Gold may depreciate, stocks rise or fall, and business values change so as to leave the market in panic, but every man on the street or in the store knows that one value forever remains permanent, unvarying, and that is character. Every other asset may be swept away and success still achieved if this remain; every other aid may be at its best and failure only await him who lacks the wealth of character.
Character is that of which reputation is but the echo, often mistaken and misleading. Character is the last, the ultimate, value of life. It is the trend of the whole being towards the best. It is the passion and power that holds one true despite all persuasion.
It is the one thing worth having, because upon it all other values depend. The wealth of the whole world still leaves poor him from whom the soul, the power to appreciate, the purity of heart which sees God and the good, the peace and quietness of a good conscience, have fled. When we turn away from our fighting for fame and our grinding for gold long enough to think, then we know that the things within determine wholly the value and reality of all things without.
The wise ever have set this treasure above all others. Happy the people that love righteousness more than revenue, the way of virtue, the clear eye, the upward look, and the approval of a good conscience above all other prosperity or advantage. The days of national greatness ever have been those when the things that make manhood bulked far above all other considerations. Alike to people and individuals, the imperishable value ever has been that of character.
This asset comes not to a man by accident. He who is rich in character, whose success in many ways is built upon his resources in this way, does not just simply happen to be good, true, and square. There is a price to character; it costs more than any other thing, for it is worth more than all other things. Essentially it never is inherited, but always acquired by processes often slow and toilsome and at great price.
If you would be perfect you must pay the price of perfection. Unless the passion of life is this perfection it never will be your possession. Dreams of ideal goodness only waste the hours in which it might have been achieved. No man ever finds character in his sleep. The education of the heart is a thing even more definite than the education of the head. The school of character has an infinite variety of courses and an unending curriculum.
Folks who are sighing for goodness usually go away sorrowful when they learn what it costs. But life ever is putting to us just such tests as the wise teacher put to the rich young man. You say you desire character, the perfection of manhood or womanhood above all other things; do you desire this enough to pay for it your ease, your coveted fame, your cherished gold, perhaps your present good name and peace of mind? Is the search for character a passion or only a pastime?
This does not mean that this prize of eternity falls only to those who devote themselves wholly to self-culture, to the salvation of their own souls. The best lives have thought little of themselves, but they have lived for the ends of the soul, to help men to better living, to save them from the things that blight and damn the soul. Like the Leader of men they have found the life unending by laying down their lives, paying the full price, selling all in order that right and truth and honour and purity, love and kindness and justice might remain to man.
The world's wealth depends not on what we have in our hands, nor even on what we can carry in our heads. It depends on the things that we have and the beings we are in our hearts. Fools we are who live only to make a living, houses, shelter, food, rags, and toys, who might live to make a life, and to mold lives, to earn the riches and honour enduring; who have not learned the gain of all loss that leads the heart to look up, the joy of all sorrow that sweetens the soul, and the profit from every sacrifice that is a paying of the price of perfection.
The Age-Long Miracle
The Sufficient SignBehold the ManThe Life that Lifts
Silent goodness speaks loudest.
Our loads lift us up to strength.
Life grows as love is given.
From the grind of drudgery comes at last the glorious divine spark.
The spirit of the father never works separation in the family.
That day best fulfills its purpose which is a preparation for the next.
The proof of a faith is not in its prestige, but in its present power.
Things divine are not defended by dodging.
It is the heart that gives ease to any work.
The door of truth never opens to the key of prejudice.
Love never knows how much it gives nor what it costs.
The scribe and the Pharisee are still with us. "Establish the credibility of the miracles of Jesus, or, better still, let Him work a miracle to-day, and we will believe," they say. This age is credulous; it hungers to believe the extraordinary. Yet, while it is running after folly, it is blind to the most extraordinary fact, the most stupendous miracle that ever took place, although it goes on right before its eyes and is open to every kind of proof. It cannot see the miracle of Jesus in the world to-day, the miracle beside which all the works He did in His lifetime sink into insignificance.
Here is the sign to-day offered to the skeptic: Once, nearly twenty centuries ago, a young preacher travelled and taught through the villages and by the wayside in an obscure oriental country. He addressed a subject race, insular in their prejudices, lacking in political genius and in artistic culture. He lived in days calculated to chill the most fervid religious enthusiasm. He was at first ignored and then hated by His own people; the religious leaders became His implacable foes. His work ended in apparent failure, in a death of shame.
But that was not the end. It is strange that the world remembers anything about that young preacher; but stranger still is the fact that to-day He influences more than half the population of the globe, surpassing all other teachers, more people are under His sway now than the whole world held when He lived. These millions make Him the object of their worship and devotion; in His name they gather regularly all over the world, without regard to language or race.
More than this, this one whom the wise men of His day ignored has been the inspiration of the works of genius and art, of the deeds of heroism, of the lofty endeavours of the world since He died. He has changed the mind. He has changed the appearance of the world; by Him nations have fallen and risen. The humble, the despised, the rejected has become the world's hero, the mightiest of all the sons of men, the saviour of His race.
Once He touched a few who were blind and lame and they were healed; to-day in His name, in every city, a thousand suffering ones are made whole. Science does the work; but the opportunity for its development and the inspiration for its application came from Him.
Nor is this all. He made the world to see; He touched the blind eyes of the people, as they groped in superstition, and has given them sight; He has made the ages, once limping and halting, to arise and march forward with magnificent tread; He found the world a babel of jarring voices and fretting purposes, and His touch gave peace and singleness of purpose until men could discern that "through the ages one unceasing purpose runs." He did for man and mind what was first done for matter, brought the cosmos out of chaos. This is the miracle indeed.
It goes right on before our eyes. They take His name to a dead people, and soon there is life there. Light, and love, and larger life spring up everywhere in His name. From this modern miracle of the power, the growing authority, the kingship of the once despised Jesus we cannot escape; we are perforce participants in its benefits; it conditions all our lives.
