goes on to say, "that is not the real impulse of their duty. What holds them to their best is rather the thought that God knows them, that He gives them their duty, and that they obey." It is like the position of a soldier under his commander. The soldier does not expect to know {193} all about the plan of the campaign, but what keeps him to his best is the knowledge that some one knows about it; that the commander overlooks the field; that each little skirmish has its place in the great design. That is what makes the soldier go down again into the smoke and dust of his duty with his timidity converted into faith.

Knowing God,—that is theology; being known of Him,—that is religion. Both theology and religion have their influence on conduct. It is a great thing to know that one knows God. There is power in a rational creed. But, after all, the profoundest impulse for conduct is to know that beneath all your ignorance of God is His knowledge of you; that before you loved Him, He loved you, that antecedent to your response to Him was His invitation to you. Thus it is that a man looks out into each new day and asks: "What is to hold me to-day to my duty?" Well, first of all, everything I may learn ought to help me. It is all God's truth, and, as I get a grasp on truth and stand on its firm ground, my conduct is steadier and assured. But, after all, the deeper safety lies in this other confession, that I am known of God; that I {194} am not merely an explorer, searching for truth, but guided and controlled as ever under the great taskmaster's eye; known of Him, with my ignorance of Him held within His knowledge of me, until the time comes when at last I shall know even as also I am known.



{195}

LXXVIII

FREEDOM IN THE TRUTH

John viii. 32.

"The truth shall make you free;"—that is one of the greatest announcements of a universal principle which even Jesus Christ ever made.

But the Jews began to ask of him: "How can one be a disciple of your truth and yet be free? Is not that discipleship only another name for bondage? We are free already. We are in bondage to no man. Why then should we enter into the servitude of obedience to your truth?" And to this Jesus seems to answer: "That depends upon what it is to be free. It is a question of your definition of liberty. You seem to believe that to be free one must have no authority or leadership or master. But I say unto you that there is no such liberty. You must be the servant of something. You must be under the authority of your law, or your superstition, or your God, or yourself. Freedom on any other terms is not freedom, it is lawlessness. {196} Indeed it may be more like slavery than freedom."

What is a free country? Not a country without law,—a country of the anarchist,—but a country where the law encourages each citizen to be and to do his best. A free country gives every man a chance. It opens life at the top. It invites one's allegiance from the things which enslave to the things which enlarge. And that is the only liberty,—a transfer of allegiance, a higher attachment, which sets free from the lower enslavements of life. Suppose a man is the slave of a sin, how does he get free? He frees himself from his sin by attaching himself to some better interest. Sin is not driven out of one's life; it is crowded out. Suppose a man is the slave of himself, sunk in the self-absorbed and ungenerous life, how does he get free? He gets free by finding an end in life which is larger than himself. He becomes the servant of the truth, and the truth makes him free. Suppose a man asks himself, "What can religion do for me? It does not solve all my problems, or satisfy all my needs. What then does religion do?" Well, first of all, it gives one liberty. It detaches one's life from {197} the things which shut it in, and attaches it to those ideal ends which give enlargement, emancipation, range to life. God speaks to you of duty, of self-control, of power in your prayers, and then you go out into the world again, not as if all were plain before you, but at least with a free heart, and a mind not in bondage to the world of circumstance or of trivial cares. The truth of God, so far as it has been revealed to you, has made you free. You have found the perfect law, the law of liberty.