If all the gospel stories could be proved myths and the miracles but inventions, there would still remain the greater, the insuperable miracle of the world's picture of the perfect and all glorious personality of Jesus and the fact of His preëminent power in the world to-day. This is the sign He gives this age, and to this the open mind answers: "Thou art the Christ, the saviour of the world."
The two words, "Ecce homo," contemptuously spoken by the cynical Roman governor contained the highest tribute that had been given to Jesus. How empty appear all the high sounding titles, such as king and emperor, beside this significant one of Man. How sad and self-damning the bitter railing of His enemies in the light of that serene dignity. How puerile the bickering over words and ways of worship, and all the wrangling that blinded them to the heavenly radiance of that all glorious manhood. The wonder of Jesus is not in the deeds He did, but in the being He was. And the wonder of His being is not in that it offers elements for arguments as to a divine personality, but it is that of a simple, clear, sublimely perfect manhood. It is upon this perfection of personal character that His abiding claim to divinity must rest; it depends not on His birth but on His being.
There is something strange about the perversity with which the church has emphasized the least attractive aspects of its master's person. The preachers have scolded men for not coming to church, and when they did come they offered them pictures of an emaciated, effeminate being for their adoration. With them the painters have conspired to set on canvas and in church window representations from the reality of which we would turn with repulsion or on which we would look with pity.
If Jesus is to be the leader of men He must go before them. He must stand in the front, not set there by artificial arguments as to His right to rule over men, but there because He belongs there, first because He is first in all that makes manhood; He is king because He can, and because He has overcome in life's great conflict.
If He is to show us the way we should go He must walk in that way; He must be flesh of our flesh, true man, knowing the full fellowship of our lives. If He was born with a halo; if He lived on angel's fare; if somehow He belongs to another world and His perfections are not those of our nature, then, almighty as He may be as a leader for beings of another world, He has no value to us.
But men have ever set aside the weavings of minds so absorbed in the wonder of their speculations that they could not see the truth. They have seen through the dreamings of poets, painters, and preachers, who pictured only their sickly ideals. And, instead of their caricatures, men have held in their hearts a man, one of their own. And this true fellow, brother and friend, has spurred them to noble deeds and lofty living.
Perfection is seen in strength, not in weakness, in virility and not in tears, in majesty, the majesty truly of meekness, but not of a maudlin, mooning etherealism. The revelation of the perfect man cannot come in a form that a child will pity; it will be admirable from all points of view. It is the heroic rather than the esthetic we must admire.
The men who followed that one long ago did so not because they had heard arguments as to His divine claims, but because they were drawn by the heavenly power of His manhood. This it is that wins men ever, the magnetism of manhood. The force of a great life is mightier than any of the things it does. There is about this leader, Jesus, that which compels us to greatness, spurs us to strife for our better selves, strengthens to sacrifice and to service for our fellows.
It matters little whence a life like this has come; the greater question is where does it lead us. Childish minds spend time on the genealogical trees of the giants; the wise men follow them. The value of the life of the great Teacher does not depend on our ability to comprehend it biologically or arrange it chronologically, but on our vision of its moral and manly perfections and on the power these attributes have over our lives.
This world will be little helped by the most irrefutable syllogism concerning the peculiar nature and separate exclusive divinity of its great religious Teacher. But lives will be lifted everywhere in the measure that they see the man in Him who taught us of God. For men need not so much a God who has come down as a man who has attained to God, not a descent, but an ascent, one who is the life and the truth because He is the way which they may tread up to the glory that is their heritage and the God who is their own.
To any save the few in the group of His friends that statement of Jesus that being lifted up He would draw all men to Him must have sounded like the ravings of one deluded. It has taken the centuries to show that He was right. He was right in His estimation of His life's end; it was a lifting up. His enemies thought it a casting down, a defeat; He knew it to be a triumph. Sorrow, injustice, oppression, hatred, the things that seem to crush are the things that elevate. Only by opposition has any life discovered power. The fiercer blow these winds the firmer grows the tree. Out of the petty persecutions, the countless meannesses, the littleness of those who oppose him the great soul builds its greatness. It is, and ever has been by a cross that men are lifted up. History abounds with prisons, gibbets, and crosses which have become thrones of eternal glory.
Whether we shall be cast down or lifted up depends upon ourselves; neither enemies nor adverse circumstances have the power to do this. The soul that seeks the stars builds its staircase out of the stones flung by the persecutor, out of the rocks of difficulties. If your heart is great, my brother, nothing can keep you from greatness; if it is mean, no amount of o'ervaulting ambition can make you other than a little, obscure man, as truly lost on the peak as you would be at the base.
Jesus died a failure; His friends were few, and the best of them thought His life a mistake. It takes more than the span of our lives to measure their size. It is better that a great soul should be called a failure than that it should die a shrivelled success. Earth measures by what the hands hold; heaven by the heart. The hands at last lose their grasp, but the heart wealth goes on from more to more. This it is that is worth while.
Jesus was right when He said that He would draw all men to Him. Then it sounded like folly; to-day it demonstrates His divine insight. Lifted up in shame the riches of His life were revealed. After all, the best in us answers to the best; it is love that leads. In the end, goodness, truth, gentleness, sincerity have the greatest attraction for men. Jesus is known and loved by millions who never heard of Nero or of Augustus. Their glory was that of circumstance; His that of character. His life lifts.
This it is that most helps the world; not learning, but a life; not power or position, but simple passion for men; not riches, but wealth of the inner life. You may not found a university or build libraries or hospitals, or even write books or preach sermons. But every one may do the principal thing that Jesus did. That was to live a life amongst men of love for them, of simple kindnesses, of God-seeking aspiration, of white sincerity. The race needs not so much men who will shake it with their power or dazzle it with their learning as it needs men and women who will lift it with the quiet earnestness and sincerity of their lives. Herein is lasting greatness and true power, to live as He lived, to love as He loved, true to God, to yourself, and to your fellows, seeking the best and giving of your best.
Service and sacrifice are the things that lift to the supreme places; the lower you stoop in helpfulness the higher you are lifted in lasting glory. And they are lifted to heaven, they achieve immortality, they can never die who were willing to die if death lay in the path of duty, to be sacrificed if sacrifice was part of their service.
Seeing the Unseen
The Sense of the UnseenThe Brook in the WayThat Which is High
The song of sympathy never comes until the singer has been to the school of sorrow.
True spirituality can see the altar in the cookstove and the washtub.
People who are always off the key are never content out of the choir.
The only version of the Bible authorized by heaven is that on two feet.
Every life must have days in the desert but it does not need to build its house there.
Many a man thinks he is patient with pain when he is only perverse in eating pickles.
No man knows how much religion he has until he goes of fishing alone where mosquitoes are many.
There are too many people to whom God has given wings who are complaining of corns.
It is some consolation to know that when you aim at nothing you are sure to hit it.
If you have large reserves of religion you will not be without the small change of kindness.
When the practically-minded man Paul writes of looking at the things which are not seen his words sound like either fantasy or folly. Yet it is plain fact, practical, and certainly essential to any success. He is blind who can see only with his eyes, and he only is sensible who knows there are many things beyond his senses. Practical men consider all the factors to every problem, and things are not less real to them because they may chance to be intangible.
The unseen things are imminent to us always. There are many things not yet pigeonholed by our science nor catalogued by our philosophies. You can dissect a daisy and enumerate its parts; but you never know a daisy until you have seen the unseen things thereof, until you have felt the subtle appeal of its beauty. Bobbie Burns saw more of the daisy than the greatest botanist without his spiritual eyes.
The danger is that in our hard workaday we shall forget the reality of the unseen, we shall get to think that gold and steel and land are the only real things, and we shall shape ourselves by the blind and base creed of gold, and steel, and land. How easy it is to measure every man by his possessions in tangible things. How easy to make these our chief end in life, to slight the real prizes, the unseen wealth that lies so close at hand or already possessed, while we rush and strive for the rainbow of riches.
Deep within us we know that he is rich, and he alone, who has wisdom, love, patience, who possesses friends, who creates kindly thoughts, whose life with simple joy abounds. Once again and often do we need to see Bunyan's picture of the man bending over his refuse, gathered with the muck rake, and heedless of the angel holding the crown that only waits his taking.
A man is wealthy according to what is within him. His greatness is of the things that are unseen. There are limits to the possession and the use of the things that are seen; but who shall set a limit to a man's possible wealth in love and honour, in wisdom and integrity, in all the things that make up the soul of man? Few are the things that a man may hold for his own all the days of his life, and fewer still are those he may grasp with pleasure when the hands are falling helpless by his side. But many are the riches he may have to hold forever in the things of the unseen. Many a man walks through the fields penniless and yet richer far than their owner; to him the birds sing, for him the flowers bloom, to his eyes there are beauties in the blue beyond all words, and all the loveliness of the fair land lifts his heart within him. The other man who holds the title deeds sees nothing beside them. Possession is wholly a matter of appreciation. The earth is the Lord's and He gives it to those who have eyes to see.
It is the eye to see the unseen that gives wealth to the seen. Values depend on vision. Appreciation does not prevent possession; it makes the possession actual. And the vision of the realities behind things keeps a man from the sense of destitution when all things are taken from him. He cannot be destitute. He may lose all his fellows, but he cannot be friendless; the Father of Spirits cannot lose him, nor can he be cut off from fellowship with those who die no more.
The seeing eye is the stimulus to the worth while endeavour. The inventors who have enriched the world endured derision seeing the things invisible to others. The truth is that it is the unspiritual world that makes the least progress in things material. The men of faith and vision are back of all advance. They have endurance, patience, and strength. The sense of another world where motives are rightly measured, the sense of a great cloud of worthy witnesses to other eyes invisible, the sense of reward in the very service itself, rewards intangible yet most real, the joy of sacrifice and service; these all enable one to push on, to toil, to endure. Then, long afterwards, the dull, weary world sees and understands.
Alongside every highway runs the brook whereof a man may drink often if he will and drinking lift up his head. Its little song we scarce hear in the rush of our businesses; its refreshing we forget even though our throats be parched with the dust of our petty affairs. Yet it is ever there, cool, refreshing, this world of spirits and ideals.
Nature has a prodigal way of scattering rivulets down the hillside and along the pathways, little heeding whether men walk there or not. The practical eye sees waste; these streams might have been made to turn wheels; the needs of the traveller, weary with the way, might be met by faucets at regular intervals.
It is well for us all that the power of the practical man finds its limitations, else all poetry would have gone from the world, and great and glorious as might have been our physical perfections our bodies would be but the empty habitations whence souls had long since fled. The utilitarian would have stolen from us the bliss of the deep draft from the pebbly brook.
The man who is proud of being practical tells us we are wasting time and nervous energy in stopping to think of ideal things; we must take the world as we find it, he says, forgetting how fair and poetic we once found it and how bleak and ugly we are likely to leave it. But to him trees are always lumber, grass and flowers but hay, bird songs spell poultry, wind and waters energy. Many are too busy making things ever to enjoy anything that is made.
In this steel age it may seem folly and waste to stop and think of sacrifice and courage and love, to admire and answer to the thrill of human passions; but alas for him who never sees the light of heaven in another's tear, nor hears the brush of angels' wings when men and women fly to their fellow's aid.
If you haven't time in your busy life to turn aside to drink of the brook of human affection, to look deep into the eyes of friendship, to sympathize, to comfort, to taste this strange sweet and bitter cup of our common fellowship, then is your heart going dry and thirsty and life becoming a whitened road that knows no wells or springs.
But something there is in man that calls for drafts at yet deeper streams than these. Foolish and unlearned he may be, ignorant of the wise conclusions of philosophers who have looked into these things with their lanterns, but through the ages he has been drinking eagerly at the waters of eternity. In every man there is a thirst after the deep, immeasurable things divine; the deeper the nature of the man the greater his necessity for drinking often here.
The consciousness of the great life that embraces all life, the sense of its nearness to us all, has been a perennial refreshing to all great hearts. In some way to bring the life into touch with the infinite is to take down its limitations, break its barriers, and give it a sense of infinitude, to lift up the head in vision of the divinity of our lives and of every life. We who walk in the dust often need to be filled with the divine lest we become ourselves but dust.
This world of things is hungry for the life that is more than things, the life of the spirit; that is why so many love to sing of heaven and dream of a fair world peopled by strange and glorious celestial ones. Heaven is nearer than we think; like the brook by the way, the life of the spirit flows beside this life; happy they who drink of its waters, who already enter into eternity, who find strength for this life's way and work by the contact with the life that is life indeed.
Is it any wonder that life is a wearisome thing, a dead drag, when you are starving its very sources? You neglect the soul at the peril of all. So anxious are you to run this race that you have no time to allow him who rides in the chariot to drink of the water of life. This is not utilitarianism; this is suicide from the centre out.
The most practical common sense demands that you feed the inner places of your life, the heart that has gone so long thirsty and longing for love, for things too deep for words, for things that cannot be used and cannot be quoted in dollars. Give your inner life its deep drafts of the infinite life and your outer life shall take its place and do its work in the world.
There are two ways of viewing the oncoming years, as burdens or as opportunities, with fear or with expectation. The days of the new year may loom up as a series of unwelcome tasks to be unwillingly done or as so many invitations to attempt and achieve great things. The difference between these two points of view marks the difference between enduring life and finding the life that endures.
The wise preacher of long ago caught sight of one of these distinctions that cut clear through to the roots of things. He says that the sign of old age is that a man is "afraid of that which is high." When courage and ambition have gone old age and decrepitude have entered in, no matter whether a man be eighteen or eighty.
He alone has youth, he alone has life before him, who can still catch the vision of the ideal, of that which is high, who can lift up his eyes beyond the horizon of practicabilities and precedents and see the things not yet realized. There is a time when men must dream dreams and see visions, when they must feast on noble purposes or die so far as the inner spirit and all that makes real living is concerned.
If you find the will becoming dull and listless, with no quickening of the pulses, but only apathy or a sneer for the high purpose or the great promise, it is but a sign of the approach of senility, of the failure of the powers. When the ambition can be satisfied with the less while the greater is before it, when things low and base are preferred to things high, afar off, and difficult to attain, the heart is dying already.
Cherish as the spark of life the aspiration to have and do and be the best. Yet who is there does not know the paralyzing chill that the sneer of the philistine or even the memory of our own many failures can give when great possibilities offer themselves to us? How easily enter in the cold considerations that deaden our aspirations; how subtle the temptation to be content with the condition that involves neither toil nor pain. How hard to realize that this is an invitation to death.
To all men comes the thrill of the passion to do some great thing, to give to our world some worthy service. To yield to this is to keep the heart young, is to defy time, to conquer the years. Whether the coming days shall bend the back with their burdens or shall nerve and strengthen the life does not depend on whether they have cares or joys in them, but on whether they find us responsive to the call of noble things.
No man can afford to let a pure and lofty impulse die, nor, for fear of failure or of ridicule, to become afraid or ashamed of his ideals. Living is more than a dull feeding at tables or troughs, more than shelter and sleep; it is growing, climbing, becoming, finding higher levels and seeing yet higher before.
Nor is this all; the spirit of greatness finds ample play in daily duties. The success of the year does not depend on whether you can do things that shall amaze men to-day or make your name known forever, but upon whether into all the things you do, lowly, humdrum, commonplace as they may seem to be, the daily duties of home or shop or store, the care of the baby, or the running of a typewriter, there shall enter the great and high motive.
This is what we all need, the high vision of the lowly things, the sight of the fact that the least piece of work is an essential part of the service of the whole universe, that a man serves the Divine not by wearing a black coat but by doing, as in God's name, with high motives the least duties that may be his. It is not place nor authority nor wage that makes the work high or low; it is the spirit of the service and the part it plays in the world's great business of perfecting humanity.
Would you ward off old age, cherish vitality and give value to your days, seek the things that are above, the life that serves some worthy end. One is young as long as his heart leaps responsive to a noble call. But he who lives to pleasure, to the satisfaction of self, who has shut his eyes to the high things that call for self-denial, for toil and loss, is dead already.
Sources of Strength and Inspiration
Strength for the Daily TaskThe Sense of the InfiniteThe Great Inspiration
Living heartily is one secret of living happily.
Life is early blighted if it knows no clouds.
You can tell the character of any age by the place it gives to character.
There is little danger in the discontent with conditions that is equalled by discontent with character.
Heart health never comes so long as the hand is kept on the pulse.
Feed on garbage and you soon lose faith in good things.
The fruitful life seeks showers as well as sunshine.
It's hard for a man who has ground of his nose on the money mill to smell a taint on anything.
Many a man goes back by trying to put up a good front and nothing more.
Every life is worth the love it gives.
It is the dull grind and monotony of life that makes it so hard to bear for the ninety-nine per cent. of us. Sometimes it seems as though we spend all our days toiling, wearing strength, and hope, and heart away for no other end than to gain just bread and shelter so as to keep the machine in condition for further toil.
How hopeless is the outlook of many a life! The mother with the weary round of home duties day after day, the father who goes to the same task year after year, seeing the same people, doing the same things, and coming home at the day's end with the same weariness, only augmented as age makes itself felt—all who toil feel at times these depressing limitations.
Little wonder that lives snatch at every fleeting, alluring promise of relief, through amusement, through anything that offers change and excitement. Little wonder that, robbed of opportunity for vision, they foment blind discontent, so that we all feel there is a mighty substratum of wretchedness and of menace lying under our social order.
Yet there are few lives, perhaps no worthy ones, without tasks that often seem monotonous and become matters of dull grinding that bring weariness and longing for relief. All worth while work involves much tediousness, painstaking exertion. All great things stand for so much life poured out, and life is never poured out without pain and loss.
The stern Puritan was doubtless wrong when he saw nothing in life but repression and stern duty, but he was nearer right than he who looks only for frivolity and amusement. Life is too large a business to be always light and trivial. Yet we must not allow its high purposes to be thwarted by robbing ourselves and our fellows of all joy and brightness and converting life into dull, mechanical servitude.
How may we find that proportion of toil and relief, that happy mixture of duty and delight that shall make life not only endurable but also useful, fruitful, and enjoyable? For it is man's duty to be happy; otherwise he can never be useful in any high or valuable sense.
It would be easy to try to give comfort by the philosophy which sees the fine fruitage that is coming from to-day's stern discipline. That fair fruitage is coming, but the trouble is it is too far off to give us much comfort now; we want something nearer and more easily apprehended. Then, too, the truth is no high fruitage will ever issue from a life crushed by slavish subjection.
After all, what life is to every one of us depends not on the demands of outer circumstances, but on the development of the life within. The heart determines the worth and beauty of life. It makes all the difference whether the physical determines its circumference or whether you have an intellect that is reaching out to the things unmeasurable and a soul that grows into glory indescribable.
You can tie a great soul down hand and brain to a loom or a machine and he will still see his visions and dream his deep, refreshing dreams; you can set the brutish being down in a gallery of the world's treasures of art and beauty and he will think of nothing and see nothing but bread and beer.
We must do our dull and heavy tasks, but we can do them and not be crushed by them so long as within there are fragrant memories, high aspirations, great thoughts; so long as the task does not set the boundary of the life. And it is the cherishing of these eternal riches within that lifts any life and makes it worthy of higher tasks.
We need to seek out the springs of noble thoughts, to find in the riches of the world's literature, in music, and in beauty of art the food for that inner life in the strength of which, drawing often on its secret resources, we can go many days through the desert of toil.
The wise life uses every opportunity of refreshing; it drinks of every spring of the up-welling waters of life; it seeks communion with every great soul. Holidays and rest days are to it times of replenishing when the eyes that ache from bending over the machine or desk lift themselves to the eternal hills and the heart turns to the things that are infinite.
One does not have to believe in the same kind of a god as did the seers and singers of long ago in order to obtain the spiritual values which they found in the thought of his nearness to them. David and Browning, Isaiah and Whittier, with all the centuries between them, still come to the same thought—we know that Thou art near.
Through all ages and in all peoples this sense of that which is other than ourselves, from which our highest good comes, towards which our ideals and aspirations strain, the ultimate force of our being, this feeling after the infinite is universal. It is the essential and determinative mark of every religion.
When those singers of long ago tried to express their sense of the infinite life and love they used words which make it appear that they thought only of some being larger, mightier, wiser than themselves, yet, after all, like themselves, a great man deified because He was great. Perhaps that really was their conception; still, we use precisely the same language, even though our ideas are entirely different.
It makes relatively little difference what their conceptions were, so far as ours are concerned. Their words are not accurate, detailed pen pictures of some being who can be described or photographed. No man has seen the infinite at any time. The great thing is that ever and everywhere men find themselves with a hunger after this sublime unseen.
One may use terms of personality and another terms of power; to one the infinite may be but a local deity; to another, that which embraces all spirit and being, and each may have all of the divine his heart is capable of containing. Here none may dogmatize for others.
Religion does not depend on uniformity of conceptions of the divine. It depends more upon universality of consciousness of the infinite and openness of mind and life to whatever we may feel and know, from any source or through any means whatsoever, of that life or energy which lies back of all life and energy, of that love and light which cheer and lighten every son of man.
Definitions determine nothing, but they do work great damage when minds capable of being stereotyped to them agree to impose those definitions on their fellows as final, authoritative, and essential to their welfare. The divine is neither infinite nor sublime when you can say, Here are His lineaments and He has no other likeness or appearance.
To the question, How shall we think of the divine? there can be but one answer—in higher, wider, deeper, nobler, purer ways than yesterday. The conception must be a developing one. A man's spiritual capacities develop as his inner vision becomes more keen. The soul takes wider flight, and in our deep thoughts we discover that which language cannot compass.
There are those who think they must be atheists because they cannot believe in the God of the Hebrews, the God of the Old Testament—a limited personality. But the genuine atheists are more likely to be those who are without a sense of the divine, because they have taken definitions and descriptions prepared by others instead of seeking truth for themselves.
We are but poor learners of those ancient teachers if we have not discovered that their greatest lesson to us is not truth, as they had found it, but the blessing of the persistent search after truth. To cherish as final past presentations of truth is to be false to its present possibilities.
We do not need to worry over definitions of the divine. We do need to cultivate the temper of mind and the sensitiveness of spirit that will save us from blindness to the higher facts of life, that will save us from the blasting whirlwind of materialism, with its sense of nothing but a soulless world of things.
We need to avoid the mind that shuts the divine up in some far off heaven to be reached only by formal telephony called prayer; that fails to see the infinite in all things—in sunlight and flower, in children's laughter, and in misery's wail, in factories and stores, as well as in churches. We need the mind that argues not about omnipresence, but in duty and delight cries, Always and everywhere, Thou art near.
Christianity is distinguished and dominated by the ideal of the life and character of Jesus of Nazareth; it is a philosophy and a system of individual and social ethics under the inspiration of a glowing ideal. No matter how greatly its people may differ on other points, all are agreed in recognizing in Jesus the fairest of the sons of men.
There never was a time when the thought of this life was more potent than it is to-day. Men think of Him as a fellow being, one who went about doing good, who looked out on life with the windows of His soul unsullied and who lived out ever the holiest and highest that came to Him.
The thought of such a one has become so real to men that they do not stop to argue about His existence, as once they did. If it was possible indisputably to disprove the historic Christ men still would cherish, as highly as ever, the ideal, the vision of such a life, and in their hearts would know that such a picture could only have been born of such a person.
This goodly, glorious man no longer is one who now sits on the throne of heaven. Men are not particularly concerned as to whether He is artistically glorified and perpetuated by some divine decree. He has crowned Himself in the glory of a pure and beneficent character; He has perpetuated Himself in human loves and admiration.
Because He once showed Himself as the friend of all, the pure, high souled friend of the down-trodden and the outcast, the strong, invigorating friend of the rich and successful, He to-day walks by many a man as His unseen friend, and in busy mart or office men feel the presence of a heavenly guest.
Once men made that life the centre of dispute; they sought to prove His divinity by His unlikeness to ordinary humanity. But the facts defeated them. This man whom men so learned to love that they became willing to die for Him was in all respects a man. His life is worth so much to us because He was so much like us.
It has come as a new revelation to the world that the supreme religious soul of the ages should be so tenderly, naturally human. We cry "Father!" with a new sense of relationship and fellowship when we see the likeness of the father in the face of such a son.
We are coming to believe that just what the great friend of mankind was so is the great father of us all to us all, that just as the Son of the most high moved amongst men seeking to help, cheering, comforting, loving, so is the eternal spirit moving in our world, going about doing good.
Once every effort of the theologian was bent to setting this majestic figure apart from mankind to secure Him sovereignty over us by separation from us. How different is that from the simple pictures drawn of Him, from the naturalness of His life, from the love which He had for homes and human friendships, from the life which earned the illuminating rebuke of being called a friend of sinners.
It is a good thing for us all often to remember that there has been such a life, that one born in poverty and unknown, far removed from centres of culture and wealth, living the hard life of a peasant, knowing all our temptations and weaknesses, yet should open His life so fully and completely to spiritual influences as to become to all the ages the greatest of all spiritual leaders.
What one has done another may do. What He has been we may be. He but shows the possibility of any life. He had no advantage over us; we know no disadvantages against which He did not have to strive. The divine heights have been scaled by human feet; His footprints beckon us on.
Finding Foundations
The Passing and PermanentFacing the FactsThe Real Foundation
Things not right can never be religious.
Bigotry puts blinders on the best of men.
Submission is the first step to sovereignty.
The principle of expediency expels all other principle.
Quiet lives are often eloquent.
The love of wealth steals wealth of love.
It's the common virtues that make uncommon saints.
Many a man is shouting his convictions to drown the voice of conscience.
A little learning is dangerous if you are planning to get to heaven by degrees.
When a man gets over anxious about the gnat it's time to hang on to the camel.
When the walls are being rebuilt it is easy to imagine that the foundations are being destroyed. Old creeds pass away, but truth remains; if they were true in their day they do but give place to the larger truth of the new day. We need to distinguish between the turmoil attendant to the process of building and the beauty of the new temple that arises.
The old folks hear the new truths and ask, where are the foundations gone? The young hear the discussion between the old and the new and ask, is there anything settled, anything worth believing? What are the permanent elements in religion on which the life may build while the things that are but temporary are adjusting themselves?
It would be the height of folly to assert that there is no change. Some say that we must believe precisely the same things as our fathers believed. To do so would be to be false to our fathers, for they refused to accept the traditions of their elders. The landmarks we leave behind once were far in front of the seekers after truth.
Truth never changes but our vision is ever enlarging. The road remains, but the traveller moves on. With the living every day has some new light. Creeds are crystallized statements of truth; truth is vital and cannot be contained in unchanging forms. Credulity blindly accepts yesterday's picture of truth; faith, with open eyes, seeks to-day's truth itself.
Skepticism is much less sinful than credulity. The sloth of the man who will not examine things, will not prove them, who prefers to buy his garments of truth ready made, results in what is worse than unbelief, and that is blind belief in the false. It is a religious duty to question every teaching, to prove all things.
How may we find those things that are certain? How may we discover the truth for our day, the truth upon which we may build? Surely there are some things fixed and certain, there is somewhere pole star and compass. How may we find that truth which belongs to our day and in which we may have the confidence that our fathers had in their truth?
The test of the vital truths is a practical one. Only those truths are vital which concern the present business of living in all its wide sweep.
It is a matter of indifference what we may think of the colour of angels' hair or the number of strings to their harps; it is a vastly different matter what we may believe as to moral obligations, human rights, and duties.
The test of creed is an ethical one. What things work out best in living, what are the ideals, doctrines, beliefs that make the noblest characters and the most useful citizens, the best sons, and daughters, and parents, and neighbours? What are the things that help me most in my life, the things that give me moral stimulus and bracing, the things that lead me to covet the best?
The way to find the truth is to do the truth; only the truth that we can do is worth discussing. If you will give yourself to the business of living the truth you have you soon will have the living truth for this new day.
Too many people are holding up as saving doctrines matters of philosophy and speculation, matters of childish curiosity, because it is easier to hold these things theoretically than to hold living truth practically. The truths that save men are the ones that change their characters; the great authorized and divine translation of the Bible is its translation into present day lofty living.
Build your life on the belief in goodness, in eternal, infinite goodness as the order of the universe, on the superiority of love to hatred, on the final victory of love and goodness, on the ideal of this great human family of ours that shall come to live in unity and brotherliness, and so fulfill the will of the infinite father of all. These things work well.
This is the age of the dominance of science. When a man asks, What shall I believe? only one answer can be returned: Believe the things that are. An age now past found it easy to believe that it believed what it was told, even the things that it knew were not so. But to-day at least has the merit of finding no merit in that form of self-deception.
The passion for absolute truth and rightness is one of the noblest that can spring up in any breast; it is a ripe fruit of religion. The scientist, by his devotion to exact facts, to pure truth, is the religious man of our day, and the schools become religious educators in their power to instill a primary love for truth and to lift up ideals of exactness and equity.
When we translate religion into terms of life, into actuality as contrasted with imagination, we begin to discover the necessity for foundations deeper than legend or romance. So long as a man's religion consisted in what he might picture in glowing colours of imagination on the canvas of fancy about his past or future he did not need to take his designs from facts.
But when religion becomes the science of right living, the process of securing right social relationships and character as the expression of ideal personal and individual character, it is evident that in such a work religion must proceed on ascertained, indisputable verities.
We may be satisfied with myths as to the ordering of the first family, and we may leave to the play of fancy the specifications of an ideal heaven; but when we begin to order our own families and adjust our social and civic affairs we are compelled to wait for principles based on facts, for truth. Religion thus becomes a science.
Much eloquence was spilled over the conflict between religion and science. It was only a conflict between the old religion and its new form, between the gray dawn and the growing day. Our fathers were not wilfully false, holding on to darkness when the light came; but they so long had held sacred the pictures seen in twilight they were loath to give them up for those of the full day's printing.
The most damaging infidelity is the lack of faith in truth, the fear that it might not be safe to allow all the facts to be known. He who in the name of religion seeks to prevent our seeing and accepting the full facts is religion's greatest foe. Only the full truth can set us fully free, intellectually, spiritually, morally.
Why should we fear the light of investigation on the things of religion? There is more sacredness in simple truth than in secrecy. It were better to be lost forever seeking truth than saved by sophistry. How foolish to attempt to adjust our lives by laws built out of speculation, to attempt to steer by a compass when there is no pole of truth?
In to-day's changing tides of thought, when the old faiths seem slipping away, when we wonder why we have lost the simple faith of our own youth or our father's, looking for some firm ground for our feet, we do well to set them down on nothing but facts, to discriminate among the sands of time and the alluvial deposits of tradition till we find the rock of truth.
But facing the facts we find everywhere one writ large, over all one great principle of unchanging law, one great purpose moving through all nature and all history, and what we once only dared to hope and dream, that back of all there throbs infinite love and there rules infinite wisdom, now is attested by the impressive array of the witnesses of science.
Truth always is safe. The holiest error must be born of hell. We can make no mistake in refusing to go beyond truth, and we will find that she leads to the ordering of life according to eternal laws, to the doing of duties and finding of sweet joys as old as the hills and as unchanging; she will lead in the paths of rightness.
Some day our race will know all the alphabet of nature and be able to read the story of the unchanging goodness; some day we shall comprehend the wavering handwriting of history; some day we shall catch the harmony of love and law; we shall know the full truth that is religion; shall know things as they are and be what we should be.
A good many thousand sermons have been preached on the parable of the houses built on sand and on rock, probably nearly all of them with the intent to prove that the way to build the life on a rock foundation is to pass through the experience known as conversion, obtain saving faith and join the church. This is typical of a popular way of interpreting the scriptures: First, determine what you wish them to mean and then make them mean that. The purpose being to persuade people to join the church, then by hook or crook that duty must be discovered in every divine precept.
But this is simply to ignore the plain words of the great Teacher. It would be impossible to clarify His statement: "If any man hears and does the things I have been teaching he is like one who builds on a rock." One thing marks the rock founded life, the doing of Christly deeds. The course of conduct, the kind of character He has just outlined in the sermon on the mount gives the established staple character.
The enduring life is not built on dreams. Many people think that their lives are rock founded because they have a nebulous admiration for the moral teachings of Jesus. On the whole they admire the sermon on the mount; having taken the trouble to say as much as this they sit back with the comfortable feeling that they have set themselves right with the universe, that the Almighty will be delighted with their indorsement.
One of the most dangerous hypocrites is the easy-going, thoughtless being who fancies that the indorsement of a duty is equivalent to the doing of it. He evaporates his convictions into compliments instead of crystallizing them into conduct. So far from being built on a rock he floats around like a wisp of hay in a high wind. A butterfly might better hope to drill and quarry out a foundation than he. Besides this, his hypocritical praise of right precepts makes them only offensive to those who might desire to practice them.
Others imagine that an intellectual assent to certain statements concerning the church or the Bible or Jesus is sufficient to fix the life in stability. But the great Teacher does not place the emphasis so much on what men may think of His character or mission, nor even on their honest opinions on the theories of the past and the future, which have delighted mental gymnasts since the world was young, to Him the great differentiating fact touches those dynamic convictions that are determining your conduct this day.
He places conduct before creed. He long ago took that method of teaching which modern pedagogy approves. He taught religion by the manual method. Instead of saying, as theologians do, first comprehend these doctrines and then you will be able to do them, He says, first do these things, practice My precepts, and they will ere long become plain to you. Men learn religion by doing. Begin to do the right and you will get the reason; get the rule through the example. Deeds are the solvents of doctrines.
The house of life is built differently from any other; we get the plans by erecting the structure. In the realm of character it is houses rather than architecture we need. Build but one hour's conduct squarely on the plain, cogent teachings of the man of Nazareth and you will serve the world better than if you gave a lifetime to the explanation of His words.
Doctrines are but teachings intended to be done into deeds. Doing them you gain a larger peace of mind and sense of stability of life than in any other way. If you want the equilibrium of faith you will find it by simply laying life's daily details on the plain foundation of His principles. Nothing could be plainer; there are no hair-splitting metaphysics, no subtle questions of policy here; do these things and the heart finds calm, the life certitude, the soul satisfaction.
The Passion for Perfection
The Great SearchThe Hunger of the AgesThe Sole Satisfaction
Pain is the parent of power.
Marking time leaves no mark on time.
The proof of love is loving the unlovely.
Truth never is found by twisting the facts.
Wings come not to those who refuse to walk.
An ideal usually is what we want the other man to be.
There is no righteousness without some self-respect.
You cannot lead men to the divine by crawling in the dust.
The real saints have no time to write their autobiographies.
When a man boils over quickly you soon find out what is in him.
True piety simply is the prosperity of the eternal things in a man.
The world never will be won from the love of evil until we make the good lovely.
The cry, "How may I be right?" is the cry of the ages. Human history is the record of our attempt to answer it. Man is naturally a truth seeker, and this is the search of all truly great souls. The enduring monuments of literature are those that have in some measure answered this question. All things that have been worth while have helped us to know and to realize the right. Health, happiness, freedom, morality, all are but parts of the right; all are but sections of the sublime whole for which man ever seeks. The search manifests itself in different ways; it may be as science, the passion for the knowledge of the right relations of things; as justice, for right relations amongst men; as philosophy, as ethics, as religion. Back of all our life is the instinct of progress; we push towards the perfect. And perfection we now know rests not in more things but in bringing all the things that are into right relations with one another.
The idea that any man can be right regardless of others we scout as absurd. The ideal civilization we work for here, even the heaven we long for, is simply a condition of living where the things that separate, despoil, and introduce discord are no more. The hope of the race is to be in right relations with all things. All the great religions are as the footprints of peoples who have sought the truth that would lead them to be right and just with one another, with the world, and with the great unseen powers behind all being. Our universal sense of wrongness is but part of our passion for rightness.
The sense of imperfection and the desire for improvement have marked all religions that have influenced men. In the Jew this desire for righteousness was supreme. Job is but a type. Coming to himself amongst the ruin of all the things he counted most precious, he forgets their loss in his desire to solve the great problem, What is right and how may I reach it? Somewhere he knows there is a solution to all the riddles of his friends and the questions of his own heart. An orderly universe is not crowned by a being whose life must ever remain an unsolved riddle. Men are not adrift in a fog with no hope of taking bearings. If men have marked the natural world with lines of latitude and longitude for the guidance of its travellers, the moral world is not without its markings.
Job's very question contains the only answer that has ever satisfied man. God Himself is the great meridian of all morality. From Him we may measure all relationships and get them right. That is the essential message of the Bible; it strikes that first of all in "In the beginning God——" Every life is right in the measure that it adjusts itself to the unvarying will; amongst the nations they have the kingdom who do His will. The world has made progress in precisely the proportion that this will has been realized. The promise of the present is that this great standard, this universal law by which all may find the right, has been made known to all through a life. One of our own has set forth God. One has lived who has shown us how to live. For every problem there is now an example of its solution. For every difficulty there is something better far than a declaration of duty; there is the great Doer of the deed. He has come near to man that men might come near to one another. He reveals the right.
Yet we must not allow His perfection to make Him unapproachable. He is only an example as long as His example is attainable. His divinity does not depend on His distance from us but on the degree in which He lifts us, inspires us towards the height He has gained.
"Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled," is the central beatitude; in a measure it embraces all the others, for every virtue they inculcate is included in righteousness. But it is often rejected as impracticable because fanciful teachers who substitute subtle definitions for simple duties have twisted its plain words until righteousness is made something so unreasonable as to be repulsive to a right mind. As a matter of fact, it means no more than rightness; the hunger and thirst for righteousness is but the earnest, supreme desire and endeavour to be right and to do right at all times, the appetite for the right.
Theological righteousness may mean some strange imputed quality laid on a man like a cloak to cover his real condition or a bill of health given to a sick man. But men who live next to real things care nothing one way or the other for theoretical rightness; they want the real article. And a right man will not be satisfied to have even the Most High think of him as being perfectly right when he knows he falls far short of it. He would rather be the faltering pursuer of actual rightness than the possessor of a hypothetical, ascribed perfection.
The great Teacher cares nothing about imaginary virtues; He praises those who ardently seek the real ones. He knows that in the market of character cash alone is currency; here you cannot draw checks on some other person's deposits. To Him it is better by far to die facing the right than to live in smug content with borrowed merits. This world will never be content with a gospel that offers only vicarious virtues; at its heart it knows too well its need of the genuine usable ones; it has at least the dormant faculties of an appetite for rightness.
And all this world story is but a record of the struggle for rightness. All human progress is but its fruitage. In every age there have been glorious souls who have made this passion a thing that glowed in their lives and became a light to their day. In every man the divine discontent that divides him from the animal is the sign of this desire in some form; it shows man seeking to find more perfect, more nearly right relations with the things about him. As the things about him come to include God and heaven and things unseen so will his search for rightness become wider and deeper and more spiritual. Every form of spiritual aspiration, every religion, no matter how uncouth and strange, is still the soul of man seeking right relations to the infinite.
What a glorious thing is this passion for the right; what visions it has seen, what strength it has given to their realization. It is the great tide that, moving restless and resistless in our bosoms, has carried us on towards God. We cannot but believe it is born of him. It does not originate in him, for it disturbs his peace, it stirs him from sloth, it spurs him to new and often unwelcome endeavours. It ever holds before him the shining possibility of a perfect being in a perfect world.
No wonder Christ used the figure of hunger and thirst. Literal appetites have been the motives back of the world's struggle for physical rightness; yet these cravings have not been more general or more forceful than those of the soul. But for hunger and thirst man would have lived in perfect content with the form and facts of life as he found them; progress, all that we call civilization, would not have been.
Man is happy in proportion as necessity compels him to heed these cravings. So is it in the moral world; the struggle has been our salvation. To cease to strive for rightness is to cease to live. Individually and nationally they are happy who accept the rigorous climate of lofty ethical ideals, who are not content to take life as they find it, but who seek to cultivate flowers and fruits of paradise on the sterile, rocky soil of the human heart. This is the life that Jesus shows, the life that seeks and finds the truth, that with passionate ardour seeks right relations both with His fellows and with His Father. Out of the fullness of experience, in the midst of His own struggle He encourages all who strive; they shall be satisfied. No ideal, no noble passion, no glorious sacrifice, no honest endeavour for the right was ever in vain; the soul finds itself in seeking the supreme good.